To my very few readers:

So, much has been happening. On the personal end, things are great. Actually things are great across the board but my computer has totally died and I haven’t set aside the time to figure out to fix it. Ergo, no posts and certainly no video posts.

But stats so far:

Highest weight: 333 (November 07)
Pre-surgery weight: 297 (August 09)
Current weight: 265

I will update as soon as I have a chance on video.

Hope all is well.

So, I had my first fill. I had 5 cc’s put in and I don’t think I’ve had enough honestly. I can still eat a good deal, but I can still feel a bit of restriction.

I’ve had a really hard time putting this post up. I am all over the place in terms of topic, so I am just going to post what I have and try to collect my thoughts more coherently for a few other posts instead of trying to put everything down at once.

I’ve always been a back-of-the-room kind of person. Most of us spend as much time as possible melting in and out of shadows in desperate attempts to blend in or just disappear entirely. Attention can be very hard to receive, especially positive attention. I’m only 16 pounds down since the surgery and its a fact I’m already starting to notice.

The heavier you are the more weight you need to loose before it becomes clear that you’ve lost any way at all. A very dear friend of mine, who has been a huge source of inspiration for me, said she had to loose 50 pounds before she looked like she lost 5.

What a fuckin mean trick!

Since the start of my journey in November 2007, and including the weight lost since surgery, I am down about 58 pounds. It took me about 37 pounds for the weight loss to become noticeable.

I was at Highland War a few weeks ago. A small, annual SCA event up in Victorville, CA. At events I tend to stick to people I know and hope I can meet others through their social pollination. While I was lingering in the fringes of the crowd, attached to either my best friend or the very nice girls I met through him, I stood back and people watched. The usual scenes spread before me: talking, laughing, hugging groping, kissing and of course the occasional disrobing as the night wore on. After saying, “My goodness! There are a lot of good looking guys at this event!”. (And there were! I am reluctant to say that back east there is a short supply of men of my age bracket and of acceptable attractiveness [and don't give me any bullshit about being shallow. I'm shallow, you're shallow, we're all shallow. Examine yourself and accept it.].) I began to notice that I was being noticed. I didn’t know how exactly how to deal with that. Whenever a guy came to talk to me I was rather guarded. Polite. Ever, ever polite, but guarded; a remnant of self-defense acquired from when I was younger during a time when people were nice to you only so that you would let them allowing them to deliberately hurt you. It will take time to work through that barrier. This is no longer elementary or middle school. It will take time.

The prize for taking "Pretty Girl Reduction" drink was a fake mustache

On a side note, check out my first fibula. Kinda proud.

My First Fibula

What has been difficult is the changes in body structure. You’ll hear some people mention thy during a plateau they didn’t lose pounds but the lost inches. Fat shifts. I realized that I go through the shift about every 30 pounds. Roughly. Shortly after surgery I experienced a noticeable change on my end. My fatty parts, in particular my thighs for some reason, were much softer. I got pretty depressed because I was seeing change, but not change I liked. I was being very unrealistic about it. Now I realize that I’ve identified a symptom of my body changing and can use that in the future as motivation instead of getting down on myself about it.

It’s taken me like…weeks to write this freaking post. Since my fill my weight has started to slowly creep down again. When I’m not retaining much water in the mornings I am at about 274 – 274.5. This week I started my workout regimen. By common standards, it is not at all a lot, in my opinion. I do about 20 minutes of yoga in the morning when I wake up and I walk for 15 minutes during my breaks twice a day. I want to work in my evening yoga routine but in the past I had some foot and knee difficulty with certain poses.

Baby steps. Baby steps.

A dear friend of mine at work, whom I got started on yoga, did something I’ve always wanted to try but was too nervous to: Bikram Yoga. Yoga performed in a 105 degree room. I asked my surgeon if it is ok to give it a go and he replied, “Yeah you can do it… …don’t know why you’d want to though…”

I decided to get back into my usual yoga routine before attempting it. I haven’t done yoga in more than a month because the surgeon did not release me to do so.

Hopefully all the walking will help me push past this plateau.

I’ve bee pretty fiercely depressed off and on since the surgery. I realized that I haven’t been this weight since high school and it seems as if I am dealing with old emotions from high school.

The only thing, seriously, keeping me afloat, has been the show from Cartoon Networks, Adult Swim called Metalocalypse.

Ahhh Skwisgaar…such a dick.

And here is a totally metal fan art

Brutal...

And another painting that totally made me smile.

Doom Comes on Little Cat Feet

I have been quiet of late. Be assured that the silence does not denote inactivity or a lack of things to talk about. I have hit a bit of smooth marble that is giving me time to reflect; much like smooth marble is want to do. I can gaze upon my own rock-veined features and wonder at the path ahead and plan for these changes I have been longing a time to plan, for their own sake. A time that is in the very near future for all of us. The “I’ll do it when…” time that was always out of reach or one step away. The “when” time. The “if” time. Now, I am in the “after I” time. The “when I” era. An era where excuses have no place to sit and rest their ever-tired feet, a place where reservations have no right to take the window seat. A place where only The Sculptor is permitted. The Sculptor, with his chisel and hammer and marble medium, is at last given free reign to hammer away the imperfections of a cold and voiceless stone and give shape to The Creation within. And now that the first blow has been struck againts the impartial slab, The Sculptor stops, hands and mind have fallen silent.

Now, in this gifted place, The Sculptor does not know what to do with his tools. The Sculptor has never truley been alone before without reservations and excuses to distract him; at peace at last to work on his blank piece of marble for the first time and now The Muse falls silent. The Sculptor has been forsaken, until memory, half-created, chimes in to mock him,

“You had all these bright and romantic ideas of what I’d say at a time like this.” jibed The Muse. “Why are you surprised I haven’t said anything? You already know everything I could possibly tell you”

That’s the Cosmic Joke (one of many, I think). The Muse isn’t at all real in the sense of it being this entity or object wholly separate from ourselves.

Where are the buxom babes in flowing vestments? Where are the unicorns and satyrs and angelic advisors?

Where is the romance in a Muse that does not stir the very soul? How can a Muse that looks like me inspire anything?

How can it NOT?

We are our own Muse when we envision our aspirations. What more riveting Creation to behold than the perfection of the self as manifested by you?

What greater and crueler trick than to be blind to yourself?

When I was in 4th grade I went swimming at my mom’s friends neighbors place. A small, in-ground pool nestled in the emerald green forests of the Appalachians. The only ladder out of the pool was missing a top step, but still retained it’s rusted screws of considerable girth. On my way out of the pool, I let my left hand slide down the railing of the ladder. The screw sliced open my entire little finger from base to tip requiring 14 stitches. I remember my mom rushing me to the car, holding my arm up and out the window in the back seat, blood running down my arm, but I don’t remember any pain until the shot of local anesthesia that my crack-pot doctor gave me. When I cried out, he threatened to give me another if I didn’t be quiet. I watched him stitch my flesh back together slowly, marveling at the lack of sensation. His unskilled stitching caused a large, white knot in the center of my finger instead of a long, even scar.

...rather phallic in nature...

Medicine, and doctors, have progressed since then – greatly. Incisions are now being sealed without the use of stitches. Mine were sealed with an adhesive (most likely DermaBond) and covered with a tape that I thought would hurt to all seven levels of hell. I even had a dream of it the night before I had the tape removed. A dear coworker yanked them off me mercilessly. The next day, my surgeon yanked them off fiercely, but they fell off easily like skin on a cooked chicken.

So I have FIVE incisions…five of them. Not four as stated erroneously on the video. The topmost one, nearest to the bust, is a little sore as is the one at the “waist crease”.

I completely forgot to mention the $25,553.13 discount that’s given. Total amount pending insurance is $38,329.70.

I am super tired today. Covering an early shift for a sick coworker. So this post isn’t very coherent.

Me go sleep nao…

When hand held gadgetry took a step from the realm of entertainment, liability and annoyance and into functionality with the iPod Touch, I decided to jump ship and see what it has to offer. Through many an exultation from my friend The Red Devil, I came to learn about particular apps to help us on our ever winding road to health and wellness. One such app has been LoseIt.

The fine folks at FitNow, Inc. have combined weight, nutrition, diet and exercise tracking and crammed it all into one rather comprehensive program. It allows access to an extensive nutritional database of foods both common and commercial (and, for the lovers-of-the-esoteric such as myself, the ability to create recipes and log original food items) and has a broad spectrum of exercise selections where you can adjust the length and even intensity of your workout.

Concerned about more than just tracking your weight and calories? Worry not! LoseIt can allow you to a daily and weekly glance at your current intake of the major essential nutritional points such as fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, fiber, sugar, and of course protein.

There two things I’d like to see changed in the future updates; namely, the ability to track essential vitamins and minerals (this is very important in particular to bypass patients!) and a more forgiving “Create New Food” menu. Once you add your own food but realize you’ve made a mistake either in the spelling or amount of nutrition, you cannot go back and individually correct it. It must needs to be deleted and created from scratch. Annoying.

All in all, a wonderful app that is already helping me on my new daily regimen!

Everyone is more and more aware of the fat and calories hidden in those tasty, creamy, seducing, comforting, warm, inviting, enticing cups of frothy deceit. Yet we still bend our will to dive tongue-first into the foamy head of caffeinated captivity.

Perhaps I’ll think twice after committing the following chart to memory.

I confess I am still prone to the McDonald’s Sugar Free Ice Coffee and the more sinful iced milk tea from the I <3 Boba down the street.

mkandlez has some great ‘infovisualization’ pieces.

I love how flat-out drunk Koreans get. The Korean Cultural and Language Meetup went to Crazy Hook in Ktown after seeing HaegumPlus perform downtown. Very cool evening. I remember passing Crazy Hook on a number of occasions and thinking “Wtf is that?” but never stopped to look. I had no idea it was a pirate-themed Korean bar.

If you’ve never been to Crazy Hook, and are looking for a good night of Korean drunkenness with a piratical theme, I suggest checking it out. Non-Koreans don’t get stared at.

They serve beer in these massive plastic “syringes” with a valve at the end.

Unfortunately, the waiters are not dressed in pirate garb…but are sexy nonetheless.

If you’ve never heard of HaegumPlus, I suggest checking them out too.

It’s interesting seeing the cross over in musical instruments across Asia. The Haegum is almost exactly like the Chinese ErHu but is considered a traditional instrument of Korea. The Haegum has a thinner, almost reedier sound, whereas the ErHu as a rich, deep, melancholy sound. Both are equally beautiful.

Anyways, onto business.

My confessional for the day is that I had 3 things I should not have had at all when I was at Crazy Hook.

3 tiny pickle slices
2 tortilla chips
8oz of dark beer.

The beer did the most damage. I had a pretty fierce tummy ache, even though it took me more than an hour to finish it. I am proud, and yet still sad that I didn’t give into my craving of the sampler that everyone bought.

This week has been a bit of a trail. I did not expect to feel HUNGER but I do feel it, for certain. I think I miss chewing and texture as much as I miss the taste for savory things. I’ve noticed that now that I am not eating as I usually do (healthfully, mind you!) I am craving things I normally never crave. Bad things. Smells drive me crazy even if it’s things I normally don’t eat (e.g. the vendor hot dogs you find scattered throughout town). Two more weeks of liquids and I can move onto mashed foods for a week. Then onto solids.

So far, if you use the weight I was at the morning of surgery at the hospital (292) I am down 5 pounds this week at 287. I obsessively weigh myself at different parts of the day to see where water weight creeps up. After a nap, I noticed I dropped another 2 pounds. After my protein shake dinner, I was up 2 again, and then an hour later teetering at 1 pound less. Now that I can actually use a scale I am interested in seeing how and when my body teeters.

Most people probably didn’t notice, but not very long ago commercially available scales used to reach only to 300 lbs. Any weight applied to the scale over that would result in an E for “Error” For the longest time I didn’t step on a commercial scale at all lest I think the US changed it’s methodology for counting to include the alphabet.

Now that the masses have increased in mass the weight limit is 330. I didn’t know this until recently when I saw the Wii Fit board (it’s on my wishlist!) goes up to 330. I shed a silent tear of thanks to Nintendo that day :)

I’m getting anywhere between 600 – 900 calories a day and walking at least 10 to 40 minutes a day. But with as little calories as that I am still guilt ridden of a few additions to the diet that should not have been there.

We can’t ever really be satisfied.

Spook was acting like a tard when I put him down.