Forced Morality

The theory of a business having a morality clause is sound. By that, I mean that your company has people sign a clause saying that they will live by a certain standard of ethics that are connected to the profession and promise not to place value of money or power over that of human life. You won't fake electricity black outs that end up causing people hooked to life sustaining machines to die just do that you can make more money from them having to use other electric companies. You won't use your position of power to coerce people with less power to have sex with you.  You won't falsify reports to make it look like your unsafe product is safe.

Unfortunately, it seems like that kind of morality is never discussed when people get hired. The concept of NOT using the job to screw over people (literally or figuratively) just isn't something that seems all that important. If it were, I would be fine with it. It is, after all, honorable.

Instead, most often we see morality clauses attached to people's jobs when it's about the company's religion and the person's private life.  They want you to live according to their beliefs not only while you are at work, but also outside of it. If they don't believe in drinking, then they do not want you to drink. If they do not believe in sex before marriage, then they do not want you to have sex before marriage. Even if something is perfectly legal, they still want you to live by their rules or you will be fired.

I would never sign this kind of morality clause. Ever. I don't care if I agreed with everything they wanted me to abide by, I still wouldn't sign it. I believe it is a violation of my rights as a private person and quite unAmerican. People should be allowed to live by their own sense of personal morality. If they do their job well and aren't hurting anyone at your company, it's none of your business what they do when they're not there.

I know that a lot of people end up signing morality clauses because they feel like they don't have a choice. Times are hard and jobs are difficult to find. Still, I believe this is one place where we should draw the line. If you work for someone, you are there to perform tasks for them for a set number of hours. You don't owe them  your whole life.

If a company asks you to sign a morality clause, I suggest you don't. Inform them that working for their company isn't worth you being a slave to their beliefs. And, again, I don't care if you believe the same way they do. That shouldn't matter. If enough good workers turn these people down, maybe they will get the hint that they need to remove this policy. Maybe they'll realize they can't bully people into acting the way they should.

Because of the job situation in our country, the average worker is at risk of having a lot of bad things happen to them. I read countless stories of people having to go to three or four interviews and jump through all kinds of hoops, just to get a minimum wage job. People are upping the standards for almost everything, requiring more and more levels of education and qualifications for jobs that do not really need this level of certification. There is a kind of bullying quality to it. Perspective employers are starting to believe they can ask anything of people who want jobs, even, as in this case, a part of their souls.

Not only would I never sign a morality clause, I would also tell the person asking me to do it that they were pretty evil. They were trying to extort behavior from me 24/7. They were trying to force me to live in a way that didn't set right with who I was. If I didn't comply, even if I was the most qualified person who interviewed for their job, they wouldn't hire me. Like I said, it's fairly evil.

I have a moral policy against working for evil people.

GoT Geekery

Facebook has a new Game of Thrones game and of course I had to start playing it. It has some kinks that need to be worked out and it slows down sometimes, but overall, I like it a lot. It's a basic script game, but there are some advancements. In the spirit of 'choose your own adventure' books, each possible quest has various options, most of which lead you towards certain alignments. You build crap too and upgrade it, but that is kind of dependent a lot on how you are structuring your character. And, to me, that is the best part. You truly get to structure this character.

Everyone has the same basic setup. You are a recently widowed person who has managed to rise to minor nobility. You have at least two children (the oldest being an annoying daughter named Jayne) and have been awarded a small holding because you helped to chase out some slavers. Everything you do past that point is up to you.

My character is named Lady Blackwood, a former Whisperer (spy). She is very devoted to her family, follows the Old Ways, but does so in a very cunning manner. In any given situation, she will always put her family first, even brat daughter Jayne. It is her strongest motivation for everything she does. So if one of my three options has something to do with family, that is what is chosen.  Family will also include anyone who is in her inner circle, such as close advisers.

She will always opt for a cunning solution over a truthful one. Lady Blackwood doesn't feel the truth gets you very far, because no one else in Westeros is telling the truth anyway. She will also follow the Old Ways because in the books, the Blackwood family is still one of the families who do. So for her, following this path is still about following family tradition.

I have to say, having such a strongly defined code for the character makes it relaxing for me. Even if the options wouldn't be the one that I, personally, would take, I know how I've written up Lady Blackwood, so her choices are very clear. Her motives are very clear and why she does what she does is obvious to me. As much as I could never be someone in my own life who was limited by such a narrow code, I can understand its appeal.

So even if I totally screw the game up, I know I did so with motives true to this character. And, honestly, if she ends up with her head chopped off, that's actually in live with how the books go.

Patience: Could it be My Virtue?

I would love to say I've always struggled with being a patient person, but that would imply I ever gave it any thought. For some reason, patience has always seemed like some foreign concept that I had no part of. It was kind of like speculating what was happening in someone else's backyard. Interesting and full of possibilities . . . but not really any of my business.

Instead, I always kind of viewed life like Wile E. Coyote falling off of a cliff. Sure, sometimes I would have my fall broken by branches or rocks, but eventually, I was going to smash into the ground below. It didn't matter if I was patient about this. It was going to happen, it was going to be bad, and my thoughts were best spent on how I could salvage things after impact.

Patience always felt like some kind of distant luxury. It was for people who were moving from one good situation to the next. It was their rather easy struggle with handling their own anticipation. That just wasn't my life.  The closest I came to patience was learning how to stay sane in the midst of dread, and I really wasn't even all that good at that.

I've talked to a lot of people who grew up poor and chaotic. I've read a lot of stuff by them as well. One of the things we struggle with as adults is learning to measure out situations. The best example I can give you of this has to do with one of my eating problems.

See, I have a lot of trouble forcing myself to ration out fun food. For most of my life, if I bought a box of cookies, I ate them until they were gone. There wasn't any 'I eat one now and then there will be more for later.' Nope. I would eat them until the box was empty. This kind of binge eating happened because when I was a kid, treats were always at risk to be taken away from me.

If one of my step-fathers noticed I liked something, it suddenly became a weapon for them. The second stepfather was the worst about this. I can remember several times when he would get my mom to buy my favorite candy and then forbid me from eating any. I would have to sit there and watch the rest of them eat it.  I'm not really sure what he was trying  to accomplish with this. The only thing he did accomplish with it was making me want to rip out his throat. Oh, and I guess he accomplished to plant these seeds of "eat it until it's gone so they can't take it away from you' mentality. Asshole.

Anyway, in this process of trying to become a somewhat healed and sane person, I think I'm going to start exploring this concept of patience. It's been flirting with me since the beginning of the year. The whole Tax Thing was a lesson in patience. I had to keep myself calm and remind myself that it would be solved. The knit project is a lesson in patience as well. One of the colors is fairly dreadful to my sense of taste, but I know that it's going to look beautiful with everything else.

Most importantly, I think I need to explore patience as a tactic for sustaining long and involved processes, such as losing weight. I need to learn how to use this patience stuff to keep myself focused on the big picture, to console me when I get discouraged, and to keep me going as this process begins to lose its novelty.

This isn't going to be easy. It may seem strange to a lot of you, but I just honestly have very little clue as to how to be patient. I get agitated and nervous. I start to fall back into dread. Or, you know, I just get bored and say 'fuck it' to the whole process. That isn't serving me well though, so I want to change it. I want to learn to be a patient person, who can use this power of patience to get her through the day. Even the stressful shitty days.

I have no idea if I can do this, but I'm going to try.

Sunday Yarn

I made a lot of progress on the knit project. I think I'll actually stick to my schedule for it. I know how I want it to look, but I'm going to have to do some practice with part of it. I'm planning on crocheting the boarders and it's been a long while since I've done any serious crochet work. This could either prove to be beautiful or ruin the whole damned thing. I'm hoping it doesn't ruin it.

I love knitting, but I will always have a soft spot in my heart for crocheting. My grandmother taught me how and it was something that always bonded us. When I would work on something, I would always bring it over so she could look at it. In fact, the very first thing I ever crocheted (the product of when she taught me) is laying across my feet as I type this. It's the most ugly afghan ever, but I love it.

Aside from a strange skin rash, which I hope is unrelated, that has basically been my day. Any day spent in the peaceful company of yarn, however, is a good day.

Goals of the Day

Today I set a goal of getting my knit project to 15 inches. I did it. I also set a goal of doing my food diary before any late night snacking (because if I didn't have the calories to spend, I wasn't going to snack). I did this as well. Two goals accomplished, by me of all people. How very awesome.

I want to have this portion of the knit project finished and be started on the next phase of it by Monday.I would also like to continue the habit of the food diary. I want that to become just a routine part of my day. In fact, I'm more interested in it becoming a habit that I am in making adjustments. Although, I would like to keep up with the idea that if I don't have the spare calories by a certain point in the evening, I just don't use them. I have a feeling that will make quite a difference in my life.

Anyway, short post tonight, but at least it's a productive one. Goals, I has them. I even accomplish some of them.

And Knowing is Half The Battle

I will say this, tracking my food intake is both enlightening and kind of scary. Though, honestly, it is explaining to me a lot about why and how I've gained weight over the years. It's one thing to suspect or even assume there are a lot of calories in donuts. It's another thing to see the reality of how quickly they can wreck your allotted numbers. Dammit.

Despite the scary, I'm enjoying the awareness. I should honestly start trying to be THIS aware of everything I do. Keep in mind, this is the total antithesis of how I usually function. I'm the person who hasn't kept a checking account in over ten years because I couldn't make myself write down how much money I was spending and stayed constantly overdrawn. It was one of those situations where I realized it was just better to stop.

Now though, I'm thinking if I ever have enough money to actually spend it on more than just basic bills/rent/food, it would be a good idea to actually chart where all of it goes. That way I would have not only a better understanding of my spending habits, but also be less shocked when I had nothing left five days before my next payday. If I decided to make changes, I would have a larger amount of data to consider.

This is basically what I plan on doing with the food diary. When I begin to make the next round of changes, I will be able to do so with more than just 'oh yeah I should eat less of ______' because that rarely works for me. With the diary, I'll be able to see what days I eat more, how work outs affect my food consumption, or even which meals need the most work. I'll have more answers so I can ask more questions. I'm really excited about this.

I'm a firm believer in creative problem-solving. I think the big mistake most of us (myself included) make when we're trying to solve our problems is that we keep trying the same thing over and over again. We get mad when it doesn't work. We blame aspects of the problem for not changing to our solution. Somehow the fact that this is illogical escapes us.

Look, if you keep doing the same thing and the situation doesn't change, then you need to change what you are doing. Don't keep frustrating yourself by assuming if you do it that way (and yell louder) one more time that's going to change. If your solution isn't working, it just isn't working. Stop it, reevaluate, and alter your plan. You're a creative person. You can do that.

The amount of weight I need to lose at this point can overwhelm me. Sometimes I get really freaked out about the length of this process, most because I worry that I won't stick to it. Then I remind myself that one of the reasons I started this journey was because I realized that if I'd kept with a 'lose the weight' plan that I started ten years ago, I'd have been at a healthy weight for a few years by now. The time is going to pass no matter what I do. I can either spend that time trying to work on this problem, or I can just sit back and let the problem get bigger . . . literally.

A New Project

I've added a healthy living app to my life. It's MyFitnessPal and it was suggested my my therapist. Actually, she suggested a different one, but I like this one more. You can access it both from the usual internet and from your mobile device. In my case, 'mobile device' is my Kindle.

You tell it how many calories you want to use in a day and it logs that for you, taking in what food you eat and how much you exercise. They have a blogging option. I won't blog there every day like I do here (okay, almost every day here) but I think I should do one at least once a week. This was my first one.

Hi there. My name is Lil and I'm new to MyFitnessPal. This is the first time I've ever used a fitness app and the first time I've taken an active role in documenting my food. It's scary to me, but I think it's also very necessary.

While I don't know how much I weighed for sure in January of 2012, we think it was close to 560 lbs. Years of trying to lose weight and then just giving up in despair, then not caring as an act of defiance, had gotten me to that weight. But last year, I started trying to take small steps to change things. Literally.

I started walking my driveway. I walked it once a day for a month, then twice a day. I added an extra lap to the first round after another month. Slowly I began to build strength and started doing other kinds of exercise. Physical activity isn't easy when you're my size, but it's not impossible.

In December of 2012, my doctor weighed me at 506 lbs. This is a significant change in my life, though most people don't really notice it that much. I feel so much better about things now and find I have a positive outlook on how things may change over the coming years.

In some ways, I've always functioned under the false assumption that things have to be perfect for me to lose weight. I have to eat perfectly and do perfect work outs. That isn't true. I have to eat less and move more. Over time, yes, more changes will have to be made. In the beginning though, the important thing is that you just start changing something.

Anyway, that's my new project. I feel rather positive about it. Heh.