Thirty-four

“There is a luxury in self-dispraise:
And inward self-disparagement affords
To meditative spleen a grateful feast.”
--William Wordsworth

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the concept of self-improvement. For those not aware (and if anyone's reading this thing anyway), I've been doing the "Slim4Life" weight loss program for about a month, and I have lost twenty-one pounds thus far. That in and of itself is improvement.

However. Man is not improved by weight loss alone. There are a lot of things about me that bug me, that could be improved upon.

For instance, I procrastinate. A lot. With just about everything. I have this mental block between point A (realizing I need to do something) and point B (actually getting up and doing it). I have a near-paralyzing fear of conflict. I don’t like fights, verbal or otherwise. I therefore don’t communicate very well with most of the people around me. This is not to say that I would primarly like to or need to be arguing with everyone I know, but that in those instances where I do need to speak up, speak my mind, put in my two cents' worth...I seldom do. Live and let live. Let sleeping dogs lie. Whatever. Experts now say that this could kill me, and I'm working on it. I started with Brian. I'm sure he was thrilled.

What else…. Well, there’s my utter inability to use a calculator correctly. I always miss a button, or read the numbers wrong, hit the AC button when I meant to hit the CE button. I don't know what it is. A lifelong struggle with numbers, in any case. Oh yeah. Lately I can’t seem to finish a book. Novels, sure, but all the nonfiction stuff I have laying around…can’t finish any of it. I think I’ve always done that, but it’s annoying me now. I buy a lot of books, it’s one of my few indulgences, and I’m starting to feel like I’m wasting a lot of money when I don’t read a book all the way through.

And, according to Brian, I
A) don’t smile enough; and
B) am a “terrible” housekeeper.
More things to work on.

PostScript: By the way, when I first got my packet of info from Slim4Life, there's a picture (stock photography) of Chris Jensen on the cover. He's eating watermelon, wearing his usual smile. The one Kugel used to give him crap about. I had to laugh. He still looks good!