Today is the first Wednesday since I decided to get back to my proper weight for a seventeen-year-old (or, indeed, for a fifty-eight-year-old). Just before lunch today I weighed 90.2 kg, which is 198.8 lb. Hurrah! I’m under 200 pounds, which I hope I will never top again. At this weight I am two weeks ahead of the schedule posted a week ago, which is nice but not surprising. It’s always easy to lose weight at the beginning of a diet.

By the way, 90.2 is POISON (P/B…S/Z…N) in the Major System, which I described briefly in my last post. I am still studying this system with a 17-year-old’s passion. At the moment I am memorizing “peg words” for all the numbers from 0 to 9 and 00 to 100.

It’s not actually necessary to memorize peg words; you can simply create the words whenever you need them. But it is faster when you already have a list of words in your head. And when you make up a complete list in advance, you have time to reflect and choose more memorable peg words than you might be able to improvise. Not all peg words are equally useful. For example,  “lily” (55) is easier to visualize than, say, “lowly” (55).

I want to regain and reinforce one of the characteristics I find most charming in adolescents: their enthusiasm. Of course, there are also things which they are completely uninterested in — in my case it was biology class — but the things they consider important are REALLY important to them. Teenagers are delightfully innocent, even as they try to appear sophisticated, and when they like something they don’t hide the fact that they REALLY like it. I miss that. I still enjoy hearing young people discussing their favorite music, movies, restaurants, whatever — they are so emotionally involved.

This ability to throw oneself completely into a new passion must be useful for something; otherwise we wouldn’t have it. My theory is that it is an unconscious learning strategy: if you really involve yourself in a project (like changing your own brain), you can finish it quickly and move on.

Does the idea of changing one’s own brain sound strange? Not to me….