The Mean State of Disappearing

Today very much depends on whether you're a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty kind of person.

Which if you're me is tricky. I'm not a glass-half-anything kind of person, I'm a glass full-or-glass-empty kind of person, or more accurately, a glass-empty-then-fill-the-damn-thing-up-again kind of person.
Today's weigh-in result is:
16 stone 10.75 pounds.

That's 1.75 pounds better than last week, and technically, an ogrefart better than I've been in any previous official weigh-in (and therefore better than I've been in recorded history blah blah blah).

The thing is, in a kind of confidential, behind-the-scenes reveal, I can now tell you that when I weighed unofficially on Friday morning, I actually tipped the scales at just 16 stone 9. For those of you with my kind of mathematical skill, that's a whole other, entirely different, 1.75 pounds better. Hence the yin-yang, glass-half-whatever nature of the day - how do you look at it? Yay, I've lost almost two pounds, or crap, what happened to that other nearly-two-pounds I thought I'd lost?

Have to say, I've gone back and forth about it most of the day, while actually being too busy to genuinely give a toss.
Then, on the tube home, I was reading my old mucker Aristotle. He's still banging on, bless him, about the idea of states, and emotions, having extremes, and deficiencies, and means - in terms of financial generosity for instance, he classifies prodigality (foolish spending), liberality (generous but reasonable spending) and stinginess (telling people to go fuck themselves rather than spare them a farthing). So I figure, while I'm not exactly his greatest fan, an Aristotelian approach to today might be the way to go - I'm neither extravagantly Disappearing, nor stingily Disappearing, I'm just in the mean state of Disappearing this week. The key, after ping-ponging back and forth for a while just barely beyond the 3.5 stone mark, is to continue in at least the mean state of Disappearing next week, and make some progress.

I'd pretty much come to this point when I walked in the door. There was a fat bloke on the screen, looking at blackened, diseased feet.
"Hi honey," said d, without really take her eyes off the screen.
"Err...hi honey," I said. "Whatcha watching?"
"Diabetic guy," she said. "Being scared of his feet turning black and falling off."
"Niiiiiiice," I said.
"That's nothing," she said. "You should have seen the penis..."
I'd been in the flat about forty seconds by this point and already some other diabetic's penis was a source of fascination.
"Sooo don't wanna see that," I said.
"Oh it was fascinating," she teased.
"Alright...well I'm going to the bathroom, while I still have a cock. Rewind it for me, we'll watch the diabetic penis..."

And so we did. One thing I never knew is that, as well as attacking your internal organs, and your eyeballs, and your feet, diabetes under certain circumstances can cause your foreskin to crack and...well, basically rot (the circumstances, I'm fairly sure, including owning a foreskin, but the programme wasn't absolutely clear on that). All thoroughly horrible and grim.

The guy in question was 6 foot something, and 24 stone. The doctor who was scaring the bejeesus out of him (and, by extension, all those of us who happen to be male and diabetic), handed him a kind of giant wobbly yellow loofah.
"You need to lose four stone," he said. "That's twelve of these. What you're holding is five pounds of fat..."

The Disappearing among us boggled rather at the size and shape and general...bulkiness of five pounds. I've never really considered five pounds as being all that much. But I did the math in my head - at this point I've lost 52.75 pounds - or ten and a half fat-loofahs. I tried to imagine them all piled up and around my currently-existing body.

Y'konw what, the mean state of Disappearing is jusssst fine. Because if you add in a time co-ordinate, and just stay in the mean over time, you end up losing a shitload of fat-loofahs. And hey, maybe next week, I'll have lost those almost-two extra pounds, and complete my eleventh loofah. Onward!