Day 52 - 63 February 1st – 12th

            I’m writing this on Monday the 13^th and let’s just say that I’m on my lunch break or something like that, because I’m at work.  I went to church yesterday for the first time this year and it was a little awkward, probably mostly on my end.  I know that everyone else is there to worship God (will God get offended if His name isn’t capitalized?) and not to necessarily interact socially so I should feel safe there of all places and yet not so much.  The pastor came up to me from behind and held out his right hand in a kind of a handshake offer, but also with his left hand lifted in a possible hug offer.  I stood there staring at both of his hands for what seemed like an eternity (by the way, you rarely hear of anyone using the phrase “it seemed like an eternity” as a good thing, but “eternity” is what we’re being sold, just saying).  I feel like at this point I should mention the hell that the whole handshaking business is for me.  Any time a person (it’s mostly males) holds their hand out for a handshake I have a mini panic attack.  Do they want a traditional handshake?  What if I grab too hard? What if I grab too soft? What if my hand doesn’t make it all of the way in before the full grip occurs and then I’m standing there with this sort of half of a handshake and he/she is holding just my fingers like I’m a woman in whatever century they used to do that thing where they grabbed a ladies’ fingers and kissed them?  And that doesn’t even touch on the whole “gang” handshake thing that’s now a possibility and I always ALWAYS  screw up.  I don’t know how to wave my hands around and slap or bump things (I’m not cool).  Okay, so we’re standing there, I look at his hands and then at his eyes and then back at his hands and then I run the possibilities through my head.  I know that he’s too old or at least too country (old school) to expect and one of those fancy fist bumpy handshake things (if it’s a handshake he wants it will be the classic straight ahead hand shake, like men should shake hands), but he might want a hug.  This is not out of the realm of possibility as we have hugged in the past so there is precedent.  I’m looking at his hands and then his eyes and then his hands and this has gone on too long.  I go with the handshake.  The handshake is perfect I go in with a good amount of speed, not too fast to appear overzealous and not too slow to appear trepidatious.  The grip was right in the middle of not too hard, like I’m trying to prove something, and not too soft, like I’m not really there.  As I’m shaking his hand he looks at me with a confused look that told me that he was looking for a hug.  Damnit, I could have used a hug today to.  Maybe next time, don’t be so ambiguous with your handshake/hug confusingness.  This all speaks to my mental health more than my diet and physical health so let’s get onto that.

I know that I have really fallen behind on this thing and I don’t even know if anyone has even noticed (not a whole lot of outcry from my fan, but she’s probably busy).  Here are the excuses but ultimately it’s just because I’m a bad bad blogger.  First, I felt and continue to feel awful.  Second, I’ve spent most of my free time sorting through 14,000 pictures, which I narrowed down to 5,000 and I’m not finished.  You wouldn’t think of sorting through family photos as work but for some reason it’s really quite extremely draining.  It would give me the biggest headache after a few hours and I would just feel like I had been “working” all day when I was finished.  If you want to see any of these pics here’s a link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/therealericanderson/ and if you don’t then that’s fine too.  I’m not finished, as I still have about 2,500 to post, and if you do look at them you might think that they could stand to be edited down quite a bit more, but trust me there are many many more photos  deleted than posted. Okay, so now that the excuse portion is over let’s go day by day to describe how this diet thing has been going.

Wednesday (2/1/12)

I felt horribly horribly awful, the kind of awful that tells you that you’re pretty much done for and you should make funeral arrangements because you could never feel worse than this.

Thursday (2/2/12)

I felt worse than the previous day…guess I spoke too soon.

Friday (2/3/12)

Today was no different, but I did go see the nutritionist so I should report how that went.  I’ve lost 4 pounds since the last time I saw her (Friday, December 30^th) so that was a ginormous disappointment, but I had also lost 3% body fat (I still don’t know what that means, but she seemed very excited, of course it is in her best interest to make me feel like we are making progress [I shouldn’t be so cynical, I’m sure she actually care about me…right?]).  She put me on a bunch of new supplements and also explained that this cleanse that I’m on could be why I feel super awful and then feel super great and then back to super awful again.  Something about my liver sucking out the toxins takes a lot of energy (who knew?).  She wants me to ask my real doctor to run a blood test and check for mono or Epstein bar or something like that.  Also, I need to get my thyroid (again), vitamin D-3 level, and while he’s in there he should check my blood sugar (speaking of blood sugar, let’s go back to Wednesday when I did go to my mom’s to check it and it came out an 89 which I’m told is good so I guess it’s not diabetes that’s making me feel this way).  She’s a super nice lady who really seems to be trying to help me (she actually suggests that I buy supplements from other places than where she works because they are cheaper and she knows that I’m broke [see, now I feel bad for being cynical earlier].  Obviously she wants me to attempt exercise more but she was proud of the 3 times I’ve walked in the last 5 weeks (she says I need different shoes to support my ankles while they are trying to hold up my fat ass [my words, not hers]).  My boss wanted me to ask her if she preferred to be call Nutri-Nazi or Nutri-Zilla and she much preferred Nutri-Zilla (said she was tired of being called a nazi).  That’s how that trip went.  Here’s a list of all of the supplements I’m on now: source naturals’ life force multi (w/o iron, guys don’t need iron because they don’t bleed every month), source naturals’ ultra-mag, magnesium malate, b- complex, D-3, gaba, solary’s niacin, iso cort, 5-htp, some ginseng junk, baby aspirin (6 a day), and I’m still on blood pressure medicine (another thing she thinks might be making me feel badly)

On saturday I dropped this on my foot

Saturday (2/4/12) and Sunday (2/5/12)

            On both of these days I worked about 2-3 hours and then spent the rest of the time watching television and movies and feeling like I was dying.  Let me describe this dying feeling that I have.  It’s like something is pulling me down into a hole from my insides.  My bones hurt, my whole body is tired and drained, my head is fuzzy and I have trouble focusing or concentrating on anything at all.  It’s a slow weird death but death none the less.

                                                                    Monday (2/6/12)

This is what my poor foot looked
like on monday morning

            I went to bed Sunday night thinking that all the rest I got was going to make a difference, but Monday morning was an awful bit of awfulness.  I walked into to work and immediately went from being optimistic about my week to pissed off at and about everything (what is that all about?).  It has been an extremely difficult couple of weeks prior to this as far as employees and work and whatnot are concerned so I guess not thinking about it for a 2 half days didn’t help the matters.  So yeah today was not great.

Tuesday (2/7/12)

            More of the same as far as work and feeling gross go.  Tonight, my laptop crashed…hard and everyone that knows me was convinced that I was going to just freak out, but something inside me just said “screw it”.  This makes absolutely perfect sense in context with the last two weeks of my life.  It was still under warranty but it’s probably my hard drive and I have a lot of stuff on it.  I do have it backed up on an online hard drive website but that could take weeks to redownload all of that info (like 250 GB).  What I’m saying is that I feel like I was perfectly justified to freak right out and normally I would (if you go back to October of last year you can see how badly I handled not having a phone), but for some reason I just said “screw it” and I didn’t really get upset and even now I’m not even a little concerned about it (even though Fry’s has not called me with a diagnoses).  Plus side is that they gave me a loaner laptop, but what can you do with someone else laptop besides get online and check your Facebook status.

Wednesday (2/8/12)

Every time my wife or I see this
bag out of the corner of our eyes
we think it's a cat (which we don't have)
Why don't we just move the bag?
I don't know

            Today was a happy happy day from the beginning.  I went to work with the knowledge that I was going to be taking a half day to go to Arlington with my laptop (not because I was worried about it, but because I was looking for any excuse to get as far away from that place with those people as I could get).  I took off at noon with my wife and children (we took the girl out of school, because our priorities are out of whack).  We went to Fry’s and waited at the tech support desk for like 2 hours where I met every stereotypical nerd tech person you could ever thing of and I still wasn’t mad…at all (the wife seemed pissed).  Something inside of me was just so happy to be somewhere else that was completely drama-free.  Then we went to the book store where I bought a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird (a book that I loved when I read it in school and I always claim as my favorite book, but somehow don’t own a copy) because I can’t find it in digital (weird).  As soon as my foggy brain problem goes away I might actually read it…again.

Thursday (2/9/12)

            Back to work, I feel better today but still not great and this foggy feeling in my brain is more than a little disconcerting.

Friday (2/10/12)

            Long horrible day where everything went wrong at work and I just couldn’t make myself care enough to do anything about it

Saturday (2/11/12)

            Showed up at work at about 9:30am after sleeping in as long as I could and everything was falling apart.  I just tried to power through and get the hell out of there to go home and play some video games and watch TV.  That was mostly an alright day.

Sunday (2/12/12)

            You’ve already read about most of the awkwardness that occurred at church this day (yeah there was plenty more, but none as entertaining as the handshake thing).  We went home after church and ate and watched TV and I played some more video games after trying to read some of the book and failed miserably (could not focus…at all).  Stayed up late watching the premier of the walking dead (awesome sauce).  Then I went to bed but couldn’t sleep at all because I thought I might be on the verge of having a heart attack (weird chest pains and sharp pain in my left arm).  The reasons for said heart attack could be one, two or both of the following reasons.  One, I drank entirely too much caffeine today and two; I ate a humongous steak for dinner (can steak cause a heart attack? Probably, but that quickly? Maybe…who knows?)

Eric Anderson

P.S. here’s a rundown of what I ate during my week + vacation from blogging:

Breakfast was the same every day

Same for lunch

Dinner was all of the same dinners I always have except for on one of the nights we had tilapia (I haven’t had fish in something like 13 years, because I hate it, but Nutri-Zilla was quite insistent that I add it to my eating habits) It wasn’t horrible, it wasn’t great either, but I can stomach it if I have to

P.P.S. what? This wasn’t long enough for you? Okay, I’ll try really hard not to let this happen again because it was all really difficult for my foggy brain to remember (something that I’m not accustomed to, by the way)

This Gave me a headache for days
Don't look at it

P.P.P.S also, for not getting any sleep last night I have a surprising amount of energy this morning…weird

P.P.P.P.S. I wrote this quite quickly so if there are (and I’m sure there are) any errors just let me know and I will fix them for the next person who reads this.