so much virtue: does it call for a renaming?

Recently I went to a fabulous tiki party held by a very old friend, someone I met back in the mid-nineties, and I saw a lot of people I used to run around with back when I was livelier and childless (and many of them have, like me, married and spawned and live a G-rated existence for the most part).  At the tiki party my iron willpower was much on display, as I was on a liver vacation (no alcohol for a month whatsoever to let my much-abused liver regenerate long before going to Burning Man).

"You really need to rename your blog," said more than one old friend.

"I know," I said.  "I especially need to change the description, where I say I don't get enough exercise.  Now I exercise all the time; I get panicky if I can't work out."  Everyone laughed.  I didn't mention it, but the "thinks too much" part of this blog's description is, more sadly, no longer accurate.  My brain has atrophied over the years, alas, and I am continually reminded by my spouse and children of how little I think.

And the iron willpower will continue to be exercised, thanks in large part to my attending that party.  A couple of old friends I hadn't seen in years were chatting about a game they are playing.  Being a gamer of sorts, I wanted to find out more about it, and it turns out they were in a diet competition.  For four weeks teams diet, exercise, drink a metric fuckton of water, and taunt one another, and then the winners are declared at the end.

"It's so much fun!" one said over and over again.

"Get ready to pee a lot," said the other.  "And it's so much fun."

I was interested.  "We're starting a new game soon," they told me.  I followed up, and now it's on.  My team is called the Jaguars, and we are taking on quite a few other teams in the "Game On Diet", www.thegameondiet.com.

Over the weekend I tried to figure out the basics of this rather ambitious program.  "Wait a minute," I said after I got the impression this diet banned drinking. "This is terrible!  I'm just coming off a liver fast, and I need to get my alcohol tolerance back up before Burning Man.  How do you other lushes handle this?"

A friend given to the consumption of fine alcohols reassured me.  "You can drink on your day off, have a drink with your meal off, and I usually take a 25 point hit for drinking on another day."  I decided I could live with that.

This diet is more than a diet; it tries to harness the power of competition to reform a person's life.  We are supposed to give up a bad habit and acquire a new one, a habit which is unrelated to food.  I pondered this.  I already took up exercise, cut back on my drinking, and have been virtuous in no end of ways; what else do I need to do?  I'm not thrilled with becoming any more virtuous than I currently am; I know my limits.

Finally I decided to make my good habit writing every day and my bad habit asking my husband to get things for me, a habit acquired after my hysterectomy and reinforced after my terrible ankle injury.   "That's pretty vague," criticized the husband.  But he was able to see the upside.  "Does this mean you'll stop asking me to get out of bed and turn off your bedside light?"  I didn't bother to mention, yet again, that my stubby little arms can't reach the bedside light.  I just said, "Yes.  Yes, it does."  Pleased, he wandered off to do whatever it is that he does of an evening, and I went off to drink more water, eat sensibly, write, and no matter what, not ask my husband to help me with small things I could theoretically do myself.