Sabbath

I seem to be getting into a habit of writing these blog posts on the bus to work - hence the lack of links or pictures - basically because it's free time with an internet connection. The fact that I don't seem to have time during the rest of the day struck me particularly this morning, because I was already thinking about Sabbath.
My Bible reading this morning was the passage in Exodus containing the 10 Commandments. Now it doesn't matter if you think that the 10 Commandments are the actual words of God, or if you think they're a Bronze Age social code with a tag saying 'And by the way God says this, so you'd better do as you're told'; the point is the same: a day of rest is not recommended, but mandated.
I don't keep this commandment. Over the years I've broken them all except for one, but right now the issue for me is that I don't have sanctioned, agreed, planned-for downtime. Instead what I have is a never-ending to-do list, and hours or days when I think 'I'm too tired, I can't be bothered, I've had enough of this,' and I then do what should be leisure activities while feeling guilty for wasting time.
Of course this isn't good, and I know I should make a change, give myself permission to chill out, even plan a deliberate Sabbath, but the truth is that even thinking about it makes me begin to panic that I have too much to do and not enough time. Planned rest may be such a good idea that ancient societies (or even God) said we should do it, but there are too many things I've got to get done.

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.

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

Getting a bit of fresh air

Decided to go out for a brisk walk over to the greengrocers in Shirley rather than wandering round to Tesco. This meant that (a) I got some exercise (b) I bought some fruit for healthy snacks and (c) I supported a small independent trader rather than a massive chain.

18 minutes, 2.4km, 175 calories. Thank you Nokia.

Teeth

There’s an important difference between less and fewer. Of course, when I say “important”, I mean “important to me”, but it’s one of those little things that I like to get right. “Less” is used when there aren’t any numbers involved, “fewer” when there are. So, for instance, there are fewer days left in 2008 than there were last week, but less time.

This distinction is important, because I’m reflecting on the fact that I have less teeth in my mouth than I did a week ago, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I had fewer teeth. I still have just as many teeth as I had earlier in December, but one of them in particular is a lot smaller than it used to be because first the outside bit of tooth came away from the ancient filling, and then on Saturday the filling, complete with small protruding screw, came out as well, leaving me with a little jagged bit of tooth sticking down from my gum. Hence me being in a situation where I have the same amount of teeth, but less total tooth.

Unfortunately this is not the only bit of tooth to have parted company with my jaws; I’ve had several come detached since the summer. And what’s more, I was warned that this very thing would happen. A couple of years ago, when I last went to the dentist, he told me that unless I had work done, then my back teeth would fall apart. He then told me that I would have to pay £1500 for the initial work, with the result that (a) I didn’t even try to find out how much it would cost in total and (b) I didn’t go back again. Well, he was right, but on the other hand we all had a very nice holiday last year. We’ve since discovered that as dentists go, he was a very expensive one, but nonetheless there’s no way that I can go to any dentist now without needing to take out a loan.

So far, the small remaining fragment of tooth doesn’t hurt (unlike the broken bit on the other side of my mouth, but that only hurts sometimes when I bite down hard with it and so doesn’t really constitute a problem), which means that I can put off doing anything about it for a while. I assume that it (or the other broken teeth) will probably cause problems at some point, and that I’ll have to have it pulled out – assuming that that’s the cheapest option – but until then, I’ll just have to content myself with knowing that while having less money than I’d like means fewer options for personal healthcare, at least it’s grammatically correct.

Greed

I really must rid myself of the belief that if one of something is good, then two will be better. I went over to Tesco for something to eat mid-afternoon, and they were reducing the price of some sandwiches. I picked up a Healthy Choices prawn mayonnaise sandwich for 49p, and then thought "That's less than half price - I could get two and still spend less." So I ended up with two packs of sandwiches, when one would have been fine; 250 extra calories when I really need to lose weight; 49p less in my pocket than I would have had.

Sometimes, more than enough is too much.

Harder, better, faster, stronger

I've downloaded Nokia Sports Tracker for my N95, and it reckons that my usual circuit of the Green is in fact just over 1km, which means I have been running slightly further than I thought. In fact, I am now running further anyway, because I have decided, since it's September, to increase my daily run to three circuits of the Green: 3.28km this morning, according to Nokia. The Sports Tracker has all sorts of nifty features, including exporting my route to Google Earth; here's what I did yesterday:

Having looked at the map from this morning's run, the margin of error for position and altitude are pretty narrow, so I'm (a) impressed and (b) likely to trust the results.

It also calculates calories burned, so I can eat cream cakes and think "I already ran this much this morning."

Procrastination

I'm becoming increasingly fed up with myself for not getting things done. There are lots of reasons behind this, which is one of the things I've been talking about in counselling sessions recently (which may be why I'm getting more frustrated about it), but more often than not it comes down to a simple choice not to do something. There may be all kinds of payoffs for inaction (or alternative, displacement action) and there may be complex and longstanding learned behaviours at work; it may well be the case that I choose not to do something that will be boring or unpleasant; still when the moment comes when I could do something, I make the choice not to do it.

Maybe I should use this blog (or now that I'm into microblogging, use Twitter) to record some successes - things I actually get done - and give myself some positive reinforcement.

P.S.

And my knee hurts.

Sandwiches saltier than crisps

I learned several things from reading this article. One is that sandwiches may contain high levels of salt. Another entirely more surprising fact is that there is such a body as The British Sandwich Association. They have a website at www.sandwich.org.uk which also contains the definition of a sandwich and a chance to subscribe to International Sandwich and Snack News. I was, however, slightly perplexed that 'The British Sandwich Association also stressed that it was "it is not the sandwich industry's job to dictate to consumers what they choose to eat".' Quite apart from the BBC's mangled grammar, if the British Sandwich Association represent British sandwich makers, then what they choose to put in or leave out of sandwiches has a pretty profound effect on what people choose to eat. Of course, people want to buy unhealthy sandwiches (all day breakfast is tasty) and these will therefore make money for members of the BSA. Conveniently, this fits nicely with the myth that all people should have choice about all things all the time, so that the willingness to take people's money while raising their risk of a heart attack is made to sound as though your friendly neighbourhood sandwich maker is your last bastion against the Nanny State.

Sport is good for your health

Except if you're South African

Young people happier in developing countries

Reuters carries a story about a survey conducted by MTVNI, which finds that overall young people in developing countries are happier and feel they have more to look forward to. There's a comment in the article that the happier young people tend to be more religious; I'd love to know if living in developing countries is enough of an indicator for likelihood of religious faith, or if religious faith by itself is a factor in young people's happiness. I thought this was worrying:

MTVNI said one of the trends they spotted was that young people with access to mass media tended to feel less safe as they did not have the cognitive skills to interpret real risk.

In the UK, more than 80 percent of 16- to 34-year-olds said they were as afraid of terrorism as they were of the getting cancer -- though the latter was far more likely to hurt them.

Not only worrying that young people may be as (un)likely to take positive steps to look after their health as they are to avoid the danger of terrorism, but that 16-34 year olds (34 year olds!) don't have the cognitive skills to spot the difference between scaremongering and actual danger.

Strange pronouncements on Scottish smoking

BBC news carries a story that Scotland's Chief Medical Officer has said the country's smoking ban will reduce the number suffering from lung cancer. I'm not sure whether a ban on smoking in public places is any more effective than other measures in stopping people from smoking, but I was slightly taken aback by the comments by Neil Rafferty, from the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (FOREST - a desperate attempt to get a good acronym if ever I heard one), who said that there is no conclusive evidence that lung cancer is caused by second hand smoke. Just out of curiosity, I put the phrase "conclusive evidence that lung cancer is caused by second hand smoke" into Google - perhaps Mr Rafferty should try the same. The winning bizarreness, however, has to be this: "Mr Rafferty said that by claiming such good results from the policy, the public could be misled into entrusting politicians with more power over people's lives". I'm sorry? Are we to assume that the Government should only deliver inaccurate and negative public health messages, in case the populace foolishly decide that they will hand over all responsibility and control to elected officials? "This Government has done something helpful: I must give them complete power over my life." Any evidence that smoking causes brain damage?