#1613, Friday, March 11: Nothing succeeds as planned

 Please leave a comment if you visit my blog. Thank you! 

Post 1613, Day 71 of 2016
- 1,897 days since I started this blog -

Daily Comment

Am I a Pollyanna? A "happy idiot"? Deluded? I'm asking myself this, because I have been challenged, because I am enjoying my "old age">
My "accuser" is not.

He has had a difficult in the last ten years, which he attributes to aging and disease. He is not happy with his life, which he feels is constrained by the limitations of his aging body. He measures his capacity for enjoyment against the period in his life where he had the greatest virility, social success, and creativity.

All of which he feels (despite evidence, to me, that they are mostly intact) have diminished due to age. He's not as virile, doesn't feel socially acceptable, let alone successful, and, for his family's sake (he says), he must live with compromises that he feels prevent his being happy.

He wants to go back - trade his old body for his younger, his times of no responsibility for the perceived weight of his current ones.

He spends a lot of time thinking about the future, perceived pessimistically as an unrewarding downward spiral to incontinence and decrepitude. And sees the only alternatives as cartoonish extremes: The old men who buy Thai wives, or play golden oldies in futile denial and an embarrassing imitation of youth.

Maybe my attitudes are like that. An element of denial, an element of glory-days pretending, an element of a fresh start and fantasy life.

In truth, though, I don't think so. I think I have found a place where I have support of the thing I am most passionate about: Playing music. Where my social life is well-integrated with that passion, and where I, in almost every way, have established a new life, separate and easily distinct from my past.

And it's a lot of fun. Somehow, this crumbling, post-industrial-grim and meteorologically uninviting part of the Universe has provided an environment that allows me, for now, a life-style, a life, a society that frees me to enjoy myself. Since my current needs don't include the hedonism I enjoyed forty or fifty years ago, and I don't spend a lot of time worrying about my future (even if I enjoy the game of planning it, and doing what I can to provide for it if/when it comes), my expectations, such as they are, are satisfied in the present. 

Nothing in my life has happened according to any plan I have ever made. Yet here I am. Happy and grateful. Satisfied? Not completely, but mainly - and grateful for what I have.

Of course, that's what I learned from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. years ago: "Nothing succeeds as planned."

Food and Diet Section

Today's Weight:                   199.0 lbs.

Previous Weight (3/10):           199.4 lbs.

Net Loss/Gain:                   -  0.4 lbs.

Diet Comment

Thanks to on-plan eating, I've lost two pounds since last weekend, and I think this weekend won't be the same kind of weight-gaining deal as last, so I think the loss will stick.

Food Log

Breakfast
Skipped.

Lunch
At Core Grains, Greens and Broth:

Chicken Cobb salad (shredded kale and romaine, grilled chicken, avocado, bacon, hard-cooked egg and blue cheese dressing with a little sriracha). Not shown: A cup of chicken bone broth.

Snack
Celery with home-made mayonnaise, pork rinds and cottage cheese.

Dinner
Almond butter.

Liquid Intake
   Espressos: 1;  Coffee:  30 oz.;  Water: 60+ oz. 

Please leave a comment if you visit my blog. Thank you!