The Vig

I need to go clothes shopping.

A friend of mine told me before Christmas that I was the only person he knew who had a good 2009.  Looking back, I think he’s right.  The funny thing about truly life-changing events is I don’t think you know they’re that momentous until you’ve gone through them and look back.  At least that’s how I feel.  The Summer of Bean has NOTHING on what actually happened.

I’ve known for years that I’m addicted to food.  I couldn’t stop eating.  Even after this happened, I stopped off at Muchas Gracias afterward for a burrito.  I was talking to a friend of mine about it a couple of weeks ago.  I mentioned it takes a serious time commitment to take in the calories required to get to 370 pounds and maintain it.  Forget about the money.  Forget about the food.  It takes time.  Daily.  I wondered for years why I never left the house.  Now I know.  It was because I was eating.

A friend emailed me out of the blue in July and told me about this program he’s been visiting which deals with food addiction.  I stopped in for the first time in July and haven’t stopped going since.  I’m down about 75 pounds.  A day at a time, as they say.  Now you know why you haven’t seen me at Whiffies or celebrating Tomato Pie Day for a while.

A month or so later I was chatting with my housemate’s girlfriend.  She’s in the mortgage business.  We were discussing the $8,000 first-time-homebuyer’s tax-credit.  I was starting to get the itch to leave Vancouver and get back south of the river.  That commute over the Interstate Bridge, even though it was only a half-hour or so, was becoming a real downer for me.  I felt isolated up there.  Friends and family were all a twenty-minute drive away at least.

I’d been looking into renting a place in Portland or maybe down in Lake Oswego.  The more I looked though, the more I thought it made no sense to keep renting.  Not at those prices.  So I asked my friend what it might take to buy a place.

To my surprise, she came back the next day with a pre-qualification letter.  The guy who, until recently, could never pay his bills on time was suddenly able to buy a freaking house!  Or, at the time, condo.

I immediately called another friend of mine who I’d known for years and asked him to help me out.

Sidebar: This is a story about friends, old and new.  The old ones, some of whom I hadn’t seen in months or even years, were happy to help however they could.  The new ones really don’t know me from Adam, but are equally willing to give.  It is, as the kids say, amazing.  End Sidebar.

After several weeks of looking we finally found my new home in Powellhurst-Gilbert.  It wasn’t my first choice, but now that I’m here, I don’t think I’d have it any other way.  My commute to work isn’t any shorter than the one was to Vancouver, but my life commute, to coin a phrase, is much shorter.  Friends who were a half-hour or more away, are now just up the street.  Family is a lot closer too and boy do they like that.  It’s growing on me.

So that’s my last six months or so.  Crazy, right?  If you would have told me at the beginning of July that I’d be closing out December down 70 pounds and in a house of my own, I would have called you crazy.  But here I am.  I really feel like I’ve won the lottery.  That’s what I tell my friends.  All of them.

No doubt you’ve seen those shows on TV or read stories of people who win some huge sum of money only to throw it all away.  Their stories are nearly all the same.  The issue is people never take time to figure out who they are with their newfound wealth.  Their lives have changed suddenly in ways that they can’t handle.  You see it with folks who’ve lost weight too.  Despite what the mirror or their friends might say, they still see themselves as that fat person.  They never take time to adjust.  And before they know it, they’re right back in their same old habits.

So that’s what I’m working on: figuring out who this new Bean is.  And thats what I hope to be writing about from here on.  Things that I’m doing to create this new life.  Posts may or may not be frequent.  I haven’t figured that out.  I do know they’re going to be focused on the positive.

Thanks, as always, for your patronage.  Let’s make 2010 one for the scrap book.

Is Tumblr.  You may have noticed some slight changes to the layout here.  Things have been added, deleted, or moved.  The biggest change, for me at least, is the addition of my Tumblr feed.  It’s much easier to post links there from my iPhone than it is to use the WordPress iPhone app.  Plus I kind of want to make this space more about my own thing and less about commenting on others’ work.

Like everything else in my world right now, this is a work-in-progress.  Once the dust settles in a few months, I may try and find a template that integrates Tumblr into my WordPress blog a little better.  This particular solution isn’t very pretty, but it does the job.

Facebook has been an interesting experience for me.  I fiddled around with it for a year or so before jumping in with both feet at the end of last year.  At first I used it to get in touch with old friends from college.  Pretty quickly we’d assembled a good chunk of the “old gang” from the early-90s.  Even though it had been over a decade, for some of us we picked right back up where we left off.  It’s been terrific.

The high schoolers started showing up after that.  And, just like high school twenty years ago, that’s when it got complicated.  Pretty soon I was getting friend requests from people I had no memory of.  Others I remembered, but I never really ran with in school and never really cared to be friends with.  I accepted almost all their requests though.  I mean, why not?

It quickly became apparent why I left most of my high school acquaintances in the past.  I really had nothing in common with them.  Many wanted to rehash old events and reopen old wounds.  Some never grew up.  And others were trolling for relationships.  On so many levels, it just didn’t work for me.  So back in the spring, I had what I called “Friendpocalypse”.  I wiped my slate clean of all but my closets friends and those I found interesting.  Everyone else was dumped.  I also put my account into a super-secret status where those I’d whacked couldn’t find me.  I knew I’d hurt some feelings, but they’d get over all of it quickly enough.  Some of them did, others didn’t.

I’ve since relaxed my settings somewhat.  I allow people to find me, but they can’t see my profile nor can they see my friends.  It works pretty well.  The friends I’ve whacked have started coming back around, but this time I just ignore them.  I don’t need the aggravation.

This is the long way of telling you something pretty cool also happened on Facebook a few weeks ago.  Back when I was young and stupid, and fresh out of college, I moved to Boise to live with Pete in Parkrose and get eligible to attend Boise State University’s teacher education program.  My plans got derailed pretty quickly by the realities of trying to pay rent and eat.  I wasn’t very successful at much of anything over there.  This included girls.

I got hooked up with a waitress at the Shari’s restaurant in Meridian.  It got hot and heavy really quickly and before I knew it, I was in way over my head.  She was talking marriage and kids and such when all I wanted to do was have fun.  It wasn’t going to work.  Unfortunately I had as much experience breaking up with women at that point as I did dating them in the first place and rather than man up and break it off, I moved back to Portland and let the distance kill it.

I was, though, still great friends with her roommate.  In fact, the roommate and I remain great friends to this day!  So when I would call over there, the ex-girlfriend would answer and I would just coldly ask for her roommate.  Yes, I was a Grade A jerk.  I’ve felt bad about it for years.

I’ve tried to find the old girlfriend a few times.  I’ve found old phone numbers and addresses here and there, but never anything electronic that I could just pop a note to her.  I didn’t want to talk to her.  Certainly didn’t want to intrude on whatever she’s doing now.  I just wanted to say I was sorry.

Well I finally found her a couple of weeks ago.  I sent her a note through Facebook asking if it was her and telling her I was sorry for being a selfish jerk lo those many years ago.  She played coy the first go-around, telling me she’d known many selfish jerks in her time, and could I be more specific.  I got a chuckle out of that, gave her some more specifics, and apologized again.

We spent the next few days catching up.  She’s a married mother of one now, living in the Midwest.  She apologized to me almost as profusely as I had to her.  She was quite a handful and she knew it.  She told me if it were any consolation, she didn’t remember me as a jerk.  It really did console me.  She didn’t have to say that, but she did.

We’ve left it be for now.  Neither of us sent any friend requests.  I told her I didn’t want to intrude on her life and she assured me I hadn’t.  She was glad I got in touch.  So am I.

I still make the drive to Boise every year or so.  I enjoy being alone with my thoughts in I-84 through Pendleton, La Grande, and Baker City.  As you drive through that stretch of freeway, you get to listen to a lot of talk radio.  It’s really the only time I’ll listen to Dr. Laura.  Once on a drive either there or back, she said something that’s stuck with me.  She said “closure” is crap.  It’s something artificial people seek that doesn’t really exist.  People use it as a crutch as they seek to make some sort of pain go away.  I thought I agreed with her because “closure” was something I’d never experienced.  I think I have now.  Two adults shared a moment and managed to forgive each other for inflicting pain.  I don’t think I could have done that by myself.  It was more than just wishing she had a good life.  It was being able to tell her.  It’s a cool thing.

I had a conversation sometime last year with my dear friend Betty with Sunglasses.  I was telling her about this concept my sociology teacher brought up clear back in high school.  Basically he hypothesized people have to go through a certain order of maturity.  You need to do certain things in your teens, twenties, thirties, and so on.  And if you skip over a certain spot, then you have to go back and pick it up before you progress.  So if you miss out on your twenties and you wake-up and you find yourself 42, you have to go back and experience that period in order to mature into your forties.  This is, he said, is why you find guys in their forties and fifties driving around in fast cars with big gold chains and chasing twenty-year-old girls when they should be a little more grown up.

It was an interesting comment and obviously one that stuck.

Talking with Betty last year, I brought up a similar concept.  Sometimes people get stuck in a certain year and never get past it.  I asked Betty what year it was in her world.  She said it was 2008, she was living in the present.  But it hadn’t been that way until just recently.  She said before she met her now-husband, she would have said mid-nineties.

That’s where I’ve been stuck.  About 1997.  Oh the clock and the calendar have kept moving, but I’ve been stuck in that one year, living and reliving my own Groundhog Day.

This isn’t to say things haven’t happened.  They have.  A few jobs have come and gone.  I moved to Arizona and some stuff happened.  I moved to Seattle.  Other things happened there too.  But nothing has ever changed.  I go to the office, I come home, I grab Fourth Meal, and I go to bed.

Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.

I think these thoughts every now and then, and a voice from deep inside seeks to calm me by saying “we’ll do this better next time”.  As though you get a do-over on your twenties or thirties.  Pretty quickly, the Big Voice comes in and says “you’re nuts”.  There’s no such thing.  There’s only the future.

So here’s to the future.

Am I the only person who has a Greatest American Hero flashback when I hear the word “scenario”?

Back in mid-June I went into an AT&T store to help a friend who was having some issues with her Blackberry.  I wanted to get her upgraded to the latest and greatest OS so she could access the app store.  After a few minutes, we got the directions we needed.  As we left, the girl asked if we needed anything else.  Then she uttered the Siren Song.

“$99 iPhone!”

I’ve resisted getting an iPhone from the start.  Yeah, it’s a great device.  But it’s on AT&T and we had an awful break-up several years ago.  I figured I’d never be able to go back.  But the lure of the price tag proved to be too much.  So I went through the application process and wouldn’t you know, I was approved!  No deposit, no nothing!  I couldn’t believe it.  I walked out with a new device that day.

And I love it…I really do…when it works.

My first trouble was a few weeks after I first purchased it.  I was driving to the coast when it quit getting service west of Salem.  I kept waiting for service to return, but it never did.  It wasn’t until I got to Lincoln City that I finally turned it off and back on.  Then it worked.  And it worked for the entire drive back.  Weird.

The second incident was much worse.  I was at the UFC fight a couple of weeks ago.  It was my intent to Tweet the entire thing.  But I had zero coverage inside the arena.  None.  Zilch.  The guy next to me’s iPhone worked.  But mine?  Nope.  The entire time I was inside the event, I was unable to send or receive texts or get into Twitter.  And it Pissed. Me. Off.  What REALLY got to me was after I’d walked outside and the thing came right back as though nothing had happened.

The capper came this last weekend, standing inside the Circuit City out at the airport.  Again, I had no coverage inside the building.  This really isn’t right.  Especially at the airport.  I don’t care if it’s inside and I’m surrounded by electronics.  My Verizon Blackberry never had this problem.

I finally decided to give it up on Saturday night.

Listen.  The iPhone is the finest device out there.  There is no equal.  I know.  I’ve had them all.  When it works, I’m able to stream radio stations from across the country, especially helpful when you don’t want to hear the Dan Patrick radio show on a five-hour tape delay.  The Blackberry will also do this, but it drops out after several minutes.  The iPhone doesn’t, at least not at the office.

The applications for the iPhone are also spectacular.  The Twitter apps are superior to anything the Blackberry offers as is the Facebook app.  Apps like AroundMe, Fandango, and Urbanspoon simply don’t exist for the Blackberry.  And don’t get me started on the MLB app.  Live games on my iPhone?  Wherever I am (provided the phone works)?  The thing is simply fantastic.

But if I can’t get coverage, it’s useless.  Verizon’s network, at least here locally, is second-to-none.  It works everywhere I go, every time.

So yeah, going back to the Blackberry is going to be tough.  I won’t be in the wilderness long though.  The Palm Pre is coming to Verizon soon and I’ll be picking that up at my first opportunity.  That is provided Verizon doesn’t also get the iPhone themselves.  In the meantime, I’m going to be that much less cool.

Who else could have possibly snuck a webcam into my room in 1988?

Can I just say Keyboard Cat is genius?

Apparently this is real.  Oh to be one of the lucky few.