So I’ve been focusing on my weight now for 40 days, and I’ve lost 21.6 pounds. I’ve dealt with Runner’s Knee, inconsistent cardiovascular training and a resulting low number of calories burned as compared to my daily goals, and poor eating habits throughout. Thus far, my weight loss has not been a slow, steady downward trend; instead, it’s been a series of solid losses offset day 3-5 day spans where I gained a few pounds. My inconsistency has resulted in a weight yo-yo since August 1st. Overall, I feel lighter and I definitely have a bit more energy than I did in June and July (but that’s not saying much, as I normally act as energetic as a three-toed sloth stoned on valium). My pants feel loose (a very new feeling indeed). My face looks slightly less bloated (but my cranium is still so oddly large that it maintains its own gravitational pull). While these are positive results directly tied to 40 days of saying “No” to various goodies of all shapes and sizes that I truly enjoy (if I were running for office right now, my slogan would be “Just Say No to Oreo”), I need to find a more slow and steady way of dropping the excess me. I’ve been fairly quiet on here for a couple of weeks, as my level of crankiness hit all – new highs as the frequency of “No’s” being uttered at all times of the day increased. About two weeks ago, the Headache Fairy swung on by and dropped a bomb on my medulla oblongata that made me feel as if someone had taken a tuba player with absolutely no musical talent and placed him inside my left ear. All this dude would do is play a crappy B flat over and over again, until the concept of playing in traffic seemed to be a sound concept indeed. Now that the head ache has subsided a bit (or maybe I’m just getting better at ignoring it), I decided to start clicking away again and provide a quick synopsis of my progress for the sole purpose of showing others that if I can drop a few pounds, ANYONE can.
As my level of crankiness increased over the past month, I also made the decision to delete my Facebook app from my phone. I was able to share daily posts of motivational sayings, etc – but the countless hours of flipping through others’ posts and corresponding comments was placed on hold for a while, as I didn’t want trending negative commentary to make me get my Irish up and go postal on some dialogue on some topic like “Chloe is the most smartest of allllll the Kardashians ‘cause she remembers to properly trim her nose hairs before she begins to resemble a party favor”. I found that the escape from Zuckerberg’s Frankenstein was a welcome relief; however, I signed on the other day just to take a quick look at messages, etc, when I found something rather – well – nasty.
I received a message on Facebook from a person that apparently friended me because we had a similar interest or two: running and triathlons. He seemed to “like” a few of my motivational posts on my page, but never made any comments. We’ve never met, never spoken, and had never traded messages of any kind prior to yesterday. This lack of personal history did not preclude him from sending me a personal message that read:
“You an A$$&%#@ with no talent, and ya know it. Gotta brag about dropping a few – F&%KING LOSER. You ain’t worth S&%T. Hope you die.”
OK, so this made my decision to refrain from Facebook appear wise. This wasn’t the first time someone I’ve never met before wished me six feet under. Back in 2015, I got a nastygram like this from another person I never met before, as I was attempting to run from San Francisco to Anaheim for charity. Some dude had some rather nasty (yet creative) expletives for me within a Facebook message, followed up with the words “…I hope you get hit a car and die.” Another dude I’ve never communicated with, never met, and never associated with in any way – and he decided that me, a stranger, should do an impression of a bug on a windshield….because that would make him happy. At the time, I was beaten up enough just by the daily grind in the August heat – so I didn’t let this stranger’s words get to me until my 18-day effort was close to wrapping up. I elected to ignore this nastygram and just focus on my long-distance run. For some reason, though, the message I read yesterday evening got under my skin.
I thought of some creative and nasty comebacks. Then I figured that all that would do is prolong the nasty back and forth with someone whose opinion I didn’t give a fiddler’s frack about. What would be the point? So I decided to check out this schmuck’s page….and all I saw was negativity. As I scrolled down his posts and comments, all I saw was one angry post after another. From politics to family to sports – it just seemed like nothing was cool around him.
As I flipped through his posts to try to get an understanding about why the venom would be thrown my way, I began to realize that I used have just as heavy of a negative opinion about life, the universe, and everything as this guy did. I began to recall how those crappy times made me feel, and how tough it was to shake off. So I decided to share a few things via a vlog that I posted on YouTube – and my message is unofficially directed to this dude. I’ll post this vlog as an attachment in just a few minutes….