PJ Harvey -- The Darker Days of Me & Him

So I'm counting the Omer this year. That's a new one for me. Every year I try to add on a mitzvah or two. Although this year, it's all I can do to cout the omer. Next year I hope to actually have a better handle on what I'm counting. I get the 49 days being combinations of the sefirah, but exactly what it means that yod is in hesed? Well, I dunno. I hope G-d has plans for me to live a long time otherwise I'll definitely have to have another life to get everything right.

Friday work is as Friday work usually is. It starts out with the promise of being slow, so I can catch up on longterm projects. Then there's a flurry of activity that's all the more difficult to deal with because I've committed to doing longterm activities. But it works out ok. I had a salad from the restaurant downstairs but forgot to tell them to hold the crutons, so I had to pick them all out of the salad. Otherwise, good salad. Not eating bread this week has helped me lose a pound or so, I think.

Losing weight is a preoccupation of mine, which is silly, because I am really about 8 pounds overweight. But I want to be at or below my target weight by my 40th birthday, and that's pretty soon. It's important to me because I'm part of LA culture. It's interesting. When I am in Santa Monica, I look fat. Honestly. I am not skinny enough. But when I am in West Covina, I look like skin and bones. Different cultures. We have people trying to be "healthy" and sunken at the same time others are doing a "Real Women Have Curves" sort of fat-acceptance flip off of the world--- it's amazing how many huge guts I see proudly hanging out these days. It's hard to stay moderate in the middle of such extreme differences in culture, and I'm just talking about weight here. It's taken on such a significance, and I think partly it's because people are afraid to talk about anything important. Character and morals are so dangerous that we've retreated from everything but pure physical. We can struggle and overcome our yetzer haras, but only when it comes to rejecting the temptations presented by donuts and french fries. To talk about bigger issues, moral issues, in an honest and productive way? Too dangerous. Too likely to result in hurt feelings or worse. So we talk about weight. Scales. As if G-d asks us when we die how well we stuck to our diets.