Why be Normal?

I know, everyone out there has a new year’s resolution and I am certainly not unique in mine.  I resolve to try and lose a few pounds like millions of others out there.  My new year’s resolution is B-O-R-I-N-G, but it is one resolution I finally feel resolved to make.

About two months ago I joined Weight Watchers.  Why?  Because I wanted to torture myself and sit in groups of people who are weight loss fanatics.  Everyone there at meetings is so serious!

When I went to get weighed in the third time, I said to the woman behind the table, which scale is lighter?  She replied “they are both the same”  Really?  You mean I’ll weigh the same if I stand on both scales?

Weight Watcher Wonder Woman then proceeds to tell me how she lost almost 100 pounds, blah blah blah blah naninanibooboo.  Whatever.  I lost 5 (peed before the weigh in) and got my first sticker.  What incentive to keep going - a little gold sticker with the number five on it.  Now, I have lived.

Chastized and smiling sheepishly as she put my sticker on my weight loss bookmark, she reminds me that the first few weeks are mostly water weight and not to expect similar results next week.  Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Weight watchers wonder woman then asks me if I am having fun.  Are you kidding? 

No sugar+No Pizza+Exercise=NO FUN.

I answered, “No, not really”.

She replied, “Oh, but you will, wait until the pounds start flying off”.

Now I just wanted to smack that silly little smile off of her face, but instead I smiled and left the building.  Hell to the Weight Watchers Wonder Woman.

I resolve that this is not going to be fun.  Weight loss is not fun, but it is good for my health and that is why I am going to do it.  I resolve not to have a run in with wonder woman even though I want to.  I’ll continue to get weighed because it does keep me on track, I just refuse to have any fun at all while dieting.  If I do, I might just get addicted to it.

Do you live on quiet, snobby street like I do?  The only decorations on our entire street for the holiday season are tasteful white lights, one candle in each window, a wreath on the door.  We didn’t realize that we were moving onto Stepford Street when we bought the house.  I’m considering spicing up the front lawn this spring with the new

garden gnome: 

Maybe a whole row of them to go along the street, letting my neighbors know just how I feel about the unwelcome wagon that has visited us over the past two years we have lived there.

Previously published in the Daily Gazette on August 20, 2008, when Billy and Lily were chosen as hometown novelties, here is a snippet from their interview conducted by Millie, staff reporter.

Millie:  So Billy, how did you and Lily meet?

Billy:  We lived close to each other growing up.  She is my mother’s daughter.

Millie:  Wouldn’t that make Lily your sister?  Not your girlfriend?

Billy:  Like I said, she’s my girlfriend.

Lily:  Yeah, girlfriend.  Me and Billy go out together.  We play cards, go to the movies, and you know.  He’s my boyfriend.

Millie:  Let’s move on.  Lily, what do you enjoy doing for fun?

Lily:  Go to the movies, play cards, and you know.

Millie:  What movies do you like?

Lily:  Movies that are at the movies.  Popcorn.  I love popcorn.

Millie:  What about you Billy?  What do you like to do for fun?

Billy:  Fish ‘n stuff.

Millie:  Great, great.  Fishing.  Where is your favorite place to go fishing?

Billy:  The lake.

After such a riveting interview, Millie ran back to the Gazette for the scoop of the week.  Afterall, in rural Massachusetts, what other kind of exciting news is there?

While waiting in line for a sandwich today, my eyes caught a pile of index card ads from a local psychic.  I live in a progressive town and you can find almost anyone or anything if you search hard enough.  I tried to scan in this ad so that you can see it, but of course I am having trouble resizing the image so that it fits in the editor.  I’ll have to read it to you instead.

It reads:  “Dorina, She will tell you your past, present and future.  No questions too big or too small.  Specializing in palm and tarot card readings that help in all matters of life.  Over thirty years of experience.”

As far as someone telling me my past?  I can do that myself, I was there.  I can pay myself the money instead, maybe get myself something good for dinner.  My present?  I’m sitting here with a palm reader, obviously curious, desperate, or a combination of the two.  My future?  Tonight you will be sitting at your computer endlessly clicking on entrecards and trying to keep your blog interesting. 

As for “No questions too big or too small”, I politely disagree.  Questions that are too big for a palm reader:  1.  Should I leave my spouse?  2.  Should I quit my job?  3.  What stocks should I invest in?  (although lately, a psychic might have better luck).  Questions that are too small for a palm reader and not worth paying someone to answer:  1.  What color is my underwear?   2.  Am I nuts?  3.  Can you guess how much I weigh?

“Over thirty years of experience” getting morons like you to pay me money to make you feel better about your life, your potential and your pitfalls. 

Now, I’m all for a self employment and Dorina is just a small cog in the fine workings of the capitalist machine.  Maybe she is cheaper than therapy, I’d bet she’s at least more amusing although she isn’t covered by my health insurance plan.

As a larger person, I do not blame my weight on anyone but myself.  I succumb to temptation on a daily basis and I rarely put one foot in front of the other and get exercise.  I don’t need special seat belts but I do have too much padding on a sturdy frame. 

My real question is, do skinny people really understand what it is like for a fat person to live in what I believe is the skinny world? 

Forget about airplanes or movie theaters, proverbially small, cramped seating for just about anyone, but what about sporting events such as football games?  The average football fan is not prancing around in his size 32 jeans and medium jersey, they are busting out of an xxl with a belt that is straining on the last hole.  Why is it that football stadium seats are 18 inches across at most?  As a larger person, you can’t even jump up to cheer without taking the seats with you. 

Public restrooms?  Forget it.  I can’t speak for men’s rooms, but in women’s rooms the stalls can be so small that it is difficult to squeeze through to the toilet.  Never mind when the door pushes into the stall and you have to suck in your gut just to get around the door and get it closed.  We are told to wash our hands after leaving the bathroom, but how do we clean off the rest of our body that just brushed every free surface of the bathroom stall?  I always use the handicapped bathroom, although I don’t have a specific handicap.  If they gave out little blue placards for the bathroom, I’d be one of the first to sign up for one.

Does a skinny person understand what it is like for the overweight woman and the shopping mall?  Not only is it impossible to find a suit that is not made of polyester, but try finding a dress that your grandmother wouldn’t want to share with you.  You can’t win at the mall as a larger person and generally you will probably buy a lot of shoes if you haven’t been reduced to tears in the dressing room already.  I know that I am not going to look hot and sexy, but I would like to look clean and presentable at the very least.  Please, clothing manufacturers, stop putting flower patterns and teddy bear prints on everything over size 14. 

Never mind all of the fad diets, the skinny jeans and the anorexic supermodels.  How is a fat person, or even a chubby person expected to have any self respect with the constant barrage of information that we are wrong, gross, or otherwise inept?  Maybe as a society we need to start focusing on what really matters, like intelligence, kindness and maybe some empathy.  If we stopped looking in the mirror and started to look around at each other maybe we wouldn’t be so focused on the little things that we can’t change anyway about ourselves and start changing the things we can.

I am frustrated.  I am working hard at keeping my blogs updated.  I have complained about bloggers writing nothing but rants or posting ads all over the place - of writing nothing of substance. 

Today editors, I apologize, because you shouldn’t even have to consider this post for payment.  I am irritated, frustrated and downright annoyed with trying to figure out the small details of a successful blog and well, since I have this blog, I might as well let everyone else in on my misery.

I get the basic things like using today.com, blogspot, or wordpress.  I have figured out how to advertise on project wonderful and adwords.  I have figured out how to put ads on my blogs and have learned which blogs don’t allow you to.  I have figured out how to have my own site through godaddy.com.  I am getting there, but what I can’t figure out seems to grow by the day.  I have learned some traffic boosting tips from Entrecard, but I am drowing in a sea of pings, diggs, widgets, meta tags, verification html, readers….how do I get people to subscribe to my blog if I can’t even figure out how to put that little box on it that reads “sign up here”?

I know.  Whine, whine, whine.  I am not old, but thirty six is starting to feel ancient in the cyber world.  I work full time and I don’t have all the time in the world to figure out the increasingly confusing blogosphere.

I am a writer and I continue to see that the only way to get significant traffic to your site is to offer something that people want to read.  I get that social networking is good, and by using Entrecard I have read blogs I would otherwise not have encountered.

I have had visitors to my blog for some of the weirdest content I have.  (see baby drinking amniotic fluid).  I guess since I found limited information on the topic, once I wrote about it, others found it.  In all stupidity, I didn’t really realize this is how blogs worked until I checked my traffic.  Duh.  Note to self:  Provide information that people are searching for.

If anyone out there has advice on how to be successful while writing a blog about blathering, please let me know.  I have to get back to writing about hair restoration, a topic I get paid to write about - really, I do.  Why?  I am not really sure, but I have learned a lot of useless facts about male pattern baldness and the marketing of hair restoration products.  I digress, but the buyer wrote to me:  “Don’t tell them that it might not work.  It probably won’t, but we don’t want them to feel discouraged.”

A dragon Lily in my yard summer 2008.

I have had some of the oddest jobs, and in my colorful working career I have encountered some of the most unique characters that you couldn’t create if you tried.  Obsessive compulsives, multiple personalities, street thugs, mentally retarded, I’ve worked with them all.

Take Lily for example.

Lily is about three feet tall and about three feet wide.  Coke bottle glasses.  Long black/gray hair.  Demanding.  She was competent enough to be living on her own for years although with the help of 40+ hours a week of individual staffing.  I was one of her relief workers, filling in when others needed some time off.

Lily’s social worker was adamant that Lily maintain a diet.  Significantly overweight, Lily struggled with heart disease and her social worker wanted to help her by creating a diet that would control portions.  The diet was very creative and consisted of regimented snacks, very little food left in the house, etc.  The social worker thought she was smarter than Lily, which was her first mistake.  (Her second was doling out diet advice when she was about 5 feet tall and close to 300 pounds herself.  A taller, more competent version of Lily).

Every shift I worked with Lily we had to weigh her.  This was a production in itself.  Lily would strip down to her underwear (her choice) and you had to put the scale into the middle of the kitchen floor.  Lily would ballet style walk up to the scale, step on, and place both feet close together, spreading her arms wide as if she was going to take off.  Why me?  I thought the first time.  Why not me?  I thought each subsequent time.  You have seen nothing if you have not seen a 3 foot tall woman in her underwear playing prima ballerina as she is about to get weighed. 

It was odd, that with such a strict diet, Lily really wasn’t losing much weight.  They had her at the YMCA in a swimming class (that is another story about powdering that I will have to share another time) and had her active throughout the week.  I learned her secret by accident while out to dinner one night.

There I sat, having dinner with my friends.  I saw Lily and went over to her table to say hi because she was sitting alone.  I figured she was having a coffee or something because she only had $1 a day spending money in order for her not to buy all kinds of junk food.  There sat in front of Lily a cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake.  She said to me, “I’m busy now”, and brushed me aside with her hand. 

I sat back down, stunned.  When Lily left, she had a to go sundae with her as well.  Lily’s waitress came over to me (it was a slow night and she saw me talking to her).  She told me that Lily comes in every night and could we tell her to stop?  She let me know that Lily first came in about a year ago, ordered a large meal, ate and then said “thank you” and walked out the door.  She had eaten at the restaurant nearly every night since without paying.  Each night thanking the waitress for her food and leaving.  I then learned she headed over to the local Dunkin Donuts next, got a coffee and donuts to go, and proceeded home.  Every night she was eating her sundaes and every morning she had donuts to eat.  Hah! 

Some people say that she might have been manipulative.  I say she was being creative and self advocating.  Who was going to stop a 3 foot tall, 3 foot wide woman from walking out the door without paying, who was ever so polite about the whole thing?

Even after I talked to Lily, there was no change in her behavior.  I tried to convince her social worker to be more liberal on the diet foods, that Lily was actually walking almost two miles round trip to the restaurant every night when we couldn’t get her to walk 100 feet.  None of this worked.  Lily had her plan and she stuck with it.  Diet be damned.

People will believe almost anything if they hear the message enough. When I owned my own candy store about ten years ago, I sold POP Rocks, in every flavor that I could find.

I had heard the urban legend that Mikey, the kid in the life cereal commercials, had died from eating pop rock and coca-cola. How stupid, I thought, why in the world would anyone believe this?

As customers came in, almost every adult had something to say about the Pop Rocks. I heard stories about kids choking on Pop Rocks and soda, and “didn’t you know that Mikey from the commercials died from it?” on a daily basis. He isn’t dead, he is in fact a licensed attorney in New York City. Even with the explanation, customers were not willing to believe that Mikey was alive and well. They wanted to believe that Pop Rocks and soda were dangerous and nothing could change their mind.

I wanted to post a sign, “No, Mikey didn’t die from pop rocks and soda”, but I didn’t want to scare any of the kids.

I even tried it myself. I took two packages of Pop Rocks and put them all in my mouth at the same time. I washed them down with a 16 ounce bottle of Coca-cola. Besides a significant sugar rush and a few carbonated pops, nothing else happened. I didn’t die and my stomach did not explode. Hah. Urban legend proven false. Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola did not kill Mikey and they did not kill me.

Now if it was mentos and Coca-Cola, that might be another story altogether. I heard that if you chew hard on mentos while drinking a Coca-Cola, all of your teeth will disintegrate. It happened to Jennnifer Aniston and that is why she always smiles without showing her teeth. Really. It happened. This is not a rumor.

I don’t sit around pretending that blogging is going to make me rich or famous.  Disturbingly enough, while searching through blog after blog, I have learned that many people do not care about the content (or lack thereof) that is on their blog.

Why is it normal to click on a blog and then be bombarded with ads, referral links, and requests to subscribe to the blog?

Subscribe to what?

If I wanted to read the equivalent of junk mail on a daily basis all I would need to do is go to my mailbox, which is also full of useless things I would never consider buying.

Yes, advertising has its place.  I’ve tried it myself with some successes and some failures.  If you really have something to offer, advertising is the way to go.  If you have nothing to offer, why are you dragging people over to your blog in the first place?

I read close to a hundred blogs tonight and came across only one that actually made me laugh and had me inspired enough to write a comment.  I won’t give him credit here because that would be against everything I just ranted about. 

Blogs are open to everyone, as long as they have a computer to access the internet.  Writing ability and a command of the English language (if you are writing a blog in English) are not necessary and unfortunately my experience reading blogs lately has been nothing short of boring. 

I am going to put on my boots and cape and strive to write interesting (or at least informative) content on some of my blogs to avoid providing others with little more than an ad and a look at how lame I’ve become with the content I’ve written.

I saw the weirdest thing today during a routine ultrasound exam my wife underwent to check on our 22 week old fetus.  You could see the baby opening and closing the mouth, drinking the amniotic fluid.

I didn’t know that babies “drank” but thought that they received all nutrition through their umbilical chord.  Clearly, I was mistaken. 

She (we learned weeks ago that it is a girl), looked like a little old man with the jaw bouncing up and down.  The technician told us that she was drinking.  I can’t decide if I was a bit disturbed or completely overwhelmed. 

My little girl is growing and I can’t wait to meet her.

It is amazing and strange that we breathe liquid prior to coming into the world.  We lie in a sea of fluid, slowly growing, drinking as we need to.  Everything we need is at ours for the taking.