In case anyone's been furiously refreshing this journal for the past weeks waiting for an update, I hit and surpassed my target weight. I'm hovering around 181 these days. Right where I wanted to be. Hooray!

In OkCupid news, I am working on something pretty awesome right now. Going to be a couple months before you guys see it, but I'm really looking forward to the piles of infuriated hate mail it's sure to generate. That's usually the best sign that we've done something progressive enough to be valuable. :)

New York is awesome for dieting. I'm not denying that it's the easiest place in the world to get unhealthy food on-demand, at any hour of the day or night. BUT ... it's also the easiest place in the world to get HEALTHY food on-demand, at any hour of the day or night. It's just a matter of actually thinking before you eat. "Two giant slices of pizza covered in penne and mozzarella," while delicious, are not going to help you lose weight.

I have taken copious advantage of make-your-own-salad places, steamtray places with lots of veggies, and the miracle of sushi. :)

213 -> 193. 20 lbs down, 8 to go. Woo!

Down from 213 to 204 and falling steadily. I'm sure all of OkCupid is vastly excited to know this. :P

TheDailyPlate.com is a pretty great site. If it had an actual staff of editors to fix some of the worthless user-submitted garbage, it's be a really great site. People sometimes forget, in all this Web 2.0 craze, that most user-driven content requires editing, because honestly, most people are pretty dumb, most of the time... even the smart ones.

(I am definitely including myself in that statement)

On a related-yet-unrelated note, Chinese Broccoli is delicious.

Also I uploaded a new picture of my girlfriend and I. It's excitement overload here at Chris's journal.

My girlfriend and I are on a diet. She insists I don't need to lose weight, and I insist she doesn't need to lose weight, so what that probably means is we both need to lose some weight. That's how it works, right?

We've been tracking everything we eat (EVERYTHING) at The Daily Plate, which is a pretty interesting website, even if it's so slow that I sometimes think their servers are powered by hamsters. Slow hamsters, at that.

It's alarming how easily one can consume like... 3500 calories a day in New York City. It's so easy to just go out to restaurants for everything (I still do), and if you're not careful, you can end up consuming an unholy amount of calories in a very short period of time (I had a chocolate-chip-and-walnut cookie yesterday that had 440 calories in it).

Paying attention to it has already helped me to change my eating habits a bit. I've been eating a lot more fruits and vegetables, and a lot less "giant lump of mozzarella with pepperoni shoved in it, wrapped in dough."

I'm at 211 today. My goal is 185, which is where I was in that black and white picture with the hat that everyone says doesn't look like me. 26 pounds. Not too tough at all, for someone who once lost 150 (yes, seriously). By Christmas, I should be able to be comfortable in my sexy Ralph Lauren leather jacket again! Woo. :P

THE TIME HAS COME ... It's been about a year since I nuked all of my OKC questions and answered every available one (for the second time, no less), and I think it's time to do it again. Reason being: I'm in a very different mindset about love and relationships than I was a year ago.

On an extremely related note, my trip to Paris was the best vacation I've ever had in my life. In case anyone was wondering.

At any rate... Operation Question-Nuke is a-go. So if you matched me X% before, watch to see if that changes!

I had a post up here about the redesign... and I accidentally deleted it. The moral of this story is: I'm an idiot.

At any rate -- we do appreciate the feedback, positive or negative, but please give the new design some time. We're still tweaking it, and we really do think that once you get used to it, you'll find it much better than the old site.

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and... wait, I'm still worrying. Shit.

Today I got to sit in a witness's chair in front of a judge, an assistant District Attorney for County New York (ie: Manhattan), and a defense attorney. Not to mention the defendant and assorted other people.

I was not on trial, nor was a trial actually happening. What I was doing instead was trying to explain to these people why I am not comfortable being a juror. Telling a judge that you have a philosophical objection to the trial by jury process -- a cornerstone of the American legal system and something by which he has lived most of his life -- is not fun times. It's scary times. I felt like I *was* on trial.

Adding to my general objections to our legal system is my powerful belief that I have no right to make the type of judgement that would send someone to prison. I'd have a hard time levying a fine on someone. The judge asked us all "can you be a juror for this case without considering sentencing? If you can't, you need to talk to me."

I can't. So I talked to him. I can't send someone to jail. Not even for selling crack to an undercover police officer. I don't deny that the action needs punishment, but I don't want to be the one authorizing that punishment. I am not that man's peer. There is no possible way he's getting a trial by his peers. The system is broken, and I'm incredibly uncomfortable being a part of it.

So I told him. And whether that made him feel contempt for me, or disgust, or anger, or sympathy, I couldn't say. I'm guessing the worst. But it did get him to remove me from the juror pool.

I left wondering if people think I'm trying to get out of jury duty because it's boring, or something. That's not it. I don't mind missing the time. OkCupid doesn't mind me missing the time. A part of me is disappointed in myself for being so against it because it's an interesting chance to participate in something involving my country.

But I can't do it. And though I have to go back tomorrow, and potentially face another harrowing situation of sitting in another witness chair, telling another group of people that I can't do it... oh well. You gotta stick with your principles, I guess, even if your principles make you feel lousy sometimes.

Good news today. I've booked a flight to Paris, arriving early in the morning on the third of June. I'm going to visit someone special there, and I'm tremendously excited about it. This is something that I would never have envisioned myself doing, even a few months ago, but I think it's going to be a great time.

I've always wanted to go, and always come up with reasons not to. I don't have any now, and I have a very excellent reason to go. So the time has come.

Spontaneously deciding that I'm going to France in a bit over a month, when I've never been outside of the US and Canada before, is arguably the most adventurous thing I've ever done (my move to CA in '99 has to be in that conversation too). I'm really looking forward to it. Just wish I'd taken French in school and not Spanish. :P

If anyone has any suggestions for activities to do in Paris, let me know.

(the rest of those journal short stories are coming, btw)

Man, it was gorgeous out the past couple of days. I ended up doing a lot of spontaneously walking around my neighborhood. There's a park two blocks down from me the borders the East River, and I wandered that for a while (pictures), and I also spent a bunch of time in Central Park, which is really well-designed, weaving back around on itself, over-and-under pathways and bridges, etc.

I'm happy that it's spring. Though I have reason this year to want it to be summer as quickly as possible. :)

Hope everyone's Easter Weekend (whether they celebrate it or, like me, completely forgot that's what it was until someone told them on Sunday) was good.

In response to my previous entry about giving me the first line of a short story, the first comment was "it was a dark and stormy night."

So here goes. Keep in mind that this is off-the-top-of-my-head, first-draft kinda stuff. Meant as a short experiment, not as literary gold. :)

---

It was a dark and stormy night.

The words stared up at him from the paper upon which he had written them, and Jim swore and crumpled it into a ball. Had it really come to this? Had he really just sat down and attempted to begin his latest work with one of the most overused lines in literary history?

"Maybe it's time to call it quits," he said to himself. His vision was a little blurry from the scotch, which sat before him in a cut crystal glass that he had refilled thrice already that night, but he could still see the stacks of rejection letters pinned to the wall. Stephen King had recommended that, not in person but in a book. Pin them to the wall. Remember where you've been, and you'll remember where you want to go.

Jim remembered where he'd been. He had a chest full of manuscripts that served as well as any roadmap he might care to consult. This one written in Portland, and rejected eighteen times before he'd junked it. That one written in Hartford, and rejected an astonishing twenty-seven times before it had been sent to the chest. He didn't think they were bad, exactly, though as time passed he had come to the slow realization that neither were they good. They were complete stories, yes, and at least on a technical level, they were above what the average person could produce. They simply were not anything that people wanted to read.

The scotch smelled like caramel and vanilla and failure. It stung his nostrils as he raised it to his lips, then spread across and beyond them, over the tongue, warm and strong. This was a good bottle. At least the work he did when not writing allowed him to drown his sorrows in style.

Ten years ago, when he had still been in the brighter half of his twenties, it had seemed like such an easy thing. Get an agent, get a publishing contract, maybe even get a book advance. Write the book, pose for a pretentious dustjacket photograph, go on a signing tour, get a movie deal... how hard could it be? Were not people like Tom Clancy and Danielle Steele millionaires? And who would argue that they produced great literature?

It was more difficult than it seemed. His short stories got no notice, and trying to tackle a novel while working full time had proved incredibly difficult. He was still on his first, now well past thirty, still trying to find the time, and the tone. Except "trying" wasn't really the right term. He'd stopped trying a long time ago. Sometimes he took the pages out and shuffled through them; yellowing, scrawled with longhand (he never typed his work until preparing a manuscript), the book was like some battered remnant from a distant past he no longer remembered completely.

He thought about taking it out now, but he had no inspiration. There were no words in his mind, yet, or perhaps ever, to follow those which he had last written. In the past, this had brought despair. Tonight? Only apathy, and a lingering sense that whatever window might once have been, it had closed.

Jim felt some stirring within him. Not the anger or disappointment he had expected, not even the effect of the alcohol. This apathy brought with it a some new perspective, a sense of freedom that he had never felt before. If there was no reason left to write, then why did it matter what he wrote? Why could he not, if he felt so inclined, begin a story with a much-maligned cliche? Who was he writing for? There was only himself, and the chest full of stories.

Jim smoothed out the crumpled ball of paper before him. It was a dark and stormy night, the words said. And yes, Jim thought, looking out through the eye of his imagination, damn it, it was a dark and stormy night.

He slid the glass of scotch aside and bent over the paper, as the words began to form themselves in that familiar longhand scrawl.