I really stepped in it

Sometimes you do something that seems like a good idea at the time. In fact, you talk it over ahead of time with a few people you might actually trust, and they even think it's a good idea. Then you think about it some more, and you say to yourself, "Self, I know you used to think this was a bad idea, but maybe that was due to some fear of failure or fear of the unknown. But it's something that really needs to get done, and this is a great opportunity for yourself, self."

So then you goes to your boss and you says, "You know, I been thinkin' it over, and I think I wanna do this particular job." And then your boss says, "Hey, that's greeeaaaaat. Somebody really needs to do that. What an excellent opportunity."

But you can't help but think that in the split second between when you said you wanted to do that, and when she responded, there was kind of a startled look. And you wonder. Startled because it's so great to find just the perfect someone to do the job that no one wants, or startled because someone you had heard wasn't a complete dumb-ass just signed up for something for which all roads lead to great suffering and almost inevitable doom, a suicide mission? But you say, hey, my boss seems to genuinely care, and she'd tell me if she thought this was a big mistake.

And it's not until about a week later that you're sitting there in your little cube, an inhumane space not fit for human inhabitation yet somehow perfectly fit for keeping "resources", and you say to yourself, "Self, what is that smell?"

So you sniff around, and you realize it's coming from your foot. You examine the bottom of your boot, and there wedged deeply into the waffle, you see a big, steaming pile of "What did you volunteer for, you dumb-ass?"

And so it begins.

I realized yesterday that I've gotten fat. Like, somehow almost overnight, I have developed a big beer gut. I mean, I'm no JohnnyB, but at the rate things are going, I will be by summer. Last time this happened, I switched to diet soft drinks, and the gut immediately faded. But I never went back to non-diet soft drinks, so what is my next step?

I thought about it a lot. I wondered if I should give up beer for a while and do the patented GerryP vodka-tonic diet, only with diet-tonic (fixing the fatal flaw of the GerryP diet, which accidentally ended up substituting high fructose corn syrup for beer residuals and led to a weight gain of about 5 lbs during the dieting phase). It seems awfully drastic to give up beer. I've done it before a couple times, but it's not very much fun.

What I've decided is this: this is seasonal fat. All I need is some short-term quick fix to tide me over until the grass starts growing again and I have to mow it every week. So I've decided to cut out the between-meal snacks. Particularly my habit of eating ~1/2 bag of potato chips every night right before bed. I finished up all my Halloween candy at work last week, so that should also help. And I did 60 situps while HannieC was in the tub. That'll probably hurt tomorrow.

I was going to photoblog the belly, but I decided against it. I'm not sure it would achieve the celebrity that other, less successful, bloggers' body parts have. If I really cared for my readers, I'd go out and buy a scale so that we could track my diet progress. But I don't really care.

And neither do you.