Posted by Allen on under Personal | 
So my blood sugar numbers have been high lately.  Not necessarily super-scary high, but closer to super-scary than I’m comfortable with.  This could be a natural progression of my diabetes (I’m Type II, in case you didn’t know), but I’m afraid that I did some damage to myself a couple of months ago by trying to see how I felt having a “regular” amount of sugar in my diet again for a brief bit (somewhat ironically because my numbers had been stable for so long) – seems like my sugar got elevated at that point and has never come all the way back down.
Yes, that makes me feel like an idiot.
But there’s good news to be had here, because it’s made me really tighten down my eating habits and begin ramping up my exercise habits. Â Over the last three or four weeks, I’ve had no pasta at all (which is really, really bizarre for me). Â I’ve had, I think, two dessert-like things, both of which were at my weekly company meetings. Â I’ve had probably three cups of coffee. Â I’m trying to introduce veggies into my diet on a more regular basis. Â I’m really, really trying hard to eat better, though I still have a ways to go, especially with the veggies.
It’s paid off a bit, though — I’ve dropped six pounds since the last time I was in my doctor’s office a month ago.
That weight loss — which I sincerely hope will continue as I eat better and exercise more — is tremendous, because dropping some of the extra weight I carry around my mid-section will, by all accounts, do wonders for my blood sugar numbers. Â I’m by no means obese (even if the nerdy, fat 13-year-old in my head likes to argue that point), but I do carry my extra poundage in the one place it’s medically worst for men to carry it, and the more weight I can drop, the better off I’m going to be, and the better my body is going to work, and the better I’m going to feel.
I don’t want to pay too much attention to the numbers, because that way lies madness. I am, however, going to continue to do what I’m doing, and hopefully do it even better, and trust that the numbers will continue to fall. Â That six pounds might not be tremendous in and of itself, but it’s validation that — possibly for the first time in my life — I’m on the right path, healthily speaking.
Posted by Allen on October 28, 2008 under Personal |
Terry and I decided to do something special to mark our tenth anniversary, and since neither of us really had much desire to go the tattoo route, we instead went down to the mall and both got our ears pierced.
Yes, we now have matching earrings because we are just that damn adorable.
Posted by Allen on October 27, 2008 under Personal |
On October 27, 1998 — ten years ago today — Terry and I snuck off to the Escambia County Courthouse in Pensacola to get our marriage license. That was the intention, anyway, as we had planned to elope on the beach the following weekend.
Instead, partially inspired by an offhand snarky comment from one of my co-workers (”Don’t come back married!”), we got married. Â We stood in a dark stairwell in the courthouse, wearing jeans and sandals (her) and sneakers (me) and enormous smiles, and we repeated back our vows to the Justice of the Peace, and we exchanged the simple silver bands we’d purchased. Â Then we went home and told our parents, and we had dinner at the Outback Steakhouse that night, and we spent our joyous wedding night in our little rental house.
I’ve never for a single second regretted either the circumstances of the wedding or thought that marrying Terry was the wrong decision. Â Not for a second. Â Far and away the best decision I’ve ever made.
I love you, sweetheart, and hope for several more decades as amazing and fulfilling as the first one.
Posted by Allen on January 22, 2008 under Personal |
OK, let me start this off by saying: Kelsey and I are both just fine.
Now: We were in a one-car accident this morning.
Road conditions around here have been fairly consistently treacherous for the last week or so, and this morning Terry told me there were black ice warnings. I told her I’d be fine — I’m a very careful driver anyway, and I figured that most of the roads I’d be traveling on between the house and the office would have been traveled enough to have warmed them up.
Problem is, that didn’t apply to the road right outside our neighborhood.
Kelsey and I got in the Jeep and headed off for school, turning left out of our neighborhood. Fifty yards later, I hit a slick of ice and started sliding. My first thought was “Hey, y’know, no big deal, I’ll stop sliding here in a second.” But I didn’t. I fishtailed back and forth for a few seconds before shooting off the right shoulder, into a drainage ditch and headfirst into an embankment — given that the mud we drove through probably slowed us down a little, I’m guessing we hit the embankment at around thirty miles per hour.
As soon as we were stopped, I turned around immediately to check on Kelsey (all I could think once it became obvious an accident was coming was “Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey Kelsey”)… who was perfectly fine, and only upset because the impact made her drop the fuzzy little frog she was playing with.
I called Terry as soon as I was sure both Kelsey and I were physically okay, but I had to cut the call short because of some unexpected help (Terry has her own version of events which describe that far too short phone call, so I’ll let her tell that part of the story). I complain sometimes about where we live and talk about missing Boston, but I’m fairly sure what happened next wouldn’t have happened had this accident occured up north: not sixty seconds after the accident, a guy pulled off the side of the road in his ginormous Chevy truck and helped drag me out of the ditch. And the state trooper who showed up to check on us was my neighbor — who thankfully didn’t write us up for having expired out-of-state tags (a situation which was fixed this afternoon). Terry called a tow truck (thank you again, Beth, for the AAA membership you got Terry for her birthday)… and we waited for quite awhile, since the tow trucks around here were quite busy this morning. Supposedly there were numerous accidents all around our area; the tow guy had trouble navigating the roads himself to come get us.
The truck wasn’t really damaged, surprisingly, outside of a blown right front tire, and even that we were able to get re-inflated. I was so, so, so lucky: there was no one else on the road at the time I started skidding, and where I went off the road I managed to split right between a row of mailboxes and a telephone pole. Where I hit the embankment, I was two feet to the right of a cement drainage pipe. Even the fact that I was driving the Jeep and not my Mazda — the Mazda would have been severely damaged by the crash, and quite possibly so would Kelsey and I. All in all, if I’ve got to be in a car accident — especially with my kid in the car — this was a good one to have.
Posted by Allen on April 17, 2007 under Personal |
Yesterday morning, I read a news bite saying that an actor I liked was going to be in a movie that I’d likely be excited about. I wrote up a quick post about it and scheduled it to publish in the afternoon since I wanted to give my legions of readers ample opportunity to laugh at the picture of 13-year-old me I’d posted yesterday morning.
In between the time I wrote that post and the time it was supposed to be published, more than 30 people were massacred at Virginia Tech.
I wrestled with whether or not posting such a piece of inconsequential fluff was appropriate given what was going on in Blacksburg; ultimately, as you can see, I decided to go ahead with it — if I tried to stop posting out of respect for every terrible thing that happened, I’d never write anything again. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter one way or the other whether I posted that article or not, I reasoned, so up it went.
But it did matter. It mattered to me.
Much like I’d imagine most every other rational, feeling person reading the news yesterday, I felt positively nauseated by what happened. It just made no sense to me. I can wrap my head around reading news stories about dozens of civilians getting killed in Baghdad — horrendous though it is, Baghdad’s a war zone and I can understand the types of things that happen there. It’s tragic, but it’s also expected (and possibly all the more tragic for it).
But what happened yesterday, the utter randomness of it… that I can’t wrap my head around. I can’t understand why someone thinks they need to kill that many innocent people before taking their own life. I simply do not get it.
And this particular incident has shaken me far more than any previous school shooting ever did. I think that it’s because unlike when, say, Columbine happened, I’m now a parent. It’s made me think more: thinking of those kids who got shot for no other reason than being in the wrong classroom when some psychopath decided it was time to make his mark on the world… thinking of the parents of those kids, watching the news, terrified, then getting the call that their child had been senselessly murdered…
It made what I wrote yesterday insignificant. It made the majority of what I ever write feel insignificant.
I know it’s not entirely so, of course; people need entertainment to help distract them from thinking too much of the likes of what happened yesterday, and I like to discuss that entertainment and to try occasionally to provide some of it myself. But those pointless murders really helped put what I do in some sense of perspective, to remind me of what’s truly important and what isn’t. Just because writing about pop culture isn’t “important” doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing it, but I’m reminded how lucky I am that I’m able to do think about the trivial so much, that my worries aren’t greater, than my family is safe and happy and healthy.
My most heartfelt sympathies to the families of the victims at Virginia Tech.
Back to the frivolities of pop culture tomorrow. Tonight, I’m going to go home and give my family a few dozen extra hugs.
Posted by Allen on August 11, 2006 under Personal |
Because I just realized that I’ve never made the official announcement here on Do or Do Not, I’ll go ahead and do so:
Do or Do Not World Headquarters is relocating to beautiful Greensboro, North Carolina. Like, next week.
The impending move has been the single biggest reason behind the paucity of posting here over the last couple of weeks. Remember in my last post when I said I didn’t have the brainpower to actually put much in the way of coherent thoughts together? That’s why. I’ve had things to say yet neither the time nor the focus to say them. So sorry — I hope to find that condition rectified after we’re settled into the new digs. Things should be a little closer to normal around here come September.
I’m excited to be returning to my roots, in a sense, moving back to the South after our three-year sojourn to New England. The winters here have never sat well with me, and the cost of living has sat even less well. I’ll once again be in a cultural environment which, while incredibly problematic for me as a left-winger, feels comfortable in the way, say, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off does: I can see the problems and the inadequacies, but I’m still able to enjoy it anyway.
Still, the slow dismantling of the life Terry and I have built here over the last three years saddens me. More than I was expecting it to.
I know that we have much ahead to look forward to and much to be excited about, but while we’re in the middle of cutting ties (well, perhaps “loosening” ties would be a better way to put it) and divesting ourselves of extraneous crap, I can’t quite get to that excited-for-the-future place. Right now I’m just a little depressed, noting every time, for instance, I walk into a building I know I’ll likely never walk into again. I even felt a little twinge when I drove past Gilette Stadium this morning, and I’ve never ever seen a game there — but it’s part of the landscape of my life here, even if a small one, and I’ll miss it.
Two weeks from now we’ll be well and truly into our new lives, our new house, in North Carolina and we’ll have time to stop, to relax, to breathe, to enjoy the bright future we’re both so confident lies ahead. But for now, all we are is tired and stressed and already missing the people and the places that have come to mean so much to us.
Posted by Allen on June 19, 2006 under Personal |
As far as my little girls were concerned, Friday night was Father’s Day; I’d imagine it’s completely pointless to ask a four-year-old and a two-year-old to keep a secret for thirty-six hours. Especially when the secret involves a present they helped pick out.
“Daddy, daddy! We got you a present! It’s a secret, SSSSSSHHH!!! It’s a bear!!”
My girls (with more than a little assistance from their amazing mommy) got me the most rockin’ Father’s Day present I’ve gotten yet:
Kelsey picked out the bear (with approval from Laurel) — Kelsey chose this particular bear because it looks like Sleepy Bear, her friend who’s spent every night with her since she was 18 months old. Terry picked out the costume (again with approval from the girls), but I think that one was pretty much a no-brainer, don’t you?
Thank you, Laurel, Kelsey (who told me “Happy Father’s Day” no less than 300 times yesterday) and Terry, for the totally fantastic Father’s Day (which included breakfast in bed, a two-toddlers-on-one-Daddy wrestling match, and trips to an art supply store, a comic book store and a swing by our amazing local ice cream place). I certainly don’t need special days like this one to know how much you care, but I truly wasn’t going to complain about being showered with all of that love and affection.
Posted by Allen on June 7, 2006 under Comic Books, Personal |
Last October, I wrote a simply fantastic article about the flooding in my basement and the damage to my comic book collection. If you haven’t read it or don’t remember it, you should go read that post before reading this one. It’s OK, I’ll wait.
doop dee doo. doodle-eee-doo.
Done? OK, good.
As those of you readers living in New England are well aware, it has now rained for 517 consecutive days here in the northeastern U.S. We went from the gray of winter to the gray rain of spring, and I swear it feels like it’s just going to stay this way until it slides right back into winter again. The weather here has, to be quite frank, sucked of late.
And all that stuff I should’ve done to the basement to prepare for all of this rain? Yeah, that’s right — didn’t do a damn bit of it.
I came home early from work today to try to help Terry with the newest round of flooding, to move stuff away from the standing water areas and start getting rid of the crap in the basement we don’t need or has been damaged beyond repair. Unfortunately, that includes several thousand dollars worth of my comic books. (That’s the value I’ve paid for them over the years, not what I could get if I tried to sell them now. Especially given the fact that so many of them are, y’know, sopping wet.)
So I went through three longboxes of comics and threw out all of the ones that were sodden and stuck together — three garbage bags full. Luckily, there weren’t too many of those that I really felt all that bad about chucking out (a significant run of Uncanny X-Men from around 1989-91 excepted). Ninety percent of the rest of what was in those longboxes is now earmarked for donation. (Question for any of you, ’specially you New England folk: do you know of a literacy organization that might be willing to accept a gift of several hundred comic books?)
I kept maybe fifty comics out of probably pushing 1000 that I went through, either comics I plan to use for art or story reference or ones to which I had any kind of sentimental attachment. That I kept so few says to me I probably need to get rid of the comics I buy on a more regular basis, preferably by passing them on to other readers — and it also says something to me about the quality of most of those books. There was a large percentage of comics of which I had absolutely no memory past the cover, comics which clearly had made no lasting impression on me whatsoever, and a larger percentage of books I just didn’t care to re-read.
I threw out comics I’ve had with me for as long as twenty-five years. I threw out the issue of All-Star Squadron #3 I distinctly remember reading on the the flight I took from Pensacola to Birmingham by myself when I was eleven years old. I threw out books whose covers have been burned into my brain for msot of my life (even if their contents haven’t been). But it was time to let go — these relics of an earlier me were adding nothing to my life anymore except more boxes to be stored in my basement.
It seems like I should feel worse about throwing away and giving away these things that were so important to me when I was younger. But I don’t. One of the main tenets of Buddhist philosophy is that of non-attachment, and I’ve been violating the hell out of that dictum by keeping (amongst other things) hundreds of pounds of paper that are largely meaningless to me now. And that attachment stemmed mainly from the fact that I was just used to having these books around, not from any true sentimentality or appreciation of quality.
So farewell, my four-color friends. You’ve been a part of my life since before I even sprouted grass on the prairie, but it’s time to say goodbye. I hope those of you I can give away will live on in another basement after providing some entertainment and education to someone new.
Posted by Allen on May 20, 2006 under Personal |
I’ve never been good at role-playing games. Scratch that — I’ve never had much interest in role-playing games. Wait, scratch that, too — I’ve had interest in role-playing games, but not so much with the role playing itself.
Sure, like many introverted, awkward, socially inept teenagers in the 1980s, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. I know lots of people of that sort who played RPGs as a method of getting some healthy and fun social interaction with people who didn’t want to torture and ridicule them for being introverted, awkward and socially inept, but for me… well, it wasn’t all that “social” since it was just me and my friend Mitch. We’d take turns being the Dungeon Master. Neither one of us played D&D for the game’s role-playing aspects; for us, it was just the combat and advancing our characters so they could kick more ass in combat.
(Mitch decided he’d had it with playing D&D with me when, at the very outset of an adventure, I ambushed his character he’d been playing for a few weeks and killed him…with a band of pixies. (No, not “the band The Pixies” — that would actually have been less embarrassing, I think. Getting whacked by a murderous Black Francis would have a certain angsty poetry to it.))
Anyway, my point was that even when I played role-playing games, I didn’t really role play. I was always too self-conscious to really get into that part of the game — even when it’s the friggin’ point of said game. Even the last time I tried, just a few years ago, in a game populated completely by people I trusted (including my wife), I still couldn’t let myself go enough to pretend to be someone else.
Every time I play a computer RPG where I get to design my character’s appearance, I always end up just making myself, trying to come as close as I can to putting myself into the game. Even in these games where The Real Me is completely hidden to the other players online, I still stick with being a pixelated version of me.
When I first started playing The Sims 2, I enthusiastially constructed my entire family, including the kids…and then horrified Terry when Sims Social Services came to take the girls away because I wasn’t feeding them. (The baby seat was sitting right in between the kitchen table and the refrigerator, situated just so my Sims couldn’t pull the baby chair out far enough to put the kids in. For all their bitching about hungry kids, “Allen” and “Terry” couldn’t tell me why they wouldn’t/couldn’t feed them. I’d have hoped that these simluated versions of me and my wife would be smart enough to move the friggin’ chair, but no. Of course, I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out until after my children had been placed in foster care, so maybe the game’s more realistic than I might think…?)
I usually tell myself that the reason I couldn’t get into role-playing was because I was just too happy being myself to want to be someone else. And while it’s true that I am damn glad to be me, it’s obvious that excuse is pure horse manure. What it is exactly, I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s quite fear in this case; I have a feeling, though, that it’s connected at some fundamental level to my traditional lack of Deep Thoughts about the world around me. The term Terry likes to use for me is “solipsistic,” or self-referential — I get so wrapped up in my own head that I Am All There Is.
The funny thing, though, is that I feel like I can get into other people’s heads pretty well, both when trying to suss out people’s motivations for what they’re doing — or when writing fiction. So I know my solipsism isn’t for a lack of ability to understand or inhabit other roles or personas, but rather from a lack of desire or need to do so. And I think that’s something else that needs to change in my head. I think know that I need to expand my metaphorical wardrobe, to try some different outfits on, because I think know that doing so will help make me a better writer…and a better person.
I know that some many of you reading this post are veteran RPGers or otherwise into Being Someone Else, so clue me in: what do you get out of it? What do you put into it? Does Being Someone Else for awhile have any effect on Being Yourself?
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