I am so totally controlled by my environment...

Rohit Khare (khare@mci.net)
Fri, 22 Aug 1997 07:17:12 -0400


I took a walk to clear my head, which ended me up at the 24 hr supermarket
downstairs around 6:30AM. Walked out with a liter of dcoke (excellent),
'baked tortilla chips' (good), loaf of garlic bread (questionable). Oh, and
some freebie local paper.

You know how you have a bowl of cereal, and there's too much cereal, so you
add some milk, but then there's too much milk and ... ?

Well, that's bits and calories for me. I dine alone, with bits in hand, and
I find myself alternately stretching one or the other until they reach
mutual climax. I didn't even notice myself subconsciously rereading the
crap in that freezine until I realized I was doing it to finish the
*entire* half-pound of bread, butter, and romano cheese.

I do this with the Times, with prime-time TV, you name it. Food really
doesn't exist in itself; it's a background task to be interleaved with
something else. So far, so good, right? But then it gets interleaved with
*everything* else: a coke walking to work, a fruit bar with email, and so
on. Worst of all, it substitutes for boredom. Whenever I get to LA, Adam
and I keep trying to work by hopping from cafe to restaurant to drive-thru.
It seems like the only public spaces left in LA to work are all
food-related (since the bookstores have become such 'destinations'... :-( ).

In the larger scheme of things, this isn't worrisome; it's not even a
binge. The lesson continues to be that I don't treat food as something for
myself, determined by myself, it's something absorbed from the environment.
I didn't decide if I wanted 2oz or 4 oz or 8 oz of bread today; I just
started eating and didn't stop. I clean my plate, not out of greed OR
obligation, but by habit.

I wonder if sex ever gets boring like this? :-)

RK

PS. Even though in one sense I'm 1/3 of the way towards my 'goal', I've
enjoyed how much healthier it is not to measure '%age completed' in favor
of 'wow! some progress at all!' instead. Recommended.

---
Rohit Khare /// MCI Internet Architecture (BOS) /// khare@mci.net
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