Juice Fast update

So the Juice Fast lasted from Wednesday to Friday. Sort of felt like forever, but at the same time Friday wasn't all that bad. I think I was starting to get used to it. I managed to lose a total of 8lbs in 3 days, so I'm assuming it's mainly water weight. But it was nice while it lasted! I'm trying to slowly go back to "real" food, so hopefully the effects of the fast will last for a little while.

Even though I had a sinus infection, I actually felt a lot better during the fast than I'd expected to. I think there might actually be some truth to the whole "juicing makes you feel more healthy" thing. I wouldn't be against trying it again sometime. Chris saw super-shining results, but I'll wait to comment on that until he posts regarding his thoughts on it.

Yesterday we started falling off the healthy-train, though. :( Breakfast was half a Grapefruit with sugar, snack was craisins and walnuts, lunch was non-existant, and then a small piece of birthday cake and ice cream at my mom's. Then many hours went by and Chris started to get hungry (how dare he be able to eat more than me! :P) so we picked up a plate of beef yaki udon at the Japanese restuarant down the street to split. We also each got a Summer roll (which seems to be some sort of rice paper filled with greens, tofu, and some thin white noodles I don't recognize). It was MORE than enough. I don't want to start over-eating already...

This morning I had an Odwalla juice, even though I'm not really hungry yet. But I got up at 6:20, so I figured around 8:30 I should probably actually ingest something. I wonder when I'll get hungry today. I bet my body is still working off that udon from yesterday...

Anyway, I've gained back a pound a day so far since going off, while Chris has continued to lose weight. It's so hard to compete with a man when it comes to weight loss. For some reason they always seem to lose it so much faster! :P

BPAL - Nephilim

Again, months old. But again, my opinions remain the same.

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Got a bunch of new BPALs recently! It's the first transaction I've actually set up myself... the previous ones have all been Beth saying "I think I'm going to order these, and they're also offering these ones you might be interested in." But I finally decided to go through the entire General Catalogue and write down the names of the ones that sounded interesting. I noticed an utterly predictable trend: if it was named after a man or had a particularly dark or rugged concept behind it, I wanted it. A few exceptions for and against, of course, but that was the general pattern.

So I took this list and started looking for sales that had bunches of matches for low prices, and lo and behold: I made two orders. One of them, a batch of 21, is currently on a slow boat from Shanghai, because the world is, unfortunately, a little large. But I'm in no hurry, because the other shipment is already here: 16 imps and decants from rayvn1, plus a few thoughtful extra samples and imps she sent. It would seem she tracked down Beth's wish list as well and sent an imp of Liz, which is hard to find, which places her firmly on my "awesome people" list. That, and the fact that she's a big fan of Monkey Island.

The BPAL I chose today is... Nephilim! In case the title didn't give it away.

The Nephilim are an interesting topic for me... my personal religious background stems from evangelical Protestant Christianity with a fairly literalist take on the Bible. To those not versed in those terms, it's pretty stereotypical American Christianity, with a belief that anything written in the (Protestant) Bible overrides science and history alike, although some inconvenient things go ignored. I have kept Christianity, however I've since moved on to my own biblical interpretations. Anyway, that's my background, and it's why I found it bizarre that I hadn't heard of the Nephilim until after high school.

The Nephilim are... well, that depends on who you ask. They're from Jewish mythology, the offspring of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men," as Genesis puts it. The latter part is pretty much always "women." Not much room for interpretation there. But the "sons of God" can mean descendants of Seth or Cain, or angels, or fallen angels (who are considered demons). Or the blood of Orion, but that one doesn't get much credence. Neither does the "aliens" interpretation, generally.

Anyway, it seems, from my previous conversations with people, that the commonly accepted interpretation of this within American evangelicalism is either angels or fallen angels (or angels which subsequently become fallen angels). The Nephilim, then, are half-angels... which means that they're either giants or have superpowers. Or both.

There's more to say about them, of course, but the point is... they're kind of fascinating from my personal religious perspective. Within Protestant Christianity, there is so much Jewish mythology that gets left out, and the stuff that survives (i.e., in my opinion, the entire book of Genesis) is tailored to be coherent without necessarily relying on the full mythology behind it, and to be effectively woven together. Kind of like how the King Arthur and Merlin we remember come mainly from Le Morte D'Arthur rather than all the many detailed individual legends it was compiled from.

But the Nephilim... that's the thing. They don't weave together quite so neatly... they're mentioned once in Genesis as becoming the "heroes of old," and then they're not mentioned again until their descendants are slain for having the nerve to live in a nice place.

...Which, strangely enough, is after the Great Flood, which supposedly killed off everything that lived on land, minus a certain family and collection of animals in a boat. The first mention of them is apparently long before this. Biblical literalists will, of course, say that there must have been more Nephilim created after the flood, but that sounds like a cop-out to me. But if we just sit down and think about it, the truth becomes apparent. There's a reason they survived the flood, you see.

Prepare yourselves for the dark secret of the Nephilim:

---they're actually mermaids!---

Makes sense now, don't it? Those crazy Manatees with seashell undergarments that sexually deprived sailors have been hallucinating for centuries? Nephilim.

Now with both of those ancient mysteries explained beyond a reasonable doubt, onto the actual scent:

Dark children conceived from the union of Fallen Angels and the Daughters of Men. According to lore, the angel Shemhazai led a group of his angels to earth to instruct mankind in the ways of piety and righteousness. After a time, the angels became prey to earthly desires and began to lust after the daughters of man, and thus they fell. They instructed their mortal mates in the arts of conjuration, summoning, necromancy and other magickal arts. The fruits of their union are the Nephilim: possessed of superhuman strength, cunning, and infinite capacity, and hunger for, sin. Venerated as heroes by some, vilified by most, the Nephilim eventually annihilated one another in a cataclysmic civil war instigated by the angel Gabriel as punishment for their transgressions. Holy frankincense and hyssop in union with earthy fig, defiled by black patchouli and vetiver, with a chaotic infusion of lavender, cardamom, tamarind, rosemary, oakmoss and cypress.

Tsch. I should really remember to read the descriptions first.

For the record, I think the lore is at least partially incorrect. The chances of an entire race completely annihilating itself is pretty slim, because someone, somewhere, is bound to come out of it alive without any mortal wounds, even if Gabriel schemed it. And even that aside, I'm sure there were a handful of pacifist Nephilim who chose to be conscientious objectors.

And those who did survive? They became mermaids. End of story.

In the bottle, it smelled very reminiscent of Beth's personal favorite BPAL, Phoenix in Autumn... which is to say warm and earthy in a way that's hard to place. It smells like a fairly dark brown. That's not entirely helpful, I know, but it didn't really turn out the same as Phoenix in Autumn, so further comparison would be unprudent.

When I first put this on, I said "dates or fig." The description clearly leaned toward the latter, so fig it is. And it's a lot of fig! Slightly sweet, but not in a way that makes it compromising to my perceived masculinity. No complaints there!

There's something else along with it though that kind of gives the fig a sort of messed-up feel. Or, as the description puts it more eloquently, "defiled" and/or "chaotic." Wish I could figure out what was mixing with the fig... I don't actually know what the other smells should be like. But there's something that both mixes with the fig and serves as an undertone. I want to call it "smokey," but it doesn't smell like either dust or smoke. It's earthy, and it somehow makes me picture a kind of haze.

Also, I noticed the smell was warm. That might be the frankincense, but that's not a very educated guess.

As it dries, the undertone develops into something a bit more... desert-like? Less haze, more wasteland. Not in a bad way, either.

Wish I had more to comment about with the actual scent, but I find it hard to describe. It's fig, warm, and earthy... with a touch of hazy chaos. The last one of which isn't even remotely olfactory, but I've found that the BPAL artisans have an extraordinary talent for breaking the rules of smell. One of the more interesting scents I've tried.

Only downside is that, at least for me, it dies in about two hours, even when I'm inside and not sweating it off in the summer heat. Beth's going to try it, so I'll have to see if it lasts any longer on her. Also, seeing as the Nephilim are mermaids, it should really have some more aquatic notes. Still a great scent regardless.

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Update: Beth checked up on this and apparently there really are people who think the Nephilim became mermaids. Or that the mermaids are some sort of aquatic version of the Nephilim, or that they were some sort of fish/human chimera experiment the Nephilim performed.

I'm not actually sure if the people making these arguments were serious or not, but it seemed to me that at least some of them were. Hard to tell, though, since when someone becomes eccentric enough to firmly support a connection between Nephilim and mermaids with any amount of conviction, they're probably quite difficult to understand.

BPAL - Dee

I haven't been inspired recently, and somehow that has kept me from posting the last couple of BPAL reviews I did write. These are now months old. But my opinions are the same!

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There's one particular BPAL scent I've been struggling to write a review for. It's not because it's bad, or even that I have conflicted thoughts about it. In fact, it's become a favorite, right next to the Antikythera Mechanism... I wore it no less than three times this week. I love it. It's called Dee, and it is excellent.

The official description is as follows...

John Dee: master of science, alchemy and magic, Hermetic philosopher in the schools of Rosicrucian Christian Mysticism and Platonic-Pythagorean doctrine, and Queen Elizabeth's astrologer, advisor, cryptologist and spy. With Edward Kelly, he created a field of study and work in Angelic Evocation, and isolated the Angelic language: Enochian. His scent is soft English leather, rosewood and tonka with a hint of incense, parchment and soft woods.

...and when you smell it, you get leather. And wood. And something kind of sweet. And more leather. It's not a harsh, leather-jacket sort leather... and that's perfectly appropriate, because John Dee was a 16th-century mystic, not a Hell's Angel. I couldn't tell you what "soft English leather" is supposed to be like, but to me this is closest to a comfy leather couch.

So why is it so hard to review? First, of course, because I can't very well make a crisp, concise, to-the-point post. I'd get bored. But also because I can never pass up an opportunity to research the fascinating history of hermeticism (or mysticism, or Renaissance magic, or anything in that broad category, really). The topic is generally ignored and treated as nonsense nowadays, but it's actually quite critical to understanding our world, in this case, particularly the "western" world. Most people, to be bluntly honest, are content enough to have almost no comprehension at all of matters beyond their own daily routines. However, I am not one of these people, and I realize that I'll never be able to fully understand the development of philosophy, science, religion -- frankly, just about anything more than a hundred years old -- unless I get a grasp on historic patterns of thought, which are positively swimming in mysticism, the occult, and the metaphysical.

But it's not as easy as just "researching" it. This is something scholars would dedicate their entire lives to, both trying to understand and contributing toward it. In fact, while it's not quite as common in modern times, some people still do spend decades studying it. It's very complex, and very hard to tackle.

But even in my frustration in trying to even get a feel for the surface of hermeticism, I may have at least found a way to make a rambling review of Dee! A week or so ago, Beth emailed me saying that I really ought to review it. I wrote back in what turned out be a long-winded rant of why I couldn't touch the subject:

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I totally need to write a review on Dee, but I keep getting too fascinated with the research. I don't even know where to start... I've wanted to research Renaissance magic, mysticism, and hermeticism for years, but it's way too hard to approach. There's really no clear distinction between all of them, and even in the cases where it is more clear-cut, they're all intertwined. Hermeticism, for example, encompasses alchemy, philosophy, natural philosophy ("science"), cabalism (Kabbalah), mathematics, theology, astrology, astronomy, linguistics (from all sorts of languages), and plenty more. Oh, and you pretty much have to trace it all back to ancient Greece, and pick up on everything you've missed in-between in order to understand it (because as far as I can tell, they studied their own origins too).

And that's just in order to begin to comprehend the surface of hermeticism! Magic (or magick) is a whole other story... Renaissance magic takes anything and everything from hermeticism, and from mysticism in general (of which hermeticism is basically like a "sect"), and then digests and uses the knowledge for purposes of manipulation of some sort... and there are many categories and schools of magic, all with different philosophies and areas of focus. Also, some of them may or may not have actually been practiced. And just when you think you have even a conceptual grasp on some part of it, you suddenly realize that Aleister Crowley screwed it all up a century ago through gaining a ridiculous and unprecedented level of influence over the community of western mysticism, which has always operated on interpretation in the first place.

So... trying to gain even an elementary understanding of Dee is kind of difficult. And after hours of (albeit distracted) research into even just Enochian, angelic divination, and Dee himself, I still can't figure out why leather, rosewood, tonka, or "soft woods" have anything to do with him.

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So there you have it. In a sentence: "The subject matter touches on some deep-seated frustrations."

That said, a very helpful person and fellow man on the BPAL forums, T.Harker, pointed to to me the leather's relevance to John Dee -- book bindings! I felt pretty dumb for not realizing that, but yeah, that's what it is. Even aside from the parchment (which is essentially thin leather) he would have used to work on transcribing Enochian, or the books he would have probably had around... Dee had a gigantic personal library, and the books would obviously have been bound in leather.

So lots of leather, wood, and... there's a kind of sweet-and-spicy bit that I imagine is incense. This is the scent of a grandiose Renaissance study. And it's good. Even Beth enjoys wearing it... it's a manly scent, yes, but it's not exclusively manly. Which is kind of strange, but awesome.

Definitely getting a bottle of this one. Try it. Don't bother trying to understand Dee's work or you'll give yourself a headache, but his BPAL namesake is excellent.

JUICE FAST! (Wednesday, 11/09)

What the title says. I am tired, hungry, and generally slow today. A bit of backstory:

I am a sturdy, heavy-built person. That's an understatement. Frankly, I'm one of the largest people I know. This is true in many aspects... for example, I'm 6'3". Actually, I may be closer to 6'4", but I've never gotten around to verifying my exact height. I'm also quite broad-shouldered. I don't have a measurement for that, but I'm that person you don't want to sit beside on a plane, as my shoulders appear to be skeletally wider than seat designers would have you believe a human body is.

As it happens, I'm also 348 lbs. As I gather, most people consider 200 lbs a lot of weight... 350 lbs is unfathomable. I carry my weight quite well, actually, and I'm still in reasonably good physical shape. Honestly, my body type is intended to be heavier than what popular culture considers "the ideal," and the BMI holds a special and well-earned place of contempt in my heart. That said, I'm still undeniably obese. It's not even the heaviest I've been, either... I'd reached about 370 lbs earlier in the year, but after getting married in May my eating habits changed. I realized that I had my own kitchen to cook in, that the food I made there was generally more exciting than Sun Chips and cereal, and that Beth was going to nag at me if the seasonal Little Debbie cakes remained a staple of my diet. But alas, my cooking is still my cooking, and I refuse to give birth to any of that soulless "health-conscious" food people recommend. If it was made to keep track of calories then it probably wasn't made to be enjoyed. And my portion sizes would positively offend the sensibilities of five-star chefs who are used to feeding tiny rich people. So yeah, I'm not exactly good with diets,

However, Beth recently had me watch a documentary on juice fasting featuring an Australian guy who consumes nothing but fruits, vegetables, and water for 60 days to lose weight, start an active lifestyle, and get rid of a disease he's facing. As expected, it works miracles. I had some skepticism, and there were definitely commercial interests at stake, but I've gone a little less scientific recently and have warmed up to things like "detox diets" and the benefits of fasting. So this past Sunday we borrowed my in-laws' juicer and I started stocking up the fridge with less cheese and more vegetation.

Yesterday we began hammering out the details of the fast. We decided to do it for ten days, agreed that having some unsweetened herbal tea was probably fine, and tried to pin down the actual start date. I gave a tentative "Thursday or Friday," although Beth seemed to be indicating Friday. All was set.

This morning, Wednesday, Beth called out sick from work and went to see a doctor about a sinus issue she's been having the past week. We needed to make breakfast before she left, so she suggested making a practice batch of juice "since we'll be starting tomorrow." This sounded great to me... all except for that "tomorrow" part, which was a day early. In the blink of an eye, my 48-hour grace period had suddenly become 24.

So we made our first juice... one honeydew melon, two cucumbers, one lemon, and a thick slice of pineapple. It was the only fruit recipe we actually had the ingredients for. I discovered two things: that removing the rind of a honeydew melon with any amount of precision is impossible, and that attempting to do the same to a lemon is downright dangerous. The end result was a bit too healthy for my tastes, and a bit too cucumber-y for Beth's, but we both agreed that it wasn't bad.

And then the horrible part came. Sitting on the couch, finishing our glasses of homemade juice, Beth's voice suddenly sounded out: "Why not just start today?"

It wasn't a question.

I tried to explain that it was impossible. For one, I'd sneaked a small nibble of melon off a piece of rind that we'd thrown away. For another, I'd eaten a wedge of cheese last night before bed, and it was clearly after midnight when I'd finished. For some frustrating reason neither seemed to disqualify me, and so it came to pass that I was trapped into dieting two days earlier than planned, all according to Beth's whim.

The good news is that if she continues on her pattern of knocking the start date back, tonight she'll tell me we started two days ago, and my tomorrow morning we'll be over it. Not holding my breath on that one, though.

Made a little bit more juice before I left for work, a V8-style one with tomatoes, carrots, spinach, celery, and parsley (bit of trivia: there is almost no juice in a handful of parsley). It was all right... not one I'd really choose to drink, but then again, if it was about what I wanted to taste I'd probably try juicing a cheeseburger right now.

This whole business started around 9:00am.

It is now 5:33pm, and I am starving. I have a thermos full of the melon-cucumber juice for lunch/dinner, but I know it's not going to do the trick. Nor is water nearly as filling as they'd have you think... sure, it works for the first 30 seconds, but not for too much longer. My stomach stopped growling a couple hours ago, but I actually kind of wish the growls would come back. They felt strangely relieving.

Furthermore, since I didn't realize what was going to happen this morning, I went to bed at around 3:00am last night and woke up to Beth's alarm at 7:20. I was thinking I might go back to sleep after Beth was gone and at work, but unfortunately she never actually went to work, and instead I spent the early morning making juice. It's not Beth's fault that I only got four hours of sleep, but I can tell you that sleep deprivation does not mix very well with starvation and blood sugar crashes. So yeah, that's another thing I would have liked to have changed.

Here's to hoping that I transcend hunger by tomorrow.

Aside from eating again someday, there is one single good thing left in the future: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is coming out on Friday! Hopefully that will help me forget about how I'm starving. >_>

Juice Fast 2011

So we're starting a 10 (edit: make that 3 :p) day juice fast today. I'm sure Chris's version of the events leading up to "deciding" to start it this morning will be rather amusing, but the way it played out in my head was basically "Okay, we just had a juice. We haven't had anything else to eat yet. Why put this off to tomorrow or Friday to start? CARPE DIEM!"

I'm home from work today because it seems I might have some sort of a sinus infection, or fluid in my head--you know that feeling you get in your head when your ears are ringing? I sort of feel like that, minus the ringing sound. So I'm currently waiting for it to be time to go to the doctor. I'm hoping they can figure out whatever it is, and that it's something that will be over quickly. I'm having a hard time concentrating on anything because most movements/sounds are making my brain feel like it's vibrating. :< And the general sinus areas on my face are hurting. So might as well add to the misery by starting a fast!


This is the juice we had this morning:

"Minty Honeydew" (minus the mint)

Cucumber, peeled and trimmed - 2

Fresh mint leaves - 1 2/3 oz.

Pineapple - 1 in. slice

Honeydew, sliced with seeds removed - 1 whole

Lemon, peeled 1/2 - 1 whole


No mint because Chris is physically repulsed by mint. :P

Chris is currently off to the store to buy some more produce. We cleaned out the fridge somewhat, and now it's full of fruits of veggies. Sort of weird to open the fridge and see all of that instead of the "normal" stuff. @.@