Major spoilers ahead for both The Last Jedi, The Force Awakens, and probably all of the Star Wars films in the end; therefore, help yourself out.  ​
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Dear World-At-Large,

Hello!  I’ve missed you.  Have you missed me?  No?  

Oh well.

Yes, you’re right.  I did entirely fail to post an entry last week on this, my allegedly weekly blog.  You have my sincerest apologies.  If it’s any consolation, I don’t even feel bad about it.  I have been busy, running about Orange County and the Central Coast, presenting interactive historical presentations, because that’s what I do now.  I present things.  I am a presenter.  That is my job title.  

And yet, here we are again.  The pair of us.  Me at my keyboard.  You at your variously sized screens.  Here I type, and there you read.  

What shall we talk about this week?

What?  You find this theatrically contrived, whimsically conversational introduction unnecessary?  You think I should’ve just begun this week’s essay without it?  

Well, you’re probably right, but try to see things from my point of view.  Regardless of your own amusement level, I am thusly amused.  I dearly love theatrical contrivances, and I have never been one to use words sparingly.  Why should I?  Words are, after all, sensationally, even scandalously free to use.  They cost me nothing!  

This is outrageously off-topic, but I am suddenly reminded of my favorite correctional note that I ever received back on a collegiate essay.  The year was 2011.  I was taking a senior level history course on the decline of the British Empire that semester, just for kicks and giggles, because the professor, Dr. Smith, was himself British, and when you attend a small school in rural Indiana that just seems cool as hell.  I had handed in an essay on something or other, having worked fairly hard on the thing, history being my hobby then, and not my job, as it now is (somewhat ironically), and I received the essay back with a grade far higher than I dare say the silly thing deserved.  But there, on the front page, which was almost completely covered in correctional marks done in blood-red ink, was a sentence now burned into my brain.  Dr. Smith had sliced into my verbose, overly dramatic opening paragraph as with a scalpel, circling my topic sentence and scrawling next to it, “An excellent point lost in a sea of waffle.”  

I memorized that, because I want it to be the title for my eventual, inevitable memoir.​

As I may have mentioned before, balance is not my strong suit. When unchecked, my propensity is to swing between extremes.  You will find me either surreptitiously attempting to eat the entire box of donuts at the office or battling to only eat “paleo” or something else equally stringent and difficult to maintain.  So, this time, rather than adopting a new stricter-than-ever diet program and swiftly falling off the wagon, I have instead attacked the matter from a different angle.    

Method one!  I have begun something that is technically called “intermittent fasting”, although I do not like that term.  It sounds frightening and almost monastic, like something a reclusive hermit would do to appease his distant and angry god, but it really isn’t like that.  It simply means that I only eat within a certain window of time each day.  My eating window starts with my first cup of coffee or bite of breakfast.  From then on, I have twelve hours in which to eat.  When my twelve hour window is up, I stop eating, and I allow my body twelve hours to rest from digesting food.  The only thing I have during my twelve hour fast is water.  

Again, this sounds dreadful, but it really isn’t.  First off, the “fasting” isn’t that bad.  Most of it is spent sleeping, which is always, for all of us (unless you suffer from particularly aggressive sleepwalking), a time of natural fasting.  This “twelve hours on/twelve hours off” has brought significant balance to my eating habits.  When I wake up bright and early, I am hungry, so I eat.  Throughout my day, I make sure to get in snacks and meals to power me through my work.  When I get home from work, I have a substantial, but still reasonably healthy dinner (with maybe a pleasantly adult beverage or two), and then I stop eating, because my time is up.  During the several hours left before bed, I hydrate with water.  This isn’t hard to do, because I already ate enough during the day. And - and this is the really KEY PART - as my body winds down from the day, burning through the last of the fuel I ate, it naturally gets sleepy.  

So then I sleep.  

It makes complete sense if you think about it.  We are always told not to eat “late at night,” but that way of thinking about this idea always struck me as stupid.  I naturally want to fly in the face of such pithy, commonly bandied about rules.  They annoy me!  Thinking about it in terms of cycles of “now I eat, now I rest”, though, has a much stronger appeal for me. For whatever reason, it hacks into a slightly more rational part of my brain, one that I am only now realizing I have.

There are scores of supposed health benefits to this intermittent fasting.  I could cite sources, but if you are interested, look them up.  The internet has a lot of stuff on it.  Supposedly, it helps promote lean muscle growth and lowers diabetes risk and cancer growth.  It even helps regulate your hormones.  All this can be yours by simply giving your digestive system, that tired old workhorse behind your belly button, dedicated periods of rest.  The benefits allegedly increase if you shorten the eating window down to just nine or ten hours, but I think twelve is a more manageable place to begin.  We are all busy, and what with work and errands, etc, it is hard to get enough calories in if you make the window too short.  

All I know for certain is that I feel a lot better when I eat this way.  And, it doesn’t really feel like you are “dieting” per say, because you actually have to be careful to eat enough during the time that you have to eat.  So you get to eat!  If you want a treat, have a treat.  If you are really hungry, eat more.  Just eat during your eating window.  Like I say, this is a way to bring balance to your diet.  It is a natural, healthy limiter, not an absolute “thou shalt not.”  

It works for me, but then, in fairness, I am a young, reasonably healthy person who enjoys mixing things up and trying new things.  Obviously, talk with your doctor if you are considering any large dietary changes.  However, if you want to try this, feel free to message me or leave a comment below.  I have only my own experiences from which to extrapolate, but I am always available if you have a comment or question.  

I have already rambled substantially, so let us proceed with greater brevity.  

Method two!

My wife and I are trying to eat more meals at home, which means we have been cooking more.  This is fun. We enjoy it.  You will, too!  I recommend poking around YouTube.  There are tons of cool cooking channels there with lots of fun and delicious recipes.  Two that I enjoy are Jamie Oliver and The Happy Pear.  

However, my wife and I have a deal.  We cook differently.  When I cook, I cook Vegan dishes, and when my wife cooks, she can cook whatever she wants, which typically involves meat or cheese of one kind or another.  This helps us maintain a varied and balanced diet. Vegan and vegetarian dishes are a great way to get a lot of vegetables and fruits into your diet all at the same time in tasty ways, instead of relegating them to the status of bland, unappealing, and therefore often uneaten side dishes.    

I mention this not to brag that I only have to cook half of the time (that would be unfair), but only to remind you that you don’t have to be all one thing.  As humans, we suffer from a tendency to be very “either/or”.  Know that you can be multiple things.  I like meat, but I don’t eat it all the time.  I love vegetables, too.  (I think I just love food in general.)  

Why not be a vegan or vegetarian one day a week? Or every other day?  Or one meal a day?  Mix it up!  Have fun!  Above all, find balance.  

Next week, we’ll talk about changes I’ve made in the way I use social media.  If that interests you, please join me again next week.  If not, go in peace.  I mean you no harm!
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​For the past few months, I have managed (against all odds) to maintain a reasonably steady release rate of one essay or story per week on this, my digital scribble scroll.  This production schedule was instituted by me as a personal challenge, seeing as the primary purpose of this blog is to provide me with a contained space in which to compose and then publish my hopefully harmless, ideally amusing writings to a gently tolerant, if mostly unaffected world.  
 
Personal challenges, as anyone who knows me well will tell you, are my bread and butter, or, in the common parlance of our time, my kale and hummus.  I find personal challenges remarkably motivating, and so I engage in the practice of challenging myself regularly. 
 
This practice works well for me, because it harnesses my natural strength as an exceptionally dramatic individual.  Think of me as a human pendulum. I exist in a world of extremes, vacillating wildly between side one and the other, rarely ever coming to rest in the noble middle, which is the rightful realm of the nominally sane and stable.  I am either totally focused or completely distracted.  I am all in or all out.  Therefore, and somewhat tangentially, I do not multi-task well, which has made my career in musical theatre, wherein one must act, sing, and dance all at once, a ceaseless exercise in both humility and denial. 
 
In short, dramatically difficult deadlines just do it for me.  If I had not assigned one for this blog, I would never have finished more than an entry or two.  Knowing that I had to publish an interesting essay or story each week has given the past few months positive focus and intention.  
 
And yet, the time has come to ease up on the self-applied pressure.  Summer is here, and with the change of season, memories have returned unbidden of the long, lazy summer breaks of my scholastic yesteryear.  I yearn to return to those distant, halcyon days.  And, too, there is also the small matter of my rapidly approaching nuptials.  Surely you cannot have failed to notice my recent proclivity towards constantly referencing “my fiancée” on this blog, or perhaps you have even been irked by a disgusting display of pictorial bliss on a media feed of mine.   
 
In light of both the summer season and my own imminent matrimony, and after some careful thought, I have decided to initiate "summer mode" for this blog.  I will occasionally persist in a post here or there as topics come to my mind and the literary itch returns, but I am temporarily removing the mandate that I publish something weekly.    
 
Fret not, fan of mine (he wrote optimistically, praying that at least one existed), the blog will return to a more regular release schedule when the school year begins anew.  Probably, it will return even sooner, but I make no promises. 
 
Now, if you’ll excuse me, there is doubtless something important I should be doing, or at the very least, procrastination calls. 
 
Here’s wishing you a dangerously pleasant summer.