Flaming Chords

This is my front page. All comments here are screened; if you don't have my email address, you can drop me a line here. If I know your email address, I'll reply by email -- if not, I'll reply to your comment, and then rescreen both your comment and my reply.

It's also got every tag I have -- this is because my current LJ style doesn't include a tag index. (At least half of my participation on LJ is on my Treo. I chose this style because it loads quickly and it's still readable on a small screen.)

I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.

In an article about Varg Vikernes and his likely sexual exploits while in prison, I saw an ad with a fit, shirtless black dude, labeled "Gay Evony Dating! Join 100% Free!" This amused me lots. After all, Evony has plastered suggestive pictures of women all over the place to try to draw male customers, so I guess it's only fair that they try to attract women (and gay men) as well. Then I looked again. It said Gay Ebony Dating. Ebony. With a B. In the words of Gilda Radner, playing Emily Litella, "why that's lovely! Never mind!"

Also taken from metalsucks.net, an extremely NSFW music video. Normally, I ignore the pornogrind subgenre because, well, to be frank, the entire subgenre is complete rubbish. Still, this video is hilarious. It involves a little gratuitous nudity and about a gallon of Jergen's hand lotion being sprayed all over various mundane objects, and as silly and puerile as it is, it makes me burst into hysterics every time I see it.

Also taken from metalsucks.net, a guide to death metal vocals. Not that I recommend actually doing death metal vocals yourself, though -- they tend to damage your throat unless you've got a whole lot of vocal training, and sometimes even then. But the video is amusing to watch.

Stolen from verious flash sites: have some noisy cats! And here, have some more noisy cats! And just in case you're not a cat person, have some noisy foxes! Then, have some NSFW toons featuring Blue, from a cartoon called Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. (All I know about this cartoon is that it had a hand in Rickrolling the whole damned country a year ago. I've not seen even one episode beyond that.) He sings in one, and gets laid in the other.

Swiped from gymrats: pectoral muscles are not supposed to look like this. Granted, his trapezius muscles also look seriously deformed, but it's his chest that looks the most seriously fucked-up. Dude looks like he's got breast implants. Big ones. Worse, he looks like Captain America, as drawn by Rob Liefeld. This is what Synthol can do to you, kids.

And finally, "borrowed" from two gay friends who posted it (neither of whom knows the other from Adam), the latest Betty Bowers, wherein she knocks the Mormon anti-gay coalition down a few hundred pegs. As usual, she's brilliant.

My plans for today originally included spending a significant portion of the day in bed. Unfortunately, while the letter of my plans still obtains, the spirit has very much changed.

Yeah, I'm sick. I ache all over, there's a fog living in my brain, and my voice has gotten lower to the point that I can sing a C2, where my limit is usually an E2 when I'm healthy.

I'll be online quite a bit more than I usually am, today and tomorrow. However, if you catch me on chat, I may suddenly go silent with little or no warning. Don't take offense. I'm making canned soup, or throwing honey/lemon/booze together, or taking a nap.

I'm one of those people who, for most of his life, has been effortlessly skinny. (Lately, it's taking a little effort, but that's mostly because I'm not in my twenties anymore, and I can't drink two or three liters of Mountain Dew every day like I could back then.) I'm also not a doctor or dietician. This means that I'm not qualified to comment on obesity. For the most part, I'm aware of this, and aside from my vocal hatred of the fast food industry, I generally keep my mouth shut. There are certain medical conditions that have been tied to obesity, and at times I do worry about my obese friends, but again, I keep my mouth shut, if for no reason beyond figuring that they know these risks better than I do.

However, despite my complete lack of qualifications, I feel safe in saying a few things:

• Psoriasis is not even remotely weight-related.
  
  
• Failing to hate your body if you're fat does not count as NPD or BPD.
  
  
• PCOS is not an imaginary disease invented by fat women. It actually does exist.
  
  
• Clinical Depression can not be instantly cured by losing weight.
  
  
• Eye problems are not caused by obesity. Nor are migraines.

There's more. Much more. I suppose there's a certain irony in the fact that I will be using this as gym fuel later, but I'm doing that because these days, pushing myself harder at the gym is my usual reaction to anger. Some guys have personal trainers -- I have a friend who sends me news articles and blog posts that piss me off.

Dear cold,

You are obviously unclear on the concept. You challenged me to single combat about a month ago. I kicked your ass. That should have been the end of it. Who said you could have a rematch?

Sincerely,
flamingchords

Yeah, I've got a cold. I'm coping okay: I have enough energy to go to work and feed my iron addiction, and even chat with friends a little, though thanks to the Tully in my folk remedy, my typing suffers a bit.

(I'm not bidding for sympathy or anything. I'm posting this because I post all problems I have with respect to health, depression, or anger issues. I do this so that I can look back later and notice things like "oh, it's been ten months since I last got sick? Wadaya know, clean living!")

When did I completely forget that there's this stuff you can drink called water?

And why am I having to remind myself constantly that it not only exists, but is the cheapest beverage there is? I've recently realized that, while I've successfully kicked Mountain Dew (yet again), I've replaced it with other non-caffeinated soft drinks (mostly fruit juices), and unless I consciously decide not to, I drink them to the exclusion of water without a thought. And I suspect I'm not alone in this. In fact, I suspect that most of us do this.

And when the fuck did High Fructose Corn Syrup get into everything? Has it always been this way? Even in drinks that call themselves "fruit juice," there's HFCS. I can understand why cranberry juice has sweeteners in it -- anyone who's tasted raw cranberries, which are actually rather bitter, can understand that -- but even fruit juices that you'd think are plenty sweet on their own still include HFCS, apparently because HFCS is cheaper than real grape juice. Hell, in all kinds of processed food, even food that you wouldn't think of as sweet in a million years, there's HFCS.

I don't care what ads like this say about it: it's not the same as sugar, and unlike the patsies in those ads, I'm not being paid to stammer like an idiot on camera, so I can explain why. Table sugar (sucrose) is a more complex molecule requiring your body to produce an enzyme (sucrase) to digest it. As a result, there's a limit to how quickly you can absorb it, and it will trigger that mechanism in your body that tells your brain that you're full. HFCS is very easily digestible, so none of this applies. It may be "made from corn," but they process the shit out of it, using a variety of nasty chemicals that tend to remain in HFCS in trace amounts. And while it may be "fine in moderation," moderation is a little difficult when your stomach doesn't tell your brain to stop eating it, and it doesn't help that manufacturers in this country use it in just about everything!

(Yes, there are studies to the contrary, claiming that HFCS is perfectly safe. Most of them, if not all of them, were paid for by corn refiners.)

I'm tempted to write a short science fiction story about it, perhaps one in which HCFS has infiltrated every processed food product there is, and as a result is slowly taking over people's brains and turning them into zombies. It would be a bit too much like The Stuff, though, which is why I'll probably never write it. (This story is up there with my story about a much nastier variant of Toxoplasma gondii, or some other behavior-altering parasite, existing in bacon -- it amuses me to think about, but I'll never actually write that one, either.)

...grrr.

Don't mind me. I'm just pissy because I have the beginnings of a six-pack, and figure that if I cut down on the junk food, I can probably get the rest of the way there fairly easily -- and believe me, I expect no sympathy for this. Unfortunately, I've also concluded that nearly any beverage beyond water, milk, tea, or black coffee counts as junk food, and I've been consuming a lot more of it than I thought. And dammit, I really like cranberry juice.

Well, I'm in a better mood lately.

A word of advice: if you ever take up an exercise routine, make sure that you can always set aside time for it, because you will become addicted, and even going without for three days will make you really cranky. Further, unless your boss is also a gymrat, he'll have no idea why you're so cranky, even after you explain it to him.

No, I'm not fanatic about it. I'm just strung out. We're seeing all the new college students at work, and we've been busy. My paycheck will be happy. My hormones, on the other hand, are suffering. But no, I'm not a fanatic. Much.

Now, if I ever get this fanatic (NSFW, plus obnoxious music!) about it, it'll be intervention time.

...and I'm not enjoying life too much.

Granted, my concentration is back and the headaches are gone, for the most part. Still, I'm irritable, and I'm coping a little poorly with those little daily part-of-life annoyances that I can usually just laugh about. Further, old grudges that I was pretty sure I'd buried are starting to make noises in their coffins.

I swear, quitting meth was less painful than quitting the Dew!

Still, it's been six days. I'm pretty sure I'm through the worst of it, so giving up now would be even stupider than giving up on, for example, Day Two. Also, having quit before, I know how much better I'll feel once the pain is over, so I have that to look forward to, at least.

The thing is, I have a handful of excuses that I've used to start hitting it again. Short on sleep due to persistent nightmares? Take a drink. At a convention, and don't want to miss anything, even when I should be sleeping? Take a drink. A girlfriend who makes fabulous spiced coffee? Take a drink.

I see [Sayeda] fairly rarely, so I may still make exceptions for her. But beyond that, the excuses have to go.

Maybe some new friends?

A few of you may have noticed I just friended you. Maybe I met you, however briefly, and thought you interesting. Maybe I got a chance to talk with you, and thought you interesting. Maybe we have friends in common. Knowing me, probably a little of each. In any case, if you're the sort of person to say to yourself, "who's this guy who just friended me," and then to look over their journal to get a feel for them, this paragraph is for you. Hiya!

(If it helps you place me, I have long red hair, and you may have seen me as the Dread Pirate Roberts.)


Caffeine, my sweet bitch-muse...

I sorta fell off the wagon, with respect to my long-dormant Mountain Dew habit. Well, no. "Fell off the wagon" isn't the right expression -- a better description might be "took an olympic caliber high-dive off the wagon." Or swan-dive, I'm not sure which. After drinking an average of a liter and a half per day at the convention, I'm weaning myself off of it again. Down to a can a day, but man, I'm feeling it.

Ugh. It's only barely 10:30, and I'm already off to bed.

Dear Health Nazis,

People like you remind me of what Halloween is really all about: wrapping toilet paper around your trees and cars, drawing naughty pictures on your windows in soap, throwing eggs in your general direction, playing ding-dong-ditch, and leaving flaming bags of excrement on your doorsteps. Think this is bad? Just be glad most of us don't know how to make nitrogen triiodide -- that stuff has thousands of pranktastic applications!

I'll admit, I've been known to bitch about fast food, television, and a whole generation of kids who seem completely unacquainted with the concept of life without their game consoles, to say nothing of actual exercise... but how heartless do you have to be to give underripe soybeans (#7) to trick-or-treaters?

It's one day of the year. Lighten the fuck up.

Sincerely,
flamingchords

Um... okay, fine. The ginger candy (#4) actually sounds really good. So does the combination of dark chocolate, blueberries, and almonds (#8). I may have to search these out myself. As for the edamame... I've had it, once, when a friend took me out for sushi at a con. It's not bad stuff, for a green veggie, but you'd still have to be heartless to give it to trick-or-treaters, chocolate-covered or not.

So, I blew it today. I was kinda wiped out at work, so I drank a 24 oz (700 mL) bottle of my former favorite caffeinated beverage.

The good news is I'm unequivocally awake. I'm also really tense, and my assistant manager is reayd to kill me for all my bouncung off the wallsm. I've also been trying to put some RL worries on the back burner, and I find that the caffiene is making this inpossible.

Why the hell did I drink this shit? Oh, welll. This fucj-up has been instrucyive. At leasr I kniw that backslinding isn't anywhere near as much fun as I was afraid it might be.