Nosedive

I'm just going to be straight with you. I'm failing at my February goals.

Not all of them, but definitely the exercise/junk food one, and the not being too hard on myself one.

So look, I started out great. I exercised 4 out of 7 days the first week in February, and I was pretty proud of myself. I started the second week with a new HIIT aerobics series from the same YouTube channel the first one I tried is from, fully intending to get that fifth day, but then I got sick.

It started with what I thought was an allergy attack.

I get those sometimes. I'm not really sure what I'm allergic to. When I was a kid, it was milk/dairy products, strawberries, and Aquafresh. These days, it seems to be environmental.

For a minute, I thought I'd developed a cat allergy (which would be tragic because I will not re-home my cats, and when they pass on, I will be adopting more cats, so I would be absolutely miserable for the rest of my life), but when I rip apart rooms and deep clean, my allergies don't act up at all, and if there's ever a time I'm inundated with cat dander, it's then.

I'm thinking it's something in the air out here that isn't in the air in the city. And, you know, that could be anything. We live dead center in cow country. There are cows, and chickens, and pigs, and goats, and horses, and llamas, and alpacas, and even a camel within 5 miles of me. And that's just the domestic animals. We've heard coyotes and seen deer, foxes, red and gray squirrels, raccoons, skunks, rabbits, opossums, and one animal that we disagree on what it was. It was dark, so we couldn't really identify it. And we live in a valley so the wind never quits. Who knows what's being blown into my yard, ya know?

The next day, my nose was burning and I sneezed every 20 minutes or so all day long. So I pounded orange juice, and Big made chicken soup, and the next day, I was fine.

And then a bunch of kids got gunned down in their school, and it knocked me for a loop.

I mean, the shooting would be horrific on its own. Then we found out that Nikolas Cruz (the kid who did it) was abusive to his ex-girlfriend, and was expelled from school for threatening her new boyfriend. Then we found out that Cruz had been caught with ammo in his backpack. Then we found out that the police had received at least 20 calls about the boy and had done nothing. The FBI had been warned, and let it go. And then it came out that he may have been groomed by a white supremacist group. And despite all these things, despite the fact that he'd been reported to police, and despite the fact that he was known to be mentally ill and unstable, and despite the fact that he was threatening people and bringing ammo to school (and who knows what else he brought that he wasn't caught with?), he was able to legally purchase an AR-15.

And then...

The kids who survived started speaking out. I cannot put into words how incredibly proud of them I am.

I've been trying to spend less time on social media because it's fucking depressing. Everybody hates everybody and everybody is okay with that, and it just really destroys my heart to see it. The final straw was seeing a man tweet that all liberals want him dead, and that's fine with him because he wants all of us dead, too. And not some famous person who liberals would actually know of if you mentioned their name. Just a random guy on Twitter.

But then those kids started standing up to people like Tomi Lahren, who are still insisting that gun violence isn't enough of a reason to ban guns like the AR-15¹. And then Tomi Lahren and other adults who share her views started attacking those kids. And now, I really want to punch a bunch of people in the face.

I mean, some of those kids were barricaded in classrooms with their dead and injured classmates while they waited for police to clear the scene. A couple of ROTC boys had to usher their classmates and friends into a room and protect them with kevlar curtains. And then, to escape the madness once the police came, they had to run through hallways that still had their dead classmates in them, were still covered in blood, still smelled of gun smoke and death.

And these adult right-wing assholes think they're justified in attacking teenagers who are speaking out against the laws that allowed 17 of their friends, teachers, and coaches to be gunned down in their school.

What the fuck is wrong with our nation?!

So! As I'm wont to do, I bought a shit ton of booze and junk food and buried my head in video games.

Today, I stepped on the scale, and I now weigh 270 pounds. That's just 5 pounds less than my highest weight. In truth, the number on the scale doesn't bother me. The fact that I have literally undone all the work I did a few years ago does. 

When I'm done with this post, I'm gonna go play video games because we just started playing a survival game that lets you tame dinosaurs (ARK). But at some point, I'm going to stop long enough to exercise. We have to do some shopping in the next few days, so I need to take some time to make a meal plan, too. And I need to figure out some snacks that aren't junk.

And then I have to stop buying junk. Like, at all. Because if it's in the house, we eat it. And while it's okay sometimes, we have literally gone through two chocolate cakes, half a pan of brownies, and two boxes of Oreos in a little under a week. And that's just disgusting².

So! Today, I'm starting fresh. Here's hoping it goes better than it has so far this month, eh?

💜

<sup>1. Let me be clear here: I do not want to ban all guns. But I don't think assault rifles should be a legally purchaseable item. Especially with the insane amount of gun violence in this country and the number of mass shootings in which the shooter used an AR-15.↩
2. I don't believe anyone should feel bad or be shamed for what they eat. I don't believe that eating sweets is bad. But there is such a thing as "too much," and in the past week and a half, I have stepped so far over that line that I'm actually a little concerned for my health.↩</sup>