I don't like eating all day long. 3 meals—really? What am I, a fish? Eat just enough. No thanks, I'm going back to the big ol' meal in the morning.

It's the psychology of it all. I argue I eat more when I eat little. Go big.

I made 3-meal shift as some sort of reaction to whatever bowled me over the other day. It was just a shot in the dark...

Out on the streets, I'm stalking the night
I can hear my heavy breathing...
...
But a shot in the dark
One step away from you

-Ozzy Osbourne, Shot in the Dark (1986)

Today, I finished up what I failed the other day. It was an extended weedwacker & mower session under the midday Sun. Since I cut off the lock the other day, I even made a sweep in the land beyond my fence. Vines now lovingly embrace the forgotten shed.

My takeaway? Plants want to kill me.

I finished the tour and stopped at the gift shop to pick up a set of tight lungs and a pair of painful eyes that hurt into the night—oh before I forget: they're handing out FREE headaches.

But, hey, I didn't fall over...it was hotter and bright. This time of course, I was doing my best Steve Harrington wearing shades...or was it Billy? No, no, it was Hopper. It's always Hopper. Sure, Hopper in Russia. The more deft version.

And yet, I was alarmed afterward because I had my first sugar craving in...what is it now...226 days. I'm about 10 days away from tying my 2nd longest diet streak, too!

Actually, it wasn't a true sugar craving. I wanted...see, in my early keto days, I loved the carby-carb-carb Walmart key lime sparkling water. How I would delight to binging on all the flavors. In those days, I also ate 8-9 boxes a day of sugar-free Jell-O, too!

I had to train myself not to seek the taste of sugar 'cause just anticipating sugar flips on the switch for my brain to kick my pancreas awake to fry up some insulin. And when that happens, we ain't fryin' the fat off.

And these days, just beef liver is a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

I look over my writing tonight and think, "I lead a small life—well, valuable, but small." I hope it's original. I don't want to complain for content—it is far too easy to criticize others and be smug in our cushy armchairs. And we're probably right on point with our assessment. But look, people need the chance to fail because we're just too stupid to read it in a book—we gotta fail. I just don't want to be sucked into the vortex of that sinking ship! Call me Mr. Glass-Half-Empty but I anticipate there's no room on Rose's door for me!

And at the end of the day, this is just a diary entry. A place for me to say...

For all the things you're losing
You might as well resign yourself to try and make a change
And I'm going down to Hollywood
They're going to make a movie from the things
That they find crawling 'round my brain

I wish I was a girl so that you could believe me
And I could shake this static every time I try to sleep
I wish for all the world that I could say
"Hey, Elisabeth, you know I'm doing alright these days"

-Counting Crows, I Wish I Was a Girl (1999)

...just as I have since 1989 in Mr. Shames's 6th grade English class.

Soon, it'll be a new school year! "What?" you say, "There's no falling leaves, no ambered-hued, god rays cutting through the forest. The breeze does not push upon my brow—feel outside, it's an oven!" You know, that furnace/humidifier aesthetic remains in West Tennessee well into fall. Purely on principle, I may mow the yard once in October.

Coming on July 1, I will be kicking off the 2024-2025 homeschool season! This year, I'll be teaching a 5th, 7th, and 10th grader. Truth be told, despite creating syllabi for textbooks, I have never fully scaffolded a school year. It's actually challenging to do because I could teach all 4 years of high school math in one year. In the upcoming days, I'll share what a school year with Master Bill looks like!

The public school I attended had too much filler packed in. There was way too much emphasis on line formation. "3 blocks away! 3 blocks!" I literally pounded my head on a concrete wall in a line. A volume-monitoring stoplight was in the cafeteria at Ellendale to keep things orderly when I ate lunch as a kindergartener through 3rd grade. And until Mom's intervention, I technically failed kindergarten because I couldn't skip. Seriously! Forget Calculus, when am I ever going to use hopping on one foot?

In that span, there was playtime on an Apple ][; there were naptimes and recess. The thing is, why the waste, why not just send me home? I'm reminded of the line from Office Space (1999), "I'd say in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work."

In time, naptimes and recess were replaced by...making broken pottery and watching the junior high music teacher's sweaty armpits throwing on a square, floppy record of Shiny Happy People...then study hall, Channel One, lunch periods, P.E., hallway locker interludes, parking prologues, and...

• the Physics of chess
• a class play on World Geography
• the Spanish checkmark
• the economics of Home Economics

Couldn't I have just went up to high school for an hour and then worked at the family business for the rest of the day? I had already been working part-time and summers since I was 11. I'd be up on current events with Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey, listening to things like If I Were the Devil (1965) that still ring frightfully true today. Plus, there was Shoney's, Blue Plate Cafe, or Dixie Cafe for every lunch! "Sorry, Bolton, you just CAN'T make the grade. And Brandon, those two burgers just ain't worth stealin' every day!" It would have been far more valuable to have dropped out completely to skill up in printing. Hey, I could throw an afternoon in to pass a GED if I needed more jobs to add to the job I had.

The things we bend ourselves for Benefits.

Written in 1978, I absolutely LOVE this scene in the noisy and corrupt city of Winoka from Little House on the Prarie with Michael Landon playing Charles:

Charles: He's being a fool going back to Walnut Grove. Nothing there but a dead town.

Caroline: Well, like you said, they'll have a roof over their head. They won't starve.

Charles: And hand to mouth, nothing to look forward to.

Caroline: Why do people have to have something to look forward to? Well, that's the trouble with folks here. There's always looking forward to tomorrow, missing today. And hurrying to make more and more money to buy something better tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. Huh. Oh, listen to me ramble on. I must be tired.

You want to go home, don't you?

Charles: No.

Caroline: Who's lying now? You do. We all do.

Charles: Well, we can't. It wouldn't be fair to Mary. Nothing for her in Walnut Grove. She's got to teach. We can't ask her to give that up.

Caroline: Charles, we wouldn't ask her to give it up.

Charles: We're a family. We stay together.

Caroline: Charles...

Charles: Things are going to get better. You wait and see. It's not always going to be like this. We'll work. We'll save some money. I'm going to build us a little place outside of town. It'll get better, you'll see. Something better.

Caroline: Tomorrow.

Verily, the scene speaks unto me.

Looking back, the only value I found in high school was in my semester-long typing class, BASIC, Pascal, and AP English, pursuits that were largely self-study. I had the highest average of 250+ students in the required, standard U.S. History course because the teacher was witty and my AP peers were off the list. I was not gunning for that mark, never studied. But, I liked the subject and even toyed around for a bit as a history major at university.

Honestly, like so many others, high school history could be replaced by a month and an armload of good books to earn that wedge in Trivia Pursuit. 'Cause let's face it, school is the place that after teaching literacy in maths, language, and dare I say coding—that would have been a powerful class for my peers to take, to understand logic and detail—high school ought to be hands-off with a heavy focus on directed reading, because knowing what to read, well, that's the real kicker.

"What use do I make of the Monroe Doctrine?"

"Just put that in the corner with 1000 Points of Light, Obamacare, and—Millard Fillmore, what are you doing—get back to your corner!"

As to the enrichment of the classes themselves, well, I used to raise my hand over the years because I'd feel sorry that nobody was answering the teachers' questions. After a few, I'd pause a measure or two to let someone else answer.

Funny how a long-forgotten memory comes to us.

Instead of running a system font stack for this site, I have applied Braille Institute's Atkinson Hyperlegible.

See, I'll use Brave's speedreader mode from time to time. Yesterday, I just got curious as to what font it uses. I like it, so, I slapped it up. And this time around, I got it set up on my Google Charts, using ChatGPT to cover those pesky hover bubbles.

I sat down and worked on my New Mid Year's Resolutions, the replacement for my New Year ones. And you know what I did? Wiped the whole thing out! Every resolution! That's not to say I then went on a Twinkie-fueled rampage down at the donut shop. "Mmmm, forbidden apple fritter..." Those are the best aren't they?

However...

A little voice in my head began urging me to shave off this big ol' beard of mine. I actually like this growth. Like a woman with her cascading beauty, a man looks better with a beard. Put facial hair on any man and they are instantly upgraded. I mean, do you really want this guy? No, THIS is the guy you want. And yes, I have literally eaten a Vidalia onion like that sans the dry outer layer.

There are internal drivers within me—life goals, whatever. They don't necessarily line up with the calendar date of New Year's Eve, though that's always just a delightful place to start! Resolutions aren't required...directly. But I wonder if this beard is my canary in the coal mine? If I stash my goals away into a drawer, are they out-of-sight / out-of-mind, like an object permanence thing? If they're no longer declared (like a variable), do they no longer exist?

My Resolutions are wrapped around the idea of preparing me for what lies ahead.

Thus, what do I want to do? What am I resolved to do? I am reminded of one of the final scenes of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series:

Kara: So, what about you? What are you gonna do? Today is the first day of the rest of your life, Lee.

Lee: Well, I always thought when this was all done, I would...kick back, relax, spend the rest of my days doing the absolute minimum humanly possible.

Kara: And now that you're here?

Lee: I want to explore! I want to climb the mountains, I want to cross the oceans, I want to...I can't believe I'm saying this, it sounds too exhausting, I must be crazy

I still have that passion in my heart—despite my 40s! I forget that I'm even there, despite having experienced a part of the 1970s... 1980s... 1990s... 2000s... 2010s... 2020s. I'm now finishing up my 46th year—about to begin the 47th! We tend to forget that those created-to-be-blown-out birthday candles are for bygone years—not new thresholds.

Years ago, I closed off that adventure into the unknown, leap into the abyss hall of my heart. Was it out of responsibilities/obligations? Maybe it was undergoing remodeling or something. There is value in stability. And there's a reason why I don't go zany on the fonts for this site: when you have an audience, you want to meet their typographical expectations. Don't make them think more about the type than the content.

And the journey I want is not the stuff of vacations at the beach, existential escapism playing dress-up, hubbed at the Holiday Inn. That's boring. And frankly, creatively spurious. The mirror there looks out over the same view.

I am not talking about vacations anyway, that one-and-done cash heist. It is the journey inside of us. The Hero's Journey has always wooed me. That's common to mankind, isn't it?

I don't want everyone else's life—I don't want to subsist in a Nutrition Facts existence—or even a grocery store reality!

I am drawn to a world with no electricity, to be up and down with the Sun. To feel alive as the rain cascades down my back. To work with my hands...

To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man's work—his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.

Henry Luce (1936)

I suppose what I want can't really be codified into a New Year's Resolution.