Day 23... a mess of a post.

I had a little bit of a falling out yesterday with the friend mentioned in my last post. I probably shouldn't have told him that "I was hungry" was a (and I'm not defending this) "F'ing Lame Excuse" (only I didn't say it quite politely). He hung up on me, I called Ang, Ang called him and when I got home, I was on the hotseat from Angela. I haven't talked to this friend yet, but he did IM me last night...

i don't understand why it was wrong for me to stop the fast

i can understand you feeling a bit isolated while you're still doing this, but still...

9:20 PM

fasting is a very personal thing, and you should seek to understand my true reasons for stopping before putting me on the defensive and asking me to give you one good reason you shouldn't think i'm a loser.

9:25 PM

anyway, i'm sorry that i reacted so harshly, but after that text from angela this morning that assumed i had given in to a physical urge, i was on the defensive waiting to hear from you.  anyway, i hope we'll be able to talk about this tomorrow after the situation has cooled a bit.

I don't know that I'm ready to talk. I'm certainly still upset, and I do realize that it's a personal thing, but at the same time, I still think that even quitting before the half-way point is kind of giving up.  He told Angela that he woke up hungry and that that hadn't happened in the previous days. I guess I know I should believe that and  I don't have any reason not to, but I guess I just don't. That's probably wrong. But part of me feels like he quit so that he could eat on his birthday and the Superbowl. That probably makes me an asshole. I don't know where to start dealing with THAT.  

I mean, I started out at 250. I haven't gotten 'ravenously' hungry yet, but it's not odd for me to feel some hunger. I've dropped weight (most of it probably water) but I still have a bunch of fat on me that I can burn. My friend is even bigger than I am. In theory, shouldn't he be able to go longer without food? Like I said, I just can't relate. I can't understand. 

My friend mentioned from the beginning that he didn't know if he'd go 40 days. Maybe not being committed to the 40 made it easier to opt out, made it easier to say that he'd prayed and 'heard from the Lord'. Ugh. Look at how awful I sound. I'm going to post this because I don't want to filter myself. If there's ugly inside of me, I want it to be out there so that I can get rid of it. I know I NEED to get rid of it, even if I really don't want to. 

If I was really telling the truth, I find myself a little superior... like I'm hot stuff... at least a chunk of the time. That's been there for years. Even in High School I had a lot of resentment that I wasn't in the honors group. I could have been if I had applied myself. I only worked as hard as I needed to and, thus, was looking in from the outside. In my head though, I knew I was just as good, if not better. I remember that it used to drive me crazy when I ran into someone who WAS better than me. Probably the best example of that was Jessie Shelton. Jessie was scary smart. She used to nonchalantly brag that she could read a page of text by looking at it. She hung out in the same little group that I hung out with in the AV department and just the fact that she was capable of things that I just wasn't wired for would drive me up the wall. 

It should have made me feel better that I did have gifts in other areas that Jessie didn't have... but I was too stupid to see that at the time. After high school, as I went off to broadcasting school (Let's go into radio! Whee!), Jessie went off to Princeton, then MIT for graduate work and then off for Post Doctorate work elsewhere. I've lost touch with her (we never really got along anyway), but it was one of my first exposures to real feelings of inadequacy. 

Y'know, since then, I've chased after the smart people and I've pretended to BE the smart person on occasion (ok, it's a mask I wear on a regular basis), but I fear that the truth is something different. 

There are all sorts of things I chase after. I enjoy the work that I do, but I work my ass off so that I can guarantee that I make more than my friends do. 

I used to brag (kiddingly) to my friend Eric that just because he'd run marathons (and eventually qualified for Boston) that he still hadn't done an Ironman. 

and why should I even be able to brag about the Ironman ANYWAY? Certainly there have been people that have done it MUCH better than I have. I barely finished. My freestyle was so awful I swam about 2.6 miles worth of backstroke, ruining my legs because I kicked them around the course. 

I had really long transitions because I was just trying to finish. 

I tried to ride the course as fast as I could... but old fatty couldn't do much on the hills. Then, I got to walk with my bike as I looked for a mechanic... holding my chain in my hand as cyclists rode by looking forlornly at me. I remember running into one of the guys that had helped fit me on my bike at Gear West in Minnesota. He recognized me (probably because there aren't THAT many heavy Ironman participants) and just looked really sad.... commiserating that I was in a pretty bad situation. 

Then, I walked the run course... not all of it, but most of it. That's not really Ironman behavior. Truth be told, maybe the Ironman behavior is just sticking it out, but let's let me keep beating myself up for a minute... it might make my friend feel better. :-)

Anyway, I just don't know that I'm in any sort of position to lord it over my friends head, but there's still part of me that wants to. Jim, the senior pastor at work, was preaching over the weekend and used a quote from Luther (which sadly I can't find). He talked about how "the old self is drowned in baptism, but the damn guy can swim!" 

Do you know how often I fear that's the case? 

I don't know where I'm going with this besides taking myself to task for taking my friend to task. Hopefully we can reconcile, one incident shouldn't destroy a friendship, but it's going to take some more introspection for me to get through this. I guess that's what the fast is for, isn't it? I think though that it will probably take longer than that, it will probably take my lifetime to sort all of this out. Maybe that's the lesson I need to learn. We'll see.