Monday Morning Grumble

I didn't blog over the weekend, mainly because I was too depressed to write. I was depressed because of my lack of progress with my diet, I'm really sick of my job, and my closest friend left for a six-month tour of duty in Iraq on Saturday night.

Although my diet and job certainly are contributing to my feelings of unhappiness, I'm most depressed about my friend. She and her husband just adopted some young children, and it seems so incredibly unfair and cruel that the military would send her off just a month after the adoption was finalized. The older of the two kids remembers her biological mother. As we stood in the airport, she sobbed. She was losing her mother for the second time in her young life.

Of course we all expect this to be temporary, and the good news, if you can call it that, is that my friend's job is a non-combat position in a relatively safe area. Of course "relatively safe" still is darn dangerous, and there's a chance my friend could come home psychologically traumatized, maimed, or in a box. Sadly, her kids are old enough that they are aware of this. Not only do they have to deal with the grief of their mother's absence, they have to deal with the worry that something bad will happen. That's a pretty tough load to lay on little kids.

I've spent a lot of the weekend trying to process how I feel about all of this, and I've come to the conclusion that we need to end the war in Iraq. When it started, I was in favor of it. After all, the Iraqis supposedly had Weapons of Mass Destruction and needed to be stopped. Now that it's come out that they never had WMDs in the first place, and we've destabilized the region, the United States has major egg on it's face.

Worse, by doing this, we've created a situation where every Arab in the world hates our guts, and rightly so. We didn't have justification to go over there in the first place, and we are losing the war. The insurgency is getting worse and worse, the troops overseas are demoralized, and nothing positive has happened.

The other justification for going over there, the Iraqi oil, has proved to be a bunch of garbage, too. Yeah, the Iraqis are sitting on top of huge oil reserves, but the war has halted their production. The refineries have been looted or destroyed, and they can't produce. This war was supposed to reduce the price of gas at the pumps. Now it's rapidly increasing the price. In my neighborhood, we've seen prices approaching $4.00 a gallon, and I expect we'll be past that by the end of summer.

What's making me the most angry about all of this is that the war is destroying families (American and Iraqi) for very little purpose. If we are going to fight a war, then fight it to win. Go over there, kill everybody, and declare land the United States province of Iraq. Otherwise, it's not our business to meddle in what amounts to the internal politics and civil war of another country.

Didn't we learn anything during the Vietnam war?

Apparently not.

At this point, I can no longer say that I'm proud to be an American. Rather, I am deeply embarrassed and ashamed.

As for my diet, I made a conscious decision on Friday morning to abandon it for the weekend. Now when I say "abandon," that didn't mean eating everything in sight. It just meant that I didn't bother to formally exercise and I stopped counting calories. I still made an effort to be more active (I washed the car and weeded the vegetable garden) and tried to skip some of the worst of the worst at mealtimes. I ate a lot of foods I would normally skip, like pizza, Mexican food, hot dogs and fruit smoothies, but I mostly passed on chips, soda, candy and out-and-out crap.

My weight was 245.0 this morning. That's down 0.6 lbs since Friday, but up 0.6 lbs from my lowest weight on Tuesday. I guess I can't complain too much.