25-50-75: Day 22

25
Lost 4 pounds so far.  Not the marathon weight loss I'd envisioned, but I am happy for progress.  The goal here has never been about becoming thin--I'm never going to be that, I never have been that, and I don't particularly want to be that, I like my curves--but I do want to be healthier.  So, I'm aiming for a healthy weight that makes me feel good.  It's never been about the number on the scale so much as it is about how my body feel and how my clothes fit.  I feel good when I'm a size 12, I'm not now, so that's my goal.  I have an idea of what weight goes with that size, but if I'm off by a little I don't care.  I'm not making health changes to become some fashion-forward bastion of beauty and consumer/capitalism driven style.  And I'm certainly not doing it for a man.  Anyone lucky enough to be with me will love me for who I am, not how I look.

50
Having just completed In the Woods by Tana French, I can say I have read 12 books so far and am into my 13th.  Again, the going is slower than I anticipated, but on the book front part of that is due to choosing 300+ pagers.  If I stuck with smaller books, as a friend told me, I could knock a lot more out.  I quickly thanked him for his foray into the world of the obvious and picked up the 599 page The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall.

First, the French.  As a rule I do not read supermarket fiction.  You know the ones I mean, endcaps at Dillons or Hy-Vee with the "hot" reads of the day, all splashily displayed with the same wanton lust as, say, detangler or white tea and jasmine scented hand lotions.  These are not items you buy the grocery store: they're too expensive and too main stream to be considered luxurious in anyway save for the price.  But, we've all been known to buy ourself a little happy in the form of an over-priced egg shaped lip balm (strawberry flavored) simply because it was too cute to not get us out of our self-indued-why-won't-someone-ever-really-love-me-funk, and so, thus entered French's novel into my life.

Told in first person by an Irish detective with a carefully cultivated British accent to hide his cultural heritage, it's the story of a man looking into the murder and disappearance of a 12 year old girl in the woods in a suburb just out of Dublin.  A wood where three other children disappeared years before, only one of whom returned.  And that boy was our detective.  A little cliche, sure, but the man's mania over not being able to remember the events of that tragic day plays so beautifully against the taut suspense of the current case that you don't get tripped up by the obvious over-reaching of the parallel, or at least I didn't.

This isn't a book that will win any awards for earth-shattering fiction writing, it's not Colum McCann for heaven's sake, but it was gripping and I did enjoy it.  If you need a good summer read, beach or pool or couchside, it's a good one. (Lovers of crime shows will dig it, people with young children may want to steer clear).

The Udall is good so far.  As the title implies, it revolves around a man practicing the principle of plural marriage.  He has 4 wives and 32 children and a failing construction business.  Already the ties to HBOs Big Love--a show I loved until they copped out with the series finale--and it rings with the truth of the memoir I read last week, Escape.  I may have noted before that I have a fascination with Mormons and ploygamy, but in this case I really wanted to read something else by Udall.  I read his Miracle Life of Edgar Mint when it first came out and loved it, so I was eager to see that this had to offer.

Nearly a third of the way in to this challenge, I can say I am proud of myself for sticking with it.  If I want a day off from the healthy eating, I take it.  If I want to watch movies instead of read (as I did today: The Rum Diary, B+ and Love & Other Disasters, C) I do.  The challenge isn't about completion in a lockstep way that keeps me from enjoying it, it's about the journey and trying to push myself.

As a very wise person said to me today, perfection doesn't exist so trying to achieve it is absolutely pointless.  Instead, we have to look for the things that feed our souls.  That's what this summer is about for me.  I hope you are doing the same.