There’s a lot of stuff afloat at the moment. Don’t bother staying tuned. I’ll probably just flake again.

So how does one handle something like this is in the middle of trying to make massive changes to their life? It’s easy! You wave the white flag, you give up. Now giving up has gotten a bad rap to be sure and I don’t mean you don’t go forward. What I mean is that you give yourself permission to not feel like a failure. Just like from Thanksgiving on through Christmas I won’t even try a little bit to track my progress or change my diet, although some of the changes will have hopefully stuck, I didn’t try to worry about everything. I was in pain and on medication and those popsicles were damn good! When you give yourself permission to have those kinds of days you eliminate the failure aspect. Sometimes life just hits you in teeth with a big bag of suck and you need to step back and realize that if you keep pushing you will fail and give yourself permission to take a day off. Small failures, in the more traditional sense of the word, are one of the biggest reasons people stop making changes in their lives. They look at their failure and decide they can’t do it. I think that most times the reality is that they couldn’t do it at that exact moment. Of course changes are hard and a lot of folks look for any excuse. So instead of giving yourself an excuse, give yourself permission.

Today I will be eating low carb again, just like the couple of days before I had the tooth issue. I know that the minor amount of pain left isn’t a valid excuse and that I can darn well manage to eat right today. I am going to work as well. In fact I am typing this on the bus. I gave myself permission and today I rescind that permission because it’s what is best for me. If you are serious about making changes in your life  you have to be willing to give yourself permission to take a step back every once in a while. Major changes take time and if you allow yourself to see set backs as failures you are less likely to succeed. I know that this battle will be won with small victories. I know that these major changes are really a bunch of small changes.  Every time a small change sticks and becomes habit I win. So what if the holiday season sets me back a little bit? So what if I ate a bunch of frozen things full of sweet goodness when I had a tooth pulled? The only real issue is making sure I am not giving myself excuses and at this point I think I know myself well enough to make sure that’s not the case.

So if anyone needs me I’ll be looking for something interesting to eat for lunch….

Diet seems like the easiest obstacle to tackle out so it’s the one I am working on first. I have my ups and downs but I am slowly working on changing my eating habits. I have no desire to “go on a diet” as that’s simply a recipe for failure. Even if I were to lose weight on a diet I would eventually stop the diet nd go back to my habits so it’s the habits that have to change. It’s really not that hard to eat a lot healthier but I have some habits that I need to change in order to really fix the problems. The first two also address one of the spending issues I’d like to change so that’s a bonus. What I need to do is eat breakfast at home and bring my lunch to work more often than not. If I am packing my own lunch then I can easily make it a healthy affair and the family as a whole does a pretty fine job of eating a healthy breakfast most days. All I need to do is get up a little earlier to eat breakfast and develop the discipline of  packing my lunch the night before.

Honestly developing healthy habits is the crux of the issues I have to overcome and the health will follow. The only exception is the one or two places where I have to break bad habits. I am not even going to address smoking except to say I am still quitting, I haven’t given up, and I am still failing. Outside of that I think that most of these things are relatively minor but the sheer volume of changes is going to be an issue and I feel like I have to be honest with myself about that. Take exercise, for example, where I have some restrictions on the sort of physical activity I can do due to my weight, my joints, and likely other things. It appears cycling will be the best option for me. I even have a good friend who is willing to bring me along on his weekly long distance ride and my wife is willing to cycle in the mornings with me. To cycle in the mornings I’ll have to get up even earlier in order to have time which is a minor sacrifice but considering I am already working on getting up early to eat breakfast this becomes a very early start to the day. For joining the crazy Irishman on his weekly ride I’ll have to give up sleeping in on Saturday which means limiting Friday night revelry. That’s not a show stopper and honestly probably much better for my health, but it is a rather major change.

None of these changes, or any I haven’t listed, are really huge changes but once you look at the big picture it’s hard to imagine what your life will look like if you mange to make all of them. All of them are worthwhile changes and none of them I can’t have, metaphorical, desert ever again but looking at the big picture is certainly feels like it. I don’t know what my life will look like when I am done and, hell, I may be truly bored out of my skull but what I do know is that if I keep going like I am today then I won’t live to see my grandkids and if I do it’ll be with someone else wiping my ass! So even if life is boring after get everything in order, which I don’t think it will be, these changes are worth making. I can always find something else, something new, to make life exciting, if I have to.

I am also starting walking/running with the wife which in and of itself isn’t an easy thing. I have to get braces because my joints are not happy with this plan but that’s a minor issue overall. The hardest part is getting up to do this before work. In order to run with Michelle I have to drag my arse out of bed at 05:00 and be moving and ready to run by 05:15. This also means she’s getting up earlier as well and neither of us are morning people. All of these things are easily overcome but will take time and dedication. I am optimistic about this and only really worried about my joints.

Monday morning I will take a profile picture, shirtless, and post it here so that I have a visible measurement of my physique as well as some public shame because, trust me, this won’t be a pretty picture. I intend to post a new picture weekly but I am not going to promise myself that because I have too many other things involved in this and don’t want a simple failure to post a picture to make me feel like a failure and give up on the important stuff.

All in all there’s a lot of commitment here and right now it sounds good but I know that Monday morning I won’t want to crawl out from under the covers and go run. I know my limits. But I intend to persevere and actually lose this weight.

I think Tim Barry says it best at the beginning of this song:

I guess it’s time for some end of summer house cleaning. I have a lot to sort out over the next little while and I may or may not reason it out here. I have some sitting down and talking with some folks to do before I make any final decisions but those are necessary steps. I doubt anyone in my life will be surprised by anything that comes of this. I am too old for a lot of things these days…

I did take almost all of July off of Facebook and now that I am back on I don’t spend even half the time on there that I used to and it feels pretty good. I never did write as much here as I wanted to but that’s how it fell in to place. I also still write for 9B and Comical Musings but not nearly often enough. I have rolled back my own expectations and realized I am not a journalist but rather an opinionator, if you will, and as such I only feel compelled to write when I have strong feelings about something. So my writing isn’t as prolific as I’d like but maybe that’s due to the subject matter and not me. I don’t know but I am not going to fret about it.

I think I am about done for tonight. I am spent but in a good way. It’s time to lay my head on a pillow and slip off in to nothing.

The first direction is that evil exists and it is random. This makes it terrifying and rightfully so but it only wins when we let that initial terror rule our world. This incident appears to the work of one twisted individual and nothing more. The odds of a copycat are non-zero. You put these two together and you might think you should avoid movie theaters altogether for a while but you would be entirely wrong. The chances of copycat acts are slim and the chances that you would be in a theater chosen by a copycat make your statistical chance of being caught up in something like this, zero. As of midnight in Aurora, Colorado your chances of being injured or killed in a theater shooting of this scale are 0.000000199 to 1. Statistically this means there is zero chance at all. Yet you can bet we will see attendance in theaters drop for the next few weeks.

Both sides are likely to make this worse than it already is. The left will be calling for more restrictions on firearms and the right will be incomprehensible about some theory that it’s the NWO. Yes I place Alex Jones firmly in the same camp as those who blame guns for crimes like these. The lovable, huggable Alex Jones has already gone off about this but I won’t disgrace my site by linking his nonsense. I haven’t seen the calls from the left but they tend to sleep later. I bet we’ll see the lunatic fringe calling for gun bans by the end of the day. Both of these reactions are out of fear and both sides will try to use this fear to their advantage instead of trying to show the public that this was the act of one truly evil individual and that we are all really very safe. And we, for the most part. will eat it up like milk from our mother’s breast.

To close out my first train of thought on the fear thread: even with this incident and any copycats we are still living in the safest, healthiest, wealthiest time in human history. This incident doesn’t make you, personally, any less safe at all. Before you react, before you cancel your weekend movie plans, before you let the fear of evil paralyze you stop and think. I implore you to take time and really consider the odds of something like this happening to you. Take the time to really analyze things and then make an informed decision. Don’t let the media narrative hold you in sway. If you really feel scared of something like this then stop and consider your mortality. Take a step back and hug someone you might not have hugged in a while then go on about your business.

As an aside if you post nonsense from either side of this issue in my comments I reserve the right to mock you mercilessly

The second path my brain took me down was relativism. I have a good friend who claims to be a relativist. I love him like a brother but think his worldview is total nonsense. And yes, it’s probably you if you are reading this. There are things in this world that aren’t relative. This was an evil act. Period. Full Stop. It is not a relatively evil act. It is not possibly non-evil in any manner. This is evil. It exists whether we believe in it or not. I think this is where relativism fails completely. You can pontificate on relativism over whiskey all you’d like but when you take a gun and tear gas in to a theater and open fire on innocent people you are objectively evil. Relativism is a nice mental exercise but in reality it just doesn’t hold water. Whilst minor in comparison to my other train of thought it is important. Most days this philosophy merely annoys me but today just thinking about it pissed me right off.

Now I am not blaming relativism for this incident. I do suspect that somewhere it played a role because of how the idea has permeated our society but I don’t think it was a conscious decision based on relativism. The “what is true for you is true” worldview necessarily begins by negating the social contract. Once you place yourself at the center of the universe then anything becomes permissible. As a relativist you may decide that you want to work for the betterment of humanity, and to be fair my friend who is a relativist is a great person, but it’s your decision and there is no social contract to guide your path. Again I am not saying that relativism is the cause of this man’s evil actions but rather that it came up in my thoughts and it pissed me off. It pisses me off because according to moral relativism this man’s actions could possibly be considered good and if not good then at least right for him. I am sorry to say but that a complete and utter truckload of bullshit. What happened last night, in the theater in Aurora, CO, was the work of an evil man. A man who acted objectively evil. I know my arguments are all that deep at the moment and frankly I don’t care. Any philosophical thought process that allows this man to be anything but wrong must be wrong. I fully intend to mock anyone that says differently.

After writing this I have come to realize that I were posting about this on FB it wouldn’t have been this long nor this thought out. Ok the relativism stuff isn’t all that will thought but I wouldn’t have posted those thoughts at all on FB so I am more open here even though I know this getting linked on FB. I also wouldn’t threaten to mock people. I don’t know whether or not this is a good thing but it is clear to me that I am more open here than I am on FB.

I am trying to be positive about life in general but the sheer amount of idiots that I had to deal with this morning has made me a bit grumpy. Sometimes the collective stupidity is enough to still surprise me. Anyway it’s time for me to log in to the VPN and officially start my day and work from home. I’ll probably get more done than I would have at the office but that’s neither here nor there. I suppose I am grateful for the idiocy this morning because otherwise I would probably still be negotiating the weather and becoming even more grumpy.

They are “training” them to avoid anything that might be construed as “sexual” contact. You can argue that this is a good thing but if you do I’ll just call you a moron. The chance of any child being molested is so low that it’s complete unreasonable to be afraid of it to being with and the incidents of children molesting other children are so rare that it makes these rules completely laughable. These rules are unnecessary and only contribute to the atmosphere of fear that permeates our society. Every day I get more and more pissed off about our societal fears and the constant overreaction to them, especially by other parents. Simply put we are living in the healthiest, most prosperous, safest era in the whole of human history and yet we allow ourselves to be paralyzed by fear! The media and the government certainly aren’t helping matters. It seems the only way to pull yourself out of the mire and rise above the fear is take the time to actually look in to the things in which you are supposed to be afraid and frankly not enough people are willing to go even that far.

The end result of this is that a fourteen year old girl can’t give an eight year old a hug at a church camp! It’s completely ridiculous and if you try and speak out, most of the time, all you’ll get is an emotional response that has no basis in reality. Reality doesn’t matter to a mother who thinks she is doing best by her child. The problem is that children are being taught to fear. They fear every man they say that doesn’t have a woman with them. It’s frankly just sick. These children, boys and girls alike, will grow up not trusting anyone and society will be worse off for it but can you get anyone beyond a small subset of parents to listen? It’s not likely.

This post isn’t all that coherent because I am typing it whilst angry. No I am not going to give citations because I am sick and tired of people not looking stuff up for themselves. I will respond mockingly to any comments that are not based on actual statistics. This is my rant, my vent, and I reserve the right to deride anyone who doesn’t bother actually looking the numbers if they want to disagree with me. No it’s not fair and I really don’t give a crap!