Snowpocalypse 3: This is Getting OLD

It's snowing again. We're at 8 inches and counting. And dumping. And dumping, and whirling flying spinning pausing, dropping straight to the ground and piling up even more. The gusts don't seem to know what way they want to go anymore and so the poor snowflakes are getting blasted around everywhichway imaginable. I think. They were earlier, anyway, but at this point between the wind and the sheer amount of snow coming down, it's more or less impossible to see across the street. At this point, there's this awesomely mauve-ish radiant glow coming in from outside, as the reflections of all the streetlights in the area are bouncing around through all the snow - I can't see any of the streetlights individually anymore except for the one directly across the street, but they're having this cumulative effect of lighting everything up so that it's much brighter than I'd think it normally should be at 12:30am. Why this has decided to go mauve is beyond me.

I'm teaching Baudrillard tomorrow, which I haven't yet re-read. I have roughly 12 microthemes left to grade. I've spent the day pixel farming, watching the Olympics, foruming, playing around with my new MyPlate account in an attempt to get a vague idea as to what the hell I actually eat, and killing my arms with Jillian Michaels. Nothing productive on the teaching front other answering emails from my students wherein I promise to meet them tomorrow after class to discuss paper topics, the which class I am currently thinking may be cancelled because (due to aforementioned whiteout) I am not sure my car will make it all the way to campus. My beloved little car is not happy with the snow.

The food tracking thing will probably last about a week. I'm just sort of curious to see what sorts of food I eat through the week. The tracker is counting calories (hate) and then breaking up my food intake into carbs, fat and protein. In two days, I've figured out that I apparently kick ass at getting enough fiber, but it (the tracker will from here out only be "it") doesn't think I'm eating enough carbs, which I find near-riotously funny because I often feel like carbs are 95% of my food intake (which I don't think is bad). I'm uncomfortable with the calorie-counting thing, however. The way it works, there's a baseline caloric intake that it thinks I should be eating every day: it starts with that total and then subtracts out everything I tell it I've eaten. If I work out, it adds a few calories back in for me so that it can subtract them back out later. I suppose this is probably the way to go about getting a general idea of what I eat, but I hate thinking about calorie levels. I've known too many people who have been calorie-obsessed, and I feel like having a calorie count in front of me is like trying to get myself to think of my food in terms of numbers rather than in terms of "red veggies are good for me, so I should have them." Like with a potato, for instance: when I see a potato, I think of how potatoes have shittons of potassium along with the carbs and are therefore good to eat before I'm planning a major workout (mashed potatoes at dinner tend to make for superawesomesauce running fuel the next morning). However, I know too many people who look at potatoes and think only of the carbs, that carbs are bad (RRRRRRRRR, South Beach Diet), and that the potato should therefore not be consumed (or, more unfortunately, that the potato is eaten guiltily). I'm oversimplifying this a lot, I know, and I know that the people for whom food=numbers rather than enjoyment tend to have that attitude toward food for numerous reasons, not all of which are bad, some of which are very good. At the moment I'm feeling guilty for a half-piece of cheesecake that I ate for dessert because it put me over my MyPlate caloric allotment for the day. I hate feeling that guilt, especially because I don't feel like I should be feeling it.

I guess my point here is that food for me isn't about numbers, and I don't want it to become that way, because for me that type of thinking tends to be unhealthy for me personally. If I think of food in terms of bright colors and nutrients within rather than calories, I eat much better and with much less guilt. So I'll track my food intake for a week or two to see roughly what I eat, and then I'm stopping it, because I can already sort of feel the numbers game running in my mind and I don't want it to get ingrained.