DAY 3

Not smoking is mostly easy but as the day wears on, the more I want a cigarette. I weighed myself today for the first time in months and I am at the lowest end of my average weight range, which is good. I have been super tired lately and opting for catching up on sleep when I can like last night even though it was a Friday. Lately I have been sleeping awfully, either insomnia or going to bed at 4 am and waking up after only a few hours. All in all, I feel good, but could easily do a little better.

Looking forward to some bike riding today and tomorrow! 


DAY 3:

whole wheat english muffin with butter
way too many BBQ almonds 500-600 calories oops
Beef and veggie soup with whole wheat pita 360 calories
6 oz coleslaw 340 calories? oops
2 cigarettes
3 tall Budweiser drafts
No exercise

DAYS 1 & 2 OF MY 24 DAY EXPERIMENT.

An experiment in quitting smoking again, being less focused on drinking, eating more strictly, and being a little more focused on exercise.

Because " an experiment" is a short-term test of will as opposed to an overwhelming "oh my goodness, I can't do this forever."

On the 24th day I can decide how bad I want to be during the weekend of the Soundset Music Festival in Minnesota, and then choose to return to grown-up decisions upon my return. We will see. 

DAY 1:

Whole wheat bagel with butter and peanut butter 240+ calories

2 protein bars totaling 320 calories

660 calories of cottage cheese

2 cups of coffee

2 late-night cigarettes 

2 PBRs

Several shots of Jameson

random late night tortilla chips and queso

No exercise other than running around kissing bar patrons' asses for 14 hours.

DAY 2:

Whole wheat english muffin with butter

6 grilled chicken strips

carrot and celery sticks

handful of almonds

whole wheat and peanut butter sandwich

whole wheat english muffin with cream cheese

1 cup of coffee

1 glass of soda
1 PBR
1 Newcastle
Countless shots of Jameson.
No cigarettes, but a few puffs off an an e-cigarette.
No exercise.

The Culture of Whiteness!

Describe your ethnic culture to me and how your ethnicity is important in your life. Find it difficult?

Chances are that means you are White, or more importantly, people treat you as if you are White.  Whiteness is the unmarked marker, the invisible, the taken-for-granted, and it is tied to economic and social privilege.

"A kind of unholy trinity of corporations, the state, and monopolistic media produces and reproduces patterns and practices of whiteness with dreadful predictability...its continued persuasiveness rests upon the pervasive social spatial, occupational, and residential segregation that makes our bifurcated social structure seem like a natural phenomenon."

You could also replace "whiteness" with 'hegemony' or 'heteronormativity'.

"Although the nature of jobs and the racial composition of the labor force have changed along with the industries in the economic core, the mass of the working class is still--or perhaps more accurately, once again--not-white, racially segregated, and occupationally segmented."

"The eagerness to be white is not hard to understand, since whiteness is a state of privilege and belonging."

-Karen Brodkin, from How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (1998)

Who is Barack Obama?

I love the following excerpts from chapter two of Barack Obama's Dreams from my Father. Maybe he is full of meaningless rhetoric like most politicians that enjoy successes.  Maybe he has let some of us down with respect to the vision that we aligned with.  But I can't help but believe he possesses a quality of character that each of us should hope and strive for and look up to.  He isn't perfect, and he exists as individual mediating within the current world-state, just as the rest of us are.  You're either the type who hurls literal or figurative Molotov cocktails at perceived institutions and ideologies of injustice, or you're the type who fits in enough to combat them as an insider.  I can't honestly opine as to which is nobler, both approaches can accomplish progress, and I'll go out on a limb to assert the balance of the two is a tricky art.

"It had taken me less than six months to learn Indonesia's language, its customs, and its legends. I had survived chicken pox, measles, and the sting of my teachers' bamboo switches.

The children of farmers, servants, and low-level bureaucrats had become my best friends, and together we ran the streets morning and night, hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp lines – the loser watched his kite soar off with the wind, and knew that somewhere other children had formed a long wobbly train, their heads towards the sky, waiting for their prize to land.

With Lolo [Obama's stepfather], I learned how to eat small green chill peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)."

"That's how things were, one long adventure, the bounty of a young boy's life. In letters to my grandparents, I would faithfully record many of these events, confident that more civilising packages of chocolate and peanut butter would surely follow.

But not everything made its way into my letters; some things I found too difficult to explain. I didn't tell Toot and Gramps about the face of the man who had come to our door one day with a gaping hole where his nose should have been: the whistling sound he made as he asked my mother for food. Nor did I mention the time that one of my friends told me in the middle of recess that his baby brother had died the night before of an evil spirit brought in by the wind – the terror that danced in my friend's eyes for the briefest of moments before he let out a strange laugh and punched my arm and broke off into a breathless run.

There was the empty look on the faces of farmers the year the rains never came, the stoop in their shoulders as they wandered barefoot through their barren, cracked fields, bending over every so often to crumble earth between their fingers; and their desperation the following year when the rains lasted for over a month, swelling the river and fields until the streets gushed with water and swept as high as my waist and families scrambled to rescue their goats and their hens even as chunks of their huts washed away."

"The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel. My grandparents knew nothing of such a world, I decided; there was no point in disturbing them with questions they couldn't answer."

Excerpts taken from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/09/barack-obama-childhood-indonesia

I'm attracted to female-bodied persons.

I could attempt to identity all the reasons and circumstances as to why it is that I am, usually somewhat masked,  intensely attracted to female-bodied persons.

But this is just a blog post.

     Adrienne Rich defines the lesbian continuum as that which embraces "many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support".  Rich's "lesbian continuum" embraces not only lesbian but also heterosexual women, who are conceptualized not as part of a hierarchical binary but as part of a continuum.  Rich's continuum also includes female bonding against homophobic tendencies in some of the feminist movements.


Rich, Adrienne. 1980. Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence.
as quoted by Wu, Peichen in the collection: Women's sexualities and masculinities in a globalizing Asia.

Langston Hughes and El-P

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The Wonderment for Things Once Valued, Now Discarded.

In our selfish way of life in this great industrialized nation, we ignore all that we leave behind. We want bigger. We need more. We deserve better.

Like a carousel ride, to stare out at the blurry rise and fall of trends without substance will make you nauseous. It can be mind-numbing to contemplate on the plethora of limited time offers dying and being born at any given moment. In our lives of convenience to be denied instant gratification seems unbearable. As we look down at the wooden horse's reins, we realize we are just going around in the same circle and wonder when it stops. We can't ever be complete or happy.

All of us lost in our own self-medication for the common human condition, we are comforted to have company next to us on our little downward spirals. No one is making a fuss, and we're not going to be the odd man out. As we move on to each new distraction we do not take time to care of the past.

This is not completely true of everyone. It is somewhat true of most. The rare person who may be free of responsibility of guilt is looked at as a freak instead of a hero and example to all of us. This is less of a critique on my part and more of an observation. It's not hard to understand why we are the way we are. We are players in a mysterious game.

I've always been fascinated with the things we leave behind. Mere objects once infused with a life of their own by the love of the owner at some point become trash. Homes get destroyed, or otherwise abandoned and are left to fall apart because someone isn't sure what to do with them. Businesses find it more profitable to close up in one area and build in a new area, leaving the previous building for sometimes many years until someone else buys the property.

I must have nostalgia not only for history, but also for things deemed ugly, outdated, and not good enough anymore. I am surprised that things are so easily forgotten. It is compelling that the forgotten continues to exist even though no one is interested. It seems to be waiting for me to come along and discover its beauty and uniqueness.

Anyway, I didn't expect to write all that. The point is I am so in love with things abandoned. Exploring forgotten places is a difficult hobby to be into. You have to know people who have experiences with it, and I don't. I am fairly educated about the safety measures and protocol of these things, but I can't do them well on my own. The biggest problem is figuring out where to go. This is not the easiest thing to do on the internet, even as wonderful as the internet is, and especially when you live where I do. I love to drive for hours in the country just for fun, which is probably the easiest way to spot a potential place around here.

I really want to go here:

http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/centralia.htm

Admittedly I'll go just about anywhere *nearby* if someone has a place in mind...

Guess being sick on a Friday night is an excuse to blog,
Etoilia