more and more about less and less

We're on Day 7 of the diet-until-the-end-of-the-semester-diet, and so far things still seem to be going well. If I continue to survive it and various other travails of this semester, I'll post some graphs or something of its progress.

I had the idea for the diet-until-the-end-of-the-semester-diet in seeing the movie Touching the Void, which features a man who barely survived a femur-shattering fall and being left behind by his partner (who thought he was dead) on the side of the mountain. As he described how he crawled and butt-scooted his way to safety, he said that he couldn't think about the whole improbably journal in front of him. Instead, he would focus on like a rock somewhere ahead and decide he was going to get to the rock in twenty minutes (luckily, his wristwatch, despite taking a licking, kept on ticking). So, I thought, rather than decide to try to make any proclamation that I was going to try to eat-less-and-healthier-and-move-more-and-more-briskly for, say, life, I thought I would try to do it for the rest of the semester, especially since it's so easy to say that one will postponing to resolve doing anything until the end of the semester.

Another part of this resolution: I have declared that I will not again use the elevators in the Social Science building for the remainder of the semester. Really, truly. Not going from 2 (entrance from path to parking lot) to 8 (office) to 5 (exit toward classroom) to 6 (exit to State Street) to 4 (vending machines [although my soda consumption is now exclusively diet and is much reduced]). Once, since making this resolution, I absent-mindedly pushed the button for the elevator, and when it arrived, stepped in, remembered the resolution, and then pounced out, murmuring something about having "forgotten something" to the person already in the elevator. I also pressed the button once and remembered the resolution as it arrived, and again I jumped away.