Yesterday’s excitement was making blackened chicken breast for dinner. I know that’s not exactly exciting but at least it’s spicy. I used to buy Cajun seasoning, now I just throw on a mixture of cayenne, paprika, black pepper, and garlic salt, in no fixed quantities. It ends up being cheaper and just as good. No more messy cleanup of my stovetop grill, I use the air fryer. I finally weighed myself yesterday. I’m still 182. How much I eat and how much I weigh no long have much to do with each other. I’m getting much less exercise and I’m eating more snacks and my weight holds steady. I used to weigh 240 lbs. I don’t know if I could get there if I tried. I still get mad at my college classmate who said he has no respect for overweight people because they have no self-control. I had enough self-control to go from 240 lbs to 160 through dieting. But since that intense effort maintain a weight of between 170 and 185 has required little effort. I’d like to lose ten lbs but the happiness I’d gain from that is not worth the happiness I’d lose from giving up favorite foods. My blood pressure and cholesterol are good, so I’m not worried about my health. When I weighed 240 my resting pulse was over 90bpm and my blood pressure was high-normal. That’s what scared me into losing weight.
I spent 45 minutes in the hypnopompic state after my alarm when off this morning. I won’t make you look it up, that’s the state between sleep and waking up. It is magical. There is no anxiety, no depression, no negative feelings at all, it’s a state of peace. I wonder if it’s the inspiration for nirvana, the state, not the band. This is how Wikipedia describes nirvana, ” All Indian religions assert it to be a state of perfect quietude, freedom, highest happiness … .” That is exactly what the hypnopompic state feels like. Today I indulged myself and didn’t force my way out of it. Sometimes that’s a bad thing. It’s a way of escaping the world and I don’t get things done. Today, it was just peaceful. It’s my goal when meditating. I don’t understand how people meditate with their eyes open, I need to cut off all sensory input other than the feel of my body on whatever it is resting on. That feeling is part of the process. At some point my body stops trying to defy gravity.
I’m going to keep it short again. There is something I have to do, send postcards to voters in communities of color in voter suppression states. You can do it too, sign up here, Help Save Our Democracy. How much will it help? I don’t know but voter turnout efforts can be effective. The fact that so many people don’t vote is a big part of the country’s problems. People often don’t vote because they think politicians don’t care what people want. The reality is politicians care very much what voters want, they just don’t care what non-voters want. The reason money gives political power is because money can get people to vote. Selling candidates is no different than selling any consumer product. Politicians can get by selling image instead of quality only because people let them. Surveys of registered voters always give more support to liberals than likely voters. Surveys of eligible voters are even more liberal. That’s why there is voter suppression and I why we have to fight voter suppression. It can’t be the only tool we use but it needs to be one of them. We also need to make voters more informed. There’s a reason why more informed voters are more liberal than less informed ones. It’s why Trump said, “I love the poorly educated.” It’s why 59% of Republicans say that college has a negative effect on the country (Pew Research: The Growing Partisan Divide in Views of Higher Education).
We can’t fix everything at once, choose one task at a time. Right now, my task is making it easier for people to vote. Join me and Allison. She’s the one that got me to do it. It’s not just me, cool people do it too. I bet you have a better handwriting than me. I think my cats have a better handwriting than me. I hope the recipients of my cards take that as a sign of sincerity, not that first graders are sending them mail.
Wise Madness 