Heavy

A few months ago I looked at myself and realized that I had put on some weight over the course of the pandemic.  I had noticed a few times that I had a bigger tummy than before, and finally it was undeniable - this was no longer a 'drank a lot of water' or 'big dinner' tummy, but long term weight gain.  Upon realizing this, it was obvious why.  I had spent many months sitting in my chair, not getting proper exercise.  I was still doing all my weight training but I wasn't doing any walking except to go to the grocery store.

I was also getting high late at night and snacking on all the things way too often.  The pandemic has led to me being frustrated and lonely, not able to do the things I am used to doing that bring me so much joy.  My DnD games were on hiatus, my travels for gaming conventions were all cancelled, board game nights not allowed, and even visiting The Flautist was off the table.  That left me feeling blue, and pot and snacks helped dull the pain and upset.

My response was quick.  I needed to get more active and stop piling junk into my body.  I added on 30 minutes of walking every day and cut out most of the late night snacking.  This was good in other ways too, because quite frankly I didn't need that food and the walks gave Wendy and I time together and improved my mental health on its own, entirely separate from body shape or size.

I am one of those lucky people whose hunger effectively regulates my weight.  If I just eat when I am hungry and eat healthy food my body maintains a weight I am happy about.  I don't have to starve myself to get to a good weight, I just have to stop messing with my appetite with drugs.

Over the past 2.5 months my weight has dropped back closer to where it was pre pandemic.  Before I began weightlifting I was at 175 pounds, and over the last five years I added on 30 pounds of muscle to sit at 205.  In March of this year I was up to around 215, and now I have dropped back down to 210.  This got me thinking a lot about how I think about my body and how society thinks about fat.

The most absurd thing is the way BMI scores me.  For most of my life I was extremely skinny and yet I scored right in the normal range for BMI.  The system takes your height into account, but it does it so badly that everyone who is tall is shifted heavily towards the overweight side of the spectrum.  Right now I am officially overweight by BMI, which is absurd.  I am a skinny guy with a bunch of extra muscle and five pounds of extra fat, there is no possible way I should be considered overweight.  This picture, for reference, is of an officially overweight person.

Yeah.  'Overweight'.  Now it is clear that BMI does not take into account muscle mass.  This makes it a stupid system, but the fact that it takes height into account so badly that tall people of totally normal build are considered overweight is pathetic.  We shouldn't be using this system for medical diagnosis, or anything else.  It is a classic case of measuring what we can easily measure and confusing that for measuring the right thing.

Figuring out a simple system to categorize people's weight isn't easy.  I don't have a replacement system to offer.  (Improving BMI to properly take height into account is easy, and the fact that we haven't done it is an embarassment.)  However, if a system is garbage we shouldn't stick with it just because we don't have an easy alternative.  Sometimes you just have to toss the system out when it is crap.

This did get me thinking about why I so quickly decided to change my lifestyle.  The main thing was I could see that snacking and sitting weren't good for me.  That is true regardless of my weight, and adding in extra walking and fixing my diet are good by all metrics.

However, I can't deny that part of the motivation was that I didn't like the way my tummy looked.  I was thinking to myself "Dammit I do 200 pushups, 56 deadlifts, and 56 rows a day.  Shouldn't I have a bloody six pack?"  I have never had a six pack, and at this point I am never going to.  My extra bit of belly still bothered me though, and it shouldn't.

That 10 exra pounds around my middle is not a health hazard.  Nobody needs a six pack, and in fact getting one is actually hazardous to the health of most people.  Our bodies are made to store some fat!  I looked fine.

But no matter that I have tons of muscle, no matter that I looked fine, my brain still insisted that I absolutely had to change things.  Vanity and desire for status clearly drove my behaviour no matter how much I could use health to justify it.

That is the way our society deals with fat in a nutshell.  We moralize over people's weight, and go on about health hazards, but most of that is just denying the truth that we want to be skinny for status, and we mock heavy people for that same lack of status.

It sucks.

No matter that I know all this, no matter that I don't want to villify fat, I still made a swift and binding decision to change things when I got some of my own.  

Covid19 giveth, and Covid19 taketh away

Much of my life has vanished over the last week due to Covid19.  My gaming groups have all called it quits, my trips to Ottawa and Waterloo for gaming and socializing got cancelled, and now my building has closed the gym and hot tub for the forseeable future.  Aside from grocery shopping I have no reason at all to leave my condo anymore.

But while the virus has taken much from me, it has opened up new doors.  For example, even though I can't lift weights anymore because the gym is gone, I found something new to do in its stead, courtesy of our viral overlord.

Grocery bags filled with emergency food are my new weight lifting solution.  It isn't as good as proper weights of course, because exercises like deadlifts don't work with objects as large as this.  However, there are enough exercises that do work that I can use these as a clumsy and annoying replacement for proper weights.

As I said in my post a few weeks ago, I bought a lot of groceries well ahead of time to get prepared for the inevitable supply chain disruptions and the possibility of quarantine.  I collected the last few things this week, but my household was well prepared for this mess.  I may get bored of pasta and vegetable soup, but we won't go hungry.  Boost and ramen, as pictured above, aren't exactly my ideal meals, but my small person has particular tastes that must be accomodated.

You might wonder why I am weighing bags down with packages of ramen - surely those weigh nothing?  You would be right that they a bag full of ramen would be nearly worthless.  However, the bottoms of these bags are full of canned soup and bags of beans, which add considerably more heft.  They still weigh quite a bit less than the weights I am used to using, but I just increased my reps to make up for that and overall it still works.

Grocery bags full of cans don't have nearly the flexibility of a proper weight room though, so I expect that there are certain muscles that won't be getting the workout I desire.  I am going to be doing two hundred pushups a day in additional to grocery based exercises, so at least my ability to launch myself up off the floor will remain intact.

Covid19 can take away my gaming.  It can take away my dates.  But it cannot take my muscles!

Armageddon, only not quite

Covid-19 is coming.  At this point the consensus is that everyone in the world is going to get it, pretty much, and a bunch of us are going to die of it.  That doesn't mean you should not worry about passing it on, of course.  Slowing the rate of infection is a great way to improve our response quality and lower the burden on the system at any given time.  Somewhere between .5% and 3% are going to die of it, most likely, with a heavy lean towards older people dying.  It isn't a thing to be trifled with.

Watching what people say about this is a fascinating exercise.  I have seen posts talking about how scary it is and emphasizing that everyone needs to wash their hands a lot, but also posts talking about how the flu has killed many more people this year than Covid-19, so calm the fuck down.  When something siezes the public imagination like this I can't help but stare at the human reactions in awe and wonder.

Personally, I am stocking up on food and medicine.  Not because civilization is going to end, because it won't, but if a ton of people get sick and governments start implementing quarantines supply chains start breaking.  Who knows what food and medicine I will be able to get when Toronto's infection situation is at its worst?  Also if I end up having to be home ill for weeks on end and can't go out without risking passing the infection on, I should have all my shopping taken care of.

I talked to the Flautist about this and it worried her a great deal.  Not just the news, but my response.  I have a 'bah, the world will be fine, don't panic' response to all kinds of things in the news that get other people all aflutter.  This is different though.  I have extra packs of menstrual supplies, toilet paper, ibuprofen, and cleaning products along with tons of dried food.  Not because it is time to panic, but because other people will be panicking and I need to get out ahead of them in building a stash.  I will end up using all the stuff I have bought anyway, so it won't go to waste.

It is going to be extra difficult on those who are in precarious financial situations.  I have the money to buy a month's worth of everything and it isn't a problem.  Some people don't though, and as usual when there is a systemic disruption it is the poor who won't be able to stretch to get past it.

Seriously though, you should stock up.  Don't fool yourself with things like "aww, it won't be that bad" because even if you are only kinda sick, you are going to be morally obligated to stay home, and you will need things.  Don't try to weasel out with "meh, I will just get food delivered" because if 25% of the delivery people are out sick, and 10 times as many people as usual want food delivered, you aren't getting that delivery.  Figure out a way to store a bunch of the food, medicine, toiletries, and other necessities of life now, while supply chains are still intact and getting those things is easy. 

There are already stores that are running out of things, partly because of panic, partly because so much of our stuff is manufactured in China.  Don't be the last person to realize what is coming.

Civilization is going to be fine.  You, on the other hand, might not.  So have a plan, and make sure that plan doesn't include getting scammed, because I have already seen Covid-19 based marketing out there, and more will be coming.

Wine, of the fancy pants variety

For years now Wendy and I have gotten our wine via bottle-it-yourself places.  If you bottle your wine yourself you don't pay the extremely large tax rate, which I assume was meant to apply to people making their own wine at home.  I feel strange using such a service because they are so obviously a ridiculous tax dodge that brings no value whatsoever.  They do all the work up until I show up at their door and use their machines to put wine into my bottles.  If I am bad at bottling, they will basically do it for me, removing even the paper thin excuse for tax avoidance.

I don't much like patronising businesses whose entire model is 'tax loophole!' but it does save me a lot on wine costs and I also hate paying full price.  Hatred and bitterness either way, I guess.

One thing that has come up over the years is the terrible ugliness of the wine bottles.  I put labels on them each time so we know what they are, but I have no desire to spend hours scrubbing and scraping to get the labels off, so the labels just stack up as I put new ones over top of the old ones.  This time round some of the labels were five deep on the bottles and they began to peel off, creating quite a mess.

This is what comes of years of labels of different sizes slapped onto bottles and eventually stripped off in a slapdash sort of fashion.  I put new labels on these of course but the new labels did not cover up the mess at all.  Every bottle still has lots of shredded paper and glue sticking out from under the new label, and naturally the labels aren't sticking perfectly so the new ones peel off some on their own.

I don't mind this in the least.

Hell, I like it.  I take a perverse pride in using things as long as possible.  If my shoes look a ruin but are functional I take it as a point of pride - I am not wasting materials by buying new shoes!  I like to reuse bottles and I don't care at all that it shows, rather I am happy to model the behaviour I want to see in the world - reusing of stuff.

Wendy is not on board with this.  In theory she loves the idea of conservation and reusing things, but in practice she cringes at the idea of serving wine to guests in a bottle covered in ripped paper and glue stains.  I am filled with glee at the idea of serving wine while saying "See this haggard old bottle?  The wine in here was CHEAP.  Woo, inexpensive inebriation!"

Other people don't seem to buy into that so much.  They usually like the idea of reuse, but they really seem to think I ought to put a little more effort into my presentation.

The trouble is it isn't a matter of laziness.  I don't eschew presentation because I can't be bothered.  I do it rough and ready because I actually prefer it that way.  If someone offered to make all my bottles of wine pretty and high class for free I would turn it down - that isn't what I want.

I am going to continue down this path, I think, peeling off huge masses of labels only once they become totally unworkable.  I would happily just stop using labels altogether but other people have strictly forbidden me to do this on the basis that they want to know what they are drinking.  I figure it is all red wine right, so who cares?  You aren't going to turn it away because it is Barolo instead of Cabarnet, are you?  So just drink it!  But others have this thing about wanting to have a name for the stuff they are about to pour down their throats.  Fancy pants attitude, that.

I wish for better advertising

I saw a poster in my local grocery store that showed a picture of a woman with a child, and talked about 'raising a food lover'.  The store also has all the employees wear shirts that say 'we love food'.

The marketing personnel who came up with this really ought to be ashamed of themselves.  You know who loves food?  Nearly everyone.  Do you know what a grocery store has to offer in terms of turning your child into a food lover?  Nothing.  People become food lovers because evolution demands it.  You know what happened to all the people who hate food?  They died.  They did not produce many children. 

The 'we love food' thing is the marketing equivalent to unflavoured oatmeal.  Gray, slimy, tasteless garbage.  I wish they would actually say something, anything, to provide me information. 

"We sell substandard food for cheap but the place looks like crap!"

"Our food is expensive but we have lots of employees handing out free samples and fancy music!"

"All of our food is locally sourced!"

These are all actual information that might bring me to a store, if I like their thing.  But instead they are trying to feed me rubbish designed to be inoffensive and boring.  It is like a politician saying 'I want to help struggling families' or a dating profile bragging 'I like travel and I am looking for someone kind and smart'. 

All of them are just wide open displays of cowardice.  Say something real.  Be vulnerable.  Share information!  These desperate attempts to pander to everyone while informing no one get me spitting mad.

Buckley's company message is one I can get behind.  "It tastes terrible, but it works."  +1 to their marketing team, sticking to a message that tells the consumer real things about the product.

Political signs boil my bodily fluids the same way.  They have a simple message - a name.  They don't tell me anything about a candidate, their positions, their record, or anything else.  All I can derive from political signs is that the candidate 1.  Has access to money to buy signs.  and 2.  Has at least one person who likes them.  Having access to money does not tell me anything good about a candidate, and given how the last provincial election went here I would be tempted to vote against someone on that basis if that is all I have available.  We could really use some poor people in office for a change.  Knowing that someone is willing to put that sign on their lawn is also worthless - the politicians I hate have plenty of supporters willing to do that.

It all points to just how much of a farce some of our core concepts of democracy and capitalism are. People don't make sensible economic decisions to benefit themselves.  They buy whatever garbage advertising has associated with curvaceous asses, adorable children, or monetary success.  Voters are swayed by vacuous promises, meaningless appeals to happy feelings, and signs with people's names on them.

Sure, we do make decisions here and there that are truly informed and reasonable.  But advertising works, political lawn signs matter, and a pretty photoshopped face is all you need to sell snake oil.

Suffering for my art

I thought that I had a handle on the downsides of weight lifting.  Mostly it is a massive sink of time and money, in that you have to not only work out but also cook and eat a *lot* of eggs.  You know that your routine is burning a ton of calories when you need to schedule extra time in just for eating all the eggs you need!

But the month of March taught me a new lesson.  I have maxed out all the weights in my gym so increasing my difficulty is a matter of doing more reps.  Throughout February and early March I added on reps for all of my exercises and then found myself feeling positively ill for most of my workouts.  Sore muscles, this is normal, but working hard not to barf for forty minutes a day is not fun.

A sensible person would probably decide to dial back the reps a bit.  After all, nearly vomiting from working too hard is a pretty good sign that the exercise you are doing is not healthy.

I am not as sensible as that.

The only concession I was willing to make was that I stopped adding on reps and purely focused on improving enough that I could do my current sets without constant nausea.  It took a month, but by the end of March I was able to do my regular routine with only minimal complaints from my tummy.

In April I added on a few more reps but only on a couple of exercises.  I seem to be hitting a plateau where increasing gains are becoming difficult to come by, so I will need to be gentle with my increased demands.

Still, I am not capped out.  I have added 20% more reps across all my exercises in the past six months, which is a pretty substantial increase. 

The weird thing is that although I am obviously still increasing in strength I am no longer increasing in size.  I am the same weight as I was half a year ago, hovering right around 205 lb, (93kg).  I don't know if my extra strength is me converting my relatively sparse body fat to muscle, basically just shifting percentages, or if I am getting more efficient somehow without adding muscle mass.  Possibly some combination of both explains it, though I have no good way to be sure.

Quite some time ago I had thought that if I ate a lot and worked really hard I could add on a ton of muscle and maybe get my weight up to 250 lb (113kg) or so.  Now I don't think that will work.  I could probably eat a truckload of sugary calories and get my weight up by adding on fat but my muscle gains seem to be capped, barring heavy drug abuse, which isn't part of my plan.  There are probably some marginal gains over time that I can achieve, but most likely I am as heavy as I can be while staying lean.

This is a fine thing really.  I like the way I look now and I am plenty strong for all practical purposes.  I even had a bit of a moment the other day when I lay down on my back, putting my arms beside me on the floor, and my elbows couldn't touch the ground.  Too much tricep muscle on the back of my arms, apparently.  RAWR /flex whoot! and such.  These sorts of small things drive me on ever further, even through great suffering.

Getting big like a cat

I have spent a lot of time over the last year and a half looking for ways to get cheap protein in my diet.  The trickiest thing about this has been the struggle between ethical meat consumption and cost because the cheapest meat is never the kind of meat that has 'ethically raised' stamped on it.

Last night though Wendy and I were talking about this and the idea of cat food came up.  Cat food is advertised as being high in protein and is cheap on a dollars per gram metric.  What could go wrong?

Comparing cat food to normal human food is tricky though.  Cat food doesn't have the same nutritional information panel that most human food does so I have to make some guesses about what I would get out of it.  The first thing that struck us when we started evaluating the cat food bag for weight lifting consumption was that the protein content was *really* high.  36%, in fact, which is higher than beef, pork, or chicken.  That seemed a little bit ridiculous but then I realized it must be due to water, or lack thereof.  Slabs of meat have a ton of water in them but the dried cat food doesn't so even though it has all kind of random stuff in there like corn the protein content is still fairly high by weight.

The ingredients in cat food read kind of sketchy though.  I don't know what "chicken by product meal" actually is but I bet it is all the worst parts of chicken that humans would never eat ground up into a paste.  One of the ingredients is salmon though, without any modifying words like "meal" or "by product" so maybe I can think of it as a fancy fish meal.  I could pretend that the crunchiness is like tempura coating!

I am not actually going to try to gain muscle mass by eating cat food, even though it is the cheapest protein I have been able to find.

I know that cat food has stuff in it that isn't good for humans in large quantity, particularly the high Vitamin A content that apparently can cause "nausea, vomiting, irritability, headaches, and blurred eyesight" and eventually death.  Good for cats, bad for people.

It does seem like there is a real market possibility out there though.  There are people like me hunting for cheap protein who are willing to eat whatever gross parts of animals nobody else wants, and if you don't put toxic levels of cat specific vitamins in the food I would totally eat it.

Now if only the invisible hand of the market would supply this particular need!

Getting wet

This past weekend I went to a party and got a drink poured on my head.  This is a new thing for me, and I was kind of torn about how to react to it.  On one hand I have seen plenty of drinks tossed on people in movies and sports shows and such so I kind of wondered what it would be like, but on the other hand I didn't really want a drink tossed on me.

It came at the end of the night when I was saying my goodbyes and on my way out the door.  Just before exiting I ended up in a conversation with two people, and myself and the other guy in the conversation were talking about how our pants don't fit because we have been exercising and our legs and butts got bigger.  The woman in the conversation was angry at us about this because, according to her, we don't know anything about clothes not fitting.  She threw food at me to emphasize her point.

This was strange, but potato chips don't do much damage so I didn't fuss about it.

The conversation shifted to language and she and I found another point of disagreement.  I don't think there is any proper form to language and it should be described and evaluated based on efficacy of communication, not adherence to a particular ruleset.  For example, I would be perfectly happy with someone using u instead of you because it makes a hell of a lot more sense and everyone knows what it means.  She found this to be anathema.

Then she threw a wine cork at me and it bounced off of my head.

Again, I felt like I didn't take much damage so I shouldn't worry overly about it but it did seem rude to do such a thing.

I decided that it was time to go.  She elected to stand over the sole exit and lean over the railing with her drink and informed me that she was going to pour it over my head if I left.  There was no other way to get out of the place and I thought it unlikely that she would go through with this threat - it does seem particularly unfriendly to tell a person they may not leave under threat of being soaked.

I walked down the stairs to go home and halfway down her entire drink came splattering down onto me.  Of course it also got all over the stairs and made a huge mess.  I stood there for a moment, kind of shocked, then noticed that the host had wandered over with some paper towels.  I think he had brought them for a laugh because of the threat of the drink pouring and hadn't actually expected it to occur.

Nonetheless I cleaned myself up and he cleaned up the stairs and the person who poured the drink just watched.  Then I left.

I wasn't at all sure what I should feel about this.  The drink didn't do any damage to me so I can't find any reason to be upset.  And yet I think it was a thing she should not have done.  There would be people out there who would be really upset by this sort of thing, particularly since it was accompanied by the threat.

I am a big dude.  A woman threatening me in this way does not actually put me out and I don't feel any intimidation or worry.  Lots of other people might though, which makes me evaluating this action a tricky thing.  Do I evaluate it in the context of what it did to me?  In that case it was rude but not particularly a problem.  Or should I look at it as a person doing this to another random person at a party?  In that case it is more troubling.

I know that other people don't have the same experiences and privilege I do so I often spend time looking at events like this and wondering how I would feel about them if I were different, and thus how they should be treated.  I rarely can figure out if people who do things to me that I shrug off but which would upset some others do it because they correctly read me as not being susceptible to that sort of thing, or if they just do shit to whoever they want.  Would she have done this to a woman?  Or just any person smaller than her?  Or was it something she felt was fine because I am obviously not physically intimidated by her?  I wish I knew.

Leftovers for me

Tonight was the first of Pinkie Pie's birthday celebrations.  Last year through a series of strange events she managed to have four birthday celebrations, and that was TOO MUCH BIRTHDAY.  Mostly for me, I think Pinkie Pie was fine with it all.  This year we have kept it down to two birthdays which is much more manageable.  We and the family went out for dinner and as usual I ended up vacuuming up extra food.

Wendy gave me a quarter of her tuna salad and Pinkie Pie gave me the dregs of her tomato meat sauce.  I had an entree and an extra side soup and was still hungry - this is the power of squats.  At the end of the meal after I had a whole stack of plates in front of me there was still a plate with half a fish dinner on it.

I started at the plate.

I wanted that fish.  Veggies too, but mostly the fish.

The person who ordered the fish dinner was going to leave and it wasn't clear what was being done with the fish.

I would be perfectly happy if they packed up the fish and took it home.  I would also be happy with me eating the fish.  What would make me sad is the fish being dumped in the garbage.

But it is really awkward asking about this.  I don't want to take people's food away from them, especially if they were looking forward to taking their leftovers home.  But if I ask them if they are packing it up there is a really awkward moment where they feel pressured to give me the food and I hate applying that kind of pressure.

Other people really don't seem to care about tossing out food.  Certainly not the way I do.  Oftentimes it seems like it is an afterthought, like it hardly matters if the food gets eaten or not.  It matters to me!  Partly because I want to eat the food, partly because I can't stand the thought of perfectly good food being thrown out for no reason.

I often seem to end up in the position of springing into action when the server is whisking the food away saying "wait, wait! I want that!" and grabbing food off of the plate that is currently being transported away from the table.

People look at me so strangely when this happens.  Normally everyone seems to think I am being gross because who wants food that someone else has touched?

Me!  I want it.  Pick me, pick me!

Hell, I have a hard time watching people I don't know at other tables send food back.  I want to flag down the server and get them to deliver a stranger's food to my table so I can fill up.

I ended up asking if the fish was going to be packed up or thrown out.  The person who ordered the fish didn't seem to figure out what I was asking at first, but eventually it came out that they were going to toss it so I ate all the fish and veggies and was well pleased.

I get why other people don't want to share food and would rather throw it out than have someone else eat it.  We have strong taboos about doing things that might share germs and there is some value in that.  I think though that most people go far beyond that and end up associating someone else's stuff with grossness in a way that has nothing to do with health and safety.  Moreover I think that this feeling that people have causes a terrible amount of waste, both in food and otherwise.  People want new, they don't want something someone else has had, and this combined with our worries about contamination causes us to waste so much food.

As we were about to leave the table I noticed that someone had left one third of a beer undrunk.  I couldn't stop myself, and I grabbed the beer and downed it.  It wasn't bad.  For beer.

You can't take me anywhere.

Not fancy enough

This week I was in an Italian restaurant for a birthday dinner.  The person whose birthday it was seemed to quite enjoy the experience, and so did everyone else at the table as far as I could tell.  Me ... not as much.

The trouble was that it was trying hard to be a fancy, exclusive restaurant.  This is accomplished in a variety of ways including high prices, frustrating menu design, attitude of the staff, decoration, and more.

I hate fancy and exclusive just makes me sad.  Generally exclusive is meant as a compliment, another way of saying superior.  But when you look at the root of exclusive you should note that it comes from exclusion.  A thing is exclusive when people are kept out.  In this case, people like me.

The core of it is always price.  I looked at the cost of food in this place and was appalled.  I certainly don't mind if other people want to spend one hundred and twenty dollars on a steak, but the idea of doing so myself makes my head spin.  Just being in that place puts me in a position I hate - I am reliant on other people to carry me, to pay for me.  It underlines the power difference between me and others, even if I am not paying, because I can't possibly afford to eat at such a place and so if someone else pays it means they are going to throw money at me, but not in such a way that I get to have control over how that money is spent.  When I am in a place where I might go normally having someone else pay isn't an issue, but I hate that sense of obligation that comes with knowing that someone else is paying a bill for me that I would never consider paying if I had a choice.  It is all very awkward.

There were lots of small things though, like the menu design.  I don't speak Italian, though certainly I can puzzle out the great majority of a menu written in Italian.  But without an English description I have to resort to bothering the wait staff to translate a ton of the menu which is annoying and frustrating, or simply guess and hope.  I also am not familiar with the categories of food, which means I don't know what things will actually be enough food for me and which will not.  The restaurant clearly assumes a body of knowledge I do not possess, largely because I don't have the money to eat at expensive Italian restaurants.

I should say that I don't object to languages other than English!  It is often important to make sure that non English speakers have resources to understand things, and having the names of food in their original languages is actually a plus.  But fancy Italian restaurants aren't refusing to have English on the menus as an attempt at outreach to hard done by Italians - they are doing it to seem fancy and exclusive.

And in this case the people they are trying to exclude are people like me.  People who don't have the money to be familiar with this sort of thing, people who don't wear suits or fancy dresses, people who find the 'fancy restaurant' style of serving to be strange and offputting.  Restaurants like this focus hard on things that make me feel powerless, uninformed, and out of place.

There are plenty of places where things are not designed well for me but I get why they are designed that way.  Maybe it is for 'the average person' who is smaller than me, or maybe for someone with a different knowledge set.  That is a challenge, but not an affront.  But when they make a clear point of doing things just to make it harder and less comfortable for me to create an aura of exclusivity, when they do this deliberately, it makes me sad.

I grew up somewhere between working class and middle class, and that is where I am comfortable.  I am glad that Pinkie Pie is getting to experience these things as she grows up, because I hope that she will find a greater variety of places comfortable when she gets to my age.  Perhaps she will even have the money to make those choices herself.

Supplies report, Day 11

The world boardgaming championships is over for 2017 and I am home again.  In terms of raw winningness I ended similarly to last year.  I made two final tables in both years, though my results of 2nd and 2nd last year were better than my 4th and 3rd this year.  I am still immeasureably happy to have gone and it was wonderful to reconnect with so many people.  Playing games or even just kibitzing games with people so talented is great times indeed.  Those final tables were made along with a total of eight semi finals, so my 25% advancement rate is right on schedule.  I still haven't won an event outright, but clearly it is just a matter of time if I keep up this rate of getting into semi finals for various events.

My food plan worked out really nicely, as I brought only a little bit of my supplies back home.

I brought 64 granola bars, and only 6 came back.  Of my 2 jars of pickles, half a jar returned.  The peanuts were the only real failure as I hardly went through any of those.  Thankfully I can just eat them over the next few months.  All of the meat and fruit and cereal all got eaten and I went to the buffet twice, just enough to stop me from going nuts from not having a hot meal for days on end.

All in all I managed to stay at a nice hotel for a nine day convention and have an absolute blast for a cost of under $1200 CAN in total.  As far as entertainment dollars go that is a steal.

I am really lucky to be able to do this.  My inlaws and Wendy taking Pinkie Pie for ten days is required for me to attend and some people don't have that offer on the table.  The ability to attend WBC this way really makes parenting overall a much more rewarding and enjoyable thing - knowing that every so often I get to run away from my responsibilities and party like it is 1999 (seriously, WBC is an awful lot like 1999 was for me!) is a critical release valve.

I am exhausted but deeply happy.  Already looking forward to next year.

Report on supplies

I am at the world boardgaming championships this week.  So far it is a highly enjoyable affair, particularly the part where I get to get reacquainted with a bunch of smart, interesting people that I met last year.  It is wonderful to be able to so easily step into really intense strategy discussions and debate with people who are so talented at this thing I do.

My actual gaming results so far are pretty mediocre, but that isn't surprising considering the schedule.  I played a lot of Agricola but I am not one of the sharks in that game - to be good you need to know every one of the hundreds of cards and also know just how good each of them is and how they interact with all the other cards.  I know a few of them.... but I am nowhere near a strong player.  I have enough skill to beat a lot of the randoms that show up but I am not the best player at the table.  I ended up with a 2nd, 2nd, 3rd set of results, and I feel like that is reasonable because I think I was the 2nd, 2nd, 4th best player at the table in those games.

It isn't often I sit down for a strategy game thinking that I am the worst player at the table, but it happens in Agricola at WBC.

My food strategy for last year worked reasonably so I am following it again.  I bought a ton of fruit and vegetables that would keep and lots of granola bars so I don't have to go to restaurants.  I just can't convince myself that paying $25 US for a buffet is reasonable.

It is Day 2 so far and I have eaten more meat than I bargained for.  My meal plan calls for half a package of meat per day, and the first day an entire pack went away.  Cereal and peanut stocks remain full though, so total calories for the week is probably okay still.  Last year I bought 4 pounds of carrots, and after 3 pounds I was DONE with carrots.  This year I went with 2 pounds of carrots so it should be fine.  I budgeted for 6 granola bars per day for the duration and I am on schedule there.  My suspicion is that I will end up with peanuts left over but that the rest will all get consumed.

The absolute best thing about this year though?  Instead of losing my phone at the hotel before the convention and spending days in a panic trying to figure out how to find it and get it back, I have my phone in my pocket and I am focusing on the fun bits.  What a mess that was.

Sludge

I have been eating protein powder for a month or two now and it is kind of a silly routine.  I get my morning glass of juice, dump a ton of white powder into it, stir it up as best I can, and chug it down.  I often get chunks of powder about the size of a M&M in the juice so it certainly can't be said that it goes down smooth.  After I empty the glass there is inevitably some powder left on the inside of the glass so I refill the glass with water to try to get it completely clean.  After all, I paid for that damn powder, I am not going to waste it!

The water never works perfectly.  I end up with a glass with a bunch of gray protein sludge slimed around the inside of it and I just scoop up the sludge with my finger and gulp it down.  What could be better than gray slime with the occasional chunk of crunchy powder left in it?

This does not bother me.  I seem to have been born with a lack of appreciation for texture in food.  Most people place a great deal of importance on mouth feel and how things tickle their tongues, whereas I would generally be perfectly content to grind my entire dinner up in a blender and shovel it all in with a spoon.  More efficient that way!

I can tell what the textures are.  My nerves work fine.  I just don't *care*.

Yesterday I watched a youtube video about weightlifting which was talking about rookie mistakes that wannabe bodybuilders make.  One of the big ones was protein powder.  The guy making the video laughed about how when he first tried protein powder he put it in his orange juice!  How absurd!  How foolish!  What a noob!  The commenters agreed, and they shared a great laugh at how silly a person must be to do such a thing.

And this was my drink this morning.  I wasn't even using orange juice, which at least can dissolve things marginally well.  Oh no, I was trying to dissolve powder into V8.  I mean, not trying exactly, since I know for damn sure that it won't work.  V8 doesn't dissolve much of anything.  Mostly I was just trying to find something better than straight up shovelling powder into my mouth with a spoon.  Because that, it turns out, is actually a problem.

Apparently everyone else eventually figures out that you need a ton of material to dissolve your protein powder into, and a blender to smash it all into an enormous shake.

Screw that!  Washing a blender every damn day?  Never gonna happen.

I am going to keep on leveraging my extreme lack of food texture reaction and shoving that sludge into me through my morning drink, even if it does mean that I remain forever a noob and have to face the internet mocking me with 'bro, do you even lift?' meme pictures.

One plus one

When I arrived at university there was a trick some upper year folk played on the frosh.  They knew that we had high school math sorted out but most of us were still quite intimidated by the prospect of university math so they told us that the real math we were going to learn had stuff like this in it:

x^2-x^2=x^2-x^2
x(x-x)=(x+x)(x-x)  (factoring, which we knew worked)
x=x+x  (cancelling same terms on both sides)
1x=2x
1=2

The idea behind this was to leave us all dumbfounded that high level university math proves 1=2.  Of course the problem with all of this nonsense is that you can't divide both sides of an equation by (x-x) to cancel the terms because dividing by zero is not allowed.

I don't remember if I figured out right away what the problem with the equation was.  I do remember that I was sure that there was some kind of simple trick and I just had to figure out what it was.

Because obviously 1 does not equal 2.  (Incidentally, I am anti axiom of choice, if it matters.)

But sometimes 1 does equal 2.  Just not in math, only in humans.  This week I finally reached a new benchmark in my quest to look like Chris Evans; I am now twice as strong as I was when I started lifting weights.

I am ... not there yet.  That man is too pretty for words.

But I can bench about 280 pounds, which is double what I could at the beginning, and close to the goal I set for the year of getting to 300.  When I started out I figured I would just lift weights and I told Wendy that I wasn't going to start chugging protein drinks and doing steroids, nothing crazy... just regular ole hard work.

It turns out that regular ole hard work only gets you so far.  Eventually you realize that you have plateaued and you need to do other things to continue along the path.  First I started eating eggs, tons of them, in an attempt to get more protein in.  That helped.  Then I upped the frequency of workouts to 5-6 times a week, and that helped.  A month ago I decided that it was just too much of a pain in the butt to eat all those eggs, and moreover while I need a ton of protein but I don't actually need all that food, it is kind of wasteful, so it was time to buy protein straight up.

Now I am chowing down on protein powder every day.  Although my methods of measuring progress are inaccurate at best it seems to have helped.  I am increasing in strength at roughly the rate I was back in the beginning in terms of pounds / week, and I think I am packing on mass at a similar rate.  That second metric is a tricky one as I don't actually have a bathroom scale so I only check my weight a couple times a year.  Best guess is I have increased my mass by 10% or so.

That I can lift twice as much while only being 10% heavier feels strange.  I know that most of my mass is in organs and bones and such that don't contribute meaningfully to strength but I still look at my body in puzzlement wondering how it can do these new things without actually being all that different.

I am definitely not going to start doing steroids though!  Initially I was not into the protein powder thing because I felt like it wasn't pure somehow.  But that is silly; there is nothing unhealthy about protein powder and it helps my body repair itself faster when I have beat myself up.  Since I am in the business of beating myself up I had best help my body fix itself.  Steroids are a totally different thing of course because they have actual negative side effects that are terrifying.

I do totally get how people end up doing steroids though.  It is that progression and plateauing thing again.  It feels so good to be making gains, doing better, putting up bigger numbers.  Each plateau sucks, and each new step that pushes you back into big gains is wonderful.

After years of changing your diet, buying protein, focusing your life around effort and pain, is it so hard to imagine that you might take another step to regain that feeling of progress?

In the past the idea of using steroids was unthinkable and I couldn't figure out why anyone would, barring being in serious competition for cash like the Olympics or professional sport.  But lots of random people use steroids who will gain nothing from it financially and that always puzzled me.  Not anymore though.  I get it.

Still not going to take that step, but I understand those who do.

It kind of blows my mind when I look at world bench press records to think that after all the work I have put in I am still only benching 26% of the world best.  People do some pretty amazing things.  So do drugs and special equipment, of course.

A big plastic cup

We had a party last night and people were drinking wine.  They were drinking that wine out of wineglasses, which of course is ridiculous.  Wineglasses are terrible at being containers for wine.  They tip over easily, smash into many sharp pieces on a regular basis, and are annoying to clean.

Of course people spilled wine, at least in part because wineglasses are garbage for holding wine, though admittedly in part because, you know, wine.

Then they smashed a wine glass and had to clean it up.  Again, wineglasses.  Though, again, wine had something to do with it.

Instead of putting the wineglasses in the dishwasher like any reasonable sort of container they all had to be cleaned by hand, because wineglasses are terrible at the only thing they are meant to do.

People don't like me saying this.  They tell me that wineglasses are designed to perform critical things like providing the perfect temperature to control taste and the perfect shape to control smell.  And after telling me this they grab the wineglass by the bulb, fully negating the temperature control, and slosh the wine back with reckless abandon, forgoing any attempt at savouring the aroma.  If we are so concerned about providing the perfect temperature, I ask, why is it we seem so willing to consume wine that is randomly refrigerated or not, and wine that has been sitting out for a totally random amount of time?

The answer of course is fancypants.

Wine glasses are to make you look fancypants while you drink it.  Nothing to do with temperature, nothing to do with aroma, just fancypants.

I say FAUGH to fancypants.

Give me a big old plastic tumbler any day of the week.  One with a wide base so it doesn't tip over, and a huge capacity so I can fill it with wine once instead of going back multiple times.  And yes, plastic, so I can drop it on the tile if I want and throw it in the dishwasher if I want, and I can expect it to be a perfectly serviceable device for serving wine for my entire life and then some.

If you can admit that your wineglass is just for fancypants, then that is one step at least.  No artifice there.  You want to pretend to be some sort of real for serious person while you slam down your silly juice.  Fine.  But don't give me this nonsense about it being a better way to serve wine, because a wineglass is a far worse wine container than a child's sippy cup.

Wineglasses are just like shoes, and pants.  Ridiculous affectations for people to maintain the illusion of adulthood.  Wine in a plastic cup, drunk barefoot and naked from the waist down.  Now *that* is authentic living.

The cost of veggies

I was talking with the Flautist this weekend about being vegetarian.  She is one and always has been while I am an omnivore and always have been.  I have tried just eating veggies at times but it has never lasted long as I always felt my diet lacked something and I had serious meat cravings.  She told me about an argument against being vegetarian she had trouble with, which was essentially that growing crops kills plenty of animals so even vegetarians kill animals in order to eat.  This is of course true to an extent, but could easily be abused.

Let's be frank.  If you live in modern society your existence kills animals.  Your home is on land that could have housed animals.  Your food comes in trucks that run over animals.  The farms that make your food slaughter insects by the millions, dismember worms, groundhogs, and other underground critters, and wipe out forest habitat.  Your clothes and vehicles and everything else you have also comes from processes that wipe out animals.

Your very life is perched on a gigantic mountain of dead creatures.  Doesn't matter how environmentalist you are, how vegan you are, or how much it bothers you.  The only way to stop murdering other creatures for your own life to continue is to die.

Deal with it.

So given that we can't avoid being mass murderers of animals just by living in the society we live in, what are we to do?

We could decide that animal lives are clearly irrelevant and tuck into veal cutlets for every meal while throwing away as much waste as possible.

But we could also be thinking creatures and realize that we can't avoid the carnage we cause but we can minimize it.  Nobody can claim to be pure, causing no death and suffering by their passage, but we can work on ways to try to make the devastation we all leave behind a little less.

Being vegetarian is a fine way to do that.  A cow takes up far more cropland than veggies do, so vegetarians leave far less death behind them even if you ignore the death of the meat animal itself.  There are also strong arguments for vegetarianism from an environmentalist standpoint for basically the same reasons.

The two main reasons I see for people advocating vegetarianism are environmentalist and animal rights related.  Both have the same sort of structure though, for my purposes.  In our lives we destroy animals and do environmental damage whether we want to or not.  Also in both cases we can lessen that damage.

The trick is to not get caught up on any one thing, to my mind.  We don't have infinite energy, money, or attention.  We can't reduce the animal impact of our eating to zero, so absolutes like "It is wrong to kill animals for our food" aren't useful in the real world.  However, we certainly can take steps to try to make our impact less and each person is going to have different ways they try to do that.  Different people have different compromises that they can manage.

Some people can manage not eating meat.  Some can use no plastic.  Some can never fly in a plane.  The trick, I think, is to get away from absolutes.  It isn't that flying is right or wrong, it is that it has problems we should acknowledge.  Same goes for so many other things.  We should look at people with the expectation that they make real, serious attempts to make the world better in the ways that make sense for them, even if those ways aren't the ways we ourselves choose.

All the foods

The resort that the World Boardgaming Championships is at this year is a pretty nice place.  Compared to the previous venue which had tremendous problems like a lack of AC and random leaks (culminating in the building being shuttered this year!) it is a paradise.

The problem?  The food is brutally expensive.  I can't look at a sandwich for $12.99 US without cringing, and even though I do want to just stay in the zone and enjoy myself without worrying about expenses much, I can't do that at the prices I see.  But there are solutions, and they end up being even better than just eating out without even considering the monetary benefits.

A giant jar of pickles.  This is the solution to my food dilemma, or at least part of it.  I went to the grocery store to buy a huge stack of things that I can eat while sitting at the game table, and on that list was two 1 litre jars of pickles.  Also a bag of carrots, tons of fruit, and cereal that I eat straight out of the box.  Mini Wheats, naturally, since they are the easiest to eat without making a mess.  This way I can just reload on groceries every time I visit my room and I don't have to leave the game room to eat!

Plus it looks like I have enough food for about a week on $45 US, which would barely buy me one day worth of food in the restaurants around here.

I did get one player complaining of the smell of the pickles when I cracked them out during a game, but generally people just laugh at the fact that I have a full bag of carrots in my bag at all times.

It is a good end run around my money demon, because not having to think about money when I eat really makes the whole experience better.  Combine that with extra gaming time and I wonder why anybody eats in the restaurants.  Why would you when you can just munch down on a delicious carrot anytime you like?

Marshmallow soup

Elli recently had a project for school where she needed to make up her own recipe.  She elected to combine a dessert recipe I had sitting around with some of her own ideas and ended up settling on the following concoction:

Marshmallow soup

1 chocolate bar
1 cup of marshmallows
1 tbsp of brown sugar
1 tbsp of honey

She pestered me about actually making her recipe for quite some time and this weekend we finally got around to doing it.  First we melted the marshmallows and chocolate in a pot, which looked like this.

Then once everything was nicely melted we added in the honey and brown sugar.  Unsurprisingly it tasted pretty good, since of course it is nothing but a giant pile of sugar.  Elli was thrilled to eat her own creation, though I was surprised that she didn't vacuum it all up immediately and saved it to enjoy over the course of a couple days.  The final product looked like this.

It tasted a bit like s'mores with a honey accent.  Which could have been predicted by anyone, really.

Gotta learn the hard way

When I started looking for advice on how to go about lifting weights I saw a lot of things that didn't make any sense to me.  One of them was the way that people who lifted weights just sat around for most of the time in they spent in the gym.  I couldn't quite figure out why that would be, because I figured that if I was spending time in the gym I ought to spend all of the time doing something.

Initially my routine was to do a set, jump on the elliptical machine for 1 minute, then do another set.  I just kept myself constantly working.  Efficiency!  Fitting in extra cardio!  I wondered if the reason other people didn't do this was just because in most gyms the cardio equipment isn't right beside the weight equipment, or that there are lots of people competing for equipment so you can't just run back and forth between machines monopolizing everything.

Now I think I actually understand.  When I started out I wasn't lifting much weight so when my muscles were worn out I still hadn't actually burned through that much energy.  My cardiovascular system wasn't being particularly taxed even though my arms were sore, so I could easily do some extra cardio between sets.  Now though my weights are a lot higher and I am struggling because I really need actual rest between sets and can't just 'rest' on the elliptical.

So it seems that all those people who were sitting around actually knew what they were doing.  Who would have thought?

I also had the problem that while I was trimming away the tiny amount of fat my body had, I wasn't really bulking up much.  Of course that was because I was working out for an hour a day but hadn't changed my eating habits at all.  No matter how much weight I throw around it isn't going to get me big unless I put all the food into me.

My solution was to eat my normal amount of food every day and just add on 6 eggs.  I like eggs a lot and they are healthy, cheap protein so that was an easy choice to make.  The trouble I have been having is that my eating and lifting is messing with my schedule.  I need to pack in extra meals but I can't do it right before working out or I feel absolutely gross.  I keep running into the situation where I realize I have 3 hours and in that 3 hours I need to eat two big meals and do the whole work out / shower / cool down routine and that just doesn't have an obvious optimal route.

I need to redesign my life around always finding time to eat a lot and have 90 minutes to spare that doesn't come right after eating.  I really thought it would be the pain or exhaustion that would be the tough part of bulking up, not the raw logistics of fitting the stuff into my schedule.

Biggifying

In the past I have made the mistake of doing things without consulting the internet first.  When first starting dating a few years ago I wandered into a few random sites with a notable lack of success before I finally figured out that "polyamorous internet dating" would return lots of Google hits that all sent me to the right place.  I tried cooking lots of things on my own until I found out that effectively leveraging Google results like "cream of mushroom soup" created way better food than my paltry experience could produce.  A few weeks ago I started an exercise routine that mostly is focused around lifting weights and I thought AHA! I must consult the internet!

Turns out the internet is pretty stupid when it comes to exercise.  There are lots of sites urging me to consult my trainer, which is entirely useless.  If I wanted to pay a person a boatload of money to tell me stuff, I wouldn't be on the internet looking for free advice, now would I?  More specifically, if I *was* paying somebody a ton of money to train me my money demons would lead me to quit training in a hurry, so that isn't of any use.

The advice is also all kinds of contradictory.  Don't exercise too much, you won't gain strength!  Don't exercise too little, you won't gain strength!  Sure, right, but how much is too much?  I know that multiple times a day is too much, and once a week is too little, but some solid advice in the middle would be great.

Unsurprisingly there is also a ton of advertising and special workout routines you are supposed to pay for and all kinds of other nonsense like strength pills and other junk with less plausibility than homeopathy.

Now I am sure if I dig deep enough I can find something useful on the internet.  There must be people out there with concrete advice I could put into action.  Unfortunately it is buried in endless mounds of useless and worse, and sifting through it is tricky because I can't just test what I find.  Unlike dating websites, I can't make an account in thirty minutes and figure out if this is for me.  Unlike recipes I can't average a ton of results and find out an hour later if it tastes good.  Averaging some random advice and then waiting three months to see how much stronger I am is far too slow for my tastes.

So, given that the internet isn't actually able to communicate the truth to me this time, does anyone who is into weight training able to point me to a good resource for developing a basic routine?  Focusing on upper body strength and general health, as those are the two things that interest me at the moment.