Le Sequoit

Hold the Mayo

What comes to mind when you hear the word gazelle? According to the World Net Dictionary this would be a small, swift graceful antelope of Africa and Asia having lustrous eyes.

Here in America, and particularly in my little corner of it, the word gazelle conjures up an image of about ten pounds of tubing and some cable trying to contain a 240 pound man as he flails his arms and legs to some primordial rhythm of the dark Scandinavian subcontinent. For the ultimate multimedia experience one hears from this oddly eared creature and over the squeaks and rattles of this “silent” home exercise wonder an out of breath Mellencamp’s “Paper and Fire” worthy of any five in the morning Tokyo karaoke bar--with lustrous eyes!

I may have eaten too much. Too often. For too long. It occurs to me that if I don’t take serious steps to curb my enthusiasm I’m going to have to do some shopping. I don’t think the wife will appreciate my sporting the Champion look in Las Vegas.

Speaking of pet peeves, I have this thing about saying Las Vegas. This whole “Vegas” thing bugs the heck out of me. We don’t say “Angeles” or “Cabos” or “Cruces”. It just seems so affected. Every time I hear someone say this it sounds to me like Sinatra is waiting at the Sands just for them to come up and do a duet.

Or is it “Angeles de Anaheim”? (that for bullock out there in Orange county)

Well it seems that I’m avoiding the subject here, that being avoidance. I’m also avoiding surrender to the urge to get up and head for the kitchen. So how am I going to lose fifty pounds? Aitkins? South Beach? Nope, Bill Gates is going to save my life and, more importantly, Judy’s vacation. I’m going on the Excel diet.

“Boy’s off his rocker!” I hear you thinking. “What in the world is the Excel diet?” Think about this. Did I ever balance my checkbook before MS Money made it fun? Did I ever spend hours of my day writing before there was such a complicated tool such as MS Word? Did I ever write anyone until there was email? Clearly the renaissance of my life (not to mention my spelling proficiency) is owed to Microsoft’s abstraction of it into one great, big video game.

So now I have spreadsheets with (short) lists of stoic caloric value filtered survivors from what were previously vast numbers of favorite foods. From these lists magically appear numbers into daily summaries, these sprouting, auto-dated, from a template and upon saving supplying daily totals, weights and calories burned through exercise onto a master sheet that tells no lies. If I need to keep my mind off of food I can simply spend a few hours trying to figure out how to make the system more complex—maybe generate some statistics or create some VB forms—the possibilities are endless. Hell, it took me hours alone to figure out how to make this (—)! (probably would take me longer than that to figure out how to use and punctuate this parenthetical phrase placed beyond the end of an exclamation which fundamentally ends with a closing uniqueness identifying quotation mark)

Gonna win this diet game, mark my Word.

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note: I replaced the “uniqueness identifying quotation marks” with parentheses because I couldn’t seem to make a set of them around a dash!

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posted by sequoit @ 11:29 AM