No maps for these territories

Account of the Di3tz0rs, day four 2.75ish:

I am attempting to modify my wretched eating habits. Tonight I still ate too much at dinner (though it was salad! graced with protein! per Springstreet’s recommendation — not my fault if it was also at a Mexican place and graced with sour cream and chips), but at least I rode my bike there. Of course, it was all of 4.6 miles round-trip, on level ground. On a bike path, even, so I didn’t even have the threat of imminent demise via traffic to make my heart beat a little faster. I’m sure the trip burned all of about 5.76 calories.

However! It did have some nice side bonuses:
1) I actually got up off my ass to go “exercise” after work, something that has to date more or less eluded me (never mind that the end goal was dinner); this has the faint, lonely possibility of becoming a habit
2) dinner was tasty
3) this continues my “salad trend”, which, again pursuing recommendations, I am following. Salad for lunch for my salad days, perhaps (which is an expression I have never really understood – did it really come from Antony and Cleopatra, as Wikipedia claims? I have never read A&C. I was a bad English major).
4) it made me a) discover a nice bike path I didn’t really know about (which happens to leads to my favored Safeway, huzzah), and b) reminded me how much I like biking. Though I bike to work, I live close enough that I don’t really have time to build up any momentum, and am too sleepy in the morning to notice if I do; with twice the distance, I still didn’t build up much momentum, but came closer.

In other diet news:
I am currently faced with the dilemma of the Bag of Chocolates which is at work. The BoC was bought in a self-pitying moment a few weeks before I decided on this whole diet thing. And they are really good chocolates. I do not do things by halves. So, the reasonable thing to do, having decided on the course of a diet, would be to Get Rid of the Chocolates. Because otherwise I will Eat Them All. But I can’t get rid of them. See, there’s not really enough left to leave out for the student workers in the library; and there aren’t really any homeless people here that I could slip them to. And it would be a crime, an abomination against mankind, to throw them out.

So I suppose I will keep eating one a day, as a sort of weaning process, and when they are gone I will get something healthier to snack on. (Either that, or I’ll eat them all in one afternoon, and promptly buy another bag).

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In other, non-diet news:

I love it when you sit down to read something that has a place in the classics canon and discover that, well, it’s a classic because it’s a really damn good read and an exciting story. This is currently the situation with me and Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, which I am sorry to say I have never read before, though I have read other Collins. (First off, the guy has a first name of Wilkie, and how awesome is that?) The book was published in 1859-1860 in serial form, which I imagine must have driven the original readers mad, as it is a ripping story: deception! murder! passion! violence! fiesty women! All good things, and only occasionally trite; the book is fresh, and snappy, and with different dialogue it would resemble any good modern thriller/bodice ripper, though with a far more intricate plot than most modern mysteries. However, as with much good fiction, it treats serious subjects as well: spousal abuse, and the role of women in society, and class relations, and British inheritance laws (this last being a plot point in any good Victorian story). While I am often irritated at the two women protagonists for being so conveniently weak-minded (they faint away when needed, and lose their minds with a bit of fever and mistreatment), I can’t entirely lose my patience with Collins, who gives them the upper-hand morally and sympathetically.

At any rate, I am not done with it yet, and I am dying to go curl up with a cup of tea and the last couple hundred pages — the mark of a good book, if I ever saw one.