Day By Day

It's been awhile again since I had blogged. The reason is simple; there isn't much to report on.

Bariatric surgery is something that takes intense retraining and relearning and introduces new coping challenges for a period of time; once you have met (or coped) with those challenges, life returns to some semblance of a new version of "normal" and you move on, with changes and checkups periodically interrupting your routine.

After a year post-surgery, what is there to talk about? I could complain about not being able to enjoy cakes or brownies or other fun foods that I used to enjoy; my son's birthday recently slid by and while family were stuffing their faces with heaping helpings of yummy-frosted cake I was eating...I think an apple or some mini-pretzels and nuts. I don't remember.

I could complain about missing the days where I could down large portions of food with nary a bit of side effect. I see shows like Man Vs. Food on the Teletubes and think to myself, "That challenge would have been nothing for me a few years ago..."

Now I see that show and wonder how he doesn't gain more weight while filming the programs.

Oh, there's always something to complain about. Complaining isn't a challenge. The challenge is moving on.

My most recent checkup at the doctor had them concerned because some of the weight had creeped up. I assured them that I just saw the surgeon and there were changes being made to my diet; I routinely monitor it (every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I record my weight in the morning), and I'm trying to make changes to trim out a few calories.

My biggest dietary challenge lately has been peanut butter. I love the stuff. And I eat way too much of it. I usually eat it with apples or even broccoli (I know it's strange, but it works for me.) I suppose a secondary challenge has been cashews; they're high calorie but good. Very good.

I resolved to trim back some calories here and there and see what the effect would be. Basically I'm aiming to change my routine enough to get into newer, better habits through small changes. First I trimmed back cheese in my wraps. I used to have a slice of white cheese (60 calories) with some shredded cheddar. Then I cut out the shreds and had 2 slices of the white cheese, so calories were easier to control. Now I cut back the slices to just one in two out of the three meals, for a savings of 120 calories a day or 840 a week, which can add up over time.

Then I swore off cashews during the week. Saturdays and Sundays I have some, but otherwise, no cashews. This saves on calories and the wallet.

Now I've reduced my peanut butter intake. Not a huge amount, but it's reduced. I'm having more raw apples instead of apples with some PB on them.

Basically I'm trying to trim some calories here and there and keep busy with other tasks rather than focusing on eating. When I stress, I eat. When I get anxious or angry, I want to eat. When I get annoyed or want to focus on something other than something that is driving me batty, eating keeps me from saying something that will no doubt do little but make other people irritated or angry. Even if I'm bored, I want to eat. And of course there's my regular routine times to eat, when I'm used to having a meal and Mr. Tummy starts getting irritated if it's not refilled at the proper time (I think I liked Mr. Tummy better when the nerves were healing post-operation).

I'm working on trying to stay busy, as I tend to not want to eat when I'm occupied with something I enjoy doing. For the past couple of weeks I was working on a video contest entry which took precedent over working on my manuscript for the novel. Once that's all submitted I'll be working on the manuscript once again (I'm actually pretty far into my pass on editing, and my wife is still looking at the previous section I gave her. By the time she's done with that I'll have something like 150 pages ready for her to go through again.) With summer approaching I'm going to have the occasional weed-whacking chores or maybe even excursions into the park for some nature walks with my son (or family, if they're game to join. I've learned through my readings for the surgery and watching my extended family age that the more activity you get into, the better off you are with preventing joint issues later on.)

I'm still out here. I'm still doing some posting on my tech blog and writing blog. I'm still trying to lose weight, and cope with my personal issues that helped contribute to my weight issues in the first place. And I'm still trying to write a novel that may or may not sell.

Still taking it all day by day.

Happy Anniversary to Me!

One year ago I was waking up in my hospital bed with a giant incision held together with giant staples.

I woke up in the morning one year ago in a hotel room, suffering from the after affects of a laxative meant to clear out my digestive system after a wonderful liquid diet regimen. Then I rolled into the hospital around five, was pushed into the operating room around eight. Many hours later I was waking up in recovery and forgetting how to breath.

I stayed up most of the night just bleeding. Bleeding and bleeding. Not much fun. But I did learn that the food network kept replaying the same few cake-backing episodes, which was good because I'd watch five minutes, doze off, and wake up an hour later right around the time the episode was repeated right near the point where I dozed off. That was pretty surreal after it happens four or five times.

When I finally decided to get serious about pre-op dieting, I weighed 458 pounds, and that was taken in January. The day I went in for surgery I weighed 376 pounds.

This morning after a lazy long vacation for the "Easter break" at my in-laws, I weighed 276.5 pounds.

If I am doing my math correctly, that means that I've lost nearly 100 pounds since my surgery and nearly 180 pounds overall.

Further estimates would say that I've lost 40% of my weight overall and about 26% since my surgery.

Depending on the weight charts you use I think I've lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 66% of my excess weight. I haven't talked to my doctor about it yet because my one-year followup is scheduled for next week (yipes!) and supposedly you're aiming to lose 75% of your excess bodyweight post-bariatric surgery. If I'm right and I've only lost about 60-some percent, then I'm either still off or there's more weight to lose down the road.

I don't know if I should expect to be chastised next week or congratulated. To be honest I'm nervous about hearing the doctor's assessment. I can picture him telling me that he's disappointed in my lack of progress or that I'm not doing something right.

It has certainly been quite the interesting trip. It's getting rather late here because to celebrate my anniversary my wife took me to my favorite restaurant since my surgery: Panera Bread. My wife, son and I had a lovely evening out shopping at Barnes and Noble, Target, Walmart, and Panera; my daughter decided she'd rather spend her time doing something else, but my four year old son told me to have a happy anniversary, so it wasn't so bad. Right now he's in love with a new Bakugan that Daddy helped pay for him as a treat.

Maybe tomorrow or in the near future I'll sit down and go over some thoughts about how things have changed and what has happened since and because of the surgery. So many things have changed, many other things have stayed the same. It's weird to look back on the journal and the blog to see how things have altered through the months following the surgery.

I was determined to put something up on the anniversary of my alterations. I got up the numbers. And later on I'll try posting something about the feelings from the surgery and further thoughts on the enormity of the changes that have occurred. No pun intended.

One year ago I was waking up soaking in my own blood. Today I'm reminded of that every time my skin wobbles and flaps, or I look down at the horrible rigid scar tissue. My branding for life to act as a reminder why I cannot and should not ever eat cake again, or what too much McDonald's can do to you, or what our fast food nation and culture of pre-packaged convenience foods have encouraged the population to indulge in.

Today I'm waking up in an alien body that doesn't quite fit anymore, and feeling more than a little weird when I can walk more than three hundred paces and not feel like I can't get enough air into my lungs. Our "local" Panera Bread is at one end of a strip mall anchored on the other side by a Target. My wife drove the car from Panera to Target while my son and I walked; we were about halfway there when my son spotted Mommy driving by in the car.

"Oh no!" he shouted. "Mommy is going to beat us!"

He took off in a fast trot down the sidewalk. I started jogging alongside him. Soon we were running, a still overweight thirty-something and his four year old son running down the sidewalk to get to the store entrance before Mommy did. We got there with time to spare; Mommy had just parked the car and was opening the door when we stopped at the front entrance. My son was beaming a huge smile, declaring to Mommy as she walked up that we had beaten her to the door. I was silently smiling because I could still breathe without gasping like a fish.

That was my night, one year after my surgery.

What It's Like to Weigh 500 Pounds

I have been working on a first draft of a novel for several months now, and after over 100,000 words am finally drawing near the end (then comes the FUN part...editing and rewriting parts of the draft so I can submit it in hopes of finding an agent!)

I was exploring different ways to end the story and yes, it includes the possibility of killing someone. Maybe not in real life, but one of the characters might die. I don't know yet. In either case I remembered picking up and glancing at a bargain book at the local Barnes and Noble titled How It Feels to be Attacked by a Shark edited by Michelle Hamer. It had accounts by various people, apparently all Australian or New Zealanders, regarding their brushes with death.

It includes (on the back jacket) stories of getting shot in the heart with a nail gun, come back from the dead, getting trapped in an avalanche...interesting stuff, I thought, and maybe the recollections could help in my own shaping and description of a realistic fight or death in the story.

I started reading it and after a couple accounts of being struck by lightning and saving a kid from a storm drain after a torrential storm, I found one titled "How it feels to weigh five hundred pounds."

I had to stop for a break. Looking back at my own weight loss records, I started this year at 458 pounds. About 40 pounds shy of 500, but still it's up there. Before I had lost weight the first time, many years ago...maybe six or seven years?...I was probably pushing 500, if not a little higher. I honestly don't know if there is a record of it.

Seeing that title first had me thinking, "Is that really a life or death account?" Then I was scraping my own memories to see if I could recall what it was "really" like for me at that weight. What do I say to someone if they asked about it?

I sat back down and read the story. One thing I definitely took away from it was that not all fat people are fat in the same way.

This is the story as told by (and about) Bobby Ballantyne, 42. She hated her father's vegetables and fish, so she'd toss them aside in favor of ice cream and chips and candy. She'd make herself three or four "big, thickly sliced toasted sandwiches" instead. Hmm...okay, I don't think I normally had three or four sandwiches, but I would have two. I don't remember doing it but it's possible I had three on occasion.

She said she had seven kids, getting heavier after each one. Can't say I did that.

Then she said that one day she couldn't climb a chair to clean the top of the fridge so she just didn't do it. I don't remember not reaching a point where I couldn't get on top of a chair.

She said that as she got heavier, she found there were more things she couldn't do and fell into a depression. When she was depressed she had to think happy thoughts to get into a "tranquil frame of mind" just so she could eat, since she couldn't bring herself to eat when she was depressed. Me, I found I ate depressed or not. Happy? Sad? Morose? Angry? These enhanced eating. But it was time to eat at lunch time or dinner time or a snack time...so I ate.

She recounted eating half a dozen slices of toast with heaps of butter and grilled cheese by late morning, then a block of chocolate. She'd make tea and open a pack of biscuits (are they cookies in Australia? I'm not sure). She'd hide food from her kids so she wouldn't have to share. Me? I wasn't big on chocolates or candy. I ate lots of cheese...snacking on slices of cheese, maybe a peanut butter sandwich as a snack. Cookies if they were around. Mindless things that could be downed quickly. but not typically chocolate bars and lollipops.

She blamed fat- and sugar-laden foods in addition to the quantities that she ate. My only caution there is that there is plenty of research showing that fatty foods aren't necessarily horrible. It's how much you eat of them...so it's more likely that while she needed to vary her diet more, she was closer to the mark in saying that it was quantity that really was her problem. Calories are calories whether in fat and sugar or lean protein. Health is a totally different matter (even if you ate lean cuts of meat for your diet, eating just lean cuts of meat and nothing else will still adversely affect your health.)

She recounted deals she made with God to go on a diet if she survived her chest pains at night. Me? I don't remember chest pains when I weighed that much. In fact, I have them now periodically after losing nearly 200 pounds. Closest diagnosis I managed to find has been stress. I consciously stopped giving quite as much of a damn about some of the crap at work and much of the weird pains and chest aches have subsided. I still get them on occasion but it seems that after a couple tests with the doctors they aren't too concerned, or at least not concerned enough to keep testing. I do remember making "deals" with God, though, back when I was trying to believe in a God that cared enough to help. Obviously didn't help me in the formative years of my weight gain...maybe that was part of the reason I started more strongly questioning His existence. The answer I was given was that God helps those who help themselves, so I had to do the work. Well...then it's not Him helping me, is it? If I have to "help myself?" But that's a separate discussion. Point is that I remember making deals that never worked, and in the end I'd have to do it myself.

She said she couldn't walk far; checking for mail exhausted her. She had to wear ugly clothes because that's all that fit her. She had to wear bike shorts for underwear because that's all that fit, and they helped reduce chafing. She couldn't wear shoes because her ankles were swollen, and had to wear sandals. Hmm...I remember that yes, walking a distance was tiring, but I had to do it. I forced myself to do it, because if I couldn't make it from one end of the mall to the other (or at least as far as we needed to go to finish shopping for things) then I was admitting I was too fat. I remember going to the Renaissance Festival one year and feeling so very tired...I spent half the time wishing we were heading back to the car. I remember finding excuses to take the lazier shortcuts and procrastinating to do things that meant extra moving, but in the end I'd have to do it because...again...it was admitting I was simply too fat. I usually covered for this by complaining, griping, or moving just slow enough that I wasn't completely out of breath. People with me usually just wrote it off to me being a rude bastard and while I'm sure they made plenty of mental insults about me that would have been wrong to voice, they may not have ever stopped to think that my ornery disposition was in part a way of covering for the part that scared me; having to admit that I was a terminal fatass. Complaining and griping helped cover that part of my insecurity and redirected what I didn't have control over...my fat ass...to something I did have control over...the heat, the crowds, the prices, the disgusting bathrooms, and my vocal complaints about these things.

Ugly clothes? Yeah, I remember wearing what amounted to tents and sails. I was never one to give much of a damn about name-brand crap though. Maybe in part it stemmed from always wearing ugly clothes. Still, I don't care much about shopping at the Gap versus Walmart. I worry more about making sure my ass crack isn't on display, unlike the whorish outfits worn by teenagers now displaying their own full moons, whale tales and muffin tops overflowing.

She recounts sleeping in a chair because she thought she might choke from her weight on her throat if she laid down. Can't say I had that issue. I did develop a strong...VERY strong...snore. Came from obstructive sleep apnea. That leads to issues in itself that could easily take an entire post. After losing some weight, that largely went away. CPAP machines? No fun. Except it did let me make weird noises when I opened my mouth.

She broke several recliners that she used to sleep in, five chairs in ten years because they broke on her. Chairs, she said, were her worst enemy. Plastic chairs would break easily. She would have her son check out chairs if she were invited out to lunch; if she had to climb steps she wouldn't go, and if the the seats weren't solid wood without arms she wouldn't go. She was imposing restrictions on her life. For me, this was a creeping danger. I gradually had similar things happen and because they were gradual, it was far easier to accept. There were recliners that gradually fell apart...they were a few years old, they probably were in need of replacement anyway, etc...it wasn't just because I was too heavy for what they were designed to carry. I learned to avoid folding chairs. I literally get chest pains from anxiety when I have to sit in them. I slowly lower my arse into the chairs, constantly probing my balance to feel if one of the legs is about to give, even today. Plastic lawn chairs give me the same trepidation. I rarely sit in down unless I have to or there is a solid and sturdy chair available. I have trouble with chairs that have arms too. I hate them I hate them I hate them...and I always try to find seats without arms. Worse are the theater seats. I still don't completely fit them and constantly worry that they're going to break on me. Cars? I don't usually wear seatbelts because they went from being uncomfortable to just not fitting me at all; most people laugh or say that it's my own fault for being so fat that I have to find a car that I fit in instead of a car that suits me. The absolute worst thing for me now are cars that constantly alarm when they detect your ass in the chair without a seatbelt on. I have horrible memories of riding with my wife's father in his vehicle where it dinged until I could fit the clasp into the buckle. Again...anxiety attacks. I refuse to ride in his car anymore. I don't even like riding in other people's vehicles, period. At least in my car I can make the rules. There was one time that I remember breaking the seat in the car. I think my old jalopy I drive now has bent rails on which the seat is mounted, making it difficult to adjust. Don't tell my daughter, though. I imagine it's just an old car that has a finicky adjustment on it. She's just ding-batty enough not to put two and two together and realize the truth.

She said she was diagnosed a year and a half before she decided to lose weight with type two diabetes. Hey, I had that too! Had? I guess it's the sort of thing that doesn't go away...but still, I don't remember how long ago I was diagnosed. She said she continued to eat as she always did. I think I sort of modified my diet, but evidently it was just another item on the checklist (with dark fluid-filling ankles, hypertension, high cholesterol,...)

Her revelation came when she fell in the shower. She couldn't get up; she yelled for her son, who desperately needed her to get up again because the fire department would have to cut a wall to get her out. She started obsessing on how this was affecting her son; the harassment, humiliation, and publicity this would draw if they had to come in and do that just to get her back out of the shower. She described the huge effort it took, with pillows lining the tub, her son grabbing a kitchen chair in which he sat while she used it to lift herself up from an on-her-knees position in pain from the weight on her joints.  Okay...my recollection of the bathroom time is thus:
A) for guys, you lose sight of your anatomy. This makes peeing quite a chore due to lack of radar lock on the target. Fat guys, I know you know what I'm talking about. Leaning on the wall over the toilet helped with automatic aim. The rest of the time it was a matter of sitting to pee, which brought about two new sets of problems; seats that were too small for my diameter of butt, and constant fear of breaking the seat. It's happened. Whenever I saw broken seats, I wondered if I did it or not (and there are times where it honestly was not me).
B) I hated my wife's need for glass sliding doors on the shower. She took away the curtain, and voila'...I no longer fit in the shower. I still think she did it so she could have her own shower.
C) I despised, at the time, my wife's insistence on a jet tub. I think it's one more thing to break or have to maintain. However, this tub was big. The tub in the house where I grew up was a standard tub, and I barely fit in it anymore. Actually I could play in it by hitting the drain and letting water go down, only my tubbiness dammed the water behind me. In front of where I sat the water was gone. I'd have a full tub behind me. Then I'd lift my leg and have a flooding torrent of water rush to an equal level in the tub, and I'd pretend I was some great dam monster washing away a town in a valley. Tragic fun for self entertainment. The jet tub, though, was large. Much larger. As it happened I could only take baths at that point because this tub was actually big enough for me while I couldn't fit in the shower. The extra large two-person jet tub was actually large enough to let me sit.

Ah, the bathroom. The place where personal embarrassments are supposed to remain private whether you're fat or skinny.

Back to her story; she mentioned that people would speak slowly to her because the assumption is that if you're fat, you're stupid. She became rude so people would focus on her rude behavior instead of her weight, and she felt bad for what she imagined her kids went through. As for me, I'm sure that there were comments and rude thoughts tossed my way. I'm fairly sure part of my cynicism, my intolerance for stupidity, and several other vices were contributed to in some way by my weight. I had a thick skin develop (literally and figuratively) in large part from my weight level; I was insecure about my intelligence because I needed to be right. Being smart was my thing; I was a geek, a computer jock, at home in front of a keyboard or reading a book penned by Stephen Hawking instead of the football field, and by dammit I was good at those things. It made me fear failure (and thus makes my financial failings now, my debt, my realizations of missteps in life that lead me to worry about my debts now doubly difficult to take and cope with). I was fat but you were stupid compared to me and I was going to make sure I could claw myself above the majority of people academically because that's all I had. I defined myself by being the (unfortunately fat and) smart guy in the room. Downplay the fat, up-play the wits.

Complete strangers may think I'm a fat idiot. That's okay. Chances are that for the one reason you have to believe I'm an idiot, I've already found three or four reasons you shouldn't have been legally allowed to procreate and two reasons why you shouldn't be allowed to breath the same air as I was breathing. Yes, my mind honestly worked that fast when I caught you staring at my ginormous balloon shaped body.

What it came down to was that I couldn't control what you think. I had to learn not to mind it so much because I couldn't change my weight overnight, while most people around me were content to live in ignorance, which also didn't change overnight. It was a thought that comforted me.

In the end, she joined Weight Watchers and has lost 300+ pounds, according to this account. I had surgery and have changed many aspects of my eating behavior that has led me to a 190 pound weight loss so far with a painful several-weeks-old plateau in the 265 range and a nice dose of wallowing in a depression and whiplash from turning away from mirrors when I see my body with all the flapping loose skin.

Funny how many memories five pages in a $7 book can dredge up. I spent more time typing this entry than I did actually reading that epistle.

The next story in the book is about what it feels like to choke on a cheeseburger. Ironic?

When Bad Things Happen To Good People

I logged into my account this afternoon and found a disturbing post from my loyal reader, Lee. He, too, has been going through a weight loss surgery journey and blogging about it. I don't really know him personally, only through his blog posts and messages here, so I can't speak for him (just what he has already shared in messages and posts, if I may be allowed to do so).

On his blog he posted that his wife has breast cancer and because of various complications may not survive this time around. They have time to live together and celebrate their lives for awhile, but I imagine it is still hard news to bear.

I have wondered about my death. Like Lee I pretty much accepted that my obesity was a death sentence. I enjoyed my eating habits, and since weight and lifestyle takes months or years to change rather than a day or two it seemed as if losing weight was out of reach.

I basically accepted I was going to die early. In some ways I almost looked forward to it; no more aches and pains, the potential insurance payout could help my wife and kids get out of debt a bit more, no more dealing with the stress of my day job and waking to the dread that I would never find a better source of job satisfaction; all I hoped for was that it would be quick and relatively painless.

But I eventually took the steps to get the surgery and added some hope that I might see my young son grow up and maybe even grow a little older. I temper this with the realization that I could be killed in a car accident or some other freak incident as happens to hundreds or thousands of people every day.

Lee found the surgery and then changed his view to accept that maybe he, too, would buy more years with his wife and children and grandkids. And so you can imagine the irony of me finding his news posted today on the eve of my own birthday that I didn't know I would see.

I don't know what to say to him, really. Because of my Asperger self I am afraid to say much because I'll probably say the wrong things so normally I don't say anything. Better to be seen as an unfeeling jerk than a cruel moron incapable of relating the way other people normally do. After a lot of thinking I posted a comment to him for moderation; I hope that since he's followed so many of my own posts he'll understand what I mean, even if I'm not the best at conveying my thoughts on emotional topics.

It led me to thinking about the question of what would happen if you knew you were going to die in a certain span of time? I really liked the movie Krull; it had a character that was a Cyclops, and in the realm of that movie the Cyclopian race was cursed with seeing the when and where they would die, so they knew how long they had to live.

I know at the rational level that I could die at any time. A family friend just had an aneurysm but looks like he'll survive. I had an uncle that survived as half the man he used to be for several years after a stroke. I had a roommate that killed himself in college. The loss of weight doesn't mean I'm home free of strokes and heart attacks, and of course there is a possibility of fire or car accident killing me as well. Unpleasant, but those are the facts. I actually had a fixation on the thought that after my six month or twelve month followup to the surgery I'd be given a "green flag" that all was going well with no complications only to be in a pileup on the way home.

So would one rather know when they were going to die, or that they had a certain time to live? We have our mortality looming over us every day, and unlike the Cyclops we don't have any certainty when our lottery numbers will be drawn. Every day is an opportunity to spend living or dying. Most of us get so caught up in our constant routines of life that we get into a rut and don't give it a second thought. Some people get hit with the news that they will soon pass away and they suddenly find a new meaning to their lives, like the inspirational story of cancer victim Randy Pausch who ended up unintentionally becoming an motivational hit with his Last Lecture (which I highly recommend watching on YouTube and reading the resulting book).


I suppose the question is, what would you do? Would you want to know when you're going to die, or remain ignorant of it? Would you rather believe that you make your own fate every day, or know when it's time to buckle down and make the most of your days as the time draws near? So many people face this question every day in oncology departments in hospitals that it's become an invisible question for those who aren't directly affected by these issues.

My best wishes go to Lee with this challenge in his life. I hope anyone else that stumbles on my little corner of the blogosphere could also take a few moments to share their wishes with Lee as well, since he and his wife will no doubt look forward to some good wishes from others as well.

Changes to the Blog

You may have noticed some changes on the blog recently. I've decided to take my wife's advice and listen to one of the little voices in my head to create a more focused blog.

What does that mean?

It means a few things.

One, the Barry Atric blog is now going to focus on what the title says. Weight loss, diet, food, medicine, bariatric surgery and my personal updates on my progress from the surgery. Most of the entries that are not related to those items, directly or tangentally, have been removed.

Two, there are now four blogs. Click on my profile for links to the new ones, but now there is the Barry Atric blog,  New Author Chronicles detailing my attempt to become a published author, I Think Users Must Hate Me detailing my trials and tribulations dealing with technology in society and my job, and A Teaspoon of Skepticism and a Cup of Reason, a blog about...well... skepticism and reason.

Three, my schedule is changing. I used to try having at least one new blog post in the morning on my blog. I was proud that every day I had something in the feed ready for people if they wanted to follow my witty online banter. No more, I'm afraid. I still am trying to keep things updated, but there's no way I can keep a journal, work on a manuscript, work a day job and keep four blogs updated every day. Instead I'm posting things as they occur to me in the appropriate blog. That means that maybe the New Author Chronicles will fill three days in a row with material (maybe more now that NaNoWriMo is here!) while it may take a week to get something new in the Teaspoon blog. It's okay. I'll do my best to keep material going and not neglect the blogotubes.

If you're interested in all my topics, please do subscribe and link to each of the blogs! Please! If only one, feel free to link to and spread the word about that one blog. I'd appreciate it!

Four, I'm still working on cleaning up the blogs. The Barry Atric blog is getting stories flushed out that don't belong (most migrated to the other blogs) while simultaneously having the links on the side moved, and the other blogs are getting some additional of-interest blogs linked to them (for example, moving Phil Plait's Bad Astronomer blog to the Teaspoon blog rather than here). It's going to take time, but it's getting there.

What this all means is that I'm conducting an experiment on whether a focused blog will garner more attention on the webbertubes, maybe a little more love from from the Googlesphere. If you were just interested in medical/food/WLS information, you won't come here seeing my rants against organized religion, and vice-versa. If you liked my style, or what I had to say, or were at all interested in my opinions, you can still aggregate everything by subscribing to all the feeds and following in your favorite reader.

Hopefully I'll see some significant difference in using this format in the coming months!

Creating a Blog with Focus

The Creative Penn on Twitter posted a link to a site that had some interesting information on it. The article is found at Penelope Trunk's blog and the article is called, "Blogs without topics are a waste of time." You can read it here. I'd first recommend reading that site to form your own opinion then return here to see my take (if you're interested).

A blog without focus...basically calling for bloggers to have a central theme to their blog and stick with it.

My wife has said that one of the reasons I don't have a larger readership (aside from the whole drop-in-the-ocean-of-voices thing) is that I don't have a focus on this blog. She's right that I don't have a specific focus. On this blog there are some book reviews, information about bariatrics, complaints about technology, and information on writing stories and novels among other things.

Would I have more people interested if I had a central topic?

Maybe.

I started this blog with the intent of publicly documenting my surgery and aftermath. I thought it would be a handy reference for other people considering the surgery and might give another viewpoint in the surgery decision. At the same time, it was a retrospective for my own accountability and memory on what's happened.

I knew that the surgery was a big step and that I'd probably have something to write about for months ahead. And I did, more or less.

And I knew that eventually the surgery wounds would heal and life would move on. I'm not defined by my operation. I was strongly defined by my weight issues and later by the related issues for which I ended up going to a therapist to work on, brought out more strongly by the weight loss and surgery (and job stresses and life stresses...)

Key point I should have considered: I didn't want to be defined by my surgery.

To continue working with the blog and having incentive to work with the blog, I put right in that it was about comics (sometimes), technology (sometimes), bariatric surgery (sometimes), and generally whatever interested me.

In reading Penelope's blog post I saw that I had set myself up a bit for misleading a potential readership. Barry Atric; the pseudonym alone would say this is about the surgery. Yet as time passed my surgery was less a factor in who I was as a person. Other things happened and my life changed. I moved on, posting updates on weight on occasion and when I had to go in for some followup appointment. Otherwise I had a goal of just keeping new content going into the feed and not skipping a day...if someone tuned in with the RSS feed they'd have something new every morning.

Perhaps that blog is right. Without focus, I may have content, but to what end? People may not appreciate having the ramblings of some random person who one day gripes about religious hypocrisy and the next is lauding a book about training your body to be like Batman.

At this point the blog was about practice and determinism. I was keeping a rigorous schedule of blogging, journaling, and working on a first draft of a novel. Keeping the blog up to date was a matter of pride that I could juggle the task along with my day job and family and other responsibilities.

In other words, the blog has meaning to me, but may not resonate with others at all. It was a crippled journal (which I am already keeping in private). I wasn't benefiting anyone since my entries are read by all of three or four people. I take pride that I was (hopefully) keeping those three or four people entertained to some degree, but perhaps the time is coming to make some changes.

Blogger has the ability to maintain multiple blogs under the same username/ID. I could split up my non-related interested into multiple blogs. Pros: I would have more focused blogs, and potentially (only potentially) more readers to help make the comments come to life. Cons: I'd have more to maintain, and I'd have to jump through the hoops of setting up each blog and try not to slip too much with content in each blog; a blog with no readers is bad, a blog with no content is worthless. I'd also have to sit down and remember how I did things like working with Google Analytics and the live feed of visitors, re-embedding information into the blogs so they're properly tracked. Definitely falls under the category of "not fun".

I could just stop with the blogging. I don't like that idea too much because I do enjoy having to maintain the discipline that comes with writing something almost every day. Novels are good for this but what good are novels if no one ever potentially sees them? I'm also very opinionated and enjoy knowing that the opinion is being spilled on the webbertubes, even if the number of people reading the material numbers in the less than ten. Still, this is an option.

I could keep doing what I'm doing. That is, this blog, as it has been. Let things go as they do.

I could essentially split this blog up. That's related to the part above where I use multiple blogs, but I'd also carry my baggage along. That means my pseudonym travels with me (I'm somewhat paranoid about someone at my place of employment finding the blog and taking offense at something silly) as well as taking the time to parse out various articles and migrate them to another blog site so the content I've worked on doesn't disappear.

I could just kill Barry Atric. Essentially create a new identity online with Blogger and start multiple blogs with focus, this time as a more generic pseudonym and repost the information from Barry directly into a new blog focused on the surgery information. Turning this over in my head I might also be able to feasibly just delete everything from the Barry blog not related to the surgery and have a new person starting new blogs under the account I use for Barry...just put Barry on a diet. The Barry blog will become more focused and trimmed while other blogs take up the slack. My only hesitation is how Blogger handles this, as I've already got an icon and account registered with little other than my email being "real" and everything else Barry. I'd hate to have tried refocusing on, say, technology with a name attached that says "Barry Atric."

On the other hand...I could stop updating Barry's blog and focus on creating side blogs for different topics.

I don't know what I'm going to choose to do. My schedule is very full for the next month, and dedicating time to planning some kind of migration will be difficult at best. But maybe that is just what I'm going to have to do. I may just start another blog before this post hits the webbertubes and see how that goes, posting specific content to it (or re-posting content from here to a new one) and see if the content specific site garners more attention. If it gets a decent amount of love from Google, I'll adopt more blogsites and start branching out and retrofitting content from this blog to another one.

One obvious con to any of these (except keeping things status quo) is the obvious problem, to me, of no longer keeping a "once a day" schedule. I may have content every day but to one different sites. I'm very afraid that if I break my routine then a site will end up neglected or falling into the dark simply from lack of updates. What time I did invest in it will have been wasted as I flitter among projects.

Anyone else ever have this issue or have advice on tackling it?

A Small Dose of Introspection

I was at a recent birthday party for a friend. At this party was an old acquaintance with whom I was, in my opinion, a closer friend for several years while in our middle- and high-school years until we had a falling out towards the end of our high school careers and from that period forth we didn't really speak much at all.

We had kept enough in touch enough to know certain things. I knew, for example, that he got married. And I knew when he and his wife had their first child. I guess you can say it could be characterized more like keeping tabs on his life. I don't know what he knew of my own life events.

I went to the party actually looking forward to seeing him again. I was hoping to see his wife...we had gone to school together...and another old friend with whom I had lost touch, but they weren't there. I wanted to see if there was any reconciliation. It's been literally nearly a decade since he had treaded so heavily on my "that pissed me off" buttons, and I believe that the best way to reconcile with people that drive you to want to kill them is to allow a large passage of time with a large distance between you.

We got along at the party. That was good. But...there's always a "but"...there was a period of reflection where I analyzed events.

We talked and exchanged a few stories. He didn't know I had weight surgery. I didn't know that he was diagnosed with Asperger's just as he was going into college.

That was the point I was thinking about this morning. Asperger's. He's always been forthright in many respects, committing faux-pas in social niceties and such. He was usually pretty good at giving and taking criticism, for the most part, as long as it's honest and relating to a task or performance instead of the person. But this doesn't make you an Aspie.

One of the hallmarks of Asperger's is social reclusiveness. This doesn't mean hiding in the woods in a shack or threatening to shoot people that come within twenty feet of your doorstep. It simply refers to a social isolation, whether physical or mental, that stems from the inability to relate to "normals". Normally, from my research, means that we tend not to draw attention to ourselves because we're introverted.

Mr. Man routinely draws attention to himself. He is one of those people that is LOUD. Loud when he speaks, boisterous in his actions, generally...well, there's a line between Asperger's and just being obnoxious. He always firmly fell into the downright obnoxious realm of behavior.

I suppose I see these traits best because there's an indirect relation who is also a loud, boisterous person with delusions of their own capabilities. I've watched that person's behavior and correlated it as best I can with other opinions and behavior profiles and came to the conclusion that this person is completely self-deluded and obnoxious (and quite proud of it, although I don't think the person in question knows just how deluded and obnoxious they are). Mr. Man isn't quite this far gone. Believe me, I've known him longer and there would be no hesitation on my part to slam that which I think needs slamming. He's not quite that bad.

There are other things that made me kind of lump him into the semi-deluded label. He works with people at a state college now after a career working in technology for a startup that went (apparently) belly-up. He talks about making really good money, having lots of good money...he started out from poverty, so maybe "good money" is relative but the way he spoke made it seem as if he's going home at night and rolling in piles of cash. Working for a state college system...I can't reconcile that. I acknowledge that it's possible he's making a lot. A computer science degree can be worth quite a bit in the business world. I'm being paid far below what the market supposedly holds for someone with my degree and experience level (which contributes to my own sense of frustration with my situation do a degree, but that's a separate and more layered topic). In my travels I've found that there are only a few key people that make a lot of money in any field associated with academia:

• Traditional administrator roles - superintendents, deans, heads of major departments (here I mean things like head of organizational roles, not necessarily the head of academic roles like the head of the humanities or science departments).
• Teachers of high rank - teachers with many years of additional education (as required by law in the US for public schools teachers), thus bumped up on payscale for experience + education level, professors of many years of experience (as in near retirement)
• Vendors and consultants - they make short bursts of income in the range of "poopload", especially for solutions that they get organizations invested in. Organizations will spend fifty grand to a million on a solution because of a good snowjob sales presentation and technology challenged decision makers, and once that check is written it becomes a matter of "make it work" instead of "we made a mistake, let's find another solution" once issues are discovered. Along with that "make it work" attitude comes more checks for support to the contractor as people scramble to fit the square peg into the round hole.

There may be others, especially depending on your definitions, but these are the major once that I end up envying a bit when the subject had come up.

I know that he had a talent for framing things in a more positive light than is necessarily reality. When I was applying to colleges I was accepted at two; one large college with a name that contains an "Institute", "Technology", and a city that rhymes with "Rochester" and a polar-opposite school that was small and personal but was associated as a satellite campus to a major university in southern PA. I chose the polar opposite school. He was accepted at the school with the word that rhymes with Rochester in the name as well and went there.

I think he went for a year before dropping out. More than that he transferred to the small, quiet, secluded school that I was attending.

That's a big change. I mean total culture shock. I more or less saw those differences to begin with and that was the major reason I didn't go to that larger but bigger name school; he had framed it in a positive light for several reasons and quite frankly I didn't care. Part of me always thought that at least part of the reason was because he couldn't hack it there, though. I don't know if it was the truth. I just sort of acknowledged and moved on. there's no reason to try to get him to admit something like that.

The point was that if it was true that he "couldn't hack it there" at the previous school he still was superior to everyone else at the smaller college in skills and ability and talent in his mind and didn't hesitate to make people around him understand where they were in the talent ladder compared to him.

Incidentally this further reinforced my opinion of him at the time since I was established on the campus with several Comp Sci people...and thus was privy to several conversations about the "new obnoxious punk that knew everything" roaming the halls, since I came from his hometown area and people wanted to know if he was always like that.

He spoke at the party of being on equal footing with his fellow workers at the college, people who were super-smart with PhD's. He doesn't have a PhD, as far as I ever knew, and he never told me he did. Yet somehow he always seemed to have the respect and ear of these people who worked with him while having the sacred parchment tacked to an office wall. (Oddly enough, as another side note, I tend to notice that there are a lot of people without the high-education documents that insist they're just as smart as, if not more educated due to their "school of hard knocks" life, the people who spent huge amounts of time earning a PhD in their field. I don't know if it's compensation for something or what, but I've run into that a lot. A full comparison of this topic is beyond this post's scope, however.)

He is talented, as far as I could tell. He wasn't stupid by any degree. He made a hobby in high school of playing with assembly language (remember the friend at the beginning on this entry, the guy having the birthday party? He likened Mr. Man's fascination with assembly programming to building a beach one grain of sand at a time. I always loved that comparison because in the world of programming it's pretty accurate). Mr. Man was simply obnoxious and off-putting, even to someone as socially inept as myself.

Where does all this tie in to the title of this blog entry? I believe the vast majority of people seek affirmation for ourselves on others. We want to know how far from "normal" we are and base it on other people, other relationships, to make these judgments. Our perception of ourselves is heavily influenced by our perceptions of others.

This guy for all his flaws was great at making others kind of feel like dirt. He was literally living in a room the size of a large closet and still I would end up envying his skills (though not his ego). He would talk of the fantastic job, the collection of pinball machines and video game stand-up systems like you find in arcades that littered his apartment. He had a fantastic honeymoon-wedding in Hawaii.

Seeing my own situation, stuck in debts, frustrated at certain employment situations, stresses from the surgery and coping with my own mental buggers...the picture he paints is one deserving envy.

Then I remember things like his distortion of the situation; never lying, per se, but he always had a talent for highlighting just the right features to make his talents and situation look a little better and downplay the faults. My own situation isn't the best in the world and I am aspiring to something better; I finally am starting to get off my arse and try for the next rung. I'm moving from a tentative plan to actually trying to do something about it. Maybe he doesn't deserve my envy as much as I had thought; maybe, like the once-removed relative I briefly mentioned, his world is partially in his own perceptions and my inability to tolerate living in a fantasy world once the illusion is broken is part of my problem.

Either way I wish him the best. He's obviously happy with the way his life is now and that's fantastic. Maybe someday I'll have a life similar to the canvas on which he paints. For now, though, I need to get my paints and start working on my own masterpiece.

Someone's Considering the Surgery

I am just finishing up compiling a series of posts into a document to give to someone that are tagged with "bariatric surgery" from the blog.

I was recently stopped by a coworker and she asked me several questions about the surgery. Apparently she's been struggling with her weight for awhile and has lost a large amount of weight on two occasions; one, she had an aneurysm on her pancreas that went undiagnosed for a long period of time, and the second time was a brain tumor, and in the course of trying to remove the tumor the doctors apparently had to break her jaw and that put her on a liquid diet.

She's apparently contemplating the surgery because she'd like to find a way to lose the weight that doesn't involve a serious medical trauma. Can't say I'd blame her.

It did put me in a bit of a bind though. See, while I put this blog up to educate others considering the surgery in addition to acting as a bit of a soundboard and public "journal" of my life, I never really wanted to have people personally associate me with the blog. A few people I trust were made aware of the blog. But coworkers? What if they become ticked at something? Read too much into something? Take something personally?

The last thing I need is someone getting all ticked over something stupid. I edit the blog heavily and pass much of it through what "offensiveness" filters I have built over time in addition to having my wife read the entries so she can alert me to potentially "bad" things. I don't advertise the blog to people.

I guess it boils down to I don't mind people close to me knowing about the blog and perfect strangers knowing about the blog. I don't know how casual aquaintences and coworkers would react to some of the information here despite all the filtering and care I put into it so I don't let them know.

So when she started asking me questions, direct questions, about the surgery and my experiences I thought that the blog would be the best resource. At the same time...I didn't know her well enough to trust her with that information.

That left two options. Reveal the blog's details and let her in on my "dirty little online secret" or go through by hand and filter the entries listed for the surgery into a word processor and try cleaning it up a little bit and printing it for her.

The first was easy. The second takes time. I should know because I did the second one.

I wish I could trust everyone with knowledge of the blog but I just don't feel that I can risk it. I can't risk someone getting bent out of shape over something stupid.

The document was formatted with 1/2 inch margins on all four sides and came out to be 68 pages long with nearly 39,000 words. Wow. And that's not including this entry.

I also noticed the gradual dropoff in entry frequency regarding the surgery. That's a good thing, I think. That's why I listed this with a tag of "milestones". It's a reflection of my healing process, and the fact that my life shifted focus gradually towards something other than a bariatric patient. It means that even though I've gone through a life changing event I'm not completely defined by it.

I'm dealing with other issues; my bouts of depression, my Asperger's, my debts and everything that I put into the blog. I occasionally stick in updates to my bariatric progress but it's simply not an everyday concern for me.

I don't think I put anything in about the Walk from Obesity that I attended. That's when I realized that this truly was becoming a footnote in my life; my wife and I pledged some money for the Walk from Obesity charity event and we walked around a nearby park on a course that was a little over a mile. And I didn't blog about it.

It was a wonderful event. It had free health screenings and some fun swag, and I won a candle as a door prize. The weather held out nicely with a cool breeze and a little sun and we got t-shirts for registering. Best of all I saw my nutritionist and surgeon along with several other doctors I'd seen around the hospital during my consults and time in the hospital. The only one I noticed that was missing was the physician's assistant that had been so helpful with so many appointments after my surgery and during my recovery time.

And I didn't blog about it.

It was...a footnote. A few fun hours one day over the weekend. We had fun. But I didn't blog about it.

I have an appointment, my six month followup, coming up with my surgeon in less than a month. Another milestone. That one I will blog about.

So much has changed. I see it in my skimming of the material as I go through and change the arrangment of the entries (such a pain...the blog wanted to present everything in reverse-chronological order. Ugh.) It's amazing to me to see how things have shifted focus from the beginning to this point, and the things I've forgotten, the little details.

So while I'm handing over to her the virtual keys to finding this blog and blowing my own cover, at the same time I'm glad I've kept the records. I see it as an amazing journey chronicling events in the life of an otherwise unremarkable and insignificant person existing on the planet. I've had comments from people that five years ago I'd never have thought I could have had an exchange with; Mur Lafferty, Paula B, even John Robison have visited this site for a brief time and some continue to drop in. They have no idea how much they made my day and what impact they've had on some stranger with a blog. I look forward to hearing from Lee as I drop in on his own blog, as well as Lorraine with her Renewal blog.

I have blogged my progress with writing stories for The Writing Show, prompting me to continue with an effort to write a draft of a novel which while I'm not tracking progress here I have been making progress on. If you're curious I'm closing in on 22,000 words with it so far...far enough to not make it worth my while to simply quit now without crossing the finish line and then trying to edit it.

All the while I'm still trying to lose weight. I'll hopefully cross a milestone soon that will prompt another worthwhile update on that front too.

All of these things came from keeping a blog about getting my gut sliced open.

Simply amazing to me.

Driving Traffic to The Blog

I've talked to my wife on and off about the website. Once in awhile I just sort of babble out whatever's on my mind, and one I commented on was that the Google Analytics seemed to show a steep drop after I had decided to spend more time working on things like my story instead of the blog site.

I've been posting things in spurious sessions, scheduling them ahead of time and trying to keep things ahead just enough that I can dedicate some other days to focusing on exercises and story time or whatever else is going on that day and not worry about trying to keep my one-post-a-day records.

At the same time I see that my audience is something like...three people. Which is fine. I hope people who do read it enjoy it.

My thinking is kind of split on this. On one hand it would be nice to have an actual audience that follows what I'm saying...it's a wonderful bit of mental stroking that keeps the ego fluffed up. What I mean to say is that this would be validation that I have some kind of talent for expressing myself and it would validate to my own screwy mind that I somehow matter; I mean, if Glenn Beck has an audience that pays for mansions and he's an arrogant blowhard, jiminy jillickers I should be able to get some of that type of following for spewing my brain droppings, yeah?

On the other hand I'm one voice among a sea of people that are whoring themselves on the Internet for...heh...attention and validation. I'm guilty as charged.

My wife said that I tend to be too verbose and wordy, so that may be a drawback in a time of twitter tweets and sound bites. She additionally suggested that I needed to separate my blog into several blogs, one for bariatric surgery, one for technology, etc...

This goes back to the original reason I started the blog. I started this as a place to chronicle my life as I adjusted to the bariatric surgery, so people considering such a procedure could see what it was like in my case. A the same time, a blog that is so one-tracked will grow boring. How long would someone keep reading about my weight routine or eating routine when I even know that it's very repetitive and I live this routine. That would have drawn the blog to a conclusion fairly quickly and simply faded out into obscurity, unless there's some sequel where I'd either cheat the surgery or need to have it reversed (or some other complication...which can happen a couple years out...)

There's another name for that; it's a book. Or really long article. Maybe a novella. But there's no need to continue chronicling the surgery after the twelfth time I mention my workout routine or need for an adjustment to my supplements.

Instead I sprinkle just parts of me into the blog. I mention things that maybe my son would want to read someday. I mention things that are of interest to me, that show facets of my personality. I don't have anything like this for my dad and there are times where I'd have been interested in seeing what he was like at my age, not to mention that someday maybe I'll be unable to function the way I do now and this is a kind of addon to my journals.

If I did keep multiple blogs I thought it would be a pain in the buttocks to keep track of everything. Plus, as a person who follows multiple blogs, I know that there are times I look forward to a blog that I can rely on being updated periodically whereas others seem to have simply faded away...are they no longer blogging? Are they just on vacation? What's the deal here?

By mixing topics I try to keep the blog somewhat interesting while at the same time keeping content flowing. You never know what I'll comment on. One day politics, the next day it's commenting on a local fair's choice of food. Maybe the description should be tweaked a bit since I don't discuss comics as much as I thought I would but that's something I'll probably evaluate with looking back near New Year's.

I suppose this sounds like justification for doing it the way I have been. It is. I thought about these things as I started the blog but I don't really have a lot of feedback from a lot of people as to what they're looking for; the people I have heard from (and I thank you!) have generally reacted with positive comments (although people who don't like it may very well just mosey away and not bother saying anything).

Most of all I do this blog for myself. I try to use it as a forum for practicing my wordsmithing and trying to improve my voice in "written" form. Most of all I have to enjoy doing this or I would simply quit altogether...in that respect, my audience is myself. And potentially my family should the inevitable happen someday.

Yes, I admit I get a bit of a creepy kick from the thought that should I be incapacitated these posts will continue to pop into the feed once a day for a couple of weeks. It's like something from a horror story plot.

This blog is a tangent to the journal I have to keep for my surgery-mandated psychologist visits. I can't get too personal here. I work under a pseudonym, I have to obscure certain details, I can't discuss things that are way too identifying (but let's be serious...if relatives stumbled into this blog and put two and two together it's not like it would take Mr. Monk to solve the mystery of who I was). It's one more facet to my personality and a reflection of who I am.

I've come to accept that I won't get validation from doing a blog. I'm not an Internet celebrity, I don't have mad l337 skillz in programming that draws an audience the way Mark Russinovich or Aaron Ballman do. I'm not cutting edge on rumors like Perez Hilton while hobnobbing with socialites. I'm just one of the faceless fat guys trying to lose weight, and that's hardly a rare finding in America today. I'm one voice in a sea of people.

My chances of finding validation doing this is one of the few aspects of me that are slim. But there is definitely a very good chance that I will find posterity through my expression here on this blog. I suppose that's what, in the end, keeps me coming back to this keyboard working on these entries. It's for my wife, my son, and my daughter. I'm giving them something that I never had from my parents.

I'm nothing special. But this is who I was. This is part of who your dad was, and hopefully I'm not as horrible a guy as they may have thought.

Introspection

Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. It is a conscious mental and usually purposive process relying on thinking, reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's soul. It can also be called contemplation of one's self, and is contrasted with extrospection, the observation of things external to one's self. Introspection may be used synonymously with self-reflection and used in a similar way.

That definition came from a Wikipedia entry on the term "introspection". I got to thinking about it while listening to a new podcast experiment from Mur Lafferty in her I Should Be Writing podcast. She has recently started playing with a format of releasing a daily five to ten minute podcast in addition to the "regular" ISBW episodes (usually half an hour to an hour or so). She gets up and uses a small recorder to blurb some thoughts and then converts them and posts it as-is; no real editing to the flow of consciousness verbiage. I hope by the time you read this she's still doing it (as I've said, I often do these entries ahead of time, and she's doing this as kind of an experiment.)

One of the things she did (and drew attention to) in a very early episode of "ISBW Lite" was her tendency to use filler phrases like "Umm" and "Uhh..." during pregnant pauses. She said she normally edits those out of the podcast recordings so listeners aren't aware of how often she really does that, but since these are unedited to accommodate the tight turnaround time of the daily thoughts into the feed she's kind of exposing herself to the listeners of her bad habit.

Being one of the Aspergian mental wiring that is something that really grates on my nerves when I hear presenters do that sort of thing. It's a mental tick that causes me to recoil; if I hear it too much I usually zip right through the podcast or leave the presentation. Mur is nowhere near as bad as many I've heard (a LOT of the ones I hear from the IT Conversations network podcast, often recordings from presenters at technical conferences, I end up just deleting because they're so riddled with fillers that I tend to hear those more than be able to focus on the topic at hand).

I love Mur's podcast on writing. She's one of my inspirations for getting off my ass to even TRY to write; for all my stumbles in life I've really had a fortunate set of circumstances in that I married an English major willing to help with my editing requests as well as stumbling onto The Writing Show with Paula B, Mur Lafferty's podcasts on the craft of writing as well as her podcast novels, and from them stumbling into Scott Sigler and his podcast novel successes to inspire me to plant my ass in front of the keyboard and, even if it fails, just try to write a story that may be successful. I haven't given up my daydreams of trying to create a microISV business...I'm just prioritizing the story writing first.

So as I listened to that episode of ISBW Lite I had a conversation with myself about what I'd say to her to try to overcome that tendency to use fillers in her speech. Being hardwired to wince at hearing a stream of "um" from other people makes me more conscious of eliminating it from my own speech patterns; how did I do it?

Well, Mur, you just need to be screwed up in the head.

I'm betting that's not an option. The next best thing is to become more self aware of your speech. I realized that I knew when it was coming. I just had to concentrate on the sentence, and I gradually become aware of that upcoming "skip", a point where my knowledge was blanked out and words suddenly disappeared from the queue emptying from my brain to my mouth.

I had to become aware of what I was thinking before blurting it out.

Mur likes to inspire people to overcome their fear of writing by giving "permission to suck". It's okay to not be good. I guess that it's more important to be a better editor than a writer. If you're more worried about the story sucking and you forever put off the attempt to write because of this fear, because you want it to be perfect, you'll never end up doing it.

Well, you need permission to have dead air.

Dead air isn't a good thing to have a lot of but it's going to happen. In my quest to get rid of my own verbal filler I've discovered that it makes me a bit lighter on my feet in terms of pulling phrases out of my arse to fill a situation where I'm at a loss for words.

If it's okay to suck, then it's okay to be at a loss for words.

When that mental stutter is the next thing in the queue, just relax, and work instead on the proper word to fill in. Mentally slap yourself when you think that next word should be "Um" or "Uh." The listener knows if you're in mid-sentence that there's more to what you're saying.

What it really takes is the ability to tap into mindfulness exercises, being aware of what's going on in your own head. Introspection.

That's when it started to take a new direction for me.

See, I realized that I have a lot of issues with my current situation because of my inability to control the situation. I've dug myself into debts. I've got a job that I have certain issues with, taking the bad with the good and the bad (there are just some days where that merits the double bad). I recently bought some clothes, a pair of pants and a shirt, and my wife suggested I try them on in the fitting rooms. I sat down to see how the pants felt when sitting, seeing as much of my job involves being at a keyboard, and I was planted right in front of a mirror where I saw my freakish folds of blubber-stretched skin and for several minutes I just staired at myself and wrestled with the feeling that I just wanted to cry. I can't wish problems away no matter how hard I try and I focus on those things, driving me into the brink of a depression.

But I'm trying something here to change some things. I can't control where I am now. I can't fix poor decisions in the past. But I can try writing that novel I've "been meaning to write". I can work on the concept for the software program that may pave the way to a new career after I get this novel out of my head and can use the time I'm using to write to instead code the program framework. Maybe these things will fail miserably, but between now and that time of failure I can at least focus a little less on my problems and a little more on achieving something better.

I needed to explore my own mind a bit more and change perspective, using the same introspection that I was "telling" Mur in my imaginary conversation.

None of that is easy and this isn't an overnight change. Anyone with an overnight life-changing revelation is probably deluding themselves to a large degree and thus setting themselves up for failure. What I am trying to do is take a step in the right direction. I need to become more mindful of certain things and try changing perspective in small degrees.

I suppose I kind of owe Mur a little thanks for that bit of insight. She never intended to help that way, but sometimes the great things come about by accident. Either that or I discovered I need to listen to the voices in my head more often, but I distrusted them after they told me that licking nine volt batteries was a good way to tell if they were old or not.