I’m Fat update

So I hurt my neck last week (and further injured myself by self-medicating with a Thai Massage). So the Nick Fitness Effort has been delayed a week.

But week 1 Starts Now.

First reading of the scale – Nick’s now clocking in at 230 pounds. That’s fucking fat.

Plan for Week 1:
Monday – Gym. Tuesday – Run. Wednesday – rest. Thursday – Gym. Friday – Run. Saturday Run. Sunday Rest.

Diet wise, I’m cutting carbs out. Also alcohol. Will focus on eating meat and vegetables, like our hunter-gatherer ancestors did. Yeah, I’m rejecting 10,000 years of culinary history, but no regrets.

The first ‘picture of my shame’ shall be posted later today or tomorrow. Disgust is encouraged, shame is my primary motivation in this venture!

I’m Fat

Every time I flip through my european adventures on Flickr, something becomes very apparent to me: I have been drinking too much beer, eating too much pizza, and spending too much time not exercising. I am not portly, stout or chubby – I am fat.

Therefore I will be adding a new ‘feature’ to this blog’s many…well…it will give me something to blog about. My plan is to take a picture of myself each week and allow the world to monitor my progress. Shame will fall upon me should I continue to exist in my woeful state. Praise and low-call beer shall be joyously showered upon me if I were to actually succeed.

But it doesn’t matter anyway, because only my mom and my wife read this blog. And they’ll be happy.

Someone please ban me in Pakistan

Failure Mode

Note to self: even if you feel warm after several beers, it’s still cold in your beer-festival tent. You will get sick. Several people will tell you this. But you won’t believe them.

What I’m Reading

Note – the slow revival of this blog will include such postings as these. Vent your displeasure below.

I’ve gone on quite a Balkan kick lately – I read Mark Manzower’s ‘Salonika: City of Ghosts’ and the ‘Balkans’, but this is the granddaddy of them all. The 1000+ page monster, neither history nor simple travelogue, this is perhaps the most undefinable book that I’ve ever read.

In a simple summary, it’s the story of Rebecca West’s trip around Yugoslavia (Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Kosovo) in the late 1930’s. She meets some local color, becomes disgruntled with the wife of a travel buddy, and bitches about the turks. But the single coolest thing about this book has to be her hatred of the german race. Not just a particular German (she does hate her companion’s wife, of course) but the whole race, whose accomplishments she disparages on almost every single page. I’ve never read anything quite like it.

And to say that I want to travel through Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro at this point is a drastic understatement. I’m not a big fan of female writers – i usually find them too verbose. But West’s trip through the lands of slavic Orthodoxy are somehow both melodramatic and hypnotic – she manages to capture that weird essence of Eastern Christianity. Although with the next generation rapidly approaching, I doubt I’ll be rambling around any monastaries this year.

In conclusion, this book could literally kill a high-school english student. But as a history fiend, slavophile and partisan of rambling discourse, I can’t recommend ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’ enough.