Withdrawal

Yesterday was the toughest night yet. We had pizza vouchers in the mail. 50% off, buy one, get one free, free bottle of coke, free garlic bread, free this, free that. We ate more steamed chicken tits (tiny amount) and vegetables. Put it all in a bag and tossed it in the oven. Was tasty enough and satisfied us for about two hours.

It's always fucking skinless chicken. Sometimes it's beef, but that's very expensive. I put it on skewers. I put it in a bag. Cook it in fat-free yoghurt, which is all watery and sour and shit. And lettuce. Fucking lettuce. Between Monday and right now I ate four whole heads of lettuce. There's another one in the fridge and I had nothing to eat all day, but I'm just not desperate enough to eat another one of the stupid things. Yet.

So yeah, last night at 2am, we just couldn't take it anymore. Pizza guys deliver till 5 in the morning, you just click on all the stuff you want on their website, pay by PayPal, it doesn't even hurt. We set up an order, just to see how it feels. Typed in those 50% voucher codes. All I had to do is hit the order button. I didn't. I went to bed. I felt fucking awful. Thing is, I could have eaten that pizza, felt good for ten minutes and then I would have felt fucking awful, too. For different reasons. So I went to bed, even though I wasn't tired, and spent the rest of the night listening to my growling stomach.

What I ate this week. Sometimes I had bland, steamed chicken.

I'm aware that "withdrawal" is a bit of an extreme expression. I'm no alcoholic, I'm not a junkie, I'm just trying to stop eating junk food. No pain, no hallucinations, just the ever-present sensation of starvation. It still seems fitting - they don't talk of obesity as much where I'm from, as they talk about "Fettsucht". The addiction to fat. And yes, I'm fucking addicted to all of that garbage! You can only eat so many bell peppers (I had 18 this week) until you start craving pizza again. I'm allergic to the apples that Claire has been stocking up on, the nectarines are rock-hard and insanely sour and bananas are literally off the table, because apparently they're fatty and full of carbs and other shit you wouldn't expect to find in healthy food. Yay.

I'm not entirely sure wtf is going on with food these days, anyway. I mean, when I was a kid and my parents decided to order pizza, it was just that. You got fucking pizza. Or maybe lasagne, some salad, end of story. And there was always that awkward phone call beforehand. "It's your turn, I called them last week", that kinda thing. They'd still get half of the order wrong every time, you had to search around for small change, the whole thing was a bit of a pain.
Now it's perfectly normal to order online. Click on tasty images of food. No mixups, no looking for change, no trying to explain an order to some guy on the phone, who clearly doesn't speak your language. And you don't just get fucking pizza, either. There's pizza with cheese in the crust. Cheese and barbecue sauce in the crust. Fucking hot dog and mustard pizza crust. Salad? Try our chocolate-stuffed dough balls with icing sugar on top! And free coke for everyone!

I never tried it - as a fat guy I may have low standards, but this is where I draw the line.

You can supersize just about everything. You can have cheese inside the base of your pizza. I'm not saying it's impossible to eat healthy. Of course it's not - especially if you cook your own stuff and buy all the basic ingredients yourself. But junk food is getting more and more extreme - ordering pizza today is not what ordering pizza was to my parents. Pizza guy delivers ice cream, too! When I was a kid, we had chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, that kinda stuff. Domino's deliver 500g tubs of double fudge brownie liquid chocolate cookie dough marshmallow ice cream.

I didn't care so much if all of that stuff wasn't so fucking delicious. And I refuse to talk like one of those reformed cunts. I somehow managed to eat nothing but healthy stuff for a week, which means absolutely nothing. Let's talk again if I can pull this off for a whole month, without cheating. But my point is - I fucking hate healthy food! Many of you probably know an ex-fatty or two, who tell you about how healthy food with "natural ingredients" is oh so tasty and so much better than all that insta-garbage you cover in molten cheese and fried bacon. Lying scumbags! Retards, poptarts, fucktards, all of them!

Here's something I did with my food this week, out of sheer boredom:

I sliced, diced and skewered all of that shit, myself. Why? Probably to create the illusion that preparing the ever same ingredients slightly differently will result in a different meal. I dunno. They were okay, I guess. I wouldn't mind replacing some of that chicken with delicious, crispy pork. Maybe add some bacon here and there. But no can do. Heck, if at least I could have some rice with that stuff, but noooo, evil carbohydrates and shit. ARGH!

Rumbling stomach aside, my body seems to enjoy this torture. I'm wide awake. I could go for a walk right the fuck now. I could probably even jog around a bit if that didn't make me look completely pathetic. Makes a difference from my usual condition, where getting up to take a piss feels like a fucking chore. But that's why god invented the window, right? And there was always the food coma. Eat ungodly amounts of greasy stuff and spend the next two hours fighting to stay awake. So all of that is gone, which is a good thing, I guess.

I'm not working out. I don't exercise. Fuck that. Which is another reason why I'm being so extreme with this whole healthy eating business. I'm not gonna lose weight simply by eating only half the amount of unhealthy shit I usually have. I might stop gaining weight, but that's about it. I gotta get down to a healthy level as quickly as possible, then keep it by keeping track of what I eat every day. For the rest of my life. That is, if I even make it that far and don't actually hit that fucking order button on the pizza. Stomach is bitching at me right now. Here, have a bottle of water, you greedy bastard!

My grandmother has passed away last night. I'm fresh out of grandparents. I loved her dearly, but I'm feeling disturbingly little right now. Which makes sense, I suppose. I'm hundreds of miles away, we talked on the phone once, maybe twice a year. And it was always very awkward, she was pretty deaf and didn't understand much of what I said, anyway. Technically, nothing has changed. I just got that message from my brother. "She died". That's it. I don't have to go over there and help move her stuff out of the house. I won't be able to afford going to the funeral. There is no realization that a loved one is gone and will never come back. Just words. Just that message. No immediate effect. I assume I will receive a letter or a phone call at some point if there was a will. I don't really know how this works. I'd like to have something to remind me of them. My sister in law took a deck of Uno cards when they visited the house. My grandparents were seriously addicted to Uno for some reason.

STO lifetime-subscribers get cool shit like the Chimera Destroyer

Star Trek Online is offering lifetime subscriptions at a greatly reduced price. Those are quite possibly the only thing I can't get from Perfect World for free, being a press guy and all. They're awesome with their handouts - I'm getting promo codes, Romulan legacy packs, Hero of the North packs for Neverwinter and what not, buuuut they're being a bit stingy with their lifetime subs. And I kinda want one.
Ironically, STO isn't even all that great. It looks a bit dated these days, space is always flickering, there's the ever-present ability lag, which forces you to click the same hotkey over and over until something finally happens. And all the best ships cost money or they come from lockboxes, which cost even more money to open. Cutscene animations are shit and the hysterically bad, amateurish voiceovers come without lip-synching.

But I fucking love this game, because it contains more actual RPG than most MMORPGs I have ever played. When you play WoW, most of your skills, stats, everything is predetermined by the game for you. Warlords of Draenor will even change the stats on your armor set depending on what role you choose to play. No room for mistakes. No room for individualism. Claire's little sister loves WoW. So does their mother. Which is fine. WoW is fool-proof, which appeals to many of their 7.6 or so million subscribers. Nothing wrong with that.
But on STO I can optimize and number-crunch my way to awesomeness. There's a metric crapton of skills, consoles, upgrades, weapon types, ships, mines, torpedoes... I actually like joining group missions on there, seeing a whole lot of entirely different ships and play styles. Of course there's a lot of people who "just play", without any clue what gear and skills to pick other than stuff that simply looks cool, but I'm not even mad. The game isn't very punishing and lets you get away with some seriously bad setups - and seeing bad players with weak ships makes my ship look and feel that much better in comparison.

STO is the only MMO I've never really stopped playing since release. I only play a few weeks at a time, with many breaks here and there, because the game offers very little content to dedicated players. Claire created a Romulan character and reached the level cap all within one weekend. It's all very casual. It's a game for trekkies, not hardcore gamers. But that suits me just fine. I've maxed out all the reputations, I have all the best gear, all the most "epic" stuff, because it's ridiculously easy to get all of these things on there. And I still stand out from the crowd, because the majority of players don't go after the powerful stuff. Yay!

Long story short, I want that subscription, while it's still on offer. Not sure how to tell the Bear. Claire, if you're at work and reading this blog right now - we can totally afford it! Quadruple-digit amounts of money coming my way this month and all that. And it's my birthday in two weeks! And since we're no longer ordering pizza 'n' shit, we do kinda have a bit of extra money now, anyway. C'mooooon!

- Cat