This just in

Okay, seriously now – who IS in charge of Burger King's advertising?

http://www.dlisted.com/node/32669

I loved the creepy King character they introduced a few years ago, because I'm just kind of like that – fascinated with ambiguity and uncertainty, the kind of humor you get on The Office when Michael does something just utterly inappropriate, and you get to watch people squirm as they try to decide how to respond. The King made me feel like that. Nothing you could quite put your finger on, and yet ... ick.

And now, this:
http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/stunts/burger_kings_beef_cologne__103622.asp

Actually I guess I kind of like this new pornburger approach too, for the same reason I like the uncomfortable humor on The Office. It's uncomfortable because it breaks social rules, and I think social rules and morals are interesting. The tension between what we've been taught we "should" do, be, think ... and what we actually DO do, be and think.

More creepy uncomfortable graphics and video here:
http://www.firemeetsdesire.com/

How many brown skirts does one woman need?

I just bought yet another brown skirt. Ever since I took the pledge to stop wearing black, I seem to have become a little obsessed – every black piece of clothing in my closet must be replaced with something of another color, and this summer that color seems to be brown. In addition to de-blacking my wardrobe I'm also altering several items of already-approved colors that no longer fit properly. Resizing seems like a better way to go than buying all new clothes, since I'm stuck for the moment at a sort of in-between size – thinner than I was, but still only about halfway to where I'd like to be. I've been here for awhile.

Losing weight is hard. Why this should come as a surprise to me I'm not sure ... except that when I was younger, it was always easy – so easy I sometimes had to kind of watch it, or I would tend to get (though this is hard to believe, now) too thin. I now know that a tendency to low blood sugars and weight loss is just as much of a red flag as a tendency toward their opposites – both conditions suggest that the body is having trouble maintaining a healthy equilibrium. Why don't they teach THAT in health class?

With all the hullabaloo these days about childhood obesity I fear kids will not hear the message that being too thin is just as much a danger sign as being too fat. And that either way, it is not their fault – different bodies process food and respond to exercise differently, and some people just naturally tend to be fat, and some tend to be thin, and some tend to be just right. And also – that just because your weight tendency is not your fault, that does not mean you can't, or shouldn't, do anything about it. Because you can. It just means that for some people, staying at a healthy weight is way harder than it is for others. But the benefits are there for everyone, and the hard work is worth it.

Preaching to my own choir, as usual, and also as usual humbly acknowledging that all this is much easier said than done. Five or eight or nine years ago or more I remember starting to notice (and probably writing about too, if I wanted to go back and check) that I could no longer tell when I was hungry, and when I was full. I didn't know what that meant, except that I felt like eating all the time, and once I got started it triggered this desperate animal need to continue eating even after I could feel my stomach was full. Very strange, and disorienting, but at the time I chose to "trust my body" and just go with it. Why I didn't recognize it as a symptom and do some research on what might be going on ... hmm. Not to shirk my responsibility for my own body, but I really think a huge part of it was a reaction to the general cultural bias against fat people – fat hatred – in which the media's supposed "concern" over the "health risk" of excess weight felt like nothing more than a smiley face sticker on the stylishly shrunken chest of the hollow-cheeked, thin-worshipping vampire of the fashion industry. I wasn't buying into that. I might have been fat, but I was healthy. Or so I thought.

Anyway. I'm still working on losing more weight, and in the meantime I'm wearing brown skirts and green dresses and enjoying playing with clothes this summer, which is something I haven't done in quite a long time.

Painfully boring!

That's my life right now – painfully boring. At least, so it would appear to a disempassioned observer. Or wait, is that a word? Dispassionate – I think that's what I was trying to say.

But I kind of like "disempassioned," though. That word pretty much sums it up. Work, then home, then more work, then sleep, then work again. I have been doing some sewing in between, and gotten a bunch of cleaning done, and have made dinner for Mr. A roughly half the time for the last several weeks, which might not sound like much but is actually something of a triumph for me – a person who has never learned to love, or even like, cooking.

I am not sleeping much at all for some reason, even though I'm spending plenty of time in bed. I just can't seem to get relaxed – my brain just spins and flies all night long, and every couple of hours or so I notice (again) that I'm still awake. It's not an anxious kind of wakefulness, not necessarily unpleasant – just exhausting. The other morning, in fact, I woke up remembering a dream I'd been having – dreaming that I was trying to sleep, and was too tired to sleep, and was worrying (in the dream) that I would wake up drained instead of refreshed. Which was exactly what happened.

I do have a vacation coming up soon though, and am going to try to take a few days off in the next week or so to celebrate my birthday, which is happening soon.

Nothing else to report. Just checking in.

Numbers

Did I already post this? The best part is the little dance he does at :40.

So! Once again it's time for an update on My Wondrous Diabetic Journey. The latest news is that I've had two different A1C tests done in the last few weeks, from two different labs, just to see how close the results would be, and they were actually very close. I took both tests on the same day. The one from the walk-in clinic at the pharmacy cost $36 and gave a result of 5.5, and the mail-in one from Walmart cost $9 and gave a result of 5.6. Both numbers are within normal, non-diabetic range, which makes me happy even though A1C is not the only measure of how well I'm doing blood-sugar-wise. Still, it's good to know that at least by that measure I'm doing great.

It's also good to know that both tests come back so close, because that indicates they're both reasonably accurate, which means I don't have to worry anymore about whether I'm risking my health by trying to save a few bucks on a cheaper and possibly less accurate test. Now that my insurance sucks I'm starting to realize I may have been too hard on Walmart all these years ... Not that it makes up for all of their other questionable business practices, but I am sincerely grateful for their $4 prescription program and now this $9 A1C test (compared with $70 for the prescription at my regular pharmacy, and $125 or so for the A1C at the hospital lab). They also have a $8 glucometer with strips that cost about 40 cents each, as compared with my OneTouch Ultra 2 meter, which costs $65, with strips anywhere between $1 and $1.20 each.

OneTouch is actually one of the most expensive testing systems there is, but the Ultra 2 was the first meter I ever had and I've become strangely attached to it, even almost superstitiously, fetishistically attached. It's the magical device that helped me calm down and get my numbers in check when I was so scared I thought I might die ... So for now I'm sticking with it and looking for reliable discount suppliers online that offer strips (usually in institutional, educational and non-U.S. English packaging) for 30-45% off retail. The last supplier I bought from sent strips that were only a month away from their expiration date. Not good. Today I ordered from a different company that guarantees an expiration date of September 2010; hopefully they'll deliver on that because the price was really good – 50 strips for $30, including shipping – about 60 cents per strip.

I use anywhere between 1 and 5 or more strips a day, depending on what's going on. Normally I only test once a day, first thing in the morning. Lately I've been having some inexplicably high numbers, so I've been testing more, trying to figure out what's going on ... although it seems sort of pointless to keep accumulating results from almost-expired strips, because I don't really trust the numbers I'm getting from them. As soon as this new box arrives I'll toss the rest of this old batch.

So anyway. It's been awhile since I talked about the Beetis, but it's still here. And I'm still OK.

P.S. Has anyone noticed that Blogger has started getting all buggy with the code lately? Like making one paragraph a different color than all the others, for no apparent reason – or inserting random inconsistent spacing between paragraphs ... I'm seriously thinking about moving to Wordpress one of these days. I just set up a blog there for a client and am kind of enamored of all the cool features .....

Media fast / re-fashion

I thought I'd take a break from resenting and complaining about the very rich, and focus today on one of the cool side-effects of living just a stone's throw from the sixteenth most expensive ZIP code in the country: The thrift stores around here rock. Today at lunch I got five gorgeous heavy linen sundresses (also two heavy silver plate soup spoons in a beautiful and unusual pattern) that I am going to cut up and turn into skirts and other things yet to be invented. I can't wait to get started!

In the spirit of experimentation I departed slightly from my standard fabrics of choice and picked two flowered dresses (I almost never wear anything with a pattern) and one with some embroidery and applique at the side. I also got one that is pale blue – not a great color for me, but I can dye it any kind of green. One of them is all natural colored, but has a flowery pattern woven into the cloth. It's also sewn on the bias and has a swirly hem that I'm looking forward to trying out. The other one is just plain, and might end up being used for linings and pockets and interfacings, or possibly some kind of blouse if there's enough of it.

About my love affair with linen – mainly what I like about it is the way it moves and breathes, compared with cotton, which always seems to feel either too hot, or too stiff. Also, linen dyes up great, and I love the heavy, rustic texture. Lately I've been checking out other fibers too, when I can find them. Tencel is cool and super durable, and there's a woman online who's selling hemp canvas from Eastern Europe that I might take a chance on one of these days, if I don't wear myself out with sewing this first batch of items.

I've also decided to take the plunge and cut up most of my old favorite black clothes to use as patterns. Now that several months have passed since I took a break from black, I've realized I don't really want to go back to wearing it. It seems funny that I never noticed before how really bad I look in black. I see it now, and am excited to keep moving in the direction of warmer, more alive (for me) colors.

As for the media fast, in the last few weeks of working crazy hours and getting home too wired to sleep, I've attempted to calm myself into oblivion by reading waaaaay too many books. Also, listening to too much music, watching too many movies, and endlessly surfing the web. My brain is now so packed full of other people's words and ideas that I can hardly hear my own voice anymore. So instead of doing any of those things when I need to relax, my plan is to sit down and make something instead.

Or, just to sit. I might try that too, once I've settled back into my groove again.

P.S. Tater did not enjoy the Frosty Paws. In fact, he wouldn't even condescend to taste it. I always knew he was smart. Next time I want to give him a frozen treat I'll stick to the tried & true homemade chicken broth pupsicle with shreds of krunchy karrot.

Happy birthday, Taterman!

Today is Tater's birthday. He's eleven years old. Celebrations include games with Kongs, cheeseburgers and a box of original flavor Frosty Paws.

We've been sort of sporadically looking at puppies, though still have no official plans to step up the search. A shelter not too far from here has this little beauty available – a baby pit bull with very human-looking eyes. I swear I did not Photoshop her picture. Isn't she great? The tiny little claws and everything?

In other news, in the last week I finished two huge projects – the summer issue of my huge quarterly work project, and a new website and blog for one of my freelance clients. As if that weren't enough excitement, I am also on the verge of beginning to shop for a replacement for my 30-year-old folding hair dryer. Not that there's anything really wrong with it – it still works just as well as it did the day my mom said I could snag it from my brothers' downstairs bathroom, to take with me to college. That was in the fall of 1983, and it was already several years old then. But the other day we were in one of those bedroom, linen & shower curtain stores and I somehow managed to become mesmerized by all the different kinds of new hair dryers they had ... cool colors, mysterious and scientific-sounding new "hair drying technology" and a guarantee that they no longer need to fry the hair in order to dry the hair .... which in a roundabout way is probably the reason my 30-year-old dryer has lasted so long – because it gets so hot I've rarely used it. It's also very noisy and has a tendency to suck my hair into the motor, which causes the hair to snarl and burn. And sometimes, when I look inside, the coil is glowing red.

So yeah. Lots going on at chez tinarama. Stay tuned.