23 January 1999: Weighty Issues (or not)

Saturday, 23 January 1999:

Weighty Issues (or not)

Well, it spent most of yesterday raining lightly, and continued through this afternoon. Then, around 3 pm, it turned to snow for a while, and finally stopped. But it had gotten colder, which meant a lot of the rain was turning to ice. Yick. I haven't heard of any accidents as a result, but walking around tonight was sometimes tricky.

What a weird winter.

Not a whole lot has happened the last couple of days. Today I met a woman I knew in grad school for lunch. I'd dropped her a line a couple of months ago when I was checking out the UW CS Web site to see who was still there whom I knew in grad school. Not many. It turns out she's about ready to leave, and wanted to talk to me about working at Epic, so we got together and I filled her in on what I could, and we caught up on what we've each been doing for the past N years.

Otherwise, I haven't done much. Watched Homicide re-runs, cleaned the apartment a bit, continued entering comic books into my database (I just finished Green Lantern), and had a terrific time playing with the cats with the laser pointer.

Oh, and I kept reading my stack of comics I brought back from Boston, working through issues of The 'Nam and Marvel Team-Up. The former is really very good, and I recommend the first thirty issues highly if you're interested in an unusual look at the Vietnam war. The latter is light fluff featuring Spider-Man which I mainly bought for the John Byrne artwork, and because they're cheap. It's also amusing to be reminded of Marvel's lame 1970s characters like Ms. Marvel.

Ceej wrote an entry about being/having been overweight, which was itself in response to another journalist's entry.

I've had (I think) an unusual experience being overweight. Right now, I'm about 50 pounds overweight, although this surprises many people who know me because I have a large frame and I seem to successfully dress to hide the fact. When I was a teenager I ended up having to have surgery to correct a problem which developed because I was overweight, and I lost some weight for a while, but gained it back in college, and then gained more weight after grad school, until finally stabilizing at about 10 pounds heavier than I am now. (I lost those pounds by biking this past summer, and hope to lose more with more biking next summer.)

I've never felt much pressure to lose weight, though, which probably means either that I really don't appear very overweight, and/or it doesn't really matter. I suspect that being overweight is a very different experience for women than for men in our culture (after all, how many waifish male models do you see in the media?).

I think Ceej is right on when she says, "Being obese is unhealthy. I don't buy the fat acceptance movement's rhetoric on this topic-- medical facts are not vulnerable to political arguments. But I also don't think an extra 20 pounds around the middle is worth getting het up about. Being physically fit is the best of all." My take on this can be summed up as:

Being 50 pounds overweight at age 30 is not a terrible thing.
Being 50 pounds overweight at age 50 is not good.
Being 50 pounds overweight at age 70 probably means you won't live to see age 80.

In addition to that, though, I am a bit concerned about getting back problems due to the extra weight now that I'm on what baseball analysts call "the wrong side of 30", so I do hope to drop some more weight. But I'm not going to beat myself up over it. Especially now that I have had success with my bicycling.

But certainly I'm aware that as weight problems go, mine are relatively minor.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)