Post-Lent reflection

It's rather more than six and a half weeks since my last blog post, though my Twitter feed has been busy, and I've even ventured into the confusion of another revamp to Facebook. Apart from being glad that Digsby plus Twitter integration means that I don't really need to go on the actual Facebook site, what have I learned?

• Giving up telling people about me was easier than I thought it would be
  
• Not knowing what was going on with other people was harder than I expected. I have got used to knowing what's happening with people since I joined Facebook, but because I never maintained friendships before that, I had no fallback methods (calling round to see someone, phoning them) of finding out what was going on for people.
• Using Twitter and Facebook is self-reinforcing. Having "I'm not using Facebook for Lent" as a status is OK, but in most cases I don't want the last thing I said to be the last thing I say, so I keep wanting to make sure my status is up to date. One tweet leads to another.
• Living online is pervasive; it encroaches steadily on real-world life, so that it's possible to spend increasing amounts of time reporting and reflecting on real-world life online, and then spending even more time reporting and reflecting on online life.
• In a consumer society, there's a strong drive to be interesting or appear important, because that turns me into more of a saleable commodity. If you don't think this is true, consider Facebook not telling you (and everyone else) how many friends you have, or Twitter without the number of your followers in the sidebar.

All this ties into my ongoing thinking on humility and self-worth, and some emrging ideas about how to prioritise stuff in life, which I may or may not blog about sometime soon.

Lenten discipline (more silence)

I've decided to fast from online life for Lent, and as a start I'm going to stop using Twitter and Facebook, and have changed my browser from Flock back to Firefox (and uninstalled the Facebook and Twitter add-ons). I'm also going to try and cut down on the surfing that is purely for distraction, though that may be difficult - how much time spent on BBC News is for keeping up to date and how much is avoiding doing anything else? I also want to try and keep up with writing, which will mean using Helium and Google Docs (as well as research). I will simply have to make sure I draw the line between what's necessary and what's not; I guess that's where the discipline comes in.

Hopefully in about six and a half weeks I'll let people know how it went.

Silence

10 days ago I decided to take a break from using Twitter. Initially this was a fairly pragmatic decision - I was feeling down and the only things I wanted to write were miserable little snippets of my internal world. But then I started thinking about the spiritual value of silence (or at least online silence). I wondered how much of my blogging, tweeting and status updating is to keep people informed, and how much is to bolster my self-image: "Look at me. I'm here, I exist, I'm important!" So I decided that it would be at least a week before I used Twitter again. Of course, we then had interesting weather,but I resisted the urge to tell everyone that I, too, had noticed the snow. I've now got to a stage where the craving to tweet seems to be wearing off, so I may start doing it again - though cautiously.

My job

On my way into work today (bus, not bike: I'm too tired and having to transport the laptop as well was the final straw) I seriously considered going and telling my boss that in fact I have been lying misrepresenting the facts when speaking to her recently. I rehearsed in my head as the bus went along Portsmouth Road how I had thought that saying I was happy with my work would be the most politic course of action. I went over the Itchen Bridge relishing the feel of the words "To be honest, I hate this job. It's just filling in pointless forms recording things that I couldn't care less about." And I arrived in town pleased that my mental health would no longer be adversely affected by having to smile and pretend that all this corporate nonsense held even the slightest interest to me.

Then I walked past Blackwells and was immediately seduced by a "Buy One Get One Free" offer on Teach Yourself books. On going into the shop, I found that in a small display, there were three books on writing (this, this and this). It was the work of a moment to acquire an even number of books, and I was out of the shop, reflecting on the kindness of Divine Providence in putting inexpensive guides to writing for a career in my way just when I was utterly sick of my current employment. (The more rational and sceptical of my readers will be relieved to know that I also reflected on my propensity to invoke the Divine for doing something I really wanted to do anyway - particularly when it involved spending money.)

My boss wasn't in the office this afternoon, so I didn't have an opportunity to ask her for a quiet chat. I did spend a little time submitting an article (which I'd written previously - not during work time today) to Triond, and followed a link from there to Helium, which looks quite promising. I have to say, even the sniff of a chance to earn money from writing has cheered me up - so much so that I sat in a meeting and agreed to work on the Quality section of the Community Services Contract and barely felt an urge to run screaming from the room.

Frustration

I had some stuff that I really wanted to write down, but I had a series of frustrations and interruptions and now I've not only lost what I was going to say, but have convinced myself that it was rubbish and not worth saying anyway.

Lose weight the difficult and tiring way!

I had a look via Google at a couple of sites to try and work out how many calories I’m burning by cycling to and from work (not many, given the pain involved and how tired it makes me feel – but that’s because I’m basically too slow and it gets classed as “leisure” or “gentle” cycling. I will not record my thoughts on this on a public blog) and was struck just how many ads there are on fitness-related websites for quick, almost effortless weight loss. I could probably have spent an instructive couple of hours finding out how to target belly fat or lose 10lbs in a week with herbal supplements. Presumably enough people must sign up to become members or purchase herbal supplements to make these adverts worthwhile, but it did make me wonder about whether I should use my current weight loss as a springboard for an online business empire. The ad could be something snappy like “Lose weight by eating less and exercising more – even when you don’t feel like it”. Then I could sell interested customers my secrets to weight loss success. I still need to work on the details (which I obviously wouldn’t put on here, or else I’d never make any money, duh), but I think it could probably be something like

• Be overweight and dissatisfied with your reflection in the mirror – good selling point this, as most of the people who are interested in weight loss already meet these criteria
• Try to have teenage children around who will regularly point out how fat you are. For customers without teenage children, we could perhaps offer a discounted rental service – “For only 24.99 per hour, a fifteen year old will sit in your lounge and make disparaging comments about your belly”
• Make a decision that health risks, disastrous body image AND snarky comments are too much and you’d rather find an alternative way of suffering
• Get up at least half an hour earlier than you have to (an hour earlier at weekends). Weigh yourself, then exercise. A Wii Fit is good for this, as it will combine weighing you with motivational messages and will even give your Mii a huge gut to really ram the point home. The best exercise, however, is to go out for a run. If possible, start doing this in the winter, so that you can drag yourself out in the dark, as well as having a good chance of rain or freezing temperatures.
• Start walking to places instead of driving, and then take up cycling to work instead of catching the bus. Try to make sure that your route has the lowest point in the middle, so that whichever way you go, you’ll always finish with a hill.
• Drastically change your eating habits. Breakfast should be a bowl of bland cereal with skimmed milk, or possibly plain porridge. Don’t even think about sugar. Evening meal should be less than half of your total calorific input for the day. Apart from that, all you eat is fruit. Lunch and snacks are fruit. Any fruit you like. Apart from bananas. Or dried fruit of any kind.
• Drink lots of water. Then drink more, until you slosh when you walk.
• Set yourself challenging weight loss goals and berate yourself when you don’t achieve them.
• Follow these simple steps (plus our guaranteed extra step, only 59.99) and you too can lose weight frustratingly slowly over a period of several months.

I think that about sums it up. Re-reading this, I realise that I’ve even got a name for my wonderful regime – “An alternative way of suffering”.

Small achievements

It seems appropriate that this is my 200th blog post and I'm recording having achieved something. I finally managed to cycle to work this morning, after weeks and weeks of not getting around to buying a new rear wheel and then several days of not fitting the inner tube and finally having to buy a new pump, followed by another inner tube when my brand new one blew a hole. I think it was sometime last year that I last cycled to work, though the memory is old enough to have faded quite a bit now. I can't even be sure whether it's more than a year since I've been on my bike. It's certainly a lot longer than that since I cycled any further than the 4.5 miles into the middle of Southampton - I can't remember doing any significant journeys since we moved down here 10 years ago. So I'm quite pleased that I managed to go 12.45km (7.74 miles) without serious injury - by which I mean that the pain in my legs isn't bad enough to stop me from cycling home again.

Cycling will not only help save money spent on bus fare, it will also help towards the other area where I'm achieving a little: losing weight. It's still too early to start saying "I've lost x amount since Christmas" but I've now lost enough that it's obviously the result of doing exercise and eating sensibly rather than just natural fluctuations in my weight. Getting the Wii Fit for Christmas has actually been a big boost - apart from the fact that it's a fun way of being a bit more active, it's a significant motivation to see a graph of my BMI and weight going up or (hopefully) down.

There are still lots of things I need to do, or to do better, but I'm confidently looking forward to more cycling, more weight loss - and another couple of hundred blog posts.

My journey to work this morning