So the diet is going ok… my hubby’s birthday was wednesday which meant there was a lot of bad stuff in the house.  I did take a day more or less off of the diet that day and did fairly well getting back on the wagon the next day.  As of thursday I had lost about 2 lbs, but I will weigh again either today or tomorrow.  I do typically drop several pounds very quickly the first week, but they my second week plateau is KILLER.  If I can manage push through the second week and manage to get another few pounds off after that, I very well may have some level of success.  *sigh*

I have been doing VERY badly on working out.  On monday I tried doing the first 30 day shred workout.  I have done these before and I guess I like them… as much as I am capable of liking a sadistic trainer yelling out of my tv how she has 400-pounders who do these workouts, while two skinny bitches bounce around in the background without even a glistening of sweat on them.  But as I was going into the second set of squats I felt my right quad say “Hell NO, lady!”  It started cramping very painfully and I called an end to the workout right there.  It has been very sore almost all week, and I think I narrowly avoided some kind of injury there.  I finally made it back to the gym on thursday for 30 minutes of light work on the elliptical.  Both legs were finally feeling healed again Saturday, so I’ve got two days of good healthy workouts in store for this weekend.

Now on to the topic that has ruffled my feathers for today.  Since both hubby and I are students at the same large state university, we get the same school-wide emails and individually arrived at the same level of shock and horror at a standard practice here.  It seems that every time there is any student death, the university sends a school-wide email ANNOUNCING THE DEATH!  On one level I get that this is somewhat pragmatic – it does stop the rumor mill, speculation, etc that is bound to run rampant in a population of teenagers and early-20-somethings all cooped up in dorms.  But then I thought of how I would feel if I was the one who bit it… and they sent my obit around the same way they announce a new vice associate chancellor dean of student academic program life or whatever.  It’s a freakin’ form email!  They give the student’s year, program of study, dorm, interests, parents names and method of croaking!  SERIOUSLY?!?!?

I am taking a class in Roman Religion this semester that is wicked cool, and one of the topics into which we delved is death and a comparison of Roman thought regarding death with contemporary western thought.  There are actually a lot of similarities in the way we seem to believe in treating the dead and everything regarding funeral rites with a certain level of reverence.  Desecration of the dead is felt to be one of the greatest insults we can give.  Everything about death was and still is highly ritualized and we work very hard to keep it separate from the mundane or the daily norm.  Maybe this is why the practice of Death Emails strikes me as so… wrong.  It seems to belittle the person’s life, condensing it into a few keystrokes and shooting out this very one-sided interpretation of who this person was to more than twenty thousand people.  Maybe part of what bothers me as well is that this took only about 7 minutes of some admin assistant’s time to type out, and this is the university’s public response to a death.  I guess I just feel that a well-written obituary in the school newspaper or a similarly respectful notice placed on the school’s website is more appropriate and more respectful.

Whether most people agree with me or not I know that, should I kick the bucket any time soon, I certainly don’t want the stinkin’ U to send out a Death Email for me.  Wonder if I should put that in my will, or if there is some kind of form I should fill out…

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