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Today's title was the subject of an email my friend Kyle sent me... he says his email provider has a faeture where with one click they can insert a random (and generally non-sequitorish) bit of text as the subject. I like that one.

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Science Politics of the Moment

"Situation science is about respecting both sides of an argument, not just the one supported by the facts! That's why I always teach the controversy! Like the Evolution Controversy, or the Global Warming Controversy... not to mention the Tobacco Controversy, the Mercury Controversy, the Pesticides Controversy, the Coal Slurry Controversy, the Dioxin Controversy, the Everglades Controversy and the Acid Rain Controversy...."

Heh. Look at what I titled that, for all you geeks out there, would you say strikeout is the new "^H^H^H^H^H"? (For non-geeks: the latter is a geekish way of pretending to take something back when writing online text, sometimes a poorly configured computer terminal would put in ^H characters when you went to erase something, so you could generate humor by writing the word you really meant, then a series of ^H's, then writing the polite word or euphemism directly after.)

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Personal Issue of the Moment
Lately I've been trying to think more deeply about what "food issues" I have, and my relationship to eating in general. I know I'm not usually an "emotional eater", in terms of using food to help with stress or bad feelings. And I don't have a particularly big appetite.

I think, ultimately, I find food to be a terrible distraction.

It's sort of like Snoopy and his "I could have sworn I heard a chocolate chip cookie calling me..." line, except it applies to most foods. Having ready to eat food around is dangerous for me, because I'll start thinking about what it tastes like, and often won't stop intermintently thinking about until the food is gone, one way or the other.

Possibly for similar reasons, I don't leave much food behind on my plate. And I do tend to eat quickly, sometimes embarrassingly so, because while I enjoy tasty food a great deal, I kind of want to get it over and done with and move on to the rest of life.

I enjoy good food but in a kind of shallow of way, and so value something that's convenient over food that might ultimately be better but takes more work. (Because, despite its distracting qualities, in my Interesting=Good worldview, I don't find food all that interesting, and will therefore try to adjust my life to spend less time, energy, money, and attention on it.)

The silver lining about this, diet-wise, is that I don't mind eating relatively dull diet-y stuff, as long as there aren't many tastier alternatives readily at hand. Also, sometimes I can get myself to be content with just a nibble of something. But other than that, it's kind of a challenge to deal with.

Let me know what you think, if you ever find yourself thinking in similar ways... it took a lot of introspection for me to codify it to this extent, but I'm happy to finally be able to put it into words.