You won’t need directions.

I grew up eating fried bologna sandwiches on white bread with mayo and American cheese. Candy was a regular treat, as were ice cream pops on a hot day in the back of the pick up. My family ate cheaply and deliciously, and it wasn’t until I was already in my teens that I realized you could also eat for the sake of nutrition. The habits you make as a child are hard to break, but now, at 31, I am trying to eat healthier.

That is not to say I haven’t spent more than a decade dieting, because I have. Poorly. Binge, restrict, binge, restrict was the cycle for far too long. I took diet pills once that made me jittery and sweaty and one time I thought I was having a heart attack, but I dropped 35 pounds. Those pills worked better than anything else at getting me thinner, but I never ate because I couldn’t, because I was on a legal speed. As soon as I stopped 20 of the 35 pounds came back.

I make poor food choices because fat and sugar and salt makes me feel good in my brain, and because the immediate gratification of a French fry or melted Brie often overwhelms my desire to live a long and prosperous life without the obesity, high cholesterol, diabetes and heart disease that has plagued my family.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to lose weight, but for the first time in a long time I am opting to make vegetables and fruits and whole grains and antioxidant fighting nuts and heart healthy oils the mainstay of my diet for the good of my mind and my valves and my pipes and my blood, and not in order to fit into a certain size.

But the urge to eat bad-for-me things is strong. I moved to the Bay Area into a world of delicious delights. I’ve been eating as though I am on vacation here for too long now. I need to reign in the burrito consumption in a big way. When I had a battery of tests done in Nashville a couple of years ago my bad cholesterol was 300. 300, people! That’s astronomically high. It’s mostly hereditary, I’m told, but I still have to fight it if I don’t want to die in my early 60s or sooner.

I read Dr. Andrew Weil’s Eating Well for Optimum Health, and it opened my eyes to exactly what happens to my guts when I eat fried, cheesy foods that are my favorite. It’s not pretty. I learned that eating berries and oats and olive oil can help me prevent cancer. I learned about free radicals and how to eat to destroy them. It’s fascinating, nutrition, and I want to eat for fuel, not to feel high, which is often why I choose an item. The immediate pleasure.

In order to stay motivated to eat well, and tastily (which is important for me, because I will ditch the kale for Popeye’s in a heartbeat if you try me), I read blogs like Nutritionista, Fitnessista, Oh She Glows and Lesley Eats. These women don’t count calories, they eat whole foods, and they eat only when truly hungry. They have cheese and wine and dessert, but they have them in moderation. Most of their days are filled with 7-9 servings of fruits and veggies, healthy fats, whole grains and lean protein. And their meals all look so amazing.

I know it’s about preparing and thinking ahead and not getting caught off guard by the smell of fresh baked cookies that somehow end up in the newsroom every single day. Working in the restaurant industry spoiled me on “eating out,” and I still have many a meal that was prepared by someone else. The frequency of this has to stop. Wayward lard, sugar and bad-for-you oils find their way into even the most innocuous-seeming dishes. Not to mention it’s expensive.

So in order to keep myself on track, I plan to be transparent on this here blog about what I eat. I don’t plan to document every single morsel I put into my mouth, but I do plan to talk about, be mindful of and share with others what I put into my body. You can skip every one of the food posts. These entries are for me. For my arteries and my pancreas and okay, my ass, too.

I’d love to know if there are any great nutrition blogs or websites you recommend. I’d love it if you joined in on what will be an ongoing discussion about nutrition and balance. Because there will be baked Brie, just less of it. In the meantime I’ll be finding healthy for me foods that taste terrific. Because there are plenty of them, they just don’t taste as good as pizza, so I’ve yet to uncover them all. And there is no better place to do this than in the Bay Area.

FIRST UP, coming soon: Review of a vegan California dried cranberry suncake.

What an amazing world we live in.

Proof: Make your wildest wishes known, be brave, and they just might come true faster and in ways more unexpected than you ever knew possible.

I wish that stupid restaurant wasn’t so fucking popular. I’m never going to be able to find out why.

San Francisco is the kind of place where nobody will tell you when you have a bad idea. That’s just how it is. In an effort to remain tolerant, people go out of their way not to judge. That can be a bad thing. “Hey, dude, I think I’m going to pierce my eyelids with this sliver of depleted uranium for Burning Man this year.” “Right on, that’s cool.” No. No, it’s not cool. It’s a very bad fucking idea. But nobody will tell you that. And because it is a town where nobody calls bullshit, it’s easy to get caught up in your own. Stay true to yourself. Sure, let your freak flag fly. You can do whatever you want here and nobody will even look twice at you. Embrace that inner weirdo. But don’t be weird for the sake of being weird: That way lies blind hipsterism and the cult of the yogi. You moved here to set trends, not to follow them, right? This is California. You can do whatever you want. So do yourself a favor and make it real, make it genuine, make it your own. Otherwise you’re just going to burn out.Look. You can certainly be a Mission hipster or Silly Valley type and have a wonderful experience here. But to do so you have to get off Valencia street and make some friends outside of the industry. You have to figure out what drew people here in the first place before it became populated by those stereotypes. It’s a great place to live. But you’ll never know that unless you truly live here.

Mat is wise.

In other news, I decided against that tattoo.

[via Melissa Gira]

I am dressed in my work-out clothes, procrastinating the work-out that lies at the top of this hill, and thinking about the time when our 11-12 year old softball team went to the state tournament in Johnson City, Tennessee. We traveled three hours, rented a hotel room, and the first game on the Friday that we arrived we won by forfeit, because the other team got stuck in traffic.

The next morning the skies opened up and all the heavens dumped their buckets onto that tiny town in East Tennessee. Long, driving bouts of rain that left standing puddles at every turn. One thunderstorm bled into the next downpour, but any break in the rain was enough to keep the show underway. Officials did not cancel the state tournament for girls softball, because Tennessee is long, and people had traveled great distances to participate, and a state tournament is not something you can just reschedule any old time. People took off work. The games had to go on, and so they did.

Girls were running out of their cleats. Balls, soggy and heavy with water, stuck in the mud like a fists in pillows. The hits, no matter how hard, went no where. Trying to remain upright was the goal of the game at that point. Leather gloves became saturated, useless things that you almost couldn’t pick up with one arm.

I played catcher. I had to end innings by wiping down my mud-covered face. Thrown bats landed in shallow, thick puddles that soaked my socks. It was a farce, a miserable farce, and our poor parents had to do the laundry. My glove actually never recovered, and became a petrified monument to that water-logged weekend.

We lost after three games, and the entire team was never more thrilled to have done so.

It’s gorgeous and sunny and will be for just a bit longer this evening. The putting off is now over.

San Francisco’s AT&T Park at dusk. Screaming girl no extra charge:

I adore The Ax Files:

You know this guy I moved cross country with in 1981 gave me a violet one day, out of the blue—and I saved it. He moved to SF and I moved to Portland. He wrote to me later and I wrote back, enclosing the dried violet, which I though he would be touched I held on to. He took it to mean, fuck you, here’s your fucking violet back. You just can never tell what going on with people. I actually at one time, had every rose, dried, that anyone had ever given me. When I was moving from an apartment into the house I bought, I was moving the vases with the dried roses onto the truck and they were falling onto the street and getting stepped on. Someone told me, “It’s time to say goodbye to the roses, dear.”

This should not exist:

I love cheese, even American, and I love tacos, and burgers are okay by me, too, but this thing needs to crawl back to the boardroom from whence it came.

I’ve been wanting an iPhone for a long time. I’ve been waiting for about a year and a half.
As of an hour ago, I have one.

It’s just a phone. I know this. But it’s not just a phone, it’s a tiny little computer that will play me music and allow me to shoot video, edit it on the spot, then upload it directly to the internet. It has a compass. It takes macro still shots. I really don’t expect to use the phone part all that much.

I reserved one online this morning. When the computer told me I’d need a state-issued photo ID I cringed. My wallet is MIA, and I only have a temporary license. I called the Apple store in downtown San Francisco, and a helpful “specialist” checked for me and said that was fine. I squeed, went to work and waited for lunch time to line up.

I got to the Apple store on Stockton at one. I stood in a line outside the store while people shuffled around gawking at the crowd. Someone ambled by yelling, “Get your Verizon phones here!” They handed out water bottles while we waited.

In under 10 minutes I was in, and in just 10 more the 3G S was mine. The guy who sold it to me said I was the first customer of his that day who was getting their first iPhone. I did a little dance for the salesguy, then another dance for the guy who helped me activate it.

“This your first iPhone?,” he inquired knowingly.
“Yes, can’t you see MY FACE,” I beamed back.

I haven’t even played with it yet. It’s sitting in its box in a white bag with a silver apple with a bite taken out of it. It feels like Christmas morning.

I wrote this so maybe now I can concentrate, and get back to work.

[Big thanks to one Ian MacBean for helping me facilitate this purchase sans wallet.]