Family grateful for health, which in general, has been quite good. one kid gets surgery on Friday which should be uneventful, but recovery will be tricky and slow. school drama seems to be at a minimum. Work still good and on the right trajectory. new boss is quite great. a member of my team is occasionally combative, regularly unpredictable, and sometimes volatile. Balancing between giving someone emotional space to work through issues and not being a punching bag is occasionally tricky. Life health experiment is going well(ish). reducing calories and changing what you eat is bizarre. On the one hand, it's super easy. you just decide what the plan is, and execute it. on the other hand... when you spend decades associating food with pleasure and social exchanges and a love language and then basically shut that off - it's an adjustment. Maybe I'll write about this someday when I'm further along in the experiment. Miscellaneous I vacillate between "it will all be fine" and "there will be blood in the streets" as I loosely follow headlines about top secret documents, mid-term elections and other news stories. I think that maintains a low-level amount of constant anxiety that requires tending to.
I hear ya on the food thing... ever since I did the keto diet and lost 40lbs several years ago, I've been very thoughtful about my food. Almost nothing comes in a package; everything is fresh from the meat market or produce stand. Portion size is about 1/3 to 1/4 of what a plate at a restaurant contains, and I am comfortable, happy, sated, and eating delicious food. But this bout of ennui recently has me going back to old comfort foods from years gone by. Pizza. Burger King. Taco Bell. Big hoagie style sandwiches. Grocery store deli shit. Etc. And I feel like crap. Sure, the food has some sort of sensory tastiness (or nostalgia) that is good at the moment ... but then the heartburn kicks in. Or my "regularity" is adversely effected. My energy levels are down, because none of that is "food" or quality calories to keep my body (and mind) powered. My Dad's Alzheimers and old age (86) have basically robbed him of any real sense of taste, so he's down to basically being able to sense sweet and salty, and that's about it. So when we were at the park the other day and there was a desert food truck, I figured we'd get an ice cream or something. Turns out dude was selling a scoop of cookie dough with a scoop of ice cream on top of it, covered with chocolate chips. Dad and I had one. I was up all night, sick and sugar buzzing, unable to sleep or puke... but just be miserable the whole night. Previously, if I wanted something sweet, I'd literally break off a SINGLE SQUARE of a super fine chocolate bar, and nibble that thing for the length of an entire TV show. To have such a sugar bomb all at once was ... destroying. Blech. Food is important, man. So important. Gotta give the body the right fuel to operate, or shits just not gonna go right... but there's the social element that is so important...!