Dick's Day: A Day of Degeneracy

 Saturday, April 22, 2006 6:19 AM

  Peggy:

I’m taking the liberty of sharing this email with a few hundred close friends because it’s so morally instructive.

After our Departmental Honors Thesis Orals, I had only two small, silver-dollar-sized scones (which I chose to classify as non-desserts) and announced that I would abstain from any of the other tempting pastries.  

Then I asked Kendra to take the still-full tray of pastries from the BATS lab when she left at 5 PM, because I’d be staying for a while longer and needed to put Satan behind me. Also, I contracted to pay her personally $20, if I had anything else from the tray.  

And that worked well—I stayed clean. 

But about 5:30 PM I had one of the half-dozen commercial cookies I’d noticed in the BATS Lab fridge. Cheap, gaudy, but delicious. So I had one more. (These were not part of my $20  performance-management contract with Kendra, but I’d decided to kill the whole bag of cookies and pay my customary $20 penalty to the BATS Lab fund.)  

But then I had the good judgment to check out the nutritional info—170 calories, 7 grams of  fat, 1 gram of fiber. I panicked and ran to my WeightWatchers’ point calculator. One of those very-medium-sized cookies was 4 WeightWatchers points! Interesting what a chilling effect that info had on me. If I hadn’t seen that, I’d have finished off the pack of cookies. But armed with the WeightWatchers info, I wisely once again, put Satan behind me by self-righteously grabbing the bag of remaining cookies and taking them to the trash container out in the hall. But on the way, I grabbed one more cookie for just one more bite, but ended gobbling down that third cookie before reaching the trash container. 

Then I went back to my laptop in the BATS Lab to knock off a couple hours of writing and thereby get a little closer to my weekly writing quota, on which I was seven hours behind; but instead I spent the two hours answering email—important work, but not my official writing. 

At 8 PM, I packed my laptop to head home. But in a familiar moment of weakness, I decided to go to the trash container and fish out one more cookie, one for the road. (Incidentally, I’d emptied the cookies from their package directly into the trash container so they would not be staying in their hygienic package and thereby tempt me. But maybe one would be on top of one of the others and thereby still hygienic, or maybe they would just be lying on some hygienic notepaper someone else had tossed in the container before me.) However, when I pulled the lid off the trash container, it was empty. The custodian had already emptied the containers for the day.

Week 4-17-2006
Day	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun
Weight	146	144	146	145	145	145
Allowed Points	30	35	34	35	34	35	36
Actual Points	30	60	34	43.5	34

Love,

Uncle Dickie

---

Week 3-06-2006
Day	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun
Weight	145.5	144.5	144	144.5	144.5	144.5	144.5
Allowed Points	27	29	27	29	27	29	31
Actual Points	27	29	27	29	27	27	31

Week 3-13-2006
Day	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun
Weight	146.5	145	145	145	145.5	147	147.5
Allowed Points	30	31	29	31	29	29	25
Actual Points	30	31	29	31	49.5	57	25

Week 3-20-2006
Day	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun
Weight	146	144.5	144.5	?	?	153	148
Allowed Points	21	31	30	20	20	25	27
Actual Points	21	31	119	91	98	25	25

Week 3-27-2006
Day	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun
Weight	146	144.5	146	144	145	143.5	142.5
Allowed Points	24	31	24	31	30	31	31
Actual Points	24	40	23	31	30	31	31

Week 4-10-2006
Day	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thur	Fri	Sat	Sun
Weight	145	143	144.5	145.6	144	148.5	145
Allowed Points	35	35+	35+	36	35	36	30
Actual Points	35?	65?	43.5	35	50	35	32