Bait & Switch: Allergy Meds

Here are the bottles of generic Zyrtec allergy pills at my local Safeway pharmacy.

Notice that the packaging is identical except for a red oval and the small print about the number of pills — identical bottle, identical package design.  (In fact, I’ve seen the display several times and never noticed the red oval until now.)  The only difference is the number of pills — 45 vs. 120 — and the $2 difference in the price.  What an ugly bait &s; switch.  (Which I fell for the last time I bought a refill.  45 pills lasts me less than a month.  The pills hold back my allergies for about 6 hours, not 24.)

(What does that tell you about how overpriced the 45 pill option is, when they can almost triple the number of pills while increasing the price less than 10%?  Makes me wish for a 300 pill option, would probably only cost $30.)

(I’m too dumb to go to Costco or Amazon, I guess.  365 pills for $22.  Sigh.)

What Were They Thinking? — Rub-a-Dub-Dub

“What Were They Thinking?” highlights products and presentations which just don’t make sense.

When I was in New Zealand a year ago, this sign was in the public restroom at the park in Taupo.  (Click it to see a larger view.)

While it’s always good to remind people about this stuff:

• There was no hot water.
• There was no soap.
• There were no towels or hand dryers.

Kind of reduces the value of the reminder, huh?
 

Does This Shirt Make Me Look Non-Fat?

About a month ago, at our Friday dance night, I had no less than three people ask me if I had lost or was losing weight.  In one case, it was “Looks like the diet is working.”  Another theorized that all the dancing I had done (must have done) at Sundance Stompede the previous weekend must have had an effect.

These comments kind of threw me, because while I have been gradually losing weight for almost three years now — close to 30 pounds to date, but only maybe 5 pounds of that in the past year — I haven’t tried to lose the weight, I just have.  No particular heavy diet involved.  But there are some things I can target here.

Relationship Weight Gain

Three years ago this month is when Rusty and I broke up.  At the time, I weighed about 220 (maybe even 225), weight which had crept up over the previous 7 years living in Seattle.  Some (but only some) of it was attributable directly to being in a relationship — you’ve probably seen it many times, where people connect up, settle down, and expand to fill the couch space available.  When the need to be svelte to attract a partner goes away and the diet either doesn’t change or even increases in bad ways due to more stay-at-home activities, weight goes up.  (I’ve seen guys add on as much as 50 pounds in a year or two this way.)

In no way am I blaming Rusty on this front; he gained some at the same time I did.  But after we separated, I was no longer buying and cooking for two (three when his daughter had lived with us), and I also stopped eating out as much.  By the end of the next summer, I was down to around 205 pounds.

While I was dating Cliff, it was a different situation.  We didn’t live together, my activity level had already gone up (see below), and with his thinner build, he was more aware of (more paranoid about?) the potential for getting a gut.  So during that relationship, my weight actually continued to go down a bit at a time.  18 months along (spring of this year), I was a bit above 195 lbs.

Activity Level Increase

I made two notable lifestyle changes over the past three years which may have had an effect.

First, I bought a scooter in April 2008 and turned it into my primary form of transportation.  (Over 13,000 miles in 2.5 years now, more than double what I’ve put on the car.)  This has added some upper body strength, perhaps, from manipulating the scooter on and off its stand.  It has definitely improved my core muscle strength and improved my posture, by not having a seat to slump against for support.  And being in the fresh air (and wind) more has perhaps helped my breathing and I think it has improved my resistance to colds and my recurring bronchitis problem, and that all could have some small effect on the weight.

Second, a couple years ago, we shifted Rain Country’s twice-monthly Wednesday dance nights to be all line dance.  Line dances — especially when you dance almost every one — provide really good exercize and increased heart rate and such.  A year ago, when the dance team went on hiatus from Wednesday practices, we expanded the line dance nights by an additional hour, giving me that much more activity.  (I lost some exercize from the dance team hiatus, but it is made up for by more line dancing.)  Further, I have been pursuing line dance competition — even travelled to Copenhagen to compete in the OutGames — which has probably helped even more by giving me increased focus on posture, core muscles, and so forth.

I’ve also significantly increased my sexual activity level as well, especially some practices which focus on muscle tone and muscle relaxation.  A couple hours of getting sweaty and getting your endorphins up is good exercize, and when you get that 2 or 3, sometimes more times a week… it’s got to be a boost for weight loss.  (Yeah, I’m bragging a bit.  But it’s true: I’m getting more sex these days than I ever did in my 20s or 30s.  To co-opt a phrase, “It gets better.”)

Diet and Portion Control

As I said earlier, I haven’t actively sought to lose weight, at least not in the “go on a diet” sense.  (Nor in the “do physical activity that doesn’t appeal to you” sense.  It’s much easier to up your activity level if it’s something you like to do, something that you don’t start doing because you “have” to.  Gym workouts failed for me in the past; if I have to make time for it and force myself to do it, I’m going to find ways to avoid it.  And I always did.)

I did make three small changes in my eating habits, though:

1. I eat out less often for dinner and rarely for weekend brunch.  Many restaurant meals are larger than you would make for yourself, but you finish them because, by God, you’re paying for them, and thus you eat more than you would at home.  (And often not better for you in terms of fat, calories, carbs, etc.)  I do still eat out for lunch most days at work — mostly because I have a hard time getting myself to make and take a decent lunch, but also by eating a later lunch (12:45 or later), the food carries over toward dinner and thus also reduces late afternoon food intake desires.
    
2. I put some Splenda in my coffee when it’s available.  I don’t go all the way to “no sugar” (there’s a mild bitter/chemical aftertaste to Splenda that I’ve gotten used to but still don’t like), but with the coffee service at our previous building (and when I go to a coffee shop), I do half sugar and half Splenda, effectively cutting the sugar intake in half.  That’s a small thing, but multiplied by 2 or 3 cups a day, 4 or 5 days a week, it does become a significant amount of calories dropped out of the diet.
    
3. I exercize mild portion control.  Have you ever noticed that the first couple bites of ice cream are fantastic, the next few are pretty good, and then you stop really tasting the peach or salted caramel or whatever, but you finish the amount you dished up anyway?  Same thing with chips: the first couple handfuls are yummy, the rest you just eat because they are there without the same level of enjoyment.  So now instead of a bowl of ice cream, I have a teacup full; half the quantity, same amount of pleasure.  Instead of pulling from the bag of chips until I’m full, I have a moderate bowl, or I have a small bowl of salsa and I eat until it’s gone.  I keep a box of sugar cubes at my desk and I sweeten my coffee that way, rather than the guesstimate method of pouring sugar into the cup.  (Now if they just made Splenda cubes!)

Except for the sugar/Splenda switch, I haven’t swapped out ostensibly high calorie items for “lite” ones, however.  I use real half & half in my coffee.  I eat bacon and eggs.  I use real maple syrup.  I use butter.  I cook with butter and with bacon grease.  (Date a southern boy and you’ll learn this!)  While losing some weight is a good thing, there is a trade-off: how much suffering are you willing to endure?  How much joy (and flavor!) are you willing to suck out of your life?  And what comes along with switching out real food for chemically engineered replacements?

If you need to lose large amounts of weight in a short period of time, those trade-offs may be worth it.  But for me, I am happier with a slow loss of weight combined with a minimal loss of joy.

Current State and Goals

Right now, my weight is down in the low 190s, depending on time of day, recent meals, and so forth.  What is especially cool about that is that this is lower than I have been since before I moved to Seattle, ten years ago this weekend.  That thrills me: it’s rare to be in better shape than you were a decade ago.

I’m able to now fit into medium t-shirts again.  (Well, some of them.  Some are not just smaller, they are shorter, and I can’t wear them tucked in.)  I’m buying 34-inch waist jeans again; I have one pair still at 36, which I’ll wear until they wear out.  (Thinking back, pants were one of the reasons I did make the small changes that I did.  I noticed that my jeans, which I had always worn tight, were no longer conforming to my body.  Instead, they were feeling like loose bags belted to my waist; they covered rather than clung, and I didn’t like it.)

I’m able to wear my original pair of leather chaps again, although they are still damn tight such that I can only wear them without pants on underneath.  (They are tighter in the thighs than in the waist, actually.)  Give that I bought them 19 years ago, when I had a 28-inch waist and had barely started country dancing (which is what expanded my thigh measurements), being able to get into them at all is cool!

It’s good to have goals, even if they are small.  I would like to get back down to 32-inch 501s, and down to about 185 pounds, which would be about where I was in 1995.  I think I can manage that in the next year or two.

Why It Threw Me

When I “grew up gay” (that period of about the first 5 years after you come out), I lived in the Bay Area.  It was the early 1990s.  AIDS (and fear of same) was abundant.  AZT was the only AIDS drug around.  If someone in gay circles lost a noticeable amount of weight and they hadn’t been chatting about diets and major exercize changes — or gastric bypass surgery — then you knew what was up.

Of course, no one then would ever approach someone and ask if they had tested positive or even if they were just generically “sick”.  The best you could do was verbally observe the symptom and then let them respond about their health status if they wanted to.

I had little idea that that stage of my life still had such heavy coloring for me, but I realize that I was shocked by having several people observe that I looked thinner because of the inferred subtext that they were fishing to really ask if I was all right or if I was sick.  (I don’t think they were asking that, I just subsconsciously interpretted it that way.)

Why I Actually Got the Comments

As it turns out, the main culprit in why I got several comments that night has less to do with whether I’ve lost weight recently and more with what I was wearing.  A couple summers ago, after winning a line dance competition in Tampa, I bought a nice Western shirt as my personal “prize” — cream colored fabric with a massive amount of copper brown embroidery across the chest/shoulders/back.  It is an XL shirt, but that was the only size they had and I really love it.

That was 20 to 25 pounds ago.

Now that I’m down to the low end of Large again, that shirt practically hangs on me and makes me look skinnier than I am.  (I remember a girl in high school who did that, wearing big baggy shirts to make herself look thinner.)

I guess I should be happy that people do notice these things.  But I’ve absolutely got to get that shirt tailored to better fit me now.
 

The Weight of a Quilt

Two months ago, on September 12, I went to the Seattle Center to view the WTC / Pentagon / Pennsylvania Memorial Quilt, and I volunteered some time while I was there.  I came back with somewhat conflicted feelings, rather underwhelmed by the display.

Part of it is that I don’t know anyone who was killed (or injured; how many survived but were hurt?) in the September 11 attacks.  The event remains for me very much something which occurred in the distance, not unlike the War in Iraq.  The only two panels which had any real impact were one which was just for children who were killed, and one which include Father Mychal Judge and Mark Bingham (and by extension, was probably intended for all gay and lesbian victims).  These last were the closest to being people I know; they were at least people whose names I knew.  There were also a few squares which had some truly innovative work on them, and some panels with extras, such as the lyrics to America the Beautiful stitched into the panel, but even those were interesting to me but not moving.

The largest part of my ambivalence, though, is that quilt memorials have been done before, and done both better and bigger.  Compared to the Names Project’s AIDS Quilt, this is but a shadow of the earlier one.

• The WTC Quilt took up the space of a large ballroom (albeit hung vertically, and back to back, which reduced the space required by a factor of probably 6 or 8), while the AIDS quilt covered the entire Mall in Washington DC and was laid on the ground.
   
• The WTC Quilt uses 25 quilt squares per panel, while the AIDS Quilt uses only 8.  Is that 3 times more impact per panel?  Or only 1/3 as much, since the pieces are smaller?
   
• The WTC Quilt largely uses traditional quilting methods and patterns, and mostly limited the colors to a patriotic red, white/cream, and blue; only a few of the quilts included other fabrics or fabric-printed photos.  The AIDS Quilt is a cacophony of colors, materials, and imagery.  As a result, pieces of the AIDS Quilt stand out very strongly, while the WTC Quilt fades into a sea of sameness.  Even standing in front of the right panel, finding a square for a particular person is difficult, and once found, it’s a let down because there’s nothing personal about it: just a quilted square with a name scribbled on it.  (This strengthens the randomness of the attacks, perhaps, but doesn’t really give you a reason to look at more than a fragment of the whole display.)
   
• Panels in the AIDS Quilt were usually made by lovers, friends, or family of the deceased.  You can feel the love and the pain that went into every panel, producing a memorial to each person.  With the WTC Quilt, most of the panels were done by people with no direct connection to the attacks.  The panels were largely done blindly, not attached to a name (even to a specific name the quilter knew nothing about).  The WTC Quilt comes off somewhat generic and cold as a result.
   
• Not that I wish that more famous people had died in the September 11 attacks, but much of the reason to see the AIDS Quilt, if not to see someone you know, is to see someone you know of.  Celebrity is a touchstone, and it’s a great way to educate.  The reason to see the WTC Quilt is to see the quilt; the reason to see the AIDS Quilt is to see someone’s quilt.

In no way do I want to say that the WTC Quilt is bad or poorly thought out.  It is what it is, and it certainly has a power to it.  (And both memorials utilize an American artform, as well.)  But just as my ability to publicly grieve at yet another death faded over the 1990s as friends and acquaintances succumbed to AIDS (and as half my own family died of mostly age-related causes), so too has my ability to be awestruck by the immensity of such a memorial gone away.  I’ve seen displays of the AIDS Quilt — and outright cried the first time, and halfway wish I had been able to see a full display in DC (but halfway don’t) — and I donated money to the NAMES Project for years.  The WTC Quilt cannot compare, in any direction.

I stopped donating to the NAMES Project in the late 1990s when I recognized that AIDS was not, should not be the centerpiece of the gay community.  A friend and dance partner of mine — Parm Nelson — died in the mid/late 90s, not of AIDS but of melanoma… of cancer.  (And I got to be the one to call everyone in our dance troupe to tell them the news.)  A major tragedy for those who knew and loved him, but is there a quilt panel for Parm?  Nope.  No such memorial for gays who merely died of common ailments, almost as though if it wasn’t AIDS, it wasn’t worth dealing with.  (My choice to no longer donate to the NAMES Project was purely from my own growth, not from any failing of that organization.)  Many organizations in our community have had to and are still having to deal with the fact that, as AIDS becomes less of a deadly immediacy, their structures being built solely on that disease become unstable, unfunded, and less vital to the community.

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Updated on April 17, 2006

Comment by Sid M. (Bellingham, WA)

Hi… I recently read your web-log <not blog> and see that your were a friend of Parm Nelson.

I was a pledge  brother of Parm’s at Sigma Nu — University of Idaho and sadly had reconnected with him after many years just before he died.  We were both deeply in the closet then, but in retrospect I think we both “knew”.

I was curious what ever happened to his partner?  I talked him several times but was never able to convey my condolences.

Anyhow, quilt, or no quilt, Parm remains in our memories.

Updated on June 2, 2011

By being presented vertically, the WTC Quilt encouraged people to encounter it in the same way as art in a museum — at face level and with nothing beyond/behind it but a flat surface.  The AIDS Quilt was typically presented horizontally, at foot level.  To encounter the panels, you had to look down and sometimes even kneel.  And you had an awareness of people on the other side of the panel, in the next row, and or the entire scope of the display at hand, be it in a hall or on The Mall.  Brilliance on the part of the AIDS Quilt display designers, exponentially increasing the impact of the display.