How I Learned To Leave Tro­mav­ille and Find My Own Sanity…

In Feb­ru­ary of this year, I sent an e-mail to my then-boss Lloyd Kauf­man, and it began with the fol­low­ing sentence:

I feel as though my time with Troma may be com­ing to an end.

It was one of the hard­est things I've ever writ­ten or said, for that mat­ter but it was a feel­ing that remained just as true through­out the remain­der of my tenure with the com­pany as it was on the day I wrote it.

After five very long years with the com­pany and with peo­ple who I care for very dearly, eight months after the writ­ing of that e-mail, I resigned. No fan­fare, no regrets.

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I would make a big­ger fan­fare about it, but I'm not sure if it really deserves it until I have some­thing more to show for it, but here it is:

Fotog is a PHP-based bit of code that will allow just about any per­son with a web­site to cre­ate and man­age photo gal­leries on their per­sonal site. This project has been in very, very quiet devel­op­ment since sev­eral months ago but after leav­ing Troma (and I'll address that seper­ately, soon), I'm now find­ing myself with more time to actu­ally devote to cod­ing it.

If you visit the site now, there is a very, very (read: crappy) basic ver­sion of Fotog avail­able as a demo, but of course, many of the planned fea­tures are not there as I just started active devel­op­ment about a week ago. Any­who, Fotog.raphy.org will serve as a dash­board for all things Fotog, so I prob­a­bly won't make too many more men­tions of it here. To fol­low that par­tic­u­lar saga, sub­scribe to the RSS feed over there.

The com­ment boards are open on the site, so feel free to con­tinue there. But yeah, the text win­dow beckons.

It's been thirty days, and boy was it dif­fi­cult. Actu­ally, the first three days were the worst. Andrea was right. It was pretty much all down­hill from there.

Any­who, I'll write about this in more detail later. For now, I think I hear a cheese­burger call­ing my name…

Less than a year ago, I resolved, as part of a much larger list, to start on the path to get­ting back in shape. And while I may have started well on some of the items on that list, this is one that I've neglected and avoided almost exclu­sively since the words were written.

And save for one attempt (and a bad one at that), that's how things have remained.

This is no longer accept­able. I must do something.

I'm going to do something.

Announc­ing the Stop Being A Fatass Cam­paign 2005!
(You can call it SBAF for short.)

Basi­cally, here's how it works …

As the first phase in a much larger pro­gram of my own design, I will resolve to eli­mate fast food and soft drinks from my eat­ing habits for the next thirty days, start­ing tomor­row (Mon­day, August 15, 2005.)

For the pur­poses of this pro­gram, I will define fast food as any com­mer­cially avail­able prod­uct from any chain restau­rant, includ­ing McDon­alds, Burger King, Sonic, Wendy's, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, in addi­tion to other numer­ous chain restau­rants that serve pre-processed food. I am not cut­ting out restau­rants alto­gether, mind you. Just the evil ones. Heh.

(This will prove espe­cially dif­fi­cult on days that I work, because the major­ity of food places in the mall serve noth­ing but crap, but there are a cou­ple that will do just nicely. And it gives me an excuse to try out more of those menus.)

Soft drinks will be defined as any car­bon­ated drink that does not con­tain real juice. So basi­cally, Pepsi is a no, but a 20 oz. orange juice drink is ok, as long as it's actual juice.

The Goal

I have been utterly depen­dent on fast food since I was a small child. I believe that these habits, cou­pled with years of under-exercise, have con­tributed immensely to the weight, energy, and gen­eral health prob­lems that I now face. This is some­thing that I am no longer sim­ply okay with. With that said, my goals are sim­ply these:

• To suc­cess­fully go thrity com­plete days with­out con­sum­ing the fatty foods and liq­uids that com­pose the major­ity of my "diet."
• To increase my energy lev­els so that I can start spend­ing time doing phys­i­cally chal­leng­ing activ­i­ties, such as actively exercising.
• To begin a pat­tern of healthy behav­ior that I can build on in the com­ing months and years.

I am not attempt­ing to get to a cer­tain weight by a cer­tain time or any­thing of that sort. This first step is an impor­tant one towards a much larger goal of phys­i­cal self-improvement. I rec­og­nize that I am not able to start a full-blown exer­cise rou­tine yet — that will come later. And at this point, I know that I'm also not entirely capa­ble to rad­i­cally change my eat­ing habits. But this is a start.

My goal is not one of con­stancy, but merely one of improvement.

I will make no assump­tions about this process. I real­ize that I am not a health pro­fes­sional, and I am not start­ing with all of the nec­es­sary ingre­di­ents for any sort of long-term solu­tion, but I must start small and work from there.

For The Record

I have not con­sulted a physi­cian about this pro­gram, and at least for the time being, I do not intend to.

I will keep records of weight changes, but I have not decided whether I will pub­lish them or not.

I do not know my cur­rent weight, but I will make sure that I get a num­ber within 48 hours to note as a start­ing point.

I don't know of any way to do this but with the honor sys­tem. There will be no admin­is­tra­tor guid­ing me, and no one to watch my eat­ing except for me. But those of you faith­ful read­ers that know me (and why would you be read­ing this if you didn't?) know that I can be incred­i­bly stub­born when cir­cum­stances dic­tate, and I believe this time that they do.

To ween myself toward the direc­tion of an exer­cise pro­gram, I will begin walk­ing laps (at least for the moment) every other day. As of this writ­ing, the num­ber of laps is two and the loca­tion is the park­ing lot of Fort Collins High School (which is across the street from my apart­ment), but as my abil­i­ties increase and time and energy per­mit, I will grad­u­ally increase the num­ber of laps and area. For prac­ti­cal rea­sons, some days the laps will be done while I am at work.

This ini­tial pro­gram will last for exactly thirty days, end­ing on Sep­tem­ber 15, 2005 at mid­night MST. Depend­ing on how I feel, I may extend this and move into Phase II — if I fig­ure out what that is by then.

This pro­gram does not extend to store-bought food. How­ever, this is some­thing I'm try­ing to look at as well, and for the last three foodtrips, I have replaced my req­ui­site hot­pock­ets with Healthy Choice meals. Again, it's not much … but it's a start.

Caveat

One heavy obsta­cle here is that I will be at dragon*con for approx­i­mately one week dur­ing this trial. The food pro­vided will be home­made and should not affect the pro­gram, but in the event of a sugar crash or other unforseen event, I may have no choice but to drink a caf­feinated, car­bon­ated beverage.

Also, much because of dragon*con, alco­hol is not being included in this pro­gram … because if I can't have a fat­burger when I want one, then I'm at least going to get damn good and drunk.

So, Yeah?!

Wish me luck, peo­ple. This is some­thing I've never done before, and I'm excited … but I'm also scared. Got a healthy food tip or have a bit of info that I may have over­looked? Please post it in the com­ments. I'd like to hear what's worked for other people.

Viva la revolution!

Kris Kuen­e­man was one of the first peo­ple I can ever remem­ber say­ing "Hi" to me dur­ing my first days as a stu­dent at Rocky Moun­tain High School. She was an incred­i­bly warm, car­ing per­son who did her best to accli­mate an incred­i­bly green (yes, believe it) sopho­more to the peo­ple, places and what­ever of high-school life.

Depend­ing on who you ask, maybe she did a good job.

While I can't hon­estly say that she got along with every­one she met, she did try extremely hard — and most of the time, unfor­tu­nately, not many peo­ple saw that. What I can truth­fully say, how­ever, is that she was a great friend to me, and I knew that in high school, that cer­tainly wasn't some­thing that you found very easily.

Kris always put the hap­pi­ness of oth­ers before her own — in fact, many times to her detri­ment. But she didn't care. That was just how she was. Peo­ple took advan­tage of her for it, but she took it bet­ter than most peo­ple would. Cer­tainly bet­ter than I.

After leav­ing high school, although we didn't talk or hang out often, we did see each other every once in a while and catch up. Like any­one, she hit some rough spots once get­ting out into the real world, but the girl was damn tough — and she tried to make the best out of what life threw at her.

Kris wasn't per­fect — far from it, in fact. She could be over­bear­ing, some­times even annoy­ing. But I truly believe that she always did it out of love. She was always there for me, and I did what I could to be there for her. Our rela­tion­ship was never one of romance — rather, it seemed to be a sim­ple unspo­ken bond: she watched my back, and I watched hers.

Once I trans­ferred to my cur­rent work loca­tion at the Foothills Mall, we saw much more of each other, and I can't think of a sin­gle time when there wasn't a smile on her face. It didn't really mat­ter what the sit­u­a­tion was; I knew that every time I saw her, I would be greeted with that same smile.

Lilly pow­ered that smile.

I believe that Lilly gave her a pur­pose — some­thing to look for­ward to, some­thing big­ger than her­self. She lived for that baby girl, and for good rea­son. Wow, was that baby ever cute. After what I can only describe as a rocky rela­tion­ship with Lilly's father, Kris was given the respon­si­bil­ity of rais­ing Lilly on her own, and although I didn't see it day in and day out, she did a damn good job.

Neigh­bors inter­viewed in the papers recalled that Kris had basi­cally escaped the fire, say­ing that she had made it to the bal­cony to escape the flames. One ten-foot jump, and it all would have been over. She would have been free.

Except for Lilly.

After a life­time of self­less acts for the good of oth­ers, Kris Kuen­e­man had one task left to per­form. She went back in to res­cue her baby, like any lov­ing mother would do.

That was the last time she was seen alive.

Kris Kuen­e­man (23) and Lilly Kuen­e­man (8 months) were pro­nounced dead early Sun­day morn­ing, July 31, 2005. The cause of death was ruled as smoke inhalation.

* * *

As I turned to walk away, the smell of the charred wood and the wind echo­ing behind me, a strange voice from above called out:

"Hey you!"

"Yes?"

"What are you doing here? Do I know you?"

"No," I said, quickly try­ing to hide the sad­ness in my voice and the tears in my eyes. Luckly, it was dark.

I was strug­gling to find words until she inter­rupted — "You look like death," she said.

"I, uh, knew the girl who died in the fire."

"Oh … I'm sorry. I only met her about three weeks ago … she was really nice."

"Yes, she was. I've known her for a long time."

"I'm very sorry … I guess I'm still in shock."

"Yes, well … I just found out today," I muttered.

"Oh wow … I'm really sorry."

"So am I."

I could feel the tears com­ing again.

"Oh, well you take care," she said.

"Thanks. You too. Goodnite."

* * *

On Sat­ur­day after­noon, just hours before she died, I saw Kris — and she was as bub­bly as ever, talk­ing about an old friend of ours that she had run into that day. I remem­ber laugh­ing to myself and think­ing, "Cool. I'll see you tomorrow."

I guess we can't count on tomorrow.

Depend­ing on who you ask, Kris Kuen­e­man was many dif­fer­ent things to many dif­fer­ent peo­ple. She was a won­der­ful mother, a depend­able con­fi­dant, a bitch, a prob­lem solver, a no-nonsense gal, a party ani­mal, and a close friend.

Kris, to me, you were many of these things — some­times more than one at a time — but that's what made you unique. That's what made you some­body that I always called a friend. You are some­one that I will never for­get. You made life inter­est­ing, com­pli­cated, and some­times tougher than it needed to be — and I'm sure that you wouldn't have had it any other way. Your life was cut short much too soon, but now you've got the best seats in the house to watch the rest of us stum­ble around like idiots.

I hope I don't dis­ap­point you.

And boy, do I wish that I had a chance to tell you all of this while you were here. These things never work out the way we want, do they? Well, it'll all keep.

I have a feel­ing you knew it all along anyway.

You bet­ter have some good sto­ries for me when I see you and Lilly on the other side. Until then, grab some pop­corn, prop your feet up, and enjoy. You've earned it, kid.

In Memo­riam
Kris and Lilly
July 31, 2005

I'll com­ment on this in detail later … For the moment, I just want to post it and go back to what I was doing before I felt like spit­ting up my lunch.

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