Tag Archives: Mom

Wrestling with my weight

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When I was growing up my parents were very aware of my weight.  My Dad, who was of average stature, wanted me to be above 6 feet tall because he never would be.  My Mom was from good Irish farm girl stock and was prone togain weight, especially when she was stressed.  Since she was (I suspect) bi-polar she was under stress a lot and, by extension, gained/lost weight on a regular basis.  She and my sister were early adopters of the Weight Watcher program and it did them good service over the years.

Much to my chagrin I garnered my weight gain genes from my Mom and as such have struggled with my size my entire life.  I loved my Dad and miss him terribly, but at the same time I can remember his comments from the other room when I was growing up, whenever he detected a fluxation in my waistline:

“So what do you weigh these days?  300 lbs? 400?

It was said in jest but my folks used humor for a lot of things, an unsubtle bludgeon to make a point was often one of them.  When I gained weight I heard about it.  This is why when I had an accident in the mountains at 21 that required me to have my jaw wired shut for a month, subsequently losing half of my body mass in two months, I quietly thought of it as a godsend.  I managed to keep the weight off for a lot of years, until I became a computer artist and started commuting half the day, listening to books on tape and developing an unhealthy relationship with McDonalds. Before I moved to Santa Monica I was a regular bike rider and windsurfer, unfortunately I moved in with a pal who made it an almost religious quest to get me, who was impressionable and externally validated, to adopt his life of sartorial splendor that involved trips to FATBURGER (a real place for those of you outside So Cal) and evening eating mac and cheese out of a pot.

There were times I got desperate and resorted to pills I will admit.  I never did “Black Beauties” or any sort of pharmacological speed but I did use the early forms of herbal weight loss aides, all of them liberally laced with Ephedrine.  I can thank the purveyors of those products for my pacemaker and leaky heart valves, as well as the terrifying sharp pains I get late at night when I am under a lot stress. I only stopped under duress after my brother(in-law) Jeff took the pills away from me after a session at Sears Point. He said my metabolish was so pumped that when I took my helmet off after a practice session my face was LITERALLY lobster red.  Thanks Jeff, you have always been a great friend.

So work is finally settling down for me, I have a studio to work out of and (eventually) will have a reliable car.  Time to set my sights on my waistline.  Lot hard to do, there is so much of it.  So I started back on Weight watchers last week, stuck to it (loosely) this past week and was rewarded with a 1.4 lb weight gain.  I am adjusting my intake and sticking to it though, really don’t have much choice.  I get the pains at night when I lay myself down in the WESTY and find myself wondering how long it would take, were I to actually kick off, for anyone to actually notice I was gone. I will admit it makes me sad to think that it has come to this but in the end I have only myself to blame, external influences are, after all, jsut that.  INFLUENCES.  I made my own decisions and I both own thm and live with them.

Right now I make the decision to live on.

Why I am who I am Ep #1

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When  I was a kid my Dad and I built model airplanes, scale models the kind that didn’t fly but look pretty on your shelf until they got broken or so covered in dust that the decals began to peel off.  This was the first place I ever used an airbrush and the first place I painted anything freehand, usually when I couldn’t find decals for a piece of nose art I wanted to copy.  We also painted lead soldiers or “military miniature”, the progenitors of modern gaming figures.  Both of these avocations fed both my creative needs and my love of history.  They were also something Dad and I did together and that made them the best.

One of the best things was when on a weekend Dad and I would head out to the hobby shop to select our kits or figures.  Model shops in those days were pretty common and the kits they sold were manufactured by companies driven by the market in the same way reality TV is driven these days. As a result of that there were endless variations of P-51 Mustangs and Me-109s.  My personal favorite was the P-47 Thunderbolt, I guess for the same reasons I like Can Am cars, and I built more than my fair share of those.

As I started to get older though Dad started watching what I was building.  After a while he started to ask me why I wanted to build the same thing over and over or why I wanted to build the same thing all my friends were building. There was no real prodding, if I insisted on build yet another Corsair, which I also built a lot of because my Mom had worked on those in the Marines, there was some teasing but I got the kit.

After awhile though I started to see what he meant.  There were a lot of really interesting kits coming out then of odd planes.  I developed an understanding of the Teutonic lines of unkers bombers and the flowing lines of pre-war carrier planes that were more aesthetic than deadly functional as all arcraft had to become durning the war years. I looked at the model with new eyes and in those times began to understand the diverse nature of design.

Additionally each kit was bought with a PROFILE publication, a little pamphlet with information on the plane in question, plan views and alternate paint schemes.  I started to rely less on decals and more on my brush to do the paint jobs. I learned to be precise and historically accurate, two traits that served me well in the games industry.

Plastic modeling isn’t what it used to be and hobby shops are hard to find.  Most of those are chain stores.  The last hobby shop Dad and I went to was owned by Pat Patterson and was in Sacramento near McClellan AFB.  Mr. Patterson lived in the back of his shop and had every issue of National Geographic published to date in a big case in his rooms, he showed them to Dad and I.  Mr. Patterson also had a Tattoo of a propeller with the initials RFC next to it on his arm because he had been a fighter pilot in World War 1.  I was one of his favorite customers and when Dad and I came into his shop he would show me what was new in the store and often, Dad later realized, he didn’t charge me for everything that went into the crisp white bag with HIGHLAND HOBBIES printed on it in Green. Dad and I stopped modeling after the shop closed for two weeks and then we found out from his sone that Mr. Patterson had passed away.  I did a little more modeling but I was going up and girls entered the picture.

Nick and I didn’t build models together but for a short time we painted game figures together but we enjoyed while we did.  I never told him but I always felt like there were three of us there, huddled around the dining room table with our brushes in our hands.

Sorry about that chief…

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Well that was a really UPBEAT kind of post for a Blog now WASN’T it?  I was trying out the new ANGST approach to enhancing Internet traffic (as outlined in the book “400 way to whine your way to success on the internet” by Sydney Winkerstream).  What better way to get people to come back to your BLOG day after day then by personally insulting their sincerity? I mean it works for Glenn Beck after all.

Truth is that I have had personal reasons to be more than a little down.  Put bluntly my Mother is in the hospital and we don’t really expect her to come out.  I can’t really talk about it much more than that just now as I am still working at getting my emotions all back together and in some sort of order.  No matter what you say or how old you are when this sort of thing happens you are suddenly transformed back into an 8 year old.