Life in general

All afternoon, I've been sitting here thinking about two things: dinner and this blog. I didn't have any new thoughts this week about writing, other than how really, really difficult it is to cut something that was originally 94,000 words down below 75,000 words, particularly when you think your editor may not want to acquire it no matter how much work you put into it, but…anyway. I'm just depressed because my editor recently rejected one of my manuscripts and I'm now trembling in angst that she may hate the one I'm working to cut down now, too. I'm just so unworthy and pathetic. And I'm really finding that there is truly very little fat to cut in this latest manuscript and I'm desperate.

So enough about writing. My mental anguish does not need any more exposure.

The other thing was dinner. Because everything I want to eat is really bad for you and I'm starting to get sick and tired or tired and sick of paying attention to what I eat all the time. But I did give up margarine and go back to butter. I mean, what is the point? I hate margarine. There is no margarine on this planet that actually tastes like butter. Only butter tastes like butter and I've pretty much had it with the healthy thing, anyway. Especially since I've managed to gain weight, anyway, despite my best efforts not to do so. (Although I called my doctor today and he said my thyroid is a little low so maybe I have an excuse—unless it meant it's physically dropped to a lower portion of my anatomy, which wouldn't surprise me since every other part of my anatomy has also dropped a little lower.)

Let's face it, you're going to gain weight no matter what you eat unless you don't eat at all, or exercise. The key is really exercise which is just no fun. I'm substituting an hour of gardening and mental exercise each night and figuring that's good enough. Be that as it may, I actually gained close to ten pounds on the South Beach Diet, thank you very much, and it really burned me because our food bill went up by over $100 extra dollars a week to buy the stupid food, and we didn't like the food, and I religiously ate the junk and I didn't like it. And I gained nearly ten pounds on expensive crap I didn't like anyway.

I would have been much, much happier eating my normal diet supplemented by Hostess Twinkies and cupcakes and I probably wouldn't have spent as much or gained as much weight, since I actually don't snack on a normal basis.

Now, here's the real thing. I'm thinking—is it worth eating a lot of junk you don't like and that costs a lot, to extend your life…say how long? How much more "life" are you gonna get out of eating stuff you don't like? An extra year?

Okay, let's say you get an extra year after spending, say 85 years eating things you freaking hate and being miserable because you can't eat what you want to eat. Are those going to be happy years? Are you going to be glad about that? Or are you facing 85 years of misery every time you sit down at the table?

And what about that extra year, anyway? Do you get to be 17 again? 30? 50? No. You get to get another year of drooling, utterly desperate horror sitting around in an old folks' home watching random static on a broken television, waiting to die. You get that year from 86 to 87, or 99 to 100, not that year from 40 to 41 or even 60 to 61, when, let's face it, you could at least wipe both your own mouth and your own bum. When you had at least a shred of dignity left to you.

So. Are you saying you really want that extra year of life after having denied yourself everything you've ever wanted to eat?

I gotta tell you, that package of Twinkies is looking pretty damn good to me at the moment.