FJ!!'s Neglected Personal Blog

I think one of my breakthroughs in handling my weight in what I consider the toxic US environment was when I realized I simply couldn't keep consoling myself with food just because I felt somewhat bad, like had a rough day or was upset by circumstances or felt under the weather^*. My emotional set-point is low to begin with anyway, and it's not like annoying or mildly bad things were going to stop coming in my future, so either I stop or I might as well right now admit I had set up a never-ending stream of regular excuses to eat sweets of all kinds. The comfort-eating neuropeptide boost? I know it so well, I can feel it. It doesn't stick anyway, I ended up feeling double crap afterwards: I had a rough day and more coming and I just finished that pint of ice-cream. Same for 'earning' or 'celebrating'.

The other side of settling that was making a place in my life for my vice because it was simply not going away anyway, and a place for the balance on the other side required to deal with it. Now I go for cookies because I want to and I planned it, and eat ground turkey & beans and skim everything and Splenda because I know the cookies and Sunday brunch are coming, and I'd better be ready.

^*For real crises I use heroin^**.
^**Ok, I made that up, but you get the idea: food was just for the minor things. Real crises make me numb anyway.

Utterly unrelated to thinking brunch would be an hour earlier than it was and the fact that my ex and biggest fan of my interiors was coming over, I found myself in the Oxford Circus area Saturday mornin at 9.30 shopping for some finishing furnishings. Hence the Tord Boontje Garland lampshade for the naked bulb in the hallway from my previous entry, and a real lampshade for upstairs, and a rug. It takes me three department stores to buy a simple chocolate floor rug, and it is not because I am looking for the most exclusive one, but because I am looking for the right one. Which in my case is usually the item that has the fewest detailing and the simplest shapes or colors, but without looking dowdy.

'Really simple and just nice' is actually a difficult combo to find, usually, but when you put that all together it works. My table and chairs are a set IKEA designed for outdoors and made in white plastic, but they were the smallest really simple and nice tables I could find. My teacups are round and stark white china. Yet when you put it all together I was happy with how the whole afternoon tea for 6 people ended up looking and being in the small flat. It was just nice. zombietruckstop noticed at the actual brunch, at a place called Christopher's American Grill, hours before tea at my place was to happen, that I was wearing combat boots to brunch. Yeah well, it is the style these days, just look at any Uniqlo display, but also, getting the right rug is sheer combat. I won at John Lewis, by the way. The appartment is now looking pretty nice by day, but I still can't get the lighting right for night, which is mostly a problem of lightbulbs.

As far as brunch went, the company, setting, location, and food was lovely, but I couldn't escape the thought that Christopher's missed that little essential item about what sets American Breakfast and Brunch Food apart from all other cuisines: conspicuous abundance. It was totally delicous, lovingly presented, and perfectly portioned for the European upscale restaurant experience, but I felt like someone missed the point of what makes a specific cusine unique, you know. It would be like going to a Japanese restaurant and getting correctly-made sushi just haphazardly dumped on a bed of lettuce on an individual plate. You'd be all like wait, this is indeed sushi, but uh, you know, the Japanese are supposed to go for the whole esthetic thing?...

After brunch I ran off home with my purchases, cleaned, installed, and went to Tesco for the actual food to serve for tea. Tesco is basically the Walmart of the UK, but if you grab their 'Finest' store brand you really get good stuff. The strawberries were the best I have had in a while. I served them and other fruit with ramekins of Devon clotted cream (I thought the top layer had gone rancid when I opened the pot, but upon reading it turns out this "Golden Crust" is a feature. I am obviously lacking in my knowledge of creams, not something I ever expected of myself) and pre-made sandwiches cut down to quarters. It all ended up working well.

We walked through Kenington and Vauxhall because pinkfish wanted to see how I ended up, and then I told them about how mattycub and zombietruckstop had told me at brunch about going to Eurobeat: The Musical About Eurovision and somehow, thanks to the insistence of an American with a aspirations of being a British Dizzy Queen, ten minutes and a credit card later Barry, Adam, pinkfish, and I had tickets and had to be on our way for dinner to be in time for the show. After which we ended up in a tiny busy club in Soho dancing to 80s electro hits after having charmed our way in for free by telling the door Drag Queen about the theatre. It was kind of nice, all.

Now, after my Sunday roast at the corner pub, as I try to do every Sunday, I am looking back on a week on seeing many friends and making new local ones. Suddenly the anxiety that was building after 3 weeks of no interaction is gone, I may not need to resign myself to being a hermit. Now just the job thing.

Watching 'Intervention' anorexia episodes on YouTube makes me want to get Ben&Jerry's.

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So, contradictions. Düsseldorf is an impossibly chic little city, but rents in the central area, not at all run down, are ridiculously cheap. Germany is going through a prolonged economic malaise due to reunification, but organic-ish vegetables and perfectly lovely store brand products in my local supermarket cost nothing. And this gig was in Germany and yet I was caught dead doing it¹.

This gig for Vodafone was one that my agent has been trying to get me to take fo a while, but I never liked the terms: one had to be in Germany at least four days a week, which means that if you do not move outright for the whole thing, you end up in London only one full day, and I went to London 6 months ago to live there, not in Germany. But after not having worked for a month and a half after that single week with the consultancy, and my savings being equally unhappy after this move, I was more receptive. Then my agent called and said he had talked them down to three days at the office, which means two days of work and weekends at home, plus an unbelievable dayrate as long as I paid my own travel and lodgings, but that those could come off taxes, and I said ok. It's only a 55 minute flight after all.

Logistics-wise, the gig turned out to be better than I thought it would be. Of course the first week I overpayed for a hotel, not knowing what and where. The next week I didn't because I knew where the Hotel Ibis was, a Europe-wide brand of cheap business hotels near train stations. By the third week, my appartment had been arranged, and that made me the slow one in the office: the MZW agency can do that in a day, and had for most of my colleagues who flew in like me. €580,- a month for a big studio in the center of town. Almost every name on the letterboxes, stuck on with label-maker tape, was Indian. The landlord basically rents to all us temp workers. Only drawback of my lovely space: it's a 6th floor walk-up. Oh yeah. The city was rebuilt in the 50s after the war, and elevators were not a priority.

So, little cheap Bio supermarket on the same street. Streetcar stop on the corner which I could take to work. The Vodafone tower and adjacent buildings are pretty much on the Rhine, and modern and spacious and open. My co-workers were nice, and it was kind of fun to sit in the auxiliary room together with all the young designers from the contracting firms chattering away. The work was perfectly do-able and started out bringing me further along to mastering the bread-and-butter of mercenary UI designers (which I am still relatively recent at) but by the end had me back writing strategic documents about revenue opportunities in new media (which I can do in my sleep if you tell me the focus).

I looked at all the gyms online, visited a few from very middle-of-the-road to very expensive, and settled for a bodybuilder's gym that had a good 3-month rate and was in the city center. I walked a lot with my backpack with this heavy computer and gym clothes, I ended up never buying protein powder but just eating a lot of eggs and chicken and tuna and fromage frais (known as Quark in German).

I settled on a routine for flying in and out on Monday and Thursday evenings. This means Mondays were always chaotic as I had to get ready to leave, spend a lot of time actually traveling (bus from Oval to Paddington, Heathrow Express, Plane, Taxi), and still get a whole day of work in and exercise, while Fridays were a mess while I had to get a whole day of work in, do expenses paperwork and time sheets, and was just a general tired mess from flying in Thursday night. Every Friday night when I got in to bed having juggled and hurried and done everything and eaten and worked out at two gyms and not dropped any balls, I just collapsed, and then reminded myself I'd get to do it all over again in two days. Sometimes with having to go to the bank on Monday as well to travel with €1K in cash, as using my UK and US cards was either impossible or expensive for things like rent or food. Never used it for shopping, though, as I never had time by day. This last trip I was able to just walk the whole of the shopping street and see how for a small city, Ddorf is just really well supplied in high-end fashion, all in a really nice area. Balenciaga's black knitwear for this season is Teh Raumpatrouille Orion Sex².

The constant planning got tedious. What clothes were where, what should I bring, do I have enough cash for the taxi, what was in what fridge (which is important if you often arrive after shops close), what did I need to bring to work, what would fit in what bag. When I came back in London from having stayed over a weekend to visit my family I learned that Tesco's Finest Orange Juice is not pasteurized: the bottle had bulged, opening it was a plopping adventure, and the OJ had been diligently fizzily carbonated by little entities. The only way to deal with all the planning was routines: everything had to have a place and time, from when I switched currencies, to when and where I would switch keys on my key chain, to when I would pull out my passport and when I would put it back to what I would buy and when I would leave. I couldn't keep track of it all at the same time, so I kept track of each thing as it happened and put it in a place that would be predictable for the next time this part of the routine had to happen. By the end it was actually all really relaxed trip-wise, I just ran through the steps, back and forth, with the only spanner in the works being the damn planes. I only got three outright cancellations in the whole period.

As for visiting my father, one of the reasons I took this gig, that didn't happen because it was really hard to schedule him. He was busy every weekend in May, and I only stayed over on the continent once to see him in June. I will this weekend, but the whole let's go to Rozendaal often just didn't pan out much. The work did, minus two weeks, and the weather was often very lovely. I'd do this again. But now, two days in Amsterdam, and then to Dad, and then Monday to London.

¹Ancient Euro rivalry alert
²If you are into paying €1200,- for a sweater, that is.

• Meeting a Cylon or two (can't elaborate, don't ask, all I can say is a friend has connections these days)
• MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF WEDDING CAKE

The second one has me seriously pissed.




(And no, having wedding cake by myself without an actual wedding is no fun.)

I have stupid mobile phone shenanigans because I have called the US a number of times now without having my bundle of cheap US minutes in place, and I can't register my local bank card on the stupid website because it says I have reached my limit of cards I can add to my account, and it won't allow me to top up from my non-local bank card any more nor delete it from my account so I can register my local card. Thanks, T-Mobile. I'll have to top up tomorrow at a shop.

Well, I made progress then this week: at least I have a local bank card, but funding this account is taking time since all funds need to come from foreign places; the fastest one will probably be the small stash of money I had in an old Dutch giro account. The EER or EC seems to have international money transfers down now.

I will need to fill that bank account up. I have been pounding pavement again to see flats. I find studios and flats in the price ranges I am working with on propertyfinder.com or thinkproperty.co.uk, but of course they are all gone when I call. What is left I see, and they are postage-stamp sized and drab. I know housing is out there for me, I just need to luck out. Of course, since I am new to town and thus have no references ("No, I do not have a landlord in the US, I owned"), am still unemployed, and no guarantor, the agents all tell me I will have to fund upfront the whole 6 months of the letting contract, 6 months being the minimum contract anyway. My head spins at the kind of money we end up talking about even for something with no light and so small my couch coming in a few months will never fit, costing about 200 pounds a week.

Still, if the estate agents would take AmEx for that balloon payment once I find my place, it would end up saving me a lot of transfer costs: AmEx is the only one not charging me fees for using my US card here, and I pay that card with my US bank account. I can stay in my new yet decrepit rented room here for a while, paying up every week. My top-up life: phone, travel card, room, all funds being added as necessary, in larger amounts than I want. For example: need to make 4 quick trips to see places all over zone 1 and 2, pay 4 pounds for the day. That's 8 dollars, btw. And the Tube system makes a point of telling you they are doing you a favor by capping your maximum spend if you use their special contactless travel card, Oyster. That daily maximum is 4.80 off-peak and 6 pounds on peak hours. Double to get the dollar amounts.

I am working out in the local gym, again expensive because I can't commit to an economical long-term plan seeing that I do not know where I will actually end up. I walk for hours a day, from agency to agency to supermarket. I know I am not supporting myself nutritionally enough, and will have to buy protein powder soon, instead of eating turkey breasts for dinner and lunch and pre-packaged chicken sandwiches after a work-out. Did get some EFA oils, though, healing dry patches on my skin again that came back after not having Omega 3 and 6 oils for two weeks. Still coughing up gunk, otherwise ok. Except for the chocolate binge last night, which I am not happy with since I think I may have been self-medicating.

One recruiter I have been working with for a while keeps finding me interviews. Did one over phone, that job will have a sucky commute. They wants me to do a presentation about how to improve the user experience in a specific area as part of the in-person job interview. They have yet to confirm which date on the week of the 25th. Seeing a handset division of a large company Monday, I should check my suit is ok, and iron it with the iron supplied in this room -- no board though. Meeting the head of a small UX agency Tuesday for lunch. Had some people calling based on monster resume (but I actually think it is the jobserve one they are seeing, because that is the one changed recently), but nothing interesting from those recruiters. At least they do not want me to move to Mountain View to write multi-media drivers in J2ME. It does mean I will not take the time out to do my own thing.

London looks nice in places. I've met up with people, as I wrote here, and will meet up with Nigel tomorrow.
But I am not having fun. I am just slogging through hoping I will get to a better point.

Every morning for the last couple of days I have been waking up hoping to be healthy. Today yet again, I am disappointed. However, thanks to yesterday's foray, I can quantify how I am doing. 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 38.5 degrees Celsius. The pseudo-ephedrine keeps me able to breathe, but the tylenol is not controlling the fever as much as I'd like.

Still, I will go out today to get a bank account -- HSBC has a specific banking product for people without a permanent UK address -- so I can pay rent and have income deposited as soon as both those transactions become relevant. After a nap or something. Also, dinner with spwebdesign to learn about his experiences. Since I cannot currently explore regions on my own -- going into confined public spaces like The Tube would be irresponsible right now -- I will have to get information 2nd hand so I can accelerate my search for housing next week. I worry no-one will rent to me since I do not have a job yet.

Fridge is also stocked for a few days. Being at supermarkets has been enlightening. My diet in the US consisted of lean protein sources, vegetables, and tons of fruit, fresh and frozen. Looking at what it would cost to continue that I am being strongly confronted with the fact that I now live on an island in winter. Christ. On the other hand, trans fats, hormones, and high-fructose corn syrup are totally easily avoided here. Still, I feel the UK public is being conned when it comes to fruit juices. Various manufacturers are selling mixes of juices touting specific super-nutritious fruits like cranberries or pomegranates. I am skeptical, of course, having always bought the pure juice versions of those that aren't blends: by themselves, blueberry, pomegranate, cranberry, acai, and many other super-fruit anti-oxidant juices are basically undrinkable, they have to be mixed. I know that if they are sold as part of blends or smoothies in a carton in the juice isle they have to be diluted with other fruits. Still, I get almost angry when reading the label: these blends with their red fruits on the box and big anti-oxidant push are almost always between 50 to 70% apple or grape juice. Those juices have close to no nutritional value over sugarwater, especially white grape juice. The healthy part of an apple comes from all the fiber action, which the juice does not have. Grape and apple juice are basically the cheapest juices in the food inventor's arsenal. And they're asking for tons of money for this shit of flavored fructose water with some blueberry and banana in it. No fucking way.

Read the labels people. Know what your are consuming, wherever you are, and get the least processed foods if possible. And if you want liquid anti-oxidants in Britain, just buy a box of green tea.

Like a ferret with ADD I got distracted while cleaning some spam out of my Yahoo! email by this ad for NutriSystem. I hadn't seen the site in a while, so I browsed my favorite section of every health and looks website, the Before & After shots. I like makeovers.

I browsed only the guys. Every Before & After shot has a little one line testimonial to the right of the picture.

"I look better than I did in my teens!"

"I am twice the fireman now than I used to be."

"NutriSystem was so easy!"

"Now with NutriSystem, chicks dig me."

"I tried 30 diets and NutriSystem is the only one that worked!"

And then this testimonial.popped up.

I think this guy has bigger problems than his weight.

I slept almost on schedule in Europe with chemical assistance, but obviously my brain was out of sync; twice a day I would get to a point where I just had to allow myself to sink into hypnagogia for ten minutes or so before I could function any further. Well, allow... there was really no stopping it, if it was that time of day and I was sitting down. To everyone it looked like I was sleeping in a chair very briefly. This included the first 3 days that I was on Pro Vigil by day.

Been back since Wednesday and all I got for sleep was two hours here and 5 hours there while I tried to get back in sync. Last night I finally got sleepy at midnight, a reasonable time. I woke up 20 minutes ago.

I can't remember ever having slept that long. You would not believe the siz of the smoothie I am sipping on.