Here are the categories:
- Food and Dining
- Fitness
- Entertainment
- Shopping
- Work and School
- Arts and Culture
- Social
- Travel
- Passions
Let's look at the Food and Dining category as an example. Many times your dad will have nothing more to report than, "Chicken, rice, and green beans for dinner again." But there are other times when he'll report, "Learned a new recipe for Hoisin pork ribs while reading the Week. Your mom loved it." Or, "Trekked all the way to Eugene for P.F. Chang's fried rice. My own can't even touch it." Perhaps your dad skipped McDonald's for breakfast and made some raisin oatmeal. That just might overlap the fitness category, but you see the point. Every moment won't be a victory. But every experience will be counted.
In Fitness, your dad came up with a plan. He's sitting heavy at 211 pounds, which is too dense for a guy standing only 5-foot-7. So he instigated a reward system which ties in with his passion, videogames. For every five pounds your dad loses, he earns a game. By "earns" he means that he still has to pay for it, but it's the getting that counts. Lose five pounds, and keep it off for at least one week, and he gets a game. No yo-yo weight loss. He obviously can't lose five, get a game, gain the five pounds back, then lose five in order to get another game. Nuh-uh. He's shooting for a loss goal of twenty pounds, which is four games; somewhere in the neighborhood of $240 dollars' worth of interactive entertainment. That's rather expensive when put in that light, but at least the entertainment will be well-earned. With this program, gaming can't be a right anymore. It has to be a priveledge.
The first game your dad wants is Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. A realistic modern combat military simulator. It launches October 6 or so. That's about two months from now (you'll be 21 weeks old), which is more than enough time to lose the first five pounds. But if he's smart, your dad will already be inches away from the first ten, so he'll have another game, Brutal Legend, that he can play by the time it launches on October 13. Your dad hasn't been down to 200 pounds since he was in the Navy.
Your dad surreptitiously copped those life-experience categories from an Apple application called "Booyah." Unfortunately, Booyah is tied too heavily into Facebook and Twitter, and your dad's no longer entertaining those forms of social networking. He shut down his Twitter account yesterday, finding the 140-character posts so gratifying that he wasn't getting any real writing done. Blogging, in this day and age, counts as real writing. It's not publishable, but it serves its purpose.
But let's not give Booyah too much credit. Your mom and dad have had an erasable marker white board in the kitchen for a few years now. On it, they record what they're reading, watching, and listening to; as in books, movies, and music. With as much time as they spent pursuing leisure, it was tragic when they were unable to recall in casual conversation the name of the actor that starred in that excellent Gus Van Sant film, or couldn't recall the author off the tip of their tongue who wrote the Wheel of Time series, or perhaps enjoyed Kanye West's new album, but got the title backwards by calling it "Heartbreak & 808s." Your mom and dad felt a certain responsiblity to the creators of the entertainment they ingested, that's all. And it's this selfsame principle they're utilizing to ensure that the other compartments of their life -- Art and Culture, Work and School, Social, etc. -- didn't slide into forgetfulness.
Your dad recalls a concept he learned from one of his favorite films, Waking Life. It's that, forgetting is easy and lazy; remembering is chaotic and difficult. He needs to see the film again, because that's an inaccurate recollection.
