May 2004 Archives

Here is a story about the increased variety of food choices causing people to eat more and more.

They go on to say that the best diets are the most restrictive on the number of foods you can eat.

This has been my view the past few weeks as I've been gearing up for the gym. No sugar added peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and salads with lean meat. That's all I've been eating four days out of the week, give or take some apples, sugar free candy. The other three days, it's Blimpie/Subway/Roly Poly instead of the salad.

I get very comfortable with my routines. This morning there was no more peanut butter. It was the end of the world. I had to have toast and jelly for breakfast. Wasn't the same. Wasn't a sandwich. Of course it wasn't the same.

Last night I woke up sometime after two... had to use the bathroom.

I heard Allison in the other room playing chess with Jimmy, my father's friend that lives in the basement. You could certainly hear how drunk they were. It was a good night for me to have gone to bed early. I just wasn't in the mood to entertain a drunk girl in the middle of the night, throw away all the beer bottles, clean the wine glasses after everyone leaves like I was stuck doing a few nights ago. And also, Allison told me not to cut my hair... which of course I ignored and so I'm probably in for some shit there.

I listened to Jimmy try to explain castling to her for at least ten minutes.

JIMMY: Naw, naw... you can take the king and the--wait--yeah, the king. Naw, yeah, the king and the rook... there are certain rules to it, you know? I'm pretty sure it's the king. Yeah, no. They can switch.

ALLISON: What are you talking about? You're trying to cheat.

JIMMY: Naw, naw... there's some move. I'm not going to do it or anything. But there's a real move with the king and the--wait---yeah, the king. There are certain rule to it, you know? Ahh forget it.

I tried to wait them out so I could come out and use the bathroom without confrontation, but their chess game went on and on and involved frequent smoke breaks. Eventually I just fell back asleep.

I didn't notice earlier that the nature preserve's sign claims "spiritual refreshment." It is the exact reason I wanted to go out there and though I came back less a pint of blood (mosquitos), I am refreshed.

Today, Jeremy and I hiked five miles through the Devil's Den preserve a few towns over, or as I called it, Connecticut's Florida Swamp Lands. Been a rainy week. Was a mosquito infested forest. I took a few dozen bites.

Jeremy took a bite. A snake bite.

Still yet, nature is amazing. That snake was amazing, but I'll let Jeremy tell that whole bit himself in his own blog.

Jimmy brought home drunk girls, so I'll have to let the pictures explain.

No girls... don't drum on the drumset, my father is asleep and he has to cook for Oprah's producer in the morning.

There is a fourteen post thread about me on my father's message board...

-I know this has NOTHING to do with carbs or diets or even food, but I saw the show and I saw Christian's picture at the beginning...and damn, he's SO hot!! Lol. I'm 15 if you're wondering...I wonder if there's a way to contact him...hehe.

-omg yeah i know!! his hair is so beautiful! lol. and he has the cutest dimples! hehe

-I'm agreeing, Eileen! I'm way to old, but oh to be young again! haha!

-tell him to email me if he ever gets the chance!! He's so adorable! lol.

-This really is funny because my 16 year old daughter was saying the same thing, also. He'll have his own fan club!

-This is so funny, my 15 year old daughter watched Sunday's show with me and she said the same thing.

-if I were 25 years younger, I would probably think so, too! LOL!

-Same here if I were younger I would say he was all that and a bag of chips. Oh no not chips!!!!! lets see all that and pork rinds. LOL He is a cutie no doubt. Geo you better keep a good eye on him cause he is a looker.

It's no surprise that Jeremy and I woke up too late to get what we had to get done done today. Two banks to visit. YMCA memberships to finally get.

The world of banking is one that requires you to be dependable/responsible and is a major step in a young person's life. That's why the banks close at four in the afternoon, when young people like me are just rolling out of bed.

Most certainly a setback. But you live and learn. Tonight... tonight I'll set my alarm. Then maybe tomorrow... tomorrow we'll finally get to work out.

Sure we could have sat in the Borders Cafe and wasted our already ruined day, but that's how we always waste our days.

So it was off to Trumbull and into the mall. The mall is a bigger, more heavily populated way for us to waste our day. We spent an hour or two there and sure we could have walked around there a few more... pretending to socialize, giving stares, getting stares... but we felt the call of science.

Off the highway there is an exit for the Discovery Museum and Planetarium and neither of us having been to a planetarium in our adult lives is something we've been meaning to fix. And so the fix was in.

Except for the fact that they close at five and don't even open on Mondays to begin with.

That of course, didn't stop us from exploring its outer premises. The museum building itself screamed SCIENCE and was probably super modern the day I was born and that's cool with me. It certainly made me wonder what out-of-date secrets it held inside. It would be just like the science museums of my youth!

The surrounding woods, the wooden bridge, the little trail... what we were feeling now was the call of nature. The wild.

So we got back in the car to drive home. The wooden bridge led to a building. The trail was fenced off. Everything was wet from an earlier rain. It was getting late, getting dark.

It was a sign on the side of the road for a nature trail. We pulled that motherfucking car over and we became one with Mother-fucking-Earth. An unexpected twist in our day. The trails were dark, overgrown, wet, scary, neverending and amazing... and we spent an hour traversing them. Once we went in, it was too dark to take photos, but you'll see the last photo below is one of it's many scary entrances.

I should mention that Jeremy did not find any snakes, but we didn't attempt to travel off path today either.

This is exactly what I've needed. Nature. Hiking through the woods. Slipping down rocky trails. The constant fear that you're going to walk through a spiderweb. I've been wanting to make days of this since last year when Adam Wekarski and I were cooped up in my house wallowing over girls. Now I'm cooped up wallowing over wallowing, which is a horrible thing to wallow over. Now we're going to make Thursday a full on hiking day. Thursday is the day folks. Thursday Jeremy will catch that snake of his and I'll of course catch the picture.

I leave you with the photo portion of today's adventures...

We need to talk.

We need to talk about Troy.

What went wrong? We did everything we were supposed to. Everything the books said a baby epic needed to mature into something grand, Oscar worthy even. We spent two hundred million dollars, so that he could get decent schooling and never go without above average special effects. Yet still, I can't help but think he aims too high without having enough of a creative vision, you know? This is our fault. We should have stepped back and questioned where he was going instead of just blindly paying for everything he ever wanted, needed.

I suppose it could have been worse, honey... he could have turned out like the Sommers's boy Van Helsing.

---

I wonder if anyone has made the joke that the studio should have put a Trojan on before spraying two hundred million dollars into this lackluster blockbuster?

Snake under the mailbox.

Jeremy keeps saying that he wants to go out catching snakes and snapping photographs. So I ran back inside, interrupted his afternoon breakfast and grabbed my camera.

There's no need to go into the details of the expedition because quite simply, it was unsuccessful. Oh well. We'll have to grab snakes some other time.

I blame it all on this black cat, watching us from afar.

I don't believe I ever properly named my car, so I don't believe I can give her a proper eulogy. Today we sold my car for $100 just to get it out of our driveway. The car I learned to drive in. The car I eventually unlearned to drive because of. Lot of good memories. There was that time I picked that girl up at her house and when we stopped at her mother's real estate office it wouldn't start again and we were stranded and then the girl's mother was fired in front of us and it was really awkward and we couldn't escape because we were stuck. There was the time my muscles were so tired from a long day of bussing tables and I could barely turn the wheel and then I veered a little bit to the right, side-swiping the curve and blowing my tire. There was that time we hitched it to the back of a U-Haul and towed it across the entire east coast to get it up here, only so it's engine could virtually fall apart a few months later and leave me where I am now.

Stuck in the house.

My father always says I can take the Jag. It's been months without driving now, I'm not going to start with his Jag.

Fox have picked up Arrested Development for another season. They've made me very happy.

Too bad nobody else gives a shit.

I'm trying to think of the most exciting way to explain that I've been trying to fix Jeremy's computer for the past two days. A way to at least hold your attention. I'm sure I'll think of something.

I could go for a whole inner struggle thing... how it had become a matter of pride and a measure of my skills. How everything I tried failed... made things worse even.

A computer that freezes, flashes and error messages every time you try to do anything is the most frustrating thing in the world.

Hours of disc scans, four anti-virus programs and hundreds of error messages later there is only one option left. I burn all of Jeremy's personal files to CD and wipe the hard drive clean. New copy of Windows. New computer entirely. It takes five more hours to reinstall everything.

It doesn't take long for the error messages to start back up. New copy of Windows + same error message = hardware problem.

I stand up and look behind the computer. It's pushed up against the wall. It's blowing it's hot exhaust against the wall and then back into itself. It's overheating the processor.

Days I've been working on that computer... nine hours tonight alone... and all I had to do was pull it a few inches away from the wall.

What do they call it when you think the whole world is trying to bring you down? Not paranoia...

I don't know.

One of two things has happened to me up here in Connecticut. 1. I've become completely and entirely lazy. 2. Everything else has become more tedious and impossible to accomplish.

Yesterday I sold almost all of my video games. I'm done hanging on to video games. I'm pretty much done playing video games. Video games have become so tedious and impossible (or maybe I'm just completely and entirely lazy) to play. So I sold most all of them. For fifty-eight dollars. Sold them for fifty-eight dollars so that I could start a...

Gym membership. Today, it was finally gym membership day. Time to commit.

Nothing is simple though. You couldn't possibly just go into a gym and hand them cash every month to work out. There's set-up fees. There's the fact that you have to pay for a year in advance if you don't have a checking account.

There's a bank in town that will give you free checking though. All you need is a hundred dollar deposit to start.

The woman at the YMCA is going to sign us up as a family. Jeremy and I. Jeremy's name goes at the top. My name goes where the word spouse has been crossed out. This way, we'll each save fourteen dollars a month and at the same time create wacky sitcom shenanigans. You know those episodes where two straight characters pretend they're gay to save money on some kind of membership... you know exactly what I'm saying.

Now I just need to come up with the seventy dollar set-up fee to take her up on the offer. Seventy dollars because that's how much it costs for them to... Set. Up. My account. You know, the cost of ink, paper, a manilla file folder and the little membership card. Sounds like seventy dollars to me.

I can look relatively healthy, though I need sleep, a haircut and color in my skin.

That was in response to Natasha's comment on the last post, so we're all on the same page.

And that is my brand new air conditioner being arrowed in the picture. Big shout out to my father's agent Maria for giving us two of them... she's awesome.

With the soothing sound and cool air, I feel like my room is now a hotel room and is there anything better than that? I am going to sleep so well. So very well.

Having one of those mornings.

You know, one of those mornings where you get almost no sleep and you wake up still fucked up from when you smoked and disassembled a DVD player only two hours earlier.

The DVD player is getting choosy over what it decides to play and not play nowadays. All I wanted to do was watch my Wilco documentary. I somehow had the idea that if I unscrewed forty screws and pulled the player into pieces and then screwed it back together minus a few screws that fell under the couch, it would magically work again. Final word... It's exactly the same! More finally... same is better than worse!

If you'll excuse me, I have to go to Rhode Island now to meet my great uncle. If he's so great, maybe I would've met him previously in my entire life.

Seriously, I can't believe I am moving right now. I can't believe I managed to get dressed. I can't believe I look so fucked up...

Update: My mother asked me to let the dogs in. Regan had somehow tied her own hair to her chain and I had to rip it out for her. The other one. The big dog. She ran circles around me, wrapping her own chain around and around my legs. It's an overall wet morning. Mud all over the chain. Mud all over my jeans. I have to change now.

Books on the doorstep, movies in the mail and free chocolate to boot.

Another post of perks...

My father's editor at Simon and Schuster asked me to compile a list of any S and S books that I wanted and so Jeremy and I scoured their site... made a list twenty books long. We'd hoped they'd have at least a couple of them lying around and send them out to us...

They've started arriving. A box yesterday... a box today. The invoice says there is still another box to come. I think twelve books are here so far. This is an amazing thing. I love books. I love free. I love free books. Of course, now I'm REALLY behind in my reading and really torn over what to read next.

While on the topic of free things... HVC Lizard Chocolate, a local chocolate distributor owned by the company that makes Sobe beverages (another local company) gave my father four boxes of low carb chocolate bars yesterday. Eighteen bars to a box.

These boxes of chocolate haunt me. It's like the fund raisers in school where you go door to door selling chocolate bars and they start you off with an entire case and you buy one and eat it, but then you want more... but no... you must sell them, you can't possibly afford to keep eating them yourself. It's like that. Only these are free and no one even wants them. My parents put them up in the cabinet because they don't want all the sugar alcohols. Me... I'm ignoring them because of the saturated fat. So Jeremy has inherited four boxes of chocolate bars, whether he likes it or not.

Florida/Connecticut fact that you may not know - Blockbuster charges a dollar more to rent DVDs up here than they did in Florida. A new release will run you $4.95.

Florida/Connecticut fact that I did not know - Kissimmee Blockbuster's seven day rental period on old movies is not in effect up here.

Two movies late. Eight dollar late fee. If you had to put my feelings into words, I believe the best words were the ones written on this pillar outside of Barnes and Noble by some extremely creative vandalist.

Did I pay the eight dollars and then another five to rent a film? No. I joined Netflix. Netflix is the single greatest thing about the internet and I would explain why, but god that would take forever.

Been a member of Netflix for one day and I've already received three movies in the mail. Fifteen dollars worth of movies at Blockbuster. But the most important thing is that I will never have to pay Blockbuster that late fee... and you can't put a value on that.

Some of my Ribcage short stories are going to be featured in the next "issue" of this little online literary magazine, Facets Magazine ...kind of, sort of the first thing I've ever kind of had published anywhere. Here is proof of my future inclusion.

So I think the first episode of the show went over really well, actually. Food Network people said it did well, but they don't ever disclose actual numbers. I do know this though... with just one day and one airing, my father's low carb pizza recipe was the fifth most requested recipe of the week of all of Food Network's recipes. The episode airs again Wednesday at 5pm and Friday at noon.

Oh boy oh boy. Van Helsing.

Van Helsing. What a disgusting mess of a movie! Jeremy and I went to great measures to enjoy this movie. Great, mind-altering measures. I went in with terribly low expectations and the film still managed lower. It failed in just about every way a movie can fail. The story was fucking stupid for one. Secondly, the characters were possibly worse than the ones in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen another of these new old character mash-up pieces. I can't decide which of these two movies was worse, actually. Van Helsing did outshine League in one area though... laughably pathetic special effects and cgi. Van Helsing's cgi effects are something to be studied, I tell you this. How a movie so funny for the wrong reasons could ever make it through test screenings makes me wonder what kind of world I'm living in.

Didn't anyone stand up and say, "Whoa, wait a minute Mr. Stephen Sommers, those vampire women with the titties aren't cool, scary, attractive, or entertaining. With all due respect Mr. Sommers, I think you might be slightly a moron."

One fifth of Universal's entire movie-making budget for the year went into this 200 million dollar, neverending rollercoaster of rat shit.

I feel I should own up to the fact that because of Jeremy's insistence, I now enjoy MTV's Wildboyz.

Tonight I watched Steve-O get his face farted on while attempting to rub a rhinoceros' penis. He had his face farted on and then he started retching.

I watched them pick up bees by their body and push their stingers into each other. I watched them force a bee to sting a midget on the nose.

They drank cow's blood with the Samburu tribe in Africa. They drank cow's blood and then Steve-O started retching.

Rhino farts, bee stings, cow's blood... they face this stuff without fear...

And yet... I can't face THIS...

I know what you're saying... you're saying, "Christian! That's slightly larger than a nickel, of course you should be afraid of that!"

But let me say that it was even larger than slightly larger than a nickel, because there is a slight perception problem with the angle of this photograph and therefore my intention to show comparison of size was poorly executed and only gives relatively accurate scale.

So it was KINDA BIGGER. And it creeped. And it crawled. And it must have been from some other world. As many legs as a centipede, big long spider-like legs in the back... this bug was disgusting. Disgusting and new. No one had ever seen such a creature!

Somewhere along the line, a shrimp, a centipede, a spider and a cockroach all had sex and made THIS thing.

Eventually it was Jeremy that stepped up, two Dixie cups in hand, to capture it. This was heroic, yes, but it had also run all the way into his bedroom and had therefore become his problem.

He caught it once. It escaped. This creature was cunning. Fast. It ran into my bedroom and Jeremy threw the cups onto my floor. It was now my problem.

Eventually Jeremy came back in, re-caught it, threw it outside and we got back to Survivor.

After much internet research, googling and all of that, I have discovered just what this creature truly was...

A COMMON HOUSE CENTIPEDE

That's right! Think of how scary that sounds! Common House Centipede... who ever heard of such a creature!?

Read all about them. They're drawn inside houses for their warmth and are best ridded by... reducing your house's spider population. Apparently they eat spiders. They are so much bigger and scarier than the spiders.

What eats a common house centipede? I don't want to know. Here is a drawing I found...

Do I really have to wake up to watch my father's weekly television show?

Some people go to church on Sunday mornings. We'll be in front of the television. The show repeats all over the place at more decent times, but new episodes are at noon on Sundays.

Much like I thought, there was this great big build up... months and months of build up... all leading to the premiere of the show. The wait so long and terrible that when the show finally airs you expect the phone will ring itself broken and instant fame will come to not just my father, but the entire family.

It's been two hours since the show aired... the phone rang a few times. A few relatives. The show's message board on foodnetwork.com is going crazy...

Otherwise, it is a normal day. Quiet. Completely, totally normal and I think I'm going to go back to sleep for an hour or two.

Michael Moore is a jackass. A big fat jackass that should shut his jackass mouth if he wants people to take his jackass ass seriously. Even though I agree with seventy percent of what the big jackass has to say, it's the other thirty that makes him a big dumb jackass.

There's this whole story that's been all over the news about Disney now refusing to release Moore's new anti-bush movie Farenheight 911. Michael Moore has admitted that HE himself released the story as a media stunt and that Disney came to this decision over a YEAR ago and that Disney had never actually agreed to release the film in the first place. That he just wanted extra buzz for it's Cannes premiere.

JACKASS, JACKASS, JACKASS. Media-hype-creating stupid liar. Good job lying about your movie about how George Bush is a liar.

Yes, regular gas is $2.05 a gallon.

If you still haven't seen it, Low Carb Revolution is airing twice tonight. Food Network at 10pm and 2am. Our story is in the first half.

My father was on local news shows all over the country this morning via sattelite. Something like fifteen different cities. Cooking the same dish, fifteen times in a row.

Also... a story ran in the Hartford Courant, which is the biggest paper here in Connecticut. They got my weight loss wrong, 120 pounds lost instead of 160. Every new article there's a new number of pounds lost for every one of us. Doesn't help the credibility of our story.

Also... the six hour pancake photograph that I've spoken so much of is on page 18 of the TV Guide with Dick Van Dyke on the cover. Out now! Fantastic.

So yesterday was Cinco De Mayo, did you thank any Mexican folk for giving us another excusatory drinking holiday? Did you drink strange Mexican beer with any Mexican folk?

I did. The beer was Tecata or some shit and it was imported by a company right here in Norwalk, so don't go looking for it. Also it tasted like shit, so there's another reason to keep your boots planted where they are. This girl Allison forced it into my hand, but more on her later.

The party was mainly Jeremy's coworkers from the Brewhouse, and so it was mainly people who I did not know. Mainly heavy drinkers.

Two Coronas in, Jeremy and I spot what has to be a goddam BOBCAT. A motherfucking bobcat behind the apartment building. Is it a bobcat? This begins a very short, bobcat-or-very-large-house-cat debate that ends with us climbing over a very tiny fence and entering the brush to investigate. It was a house cat. And it wasn't even the size of a dog like I swore I first saw. It was a pretty average house cat. It however did show up very bobcat-like in the following photo... and so the debate goes on... except it doesn't really go on, because we were there and we saw that it was clearly just a plain old cat.

Two Coronas and two cups of Diet Coke and tequila later, the girls start asking Jeremy and I for "our story." Jeremy tells "our story" the same way every time and every time it derails right around the "Christian was really fat back then" part. Girls love to hear how fat I was. It fascinates them. I could be all powerful if I harnessed this correctly.

In the end though, these were twenty-something party girls that go out drinking four times a week. They are great fun to be around, but that's the extent of it. I've decided that I don't hate parties or drinking, I just find them too pointless to attend on a regular basis.

At one point of the night, Tecata in hand, this girl Amy was to my right saying that I have really great cheek bones, that "people pay for cheek bones like that" (which she repeated at least four times throughout the night) and this other girl Allison was on my left punching me in the leg for being so quiet. Jeremy was on a couch across the room talking to a girl that looked all of twenty, but was actually twenty-six and a fourth grade teacher.

If a girl ever wants to make herself five times better looking, she just has to say that she's a teacher. It works wonders.

It was cool out and drinking the cold beer I fucking froze. Eventually my lips turned this beautiful shade of purple and stayed that way all night, even after I had been inside for hours. I took a picture, but they were actually much more purple in person... and thus, they became topic of much conversation as well. "Dude... what's up with your lips?"

When we left, Allison chased us out and belittled us for being quiet and leaving so early. We had been there for SEVEN hours. She tried to get us back inside, but we were no longer drunk and so what was the point?

From some low carb message board...

"they did a bit on the atkins diet and showed a family that all went on it and succeeded. Man the one kid was 350lbs at age 15 and by age 19 was down to 140lbs. It was pretty amazing!"

"You mean George Stella? He was 465 lbs when he started Atkins. And lost over 200 lbs himself."

"yup, that's him. I was actually more impressed with the kid having enough self-discipline to do it."

I was recognized today. Walking out of the grocery store a woman stopped me. The following exchange is presented for you, almost verbatim...

WOMAN: Were you in a magazine?

ME: I might have been, yeah.

WOMAN: Something with weight loss... you lost a lot of weight?

ME: Yeah. That was me.

WOMAN: God, what was that that you were in?

ME: Low Carb Living Magazine?

WOMAN: No, no. It was about your whole family.

ME: Maybe TV Guide?

WOMAN: No, it wasn't that.

ME: The Food Network? There was a special on us, Saturday.

WOMAN: No. There was a picture of all of you, in your kitchen and--

ME: Ohhh... the newspaper! Yeah, The Hour.

And then it went on and on and on about how she could possibly lose weight.

Being recognized is cool. Being recognized by someone desperate for help losing weight... uncool.

On my bed with a book. Reading, reading, reading. There is the noise of my computer, which I've decided is quite simply the loudest computer ever put to market. Simply, astoundingly loud. I now shut the computer down to watch TV, because I just can't hear softer dialogue over the whirling hiss of the fans, drives and miniature lawncare business that tiny elves have started inside the Emachine's casing. That's a different story though...

On my bed with a book, reading. Trying to read, but beyond the computer noise there is something else. Something far more horrible sounding. Something SCRAPING something. It's the sound you hear inside your head when a comb scratches it's way across your scalp. It's the sound of a zombie, doing what zombies do best, eating brains. It's this sound that goes on and on and on until I finally stab my bookmark down and close the book to investigate.

The dog was licking the door again. This is something Regan does now. She licks the door.

I took a photo.

The Bad

My body is in a state of suspended animation. Like finishing that really important chapter in my novel gave me permission to absolutely dawdle away an entire week of my life.

I haven't been writing. I haven't been reading.

Sleeping later.

Smoking. Wine. Coffee.

The show is looming now and I've realized that the Food Network is so hush hush on ratings that we won't even know if it's a success or not.

Need a job. Need money. Need money to pay for a gym membership. Need to start going to a gym three times a week. Need a tan. Need to whiten my teeth... again. Want some new clothes.

This is what happens when you discover a mall full of good looking girls. Isn't that always the way?

The Good

Been talking through a lot of Orbiting Ethan Oort's problems.

Five dollars bought me acne medicine that actually seems to work. Only took me my entire teenage life to find it. Clean and Clear's Persa-Gel 10, you can be my friend.

That tree is in my front yard. Who needs Autumn when there are trees this beautiful in spring? Also, who needs two names for one season? Autumn and Fall. Fall and Autumn. Fall sucks. Autumn should win. WIN, I say.

So I'll let Jeremy explain this in detail, because he's the one that told me... but he's taking too long to update his blog, so... apparently Natalie was chilling with Finger Eleven when they came to Tally and they recognized her from The Robert Cake. Finger Eleven have seen The Robert Cake.

Adam Wekarski... James Black thought you and Jeremy were hilarious.

That said, what point is living if you can't take a random photograph with the Asian free chicken teriyaki sample guy in the mall food court?