Does anyone still read my blog?

Sometimes I'm not sure if I should keep blogging here. I try to remember to update my online personal journal on a regular basis and sometimes struggle with that. A few weeks ago, I joined a http://www.sparkpeople.com/ and have been entering daily blogs there (mostly about my weight loss journey), so I have been neglecting this blog. But I looked back at some of my previous and admittedly kind of lame entries and noticed it doesn't appear that anyone has read them. Or maybe you did but thought they were so lame that you didn't comment.

I know I have some issues. This isn't a new realization on my part. But back when I was in grad school, I was quite active on the Love and Relationship chat boards on MySpace. I would leave for work around 5:30 in the morning and get home after 8:00 at night during my internship year. I lived alone. I was just a face in a sea of single adults at church. I didn't have any close friends outside of work, and the friends I was closest to at work ended up moving on to different positions anyway. Joe and I eventually reconnected during that year (I'd decided I was going to move to Washington after school ended and told him that), but I didn't have much of a social life. Sure, I'd try to squeeze in some time with friends on Saturdays when I wasn't busy with my internship and errands and wanting to relax, but I felt like I needed more social interaction than that. So MySpace kind of filled in the gaps, even if the friends I made on there are people I may very well never meet face to face. But I realized eventually that I was spending way too much time in my online reality and still missing out on human interaction. I eventually quit.

Then I realized I had done this before. Joe and I met on a networking site, after all. But when I left that site, most of the people I had met forgot about me. Some even hated me (because I attempted long distance relationships that didn't work out and flirted shamelessly and acted self-absorbed and childish) and slandered me.

Joe told me about a free online gaming site. A lot of the games appealed to me at first, but I found myself enjoying chatting with people more and spending a lot of time on there. Yet I want to interact more with people closer to my age (a lot of my "friends" on the site were several years younger than me, and some were in their early teens) and face-to-face. I closed out that account. SparkPeople has message boards, but I don't think I will have to worry too much about getting hooked on those and spending all day posting in there. At least, I hope I don't get hooked on those.

I have enjoyed the website so far. I've lost 7 pounds in 2 weeks. I am exercising more and eating less junk food (and smaller portions sometimes too). I am a visual learner, so having the numbers and graphs right in my face on there helps tremendously. Plus, I'm very competitive, and so I find myself pushing myself to get as many points as I can each day (you get little "trophies" for your profile with different levels of points). I'm really enjoying making this lifestyle change that for me is sustainable. Sometimes people have thrown me ideas that don't appeal at all, because I know it's not something I would stick with. But this doesn't seem so hard. And it's so organized! I LOVE being organized! I LOVE having everything in one place... support, an online food journal, a place to track measurements and workouts, and people like me! I belong to an infertility group where I can vent about how people around me are getting pregnant and having kids and somehow surrounding me (I swear I saw no less than 5 pregnant people in a recent trip to Target), reminding me of how inadequate, heartbroken, etc I feel.

So, I've been a little bit wrapped up in that the past few weeks. But I think that's okay. I'm thinking my obsessiveness about it will slowly die down a little bit and I remember that life isn't all about how much I weigh or how much I want to weigh.

For something else: Joe and I are celebrating our anniversary this week. We're going to be taking a mini vacation, for which I am very excited (especially since we're doing it on the cheap). For our anniversary gift, we picked up a blu-ray player yesterday. We love it so far. I'd purchased Discovery Channel's Planet Earth on blu-ray a while back because it was an AWESOME deal (and I've heard such great things about it), so we checked out the quality of that on our player for a few minutes yesterday after Joe set it up. He's been asking if we can watch more of that ever since. And we headed back to Best Buy (where he bought the player) and picked up a couple more blu-ray discs, which I know he wants to watch as soon as possible.