Movie Weekend

• Family Business, a pretty silly affair with Sean Connery, Dustin Hoffman, and Matthew Broderick.

• The Scarlet Letter, about which no more will be said than has been said.

• Top Gun, which I had never seen before. No, really: I hadn't. I kept cracking up at the more Eighties moments, such as the overweening, intrusive soundtrack: Kelly McGillis and Tom Cruise are in her house, listening to music on her stereo. The song ends. They look at one another. The love theme wells up on the movie soundtrack. I kept expecting them to look arond and wonder where the music was coming from.

• Heat, which got a lot of publicity around here lately after the North Hollywood bank shootout. Heat was one of the most bloated, overwrought draaaaaaaaamas I've seen in quite a while. We watched this instead of going to the sneak preview of LA Confidential, which neither of us knew about until Sunday. This was a depressing thought.

• The Full Monty. Go see it already!

• Punchline, which I did see many years ago but didn't remember at all except for Tom Hanks' final stand-up routine. Most obvious comment of the century: Hanks really is a good actor. It was so easy to denigrate him back in the Eighties and so easy to say, "Tom Hanks, Great Actor" now.

None of this movie watching got me one iota closer to finishing my own.

I made a devastating discovery this morning.

I weigh more right now than I ever have. Ever.

This is the first time I've stepped on a scale in over a year, in case you're wondering why I hadn't particularly noticed this before. I dragged the scale out from its hiding place because I've read that you should weigh yourself once a week to monitor progress made.

I don't want to be a slave to the scale. Honest. I know that muscle weighs more than fat, thanks, so if I work out and lose inches I might not lose any weight. However, when I was in the best shape I've ever been in, I weighed 30 pounds less than this. And I don't think running puts on a lot of muscle.

Lots of old feelings about food come back when I think about consciously eating less of it. Like, "What about dessert?" -- my favorite meal of the day. My family certainly trained me to get dessert after eating and I've never gotten out of that habit. You can always tell when I'm really feeling ill or stuffed -- I pass on the dessert.

Or, "Am I going to have to eat a lot of boring vegetables?" Frankly, on a scale of 1 to 10 most vegetables rank about 5, with some of them seriously lower. Fruit is okay, except one of my favorite fruits, the banana, has high fat content.

Well, I know me: I can't change everything at once. I'll run more often and try to run for a longer period of time per session. I'll try to cut back on what I eat, with the caveat that the second I feel deprived I can go eat anything I want, in order to stop serious bingeing later on.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Went for slightly over 3.75 miles this morning. Because I woke up late, I decided to take a slightly different route in order to get my off of Ventura Boulevard, which was going to have lots more cars on it. However, I didn't factor in the appearance of the LA River, which doesn't exist but its concrete riverbank screws up the conjunction of roads on both sides of Ventura. So I had to go down to Coldwater Canyon Boulevard in order to come back.