Where does the tohm go? (Mastadon Post)

Mostly I've been making my own lunches, when I used to just buy it, thus had time in the morning to blog. So a fortnight has gone by where I have had heaps of stuff to write about but no time to write it. So this will be about 4 posts in one:

Diet or Budget?

I realised that pretty soon I'll be as poor as moreley, and this will continue for a long time. The catch is I'm phenomonally rich now. Interest rates going up is good because my ING will just compound my interest. Really I'll have to beat inflation unless the Howard government keeps up the pointless tax cuts most people's saving ratio is -7% of gross income, mine is more like 30%. But the point of all my lovely saving is that after an extended period of travel I still want some sweet green in the bank.
So I have limited myself to $40 a week food budget. This represents about a 60% tightening of the screws. It was amazing how I just started finishing off old serial. Making whole meals out of bbq sauce virtually overnight.
And I'm losing weight. I always noticed when I tried to clean up my diet that an added benifit was it was cheaper. But I never really thought of approaching a diet with the relatively simple discipline of a budget. Shop once, $40 don't shop again for a week.
Its always good to add another level of discipline to my life. Really when you look at the amount of people over weight in the world (a small amount in the world really) but if you look at the disgustingly fat westerners of the world (disgusting not because they are bad people but what is happening when most people are living subsistance and we need whole buildings dedicated to working off the excess energy we consume) and I realise how fucking retarded our whole set up is.
GDP is how we have benchmarked our success, why we are envious of a country as behind our country as China simply because they have decided to jump on the capatalist bandwagon late.
GDP as a measure encourages workaholia, just plain trying to do more, if output goes up it's good, but GDP is a poor indicater of progress.
Workaholia means longer hours, Australians work the longest hours in the world (which we have to because our standard of management is amongst the poorest in the western world) longer hours necessitate the use of a car to try and minimise the impact on our recreational hours, and cars allow us to be fat.
You could not be fat if you had to ride to work. And you would save money supplementing your own energy, so you wouldn't need as much money. And thusly riding a bike to work and eating within the confines of a budget would be the opposite of progress because it would be bad for GDP.
Anyway I'm down to 76kg after a 3 month plateue of 77kg and I have a budget to thank for it.

Angry

I met up with Trav briefly in Sydney. That man is explosive, he really cares about professionalism and I have to say the man has standards.
He can drop the F-bomb beautifully and really get worked up about an industry like projectionism.
He'll even go so far as give an employer a heads up when a bad employee is heading their way.
That's the kind of standards their needs to be more of world wide. I mean I don't think its a real virtue to get optomistic and try and impose one's goodwill on reality.
Better to get angry (healthy aggression) and acknowledge what is and what is not and try and do something about it. Act on it.
Instead of all the plethora of goodwill activities that are simply about feeling good about something that is yet to achieve something.
Goodwill alone doesn't put something beyond criticism. A good intention executed with incompetence should be just as worthy a candidate for criticism as something of malicious intent executed competently.
I hope I never lose the anger, work last week was up and down for me. My anger was largely directed at myself, because I kept thinking people were sabotaging my careful plans because they didn't share my vision. But they didn't share my vision because I'd gotten my way without showing or sharing it. Because of the awkward politicalness of having to have this shit operate top down.
So I got angry at every attempt to undermine it, and undermine it they did because every layer of middle management thereon could see the work but not the light at the end of the tunnel.
I went and shared my anger though with people who are smart observant and reserve their judgement.
And then I came back up in mood and got the payload of the plan rolling out because of its own merit. Once other people stopped asking the question Why and started working on How it came through and better yet people started to take ownership of it.
And thats what I wanted, I jus got to reduce the anger I feel at people whose opinion differs from my own.

More posts to come, yet more discipline.