PAX is coming up. A three-day celebration of nerdery, video games and homemade costumes. At least that’s what I tell myself every year. Invariably it turns into a 72-hour marathon of uncomfortable self-loathing. Every time I find myself in a large group of people, I become acutely aware of how much I hate my body, and this sensation is oddly so much more pronounced when completely surrounded by my "folk." I fully appreciate this makes no sense, but there it is. 

I know I’ve said similar things in the past about my only goal with the blog is to find a point where I actually feel good about myself, but for some reason that still really resonated with me. So there it is, my goal for PAX this year is to feel awesome about myself. Well, I also want to impress ladies and not be an awkward mess in a building full of people who would actually get all my awesome Everquest jokes about Frogloks. 

In order to facilitate this glowing sensation of radical that I plan to cultivate around my person this year, I’ve got a few ground rules I’m laying down for the rest of August.

No goddamn beer

Canned calories are out. I could probably be swayed into a few whiskey fights, but nothing that even borders on actually getting drunk enough to have fun. This probably won’t be that big of a deal, considering once the con rolls around I’ll probably be comfortably hammered the entire time.

No cheat days

Also not a serious issue. As I’ll most likely catch up and then some on shitty food once the convention starts. Until then, I’m laying off anything resembling even a moderately irresponsible food decision. 

No self-loathing

Ok, here we go, this is the hard one. My brain loves this shit. I don’t agree with it, but I’m very clearly just along for the ride when it comes to my headspace. I’m going to use the rest of this month as a dry run of feeling cool about myself. This will most likely revolve around me beating sad bastard thoughts into submission as soon as they arise, and being a little bit more extroverted in public. Recently I’ve already been doing a pretty good job of this. The thought-policing part at least, but I’m still finding that I can do a just stunning job of bumming myself out from time to time. This is going to be my Pre-PAX endboss.

I have 18 days until the Con. I would really like to see myself pretty deep into the 250 range by then. I don’t know what I weigh right now, because I’m pretty sure I’d feel less awesome about myself right now if I stepped on a scale. Even if I don’t make my goal in time for the convention, I think I’ll be okay. At least I’m trying. Shit, I’ve been trying for over a year; that’s just sexy.

I used to always promise myself that I would never let my weight get so out of control that I’d be forced to resort to painting a Rascal scooter like an X-wing in order to impress chicks. It would have totally worked, because I’m clever at any weight class, and I would have totally painted the inevitable oxygen tank to look like an R2 unit, but I still swore that I would never let that happen. But I also did absolutely nothing to prevent it. Nothing at all. I noticed a number of morbidly obese people over the weekend, and couldn’t help but compare bodies, and map out how that would totally have been me in 3-5 years. That’s why I’m so fucking glad to have this Diary thing. I’m stoked if you read it, but you don’t have to -- at the end of the day, this is for me. Just as an FYI, though: When I die at the tender age of one thousand, I’m going to leave an incredibly sexy corpse, and a legion of emotionally broken followers.