To See Where I Stand

Dearest Rachel –

Well, honey, despite my best efforts to take advantage of as much of the darkness as possible – especially since I wasn’t going to be heading into the ‘office’ today – my day this morning started at six, regardless. It was too late for me to realistically put in my full time at the gym (and as you know, it’s not like I’m ever motivated to do so right from the moment I wake up, in any event) and get back in time to wash up and get dressed before Kris arrived to clean the house (which I’d like to think we haven’t had the time to get messy over the past month, but whatever), but not early enough that I could safely coax another hour or so of sleep out of myself – and at any rate, neither my mind nor my body were cooperating toward that end, anyway.

I dawdled through that first hour, in the hope that the mild disquiet in my digestive tract would resolve itself (which, by the way, is another reason I’m rarely ready to hit the gym first thing after waking up; it takes time for my body to process what I’ve taken in from the previous evening, and it needs a moment to winnow the chaff from the wheat, if you will. Within that first hour, everything is sorted out, but sometimes, it takes that whole hour. Meanwhile, it always amazed me that you could delay that process by as much as a day or two if you thought it necessary; that had to have been painful, but you never said anything about it. Maybe you thought your process was normal, and I was the weird one). In the meantime, I spent the time going through my news feed – I guess the current parlance for this is “doom-scrolling”? – which probably didn’t help matters, but that’s the nature of my addiction to the online world.

I knew I would have to shower before getting dressed to let Kris in, though. As comfortable as the weather is during the spring and fall, it’s hard to predict how to dress for the temperatures. I’m not even talking about the coming day; I’m talking about the night. If you go to bed wearing too little, you run the risk of catching cold (and at the moment, the sheet and quilt are all I have laid out on the bed – I’ll need to put more ‘reindeer skins’ on there soon enough); too much, and you wake up sweaty, even without bothering to head out to the gym to work out. At the moment, I was dealing with the latter, even as the air around me was cold enough to also provoke the former situation as well. Yes, there’s always the possibility of having to deal with the both extremes at this time of year.

But in any event, the point was that I couldn’t just sit around and do nothing for the couple hours between getting up and letting Kris in. I was going to have to take a shower and get properly dressed beforehand, even if I wasn’t putting myself through my paces on the treadmill or one weight machine or another.

And as long as I was going to have to do that, I was also going to have to step on the scale, to see where I stand as far as my weight is concerned. I let go of that concern for the sake of the trip – not only was I only able to work out on an irregular basis (and Daniel’s presence rather precluded certain opportunities, not that I was any more motivated than when I’m at home), but when I took him with me to the fitness center to demonstrate the comical fluctuations of the scale at sea, we discovered that the Brilliance didn’t even have a scale; at least, not where I was expecting to find it – but now that I’m home, and it’s available to me (indeed, I practically trip over it every morning in the bathroom), I’d best get back to checking the progress on my return to the regimen.

The thing is, I generally try to get two consecutive matching readings, in order to confirm the first number I see when I get on the scale. And not just because I might be dissatisfied with a number above the two-twenty line; I realize that I’m still clawing my way back to where I was before the trip, and these sort of readings are to be expected for a while, especially after a heavy meal like we get at the folks’ place every Thursday (this time around, we didn’t leave Mom with any leftovers save for the creamed spinach – and that wasn’t for any lack of effort on my part, as it was the recipe from the long-gone Lawry’s prime rib restaurant). Besides, the amount I was over the line could easily be considered a margin-of-error situation.

It’s getting to be that much more a case of the margin of error these days. It took five readings before I got into the shower to arrive at a definitive number – and upon getting out and drying off, it took another half-dozen to confirm the reading thereafter. Mostly because I couldn’t accept that I’d lost a pound and a half just from washing off sweat (and I’m certainly not shaving that much off of me, although I wonder how much I’d lose if I removed my beard at this point), and yet, there it was on the scale at several points, along with a reading that seemed to have fixed only as I was getting off, as I definitely hadn’t lost enough weight to get myself under two hundred pounds.

I’m starting to wonder if I haven’t just figured out how to game the scale; how and where to stand in order to get the most favorable reading, so as to give myself a dopamine boost that I really don’t deserve. Then again, if I keep standing in the same spots on the scale, the trend of my weight over time isn’t really going to be any different than is I stand square in the middle of it on a regular basis. It’s going to be a pound or so different, depending on my stance, but whether I gain or lose over time will still head in the same direction. So I probably shouldn’t overthink it. But I can’t quite get over the possibility that I might be cheating it (however inadvertently), or that it might be getting less reliable from overuse. I don’t know.

In any event, I should get ready to let Kris in now; I’ve probably kept her waiting long enough. Keep an eye on us, honey, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.