Ftrain, by Paul Ford

So yesterday I rode my bike to and fro work and stuck to my plan. And today I'm down a half-pound. I've turned the boat back around, I guess. At least from inititial results there appears to be a connection between diet and exercise.

The truth is my portions at 2,100 calories are starting to feel larger than they have to be. I could scale back here and there. And I should be eating larger lunches and smaller dinners. I keep saving up lunch to apply it to dinner, but that's a bad strategy. Except on days when it is not.

1,900? 2,000?

Something to think about.

The riding feels different lately. Going up hills used to take time and thought. Focus. They were always a question, the hills. Will this work? Now I can go up the Manhattan bridge in the highest gear without great anxiety. Not at tremendous speed, but then again not tremendously slow. Distances seem shorter; I look up and the end of the hill looks to be close whereas in the past it looked far off from the same distance. All sort of rewiring going on in the brain. Distance and pain uncoupling.

I try not to pass people; if they are slow I just work on pedaling in perfect circles, using every muscle, and match their speed, staying a respectful distance behind. There still is much to learn on that front. I am not a good rider--I tend to think too much about my legs and not enough about my environment, and my posture is infinitely variable, down, up, over, looking at tires, looking in the middle distance, and so on.

I don't like going too fast--New York City has surprises for the person moving too quickly. I have seen potholes arise over the course of a few days that are as deep as a man's leg up to the knee, or deeper; police (or someone) put traffic cones inside them and only the tip of the cone sticks up, a few inches above the ground. The rest is devoured by the earth. The earth is hungry.

I now must integrate this project with others at work I've been putting off. They're not going anywhere. No one is going to step in and help. I must address them; I should start today.

I've got my money in order; the house is increasing in order; I am eating sanely and consciously.

Now I must return to my schedule of hard work and regular writing without losing any of those things.

It sounds simple, but the way I got things done was to surround myself with a nest of stuff and work, while neglecting everything else. How to make the two work together?

First, take a vacation. But not yet.

Certain things lately are starting to stick. For instance the way that a procedure can return another procedure in a computer language, or the way that logic programming works. Books that I once paged through desultorily are starting to become readable. Summation, the calculus, etc. Yesterday I made it to chapter 2 of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a book that's been sitting on the shelf for years waiting for me. I didn't do most of the exercises, of course, but I'm not an undergrad, either. I'm just trying to get the knowledge so that I can apply it to my own work.

Play to the top of the intelligence of the room. There aren’t any bad crowds, just wrong choices. -- Bill Hicks

Weight: 329.5 lbs