April 28, 2005

April 28, 2005 Thursday Ah, another idea for my reality documentary on Florida, called something like “Another Perfect Day”. The emphasis is that Florida has no internal economy, the entire business cycle is based, not just on tourists, but ripping off tourists. So we have a Museum of Boring Flags. Ever noticed that dozens of countries show the complete lack of originality in the populace by using a flag that is virtually identical to other flags? Take Mali and Guinea or Ireland and the Ivory Coast. Of course, the most boring goes to Libya, with a solid fungus-green banner. Steve, the landlord, is having the roof tiles steam cleaned. They need it something fierce. I jogged and walked to Publix and weighed myself on the official scale. Toledo. It says I am at 181 pounds, and I guarantee you that is wrong, I am at 188 and holding, almost 40% overweight. My bathroom scale is notorious for slightly showing an extra two or three pounds. It drives some people half crazy. I’ve explained many times that you cannot half-measure your way to losing pounds. You have to make all the necessary changes in your life, and realize that most diet books are written for women. Men cannot normally lose weight through diet alone, they have to exercise, and that exercise has to be in the aerobic phase. No matter what the books say, I have seen the reasons diets fail and fail again. People try to cut the corners or make it as comfortable on themselves as they can. The mind plays tricks, sending them messages of starvation and making them dizzy. When that happens, you get up and run for a half-hour. You will not only lose the feeling of hunger, you will feel like you’ve eaten a small meal. Avoid midday or afternoon naps until you reach your weigh goal. Nearby is a shot of that Publix scale that lies (tells you your weight is less than actual, so head for the ice cream section). The Big G (Hippie) got a day off from cancelled lessons (I know, but he needs the money) and called saying we should visit some upscale thrift stores in Boca, being that I had to go there to pick up the Pavilion (HP computer) for ABC. I saw the day class, which I would have preferred and there were women in there. Hey, always in the class I’m not in. Then we went to downtown Boca and saw six or so thrift stores all in one area. You’d think the competition would keep the prices low, but this is Florida. I bought one book. We went to another store on Copans and met a charming if kind of funny looking gal who I’m sure was after Hippie. She mentioned her husband in the first few sentences, which to me has connotations. (If you are married, what are you doing striking up conversations with single men? Maybe you just want to talk? Well, that is my point – go talk to your husband, or at least some other married man so that nobody can misunderstand. The part of the world where married women prove to single men that they are loyal to their mates just does not interest me.) However, I was feeling frisky, and chatted quite a while with her, at least to the point where she must have realized it was not such a good idea to have mentioned her husband as a defence mechanism because she realized she liked me enough to fool around and I was now the one backing off. As usual, Hippie (like most men) does not understand that I do not try to screw every woman I meet. I am very choosy. He is right when he points out some of the things I said to her are not the choicest things to get her in the sack, but he assumes I’m too dumb to know that and I’m wrecking my chances. It does not matter how many times I explain it, some men cannot understand this policy. Now Hippie also loves to hop in the car and roll down the windows. He is a little cheap with his car, and real cheap with his AC. When we have practice, he just turns the overhead fan on low. It is sweltering hot, but a few degrees cooler than outside. He thinks nobody notices, but everybody knows he has a big air conditioner in his bedroom and all he has to do is leave the door open. I’m the opposite. So what if it costs an extra $30 a month to keep your place comfortable? Is sweating worth a dollar a day? Even though he knows the Sunbird window was broken, he rolls it down. (He is used to that in his car, instead of using the AC.) Took me two hours to fix it, but this time I wisely left the window crank handle off. I found out in the process that it is illegal to fix your car in your own driveway in Hollywood, FL. The landlord mentioned it, so it’s not like I got caught. We stopped at that antique store on Hillsboro. Expensive. We had a coffee, my first today and that was in the afternoon. They have a little café but Hippie, er, decided not to have anything after telling me about KFC. He is slowly adopting my way of doing things because he is now certain that I really do only eat two eggs a month, and I never put raw sugar into my food. Thus he cannot assume I gain weight for the same reasons he does, and it is time for him to start looking out or I’ll be the one running circles around him. He can also be nervy about computers. For example, he thinks I do not have the internet because I am old-fashioned, and he is continually offering me advice on how to ‘get with it’. He takes for granted that the reason I don’t watch TV is because I am so old I missed the invention. He does not understand I have done so much internet, I am wasted on it. It is too simple and slow moving for me, and I gave up paying for it in 1996, years before he and most other people got started. Internet bores me. He is convinced, as are many people, that the internet is totally new. Hippie, we had an internet when I was a kid. It was called the telephone. Everybody on the phone was just as young and slim and tall as they now are on the internet. But, you know, I wound up having sex with a lot more women I met on the phone than most men ever do on the internet. Now we have a standing bet that he can show me something on the internet that I did not see before in some form. (I know there are such things, but the bet is that Hippie, who spends hours each day on the internet, will never be able to show me such a thing. It is actually a safe bet, because the really new things on the internet are technical, whereas the social stuff has been around since Adam and Eve. Hippie would have to change the way he feels about technical things, and start some hefty research into it to surprise me with anything. Like a lot of right-brained people he never much thought the internet ever was for anything much but chat rooms. Hippie, after seeing me action, does now reluctantly mention sometimes that my knowledge is ‘useful’. He used to think tech know-how was valueless because he arranged his affairs to ignore it on a daily basis. That was one of the reasons he had so much trouble with his computer at first. He also thought anyone with a technical background must necessarily be lacking in the spiritual parts of life. This is a common and ancient theory that so many people who don’t have what it takes to learn practical things will cling to well past it’s expiry date.) Later. I watched a DVD called Escape from Sobibor, a place I’d never heard of until tonight. It was the largest and therefore most successful escape from a Concentration Camp. Then I went out to empty the garbage, wearing only my cutoffs. What a perfect evening, I thought. Would I be walking outside like that at this time of year in most places I’ve lived? I’m going to read late into the night. It is not 11:00 PM. The new improved Excel has taken away that little box on the task bar that summed any cells you highlighted. Of course, help is no help and there is no easy way to turn that feature back on. The Microsoft search mechanism really bites, for like Spanish it cannot handle compound words.