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.  

A health condition

A few days ago I was getting groceries and had a difficult interaction with a person in the lineup outside the store.  He was an older man who was wearing a mask in a half assed fashion with it loosely covering his mouth but slid down so it no longer covered his nose.  As we stood in line his mask slipped further and further down until it was sitting around his chin.

It is possible that he didn't notice, and this was entirely unconscious, but I am willing to bet a lot of money that the actual explanation isn't "whoops!" but rather "I don't give a shit about covid transmission and masks are annoying, so I will pretend this just happened and I didn't notice".

I politely said to him "Oh, in case you hadn't noticed, your mask appears to have slipped down."  In text that could appear innocuous, but obviously everyone is going to read that as "Put your damn mask on properly fool, I don't want to get covid from you."

He replied by saying that he didn't *have* to have a mask on, because he had a 'medical condition'.  He followed up by snarkily saying that he would put his mask on, just for me.

I found this infuriating.  I am not trying to enforce some sort of arbitrary dress code.  I don't give a shit about the rules!  I care about disease transmission.  This isn't about me trying to make sure everyone does as they are told, it is about me wanting to end this damnable pandemic.  It isn't about whether you *must* wear the mask, it is about doing so because it is your civic duty to protect other people even if you don't care about your own health at all.

I didn't yell all of that at him, much as I wanted to.  He put on his mask, and for the moment it covered all the breathing bits of him.  He got into the store and immediately took his mask off again once he was more than a few meters from me.

Does he actually have a medical condition that makes mask use unsafe for him?  Possible, but I doubt it.  He was wearing and using a mask, but used it only enough to create plausible deniability.  However, his actual medical status doesn't change my situation at all.  I am still pissed about all the people I see putting in the absolute bare minimum amount of effort required to get people off of their backs.  I am pissed about the woman in my building who held a mask five centimeters in front of her face while talking to the concierge in an attempt to pretend she was actually wearing it.  I am grumpy at all the people wandering about the mall with masks hanging half off of their faces, just having it on enough to not get yelled at.

I wish I knew what I should do about these things.  I am a big loud dude - if I get aggressive with people about this stuff, they are likely to do whatever I say.... for just long enough to get out of my presence.  Is it even worth trying to convince selfish jerks to do the right thing if they are only going to do it as long as my gaze is directly on them?

I don't know.  What I do know is watching people who chafe under the restrictions of the pandemic behave in ways that extend the pandemic makes my blood boil.

Love and Monsters

I just watched the Netflix adventure movie Love and Monsters.  It was great, in no small part because of the superb job done by the lead actor.  There are two things it did well though, and I wanted to comment on them because so few movies get them right.  The two things it did best were monsters... and love.

There will be a spoiler warning halfway through.

First, Monsters.  Love and Monsters is set in the near future in a world where monsters arose from a freak weapons accident and smashed human civilization.  Scattered remnants of humans live in hiding but monsters walk the world freely.  The reasoning given for the monsters was kind of silly from a scientific perspective, but I am totally willing to forgive that.  The important thing is that There Are Monsters, and I just ask that the movie tell me a story from that.

Mostly movies fail at this sort of thing.  They write themselves into corners and then get out with ridiculous Deus Ex Machina endings or insert senseless MacGuffins into the plot to cover for their shortcomings in writing and planning.  You have to strike the right middle ground where you continue to reveal things about the world you have created without making the things you have said previously seem silly.  Each new reveal in a science fiction story should follow from the previous one such that the viewer says "Oh, okay, I see how that would be.  Makes sense."  even if they wouldn't have *predicted* that reveal.

That is the key there.  You want to surprise people a bit, keep them guessing, but you want everything to fit together in the end in a logical manner.  After all the reveals are done, the characters need to have made reasonable choices given the world in which they live.  Love and Monsters does a great job of this.  Throughout the movie you learn more about the monsters and how the world works, and each time it all fits together with what you learned previously.  I couldn't have told you what the final act would look like, but it fits cleanly into the rest of the story so far.

I can accept all kinds of nutty stuff (space wizards with laser swords come to mind) as long as the rest of the story follows sensibly from there.

Now we get into spoilers as we talk about Love.

Twu Wuv appears way too much in movies.  I particularly object to it because of the built in assumptions of exclusivity and eternal duration, but also I think it doesn't well reflect how actual people work.  Relationships are messy, and that messiness does not have to detract from their beauty.

The hero of the story, Joel, is a guy with a crush.  Before the monsters he was dating Aimee and they were in love.  Then monsters came and they were separated by a huge tract of monster infested world.  Seven years pass, and Joel is still desperately in love with Aimee even though he has only spoken to her over a radio a couple of times since.  He has put her up on a pedestal so high that he has convinced himself that he can never be happy without her.

So he suits up and marches across more than one hundred kilometers of monster filled territory to find her.  Without a decent map, a compass, or any sense of how to survive.  This is idiotic, obviously, but it is exactly how lovesick, desperate people behave.  Grand romantic gesture!  Find my Twu Wuv or die in the attempt!

Naturally since Joel is the hero he makes it.  Many trials and much learning occur on the way, of course, because it is an adventure movie, but finally Joel arrives at Aimee's doorstep.

This is the point in a bad movie where they would kiss and reunite and Twu Wuv would make all the problems go away.

But not here!  Joel arrives and finds out that Aimee has moved on.  She still thinks of him fondly, you know, as that guy who she dated in high school who was a real sweetie.  But this whole "I would walk 500 miles" schtick is WAY too much for her.  She has her own life now, and while she is duly impressed by his feat, that isn't changing her mind.

Love and Monsters doesn't try to paint one of them as bad and wrong.  They realize the mixup, both feel kinda bad about the whole thing, and try to muddle along.  I love the idea that love doesn't have to 'work out' or be about betrayal and villainy.  It can just be a thing that is there, and we can empathize with the struggles of the heroes without a canned, predictable conclusion.

More adventure happens, and finally Joel goes back home.  His choice to risk his life mattered, both for his own group and Aimee's.  He learned things and got better, and more importantly he learned to value the things he already had like friendship, instead of pinning his hopes on Twu Wuv with someone he barely even knew.

Maybe someday those two do end up in a relationship.  The ending doesn't prevent that, it just has them in different places, on different courses.  It leaves them like real people, in a spot where even if you love someone or lust after someone you don't have to choose between Twu Wuv or Only Friends or Bitter Enemies.  You can have a thing where there is some love, and fondness, and maybe some lust, and who knows where you end up over the years.

This has immense appeal to me.

Relationships are complicated, and they can be good and fulfilling even if they look nothing like a fairy tale.  I enjoy when movies acknowledge that, and give us some stories that reflect the complexity of real life.

Joel is a character I can believe.  Aimee is a great complement to him, especially because she isn't some damsel in distress that he 'wins' - she is doing her own thing, has her own agenda, and gets her moments of bravery and heroism too.

I want more science fiction like this, where a logically coherent world evolves out of a simple twist.  I want more love stories like this, where people struggle with love in a complicated situation and find paths to happiness that aren't Twu Wuv.  

This was a great movie, and you should watch it.

On my way to hell

Random guy on the street, wearing a speaker:  Fornication!  Adultery!  Prostitution!

Me:  Fornication?  Sounds great, I am in.  (Making finger guns at the guy, and winking while sashaying slowly towards him.)

Guy:  No!  Fornication is bad.

Me:  But it is so fun.

Guy:  But it is bad.

Me:  But why is it so fun then?

Guy:  You will die someday.

Me:  Yes, definitely.

Guy:  And God will judge you!

Me:  Dude, God is a myth.

Guy:  You will go to hell!

Me:  Hell is where all the fornicators go, right?  I would rather go there, thanks.

Guy:  .......

I think these people who yell religious nonsense on the street really get used to being ignored, and they just don't know how to handle someone who plays back at them.  Next time I will hang around awhile and engage them in religious debate.  Perhaps I can get them to give up and take up a life of godless hedonism. You know, join Team Good.

Throwing stuff away

There is a voice in my head that is desperately worried about wasting stuff.  It is the thing that causes me to always eat whatever food in the fridge is the oldest because I cannot stand the idea of tossing food out.  It is that same voice that gets me to use shoes until they have multiple huge holes in them and my feet start sliding out.  It also triggers when I see other people doing things that waste resources, even if the things they are doing are otherwise pretty neat.

For example, I recently have been watching some youtube videos about people making wacky inventions with their own equipment.  They use 3D printers, plasma cutters, and all kinds of high end tools to produce things like bullet powered baseball bats, automatic pool cues, and supersonic pitching machines.

It is neat to see a slow motion shot of a baseball moving at Mach 1.35 ripping through nine baseball gloves while hardly slowing down.

It bothers me to see all those gloves thrown out though.

It isn't a matter of cost at all.  I know the people making supersonic baseball cannons aren't worried about the couple hundred dollars they spent on baseball gloves.  It isn't much money in their budget, and it isn't my money, but I still *hate* watching all that perfectly good material be tossed away.  Bits of plastic, hunks of metal, and all the other detritus of construction pile up when these videos are made and it all just gets sent to a landfill.

These creators are doing neat things, entertaining people, and even educating them to some extent.  That part is all good.  No matter how much I recognize that though, I can't quite ignore the cost of what they are doing.

Making youtube videos about home construction projects is a miniscule part of the waste our society creates though.  It is just that it is easy to see the waste there when it is captured on a video.

By far worse than these creative types are extremely rich people.  If you have a big house, you are creating a lot of waste.  If you have five big houses, you are creating dramatically more waste, and doing so for far less return.  Four of those houses are sitting empty, and all the energy you use to maintain them and all the materials used to create them are wasted.  When I hear about rich people working in one city and then flying home to another far away place constantly it makes me frustrated and bitter.  Not at the money, because it isn't my money, but just at the ridiculous use of resources.

This sort of feeling is why when my vaccuum broke and I could no longer repair it myself I hunted down someone who fixes up old vaccuums and gave my vaccuum to him.  I did not do this for the money, certainly, since no money changed hands, but simply because I wanted the parts of my vaccuum to be used for something if possible.  Some of it is going to be junk, but I can't avoid that, so I tried to make sure as much of it as possible got used.

I wear shirts until they are big holes in them.  I don't do this because I am cheap, but rather because I cannot stomach creating more pointless waste when I have no need to do so.  The shirt still works, so I shall not toss it.  I don't mind spending money.  I do hate wasting resources.

When a cost is something that is solely borne by me, that makes decisions easy.  If the only cost of a thing is money, then I can make a simple decision of whether or not to acquire that thing.  The hard part is that the resources to create things are shared across all people, and the cost of throwing them away is much more difficult to calculate.

Hail to the King

I watched Aquaman recently and it got me riled up about the way we tell superhero stories.  The thing that gets to me in so many of these stories is the constant reliance on royal entitlement as a moral imperative.  We are asked to believe that the most important thing in the world is people of high birth being in command.  Aquaman ends up being the king of Atlantis.  He isn't the king because he knows what he is doing - he only visited the place for an hour before being declared king.  He knows absolutely nothing about the job, and will certainly be an incompetent ruler.

Aquaman gets to rule because of being born entitled.  Nothing more.

I would prefer a world where rulership by birthright isn't a feature, but I can totally deal with stories that include such structures.  The thing that gets me isn't the existence of dynastic rule, but rather that it is framed as a good thing.  We are asked to believe that all is right in the world so long as the people who had powerful parents get to exercise absolute power over others.  

What I want, in short, is that when someone born to power ends up in charge the movie doesn't try to tell me that it is right and necessary that they do so.

This, I think, is part of why I liked Black Panther so much less than most people.  I am glad that superhero movies got a little bit more diverse in terms of race.  What I can't stand is the pitch that Wakanda is a enlightened society, one which has evolved far beyond the rest of the world, and yet they have a herediary monarchy with a 'battle to the death' element tacked on as their system of government.

In Aquaman at the end we watch the main villain be carted away to a cell.  He is spared because he is royal, someone important.  The tens of thousands of deaths that just happened a moment ago are an afterthought - those people were just peasants, after all.  The important thing is that the rightful king is on the throne, and that all the royal people are alive and well.  Death and suffering among the commoners is just a thing that happens.

It all wouldn't matter much if it was just a movie.  Movies ask me to believe in all kinds of idiocy all the time, that isn't new.  It isn't just a movie though.  Our society is currently a battleground of ideas, and one of those ideas is the idea that rich and powerful people ought to be able to guarantee their children a place in the halls of power.

There are times when this becomes a real problem, like in the case of Justin Trudeau or George W Bush, neither of whom would have been anyone of note if they hadn't been born into powerful families.  It isn't limited to just those most visible cases though.  I have often heard people talk about how taxes ought to be low so that people can give huge amounts of money to their children.  They often pitch it as a moral good to be able to give their kids a hand up, while I see it is the opposite.

Helping kids by teaching them, by supporting them emotionally, by loaning them a vehicle for a move or a place to stay when life gets them down, these are things that we should absolutely give our children.  Millions of dollars?  Hell no.  It is bad enough that people can accumulate enormous wealth themselves, much less pass it down the line.

Political battles between left and right are often about rich vs. poor, dynastic wealth vs. redistribution, iron fisted rule vs. egalitarianism.  This is a real fight we are having right now, and it bothers me to see movies so clearly pitch the idea that the only people who matter are the rich and powerful.

I am okay with movies about the monarchs and gods.  I just don't want the movie to tell me that their position is *right* and *deserved* and that it is my job to die to maintain the status quo.

Boooooring

Yesterday we held Back to the Lounge, my annual university gamer reunion.  Sadly it was virtual instead of in person, but it was still good to get to see some people I hadn't seen in awhile and take some sweet, sweet dollars from others due to their incompetence at barbu.

It sure made me feel boring though.

When someone says "So, what's new?" I used to be able to talk about things I was doing, or at least something in the news I found interesting.  Now I have nothing.

There are two reasons for this - first, everyone is boring now because nobody goes anywhere, meets anyone, or does anything.  If you aren't boring now, odds are good you are a jackass who is taking big risks for no reason.

The second reason is my hiatus from social media.  In the fall I ditched my facebook feed and I don't look at it anymore.  That has been good in a way, because a lot of that feed was full of stress inducing outrage that was useless to me.  It was largely stuff I couldn't do anything about, and focusing and worrying about things you can't change is not useful.  However, I also don't have much to say about anything.  If people want to talk about the impact on world trade of a boat getting stuck in the Suez Canal, I don't have anything to contribute.  I didn't know that was happening until days after.

Having been away from social media for many months now I think that leaving it behind was a good decision.  It isn't without cost, because there were definitely things worth reading on there.  Some of those worthwhile things were just amusing, and some were informative and useful.  An awful lot were just time wasting nonsense though, and in sum I think being away from it is a positive change.

However, I am not sure that combining this with a pandemic is a good idea.  It has left me feeling isolated.  I am not sure that solving feelings of isolation by binging on Facebook is actually a good plan, but definitely my timing could have been better.  

I can't be sure what the optimal, rational course is.  It will be many months yet before we are all vaccinated and life can truly go back to normal.  Until then my ability to generate interesting ideas and stories will be limited.  I can fill the gap with stuff from the news or social media in order to have things to say, but I don't know how much value saying those things has.  Humans use small talk as a crucial part of social interaction, so being stuck for things to say isn't great.  Should I see "Did you see the latest outrageous or unlikely thing on the internet?" as a important piece of having relationships with people, or just a pointless waste of time, filling the air?

Viscerally I don't have the urge to go back on Facebook.  No matter how much I poke at it from various angles, I simply don't have the emotional drive to get back on that wagon.  Even if it does leave me boring as anything, I think my course is charted, and I just have to wait until we finally get covid-19 on the ropes to become a person with interesting things to say again.