I always have a through the looking glass experience talking to my aunt. She only worked at one company for most of her years, and despite an awful experience on the way out, she left the workforce in the mid-90s, right before everything got really bad post-9/11. And yet she still comes out in defense of my old workplace LIB, even when I've tried to let her know just how bad it really was working there, not just what you hear in the press.

You would think that having basically been downsized for her age (which she sued and won for) she would understand just how soulless corporations can be, but even after my lovely anecdotes and experiences she continues to think of corporations as a positive employer.

I lost that image after watching a 61 year employee being laid off in my first corporate job, the year after they had celebrated her 60th anniversary. After watching my boss's boss at LIB refer to "natural attrition" as the reason to not being doing further layoffs at that time - after two of my colleagues had DIED. After being forced to shuttle between two offices in different boroughs when they wouldn't pay for an extra computer and pushing my body to the limit.

This is the first company I've worked for where I feel like I matter, and that I'm not just a number on a spreadsheet. I still use my old employee number from LIB as my work phone login since I was so used to just being known as A123456 (not the real number). I hope that SIB continues being a safe place, even though we're growing past the mid-company level, and it seems to be heading in the right direction, with a long-term CEO who cares deeply about the company and the culture. 

But I also know what to look for now if things start changing in the wrong way. No company is perfect, but there's egregious disregard for humanity and literally penalizing people for being human. Some of the conversations I heard in the elevators at LIB were horrific when you realized these people were the managers, and how little they cared for the employees. And it was encouraged. Never again, unless I'm absolutely desperate.

Over the Covid pandemic I gained 50 pounds over 3 years since I had moved out of the city and my activity was minimal. Once I moved into my own apartment I managed to gain another 20 pounds, and was basically double the weight I used to be in college. I've been trying to rectify this, although I tried the gym and hated it, so I've just been trying to not eat and walk more. I've dropped 30 pounds over the past 4 months so at least I'm lighter than I was when I moved in here, but that means I still have 40 more pounds to go, and I seem to have hit a plateau.

Of course that means I want to eat more since I got in the habit of eating my feelings while I was unemployed and back living with my parents, and I'm finding it a very hard habit to break. My diet has never been great, and even though I learned to cook during the pandemic, I was used to cooking for four people. Cooking for one is proving more daunting than I thought it would be, and there's always the temptations to just grab some chocolate, cheese, or a Stouffer's.

My work schedule also doesn't help since I want a hot dinner, but can't take the time out to cook while I'm working because I work 1-10pm. It's too late to cook at that point, and if I cook before 1pm then it's refrigerated by dinner time. It's a choice of making enough on the weekend and microwaving the same thing every day, or getting some variety by cheating with the aforementioned frozen dinners.

The only other thing I can think of is that I need to start learning how to freeze portions of things I make, so I can pull those down from the freezer instead and get some variety that way. I can do this - if I can learn to use 20+ databases I can learn how to Google what are good homemade frozen meals. I just need to gather the effort to do it, particularly if I ever plan on being a normal weight again!