What do I want? Too much.

I eat too much. I drink too much. I want too much. Too much.

I am overweight. It isn’t so bad, but I don’t like it. Just to get into the range of healthy weights for my height and build I need to lose another 30 pounds. My body can do that. It’s like my body wants to lose weight, but I won’t let it. When I’m not grossly over-eating, my weight drops quickly. Except then I grossly overeat. I go in for the all-you-can-eat crab. I have 2nd breakfast, or 2nd lunch, or 2nd dinner, or sometimes all of them in addition to normal meals. Or sometimes I’ll just eat two meals’ worth of food in one sitting, or eat a meal and go right to sleep. Gluttony. Between trying to lose weight and gluttony, my weight just isn’t changing.

I got drunk on both Friday and Saturday night this weekend. This is beginning to get expensive. Friday night, at least I was drinking with a friend. Saturday I went down to the Have a Nice Day Cafe by myself. On Saturdays, a $20 cover buys $.01 drinks until midnight. I had $40 and 10 nickels when I showed up. I had three drinks before I even went out. I used a nickel a drink, and when I woke up Sunday afternoon I had $12 left. I remember running out of nickels buying drinks, but I know I bought at least two drinks for women there, so I probably didn’t have more than 8 additional drinks, but I had enough drinks that I don’t remember where the other $8 went. Or leaving the club. I remember getting home, but I don’t remember leaving the club. I went to sleep drunk enough, after having enough cheap drinks that I managed to get my 2nd hangover ever. Usually I manage to avoid that. I think I’m going to try to give up drinking now, for a while. Not just to save money, but because I’m slowly poisoning myself.

I have a whiteboard in my livingroom. When I put it up 13 months ago, I wrote a question at the top: “What do you want?” Since then I’ve slowly been adding things. The first word was “rest”. After a few weeks of focusing on that I felt I had sufficiently focused on resting, and was no longer deficient in rest, and added “write”. Balancing resting and writing is not too difficult, and did not interfere with any of my other responsibilities. Slowly more words appeared on the board: “paint”, “film”, “code”, “garden”, and in smaller text “follow a budget” and “learn japanese”. As each thing appeared on the board one by one, trying to accomplish them all became increasingly difficult. Each single word on the board implied so much depth; I find myself going back to school after four and a half years as a subtext of the word “paint”. There are some things I want that I can’t bring myself to put on the board, perhaps because I don’t want them to become too much a priority in my life; like “mate” generally, or worse, a specific name. I just added “house” to the board the other day. The weight of the board is now bearing on me, where it used to lighten my load by clarifying what I wanted from life. There are simply too many things there, and the board is just getting more crowded as I realise more things I want. Like “health”, which will probably be appearing soon.

I’m losing the balancing act, I think, or am about to. Balancing gluttony with health. Balancing drinking with health. Balancing my finances so I can pay all my bills in full and on time and maybe save some money to buy a house next year. Balancing all the things I want to acheive with each other and with my basic responsibilities and inside my financial and temporal availability. I feel tired a lot lately. I haven’t written anything outside of this website since MENoWriMo ended (except for summer school). I haven’t painted anything since January. I haven’t written a page of screenplay or even an updated treatment for any of the short films I want to make at all this year. I’ve barely kept up with mowing my yard even once a month, let alone doing any real gardening. Then again, I’ve been making sure I take naps in the afternoons. I’ve been writing more reviews and trying not to neglect writing for the website. I’ve coded some neat stuff for the site like the color-switcher for ME. I’ve gotten myself re-admitted to ASU so I can take Fine Arts classes so I can paint with a greater skill level and technical background. I’ve had at least one really interesting idea for a short film that is not unreasonably expensive to make, and am trying to iron out the details in my mind so I can write it down. I’ve been spending a few hours a week studying Klingon (I know it isn’t Japanese, but I’m more motivated to learn Klingon right now). I have, on more than one occasion recently, trimmed the trees that keep trying to make it impossible to park in my driveway. I am getting things done, but there are too many things for me to be able to do any of them with much focus.

When school starts in a month, I don’t know what life will be like. I will be working from 6AM to 3PM M-F & in class from 4:40PM to 7:30PM M-Th, and will certainly have plenty of work to do outside of class, just to keep up. I suppose if I’m working or studying all the time, I won’t be spending as much time or money on entertainment, which will be an important thing in the next 6-9 months as I try to save enough money to afford closing on a house. If I do decide to get the Bowflex,

I’ll need to set aside another hour every day for exercise (resistance training on alternate days with Yoga). They say idle hands are the devil’s, and I’m all for having definite, specific things to do with my time. I like being occupied. I like having an idea of what I’ll be doing at any particular time in the future, or at least the near future.

I think I’ll call Bowflex and ask them if they will easily let me use my MBNA Gold Option loan (the loan I got for my iMac) to buy the Bowflex Ultimate. If they make it too difficult, I may have to put off buying it for a while. I think I’ll try to devote myself in August to finishing my novel. I think I’ll figure out a way to re-arrange my whiteboard to clear up my focus.