Weigh in!

Week 3: Down two pounds. Weight watchers is fussing at me for losing too fast, but I made a rather drastic change in how I approach food and exercise and I’m really not regretting it in the least. I know there’s a risk of my metabolism slowing down, but I don’t think that’s happening. My energy levels are so much higher.

I’ve asked DFH to take some before-pictures for me.

New face in my blogosphere

I was poking around a bit for info on a certain guilty pleasure I have (fashion-related reality shows on Bravo TV) and found this writer in another corner of the blogosphere—Jendi Reiter. She has this one piece called Jesus Won’t Make Me a Supermodel, which struck me as interesting: she makes a connection between the cattiness of pop culture that she’s watching on television and a book she’s reading on turning from judgment to love of God–an experiment in, as she puts it, “maximum cognitive dissonance,” which made me laugh out loud.

Plus she’s a Ronnie fan. So am I:

PS: Ronnie’s blog entry this week is spot-on–about bridging diversity. Check it out.

Yay of the day!

Temple at some point in the past year or so has restored its online archives for the Temple Times, of which I was associate editor between 2000 and 2004. I’m so happy about this, because it means I can restore that portion of my online clip file.

I discovered this when I had this random notion to Google an amazing student I interviewed back in the early days of my writing career. I wasn’t surprised to find that she indeed went on to Harvard Law School, and I believe we’ll be seeing more of her in years to come. I hit her up on LinkedIn, and hope she writes back, because I’d love to hear what track she’s on now that she’s out of school.

I should note that there was a story I wrote in 2001 that has been tickling around the back of my mind as being an influence on my faith journey, but I didn’t have a copy of it — I found it here. I was pretty much a nontheistic, nonpracticing Buddhist at the time.

Bad day for the in-box

I so suck at cleaning out my inbox, but this was kinda funny. Like I should play the lotto or something, but I think that counts as selling one’s soul. Either way, it’s a bit disturbing. [I mean, who else has more than 450 drafts?]

Getting my extravert on

Prior to 2003, I always tested INFP.

Weigh in!

Friday is weigh in day, and I’m down 4 pounds. More importantly, I can fit into the next size down jeans again. Well, some of them, anyway.

Also, one of the groundhogs that lives in these parts was poking around today, three weeks late, not seeing his shadow. Picked a heck of a day to wake up, though: the morning, we were getting pelted with crazy sleet. Didn’t get hit too hard by the storm, but was glad I didn’t have to go to the office, since a truck overturned on I-66 East.

No Outcasts on marriage in postmodern society

Ran across this in a blog that’s an outreach of the Diocese of Central NY that seems to be a proponent of the church of beer. (They have an open spirituality discussion that meets monthly at Empire Brewing Company, in Armory Square in Syracuse.) This essay talks about the implications of marriage in the afterlife, but I had one of those eye-pop out of your head moments when I read the latter portion of it:

Ironically, the emphasis today on marriage and family values has contributed to the loss of community. Isolated and without adequate social support, families are forced to rely on their own resources. The day to day stress on families has increased significantly as both parents are pressured to work more hours than their parents. Children hardly get to be children these days, passed as they are from one activity to the next, one parent to the next. The pressures and tensions are just too much for individual households to bear and literally pits family members against each other.

So beware of political candidates who claim to support family values, it actually demonstrates a lack of vision, an inability to imagine a better basis for our society.

Marriage cannot serve as the foundation of any society. Like Atlas trying to shoulder the weight of the world, marriage is crumbling under a burden it cannot possibly bear. Attempts to artificially reinforce it as the basis of society only make it a rigid and oppressive structure. And worse, insisting on this false foundation deprives us of the firmer ground we so desperately need.

Does this mean we shouldn’t get married? No, but marriage needs to be grounded in the larger context of a human community founded on compassion rather than oppression. If we remember to view marriage as a fragile relationship rather than an institution, we are much more likely to honor the humanity of the people involved.

The emphasis is mine, because it hits very close to home on a couple of points. Many gen-x-ers don’t trust institutions, and that includes both marriage and the church. Maybe that’s why the church of beer, as I call it, is what it is. Hanging out with friends over tea/coffee or a couple of pints and allowing conversation to flow freely may seem anarchic or subversive as a way of practicing faith in community to some folks. But for others, it’s freeing. Similarly, as DFH and I wrestle with what it means to be married, his distrust of the institution is clear even though I plead for us to approach it as a way of personally affirming our lifelong commitment to one another.

Anyhow, No Outcasts is a nifty blog, with a liberal dose of illustrations for those of us that think words are just the things that come between the pictures. You can check out the essay — and find the rest of the blog, which seems to be updated monthly — here.

I can has want wordpress hoodie

http://shop.wordpress.net/usa/hoodies/wordpress-navy-hoodie-unisex

As a faithful user of wordpress, both its open-source and hosted versions (and in both senses of the word faithful), I can even stomach the navy blue.

Progress apace

Updates continue… have the beginnings of my blogroll, mostly faith-related at this time but will be expanding gradually.
The archives are slowly coming up to par. Much of what I’m doing right now is migrating livejournal posts in from my old Deviathan journal and then editing both old gallycat posts and deviathan posts to reflect the style format of an open blog–using first names only or internet handles for personal friends, calling my son “K” and my partner “DFH”. But as I go back in time, the partner names will change; I’ve had several relationships since I started keeping an online journal. So I guess for them I’ll try to come up with nicknames that will reflect who they were at the time to me.

Right now, the meat and bones of this journal is still primarily faith-related, but that is going to be changing rapidly as I incorporate other content here. Also, for those of you who read this via a feed, you may occasionally see backdated posts appear when I create a new entry for old content without using the import tool on wordpress.

I love going through my old content, however. There have been a lot of LOL moments in the past few years that I had totally forgotten about.

I really wrote that?

I was really into writing reflections back in 2005, before I had any idea what I was doing. I’m going through the process of importing and cleaning up archives, and found this one that I wanted to share on the nature of being right and wrong, originally published on Livejournal in October of 2005.

So here I go again

I’m kind of merging all my blogs again, which is a good feeling. Simplifying, if you will, which is a huge component of what I’m trying to do for Lent: Declutter. But I seem motivated to do all kinds of improvements. I’m battening down the hatches and sticking more closely to weight watchers, for one. I’m doing pilates at least three times a week, for two. I’m also trying out The Biggest Loser Club, and whichever one I find myself sticking more closely to at the end of three months is the one I’ll go with for the year.

One of the things I’m wrestling with is the fact that Diet Pepsi and other diet sodas are increasingly showing up as big bad. You’ll notice that’s actually old news, but it continues to make headlines. Sigh. I’m such a southern girl when it comes to my cola love (although, oddly, I prefer Pepsi.) But I seem to be going British: Hot tea is increasingly my beverage of choice (Earl Grey, actually) and I can drink the generic iced kind without any sweetener at all, just a touch of lemon!