web-goddess

I’d be all about a heated bra, but I certainly don’t want one covered in faux fur.

Yay! Another Domer from the Class of ’99 has ventured into the world of weblogging. Go over and say hi to Staci (who is also the wife of my friend Nat Cunningham and the Mom of Marianne and baby Ruth).

I was amused by this blog entry cataloguing various indie bands’ answer to the question: “Would you perform on The O.C.?” The great majority say they would, and the answers are pretty funny. (I love the one that says they would have preferred to play the Bronze. Totally.)

OMG Girlz Don’t Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1 That article made me laugh. I’m not a hardcore gamer or anything but I can still remember the crazy looks I’d get when the Snook and I went to the retro games store in London. Not to mention all the karma I’d get on Slashdot by inadvertently revealing my gender in a comment… (Link courtesy of Geek-fu.)

I walked into the meeting tonight expecting a modest loss. I’ve been good all week: I faithfully tracked my Points; I got lots of exercise; I drank lots of water. I even went to the grocery store and stocked up on healthy snacks to keep at work so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat junk food. And of course, there was that whole hypnotism thing, not that I seriously expected it to make much difference. I mean, she’d told me that my metabolism might rise a bit, and that I might sweat a bit more when I exercised – (My response? “That would not be possible.”) – but I didn’t really expect it to make much of a difference. So I climbed on the scales… and HOLY CRAP, EIGHTY-SIX KILOS. I swear to God that they read eighty-nine last week. A three kilo drop? That’s like six-and-a-half pounds! There’s just no way. I didn’t have a baby or anything. So I tried to rationalize it: Maybe I read the scales wrong last week. Maybe it was all water weight. Maybe the scales were miscalibrated. Maybe I was wearing really heavy shoes or something. But all along, a little voice inside my head was whispering, “But maybe… it was MAGIC!” Whatever the reason, I am back on track, baby! That’s officially 14.1 kilos lost in total, and if all goes well I’ll be down to fifteen next week. (And I get to buy my new Crocs!)

Man, it only took 27 votes to see Dan England voted off Australian Idol tonight. And I didn’t even vote! I felt bad for him but he was never gonna win it. He’s got the best male rock voice I’ve ever heard but he just looked too weird. During the clip montage they showed him in T-shirts and both the Snook and I did double-takes. He looks so, so much chubbier in the suits he’s been favouring these last few weeks. They made his shoulders look three feet wide and his neck disappeared. The guy’s definitely got a future though, and he should be more comfortable now that he can hold his guitar onstage again. I’d pay to see him.

And you know who else I’d pay to see? Leapin’ Lee Harding! Seriously, the guy is just fun. He should be a game show host, or an extra Wiggle or something. Or maybe host birthday parties… like mine. That would rule. GO LEE!

I was serving a customer at the shop last week when she handed me a gift certificate with my own handwriting on it. “Did I sell this to you?” I asked conversationally. “No, actually I won it in a competition…” Oh cool! The Hornsby Country Women’s Association called me up months and months ago with a request to sponsor their inaugural “Australiana Beanie Competition” and I managed to talk Albie into ponying up for two prizes. This lady, Geraldine, had won in the “Landscape” category. We chatted for a bit and I said I was sorry that I hadn’t seen any of the winning entries. (We just gave them the prize; we didn’t get to judge it.) So she was kind enough to send me some pictures of her prize-winning beanies along with a lovely long letter about her knitting experience. Today I posted it at the site. Some days the nice customers just manage to outweigh the crappy ones, you know? And that makes it all worthwhile.

Cluck, cluck. I’m a chicken.
I got hypnotized today. At least, I think I did. I met my hypnotherapist this morning and we started with another nice long chat about my fears and goals for the process. My biggest worry, I told her, was that she’d be doing her thing and I’d be sitting there thinking, “It’s not working; it’s not working.” And she was like, “Oh, you may well be. But that’s cool. It’ll still work.” So that was nice to know. After our chat, I leaned back in my leather easy chair, closed my eyes, and kicked up the leg rest. She dimmed the lights and basically started going through our usual end-of-yoga-class routine – “Relax your feet, relax your legs, relax your arms, etc.” Then she counted backwards from ten and with each number I was supposed to somehow “go deeper” and relax further. I felt pretty damn relaxed, but to be honest I didn’t feel like I was in any sort of trance state. I felt like I could open my eyes and sit up at any moment… but I didn’t want to. She’d mentioned before that she was going to try to “talk to” my subconscious, but didn’t realize that meant she was going to address it directly. I remember her thanking it for helping me with my successes, but that it was being overprotective now and needed to channel its efforts into helping me. To be honest, I don’t remember a lot beyond that. It’s weird; at the time I remember thinking that I was still totally “awake” and noting everything so I could blog it later… but now there are only bits and pieces. Every now and then she’d stop and do the counting down from ten thing again, and I’d again puzzle over how to “go deeper”… and then on the third time, as we got down to one, suddenly I really did go deeper. It was like I could feel my head go “click,” like when you suddenly realize how to see those Magic Eye pictures and then you can do it at will. I was still totally conscious; I was like, “Wow, so THIS is the place I’m supposed to be in!” It was like I’d finally shucked off my body and crawled up into my own head. Very relaxing and nice. And I could drift out of it and back into it without much effort. Meanwhile she was still going on about my goals, and how I wasn’t going to have the fear and worries anymore. Towards the end she asked me to imagine myself at my goal weight, and then to imagine myself in that body. As I told her later, I randomly welled up like I was going to cry at that point. (“Happy cry or sad cry?” she asked. “Mostly overwhelmed cry, I think.” “It’s okay. Everybody cries in here.”) I also remember right at the very end there was something about the colour blue, and how every time I saw it my subconscious was going to remember the things she’d said. And then she started counting up from one to five, and I was supposed to feel the energy going back into my limbs… and I kinda did. And then I sat up and we talked about it. She gave me some homework – the counting down relaxation exercise – and I’m supposed to call her in a week with my progress.

As I re-read that, it all sounds very cosmic and hippie and weird… which is surprising to me. It honestly didn’t feel like that at the time. For most of it, I was just sitting in a chair thinking how boring a blog entry this was going to be. I mean, I was just sitting in a chair listening to some woman talk soothingly at me. It was only when I called the Snook up afterwards that I realized I was having trouble remembering the things she’d said. I can tell you in great detail what we talked about before and after the hypnosis bit, but the middle is all kinda vague. In terms of actual results, I haven’t noticed any real effects yet. I was as hungry as ever, and though I certainly noticed blue things, I wasn’t sure if that was just me consciously doing it. *shrug* We’ll see.

Happy birthday, Anthony!
Best wishes for your 23rd, little brother. (Even though Joey there is now the littlest, you’ll still always be my Bubby.) Hope it’s a good one…