No one's being dumb in the opinions on either side of this situation.

I apologize for any stridency in my words and in my tone. My inability/lack of expertise in the area of marksmanship in the first place leads me to overlay my personal experience/ opinion to the entire argument, which is of course worthless. I apologize.

Hey: let me give you a excuse. Of course it's not. But current situation is I'm down 15 lb. Normally you would say this is a good thing but it's because I can't eat. I'm trying to get an appointment to deal with it but it's difficult, voicemail hell. And so in order not to get hooked on the serious painkillers I delay and or skip doses because I'm not going to kick into dependency. So that means I really don't stand a chance of attempting to eat.

You can't drink enough muscle milk to make up for this.

On the other hand, when I do take a dose I get an opioid peak and my posting style/ attitude can be entirely different.

This state of mind has led to a wild back and forth with an old boss in an email exchange. Part of it included me showing how I had manipulated him through the years.

I say old boss but he was my boss for the first third of my career. And then we flipped roles and I was either his direct boss or he was a boss in the organization. But I had influence with his boss so I really controlled everything he did as far as the projects were concerned.

Here is where it's a straight manipulation and here is where I was his shadow boss. Here is where I have all the information and you have this little slice and that's why I think a certain way versus why you think it'll be different. Let me rip apart the veil that you thought was reality and show you what was really happening.

It was kind of fun. Once you get to the point of someone saying "that's a lot to unpack and I need to think about it for a while before responding", you've pushed past the initial denial defense.

I think we need to come up with a new industry term such as "managerial theft". It's something I've noticed individually in the past. But when I concentrated on it, I realized it was far bigger than I thought.

Resumes contain lists of project accomplished.

Managers can claim the skills of every single one of their underlings when a project is accomplished that required a certain set of skills. It doesn't matter if the manager knows nothing of that particular skill, if it was part of the project build they get to claim it. They get to claim a 100% of savings associated with projects and 100% of profit associated with projects. When all they did was toss out an occasional direction to a tech who really did everything else or farmed it out to the next level of technology.

That goes far beyond resume inflation. That should be called managerial theft.

Endodontist/ root canal appointment in 2 weeks.

My regular dentist who also does root canals handed me off to this one who's got all the fancy equipment and she's the next up-and-coming generation and he's right she's got the greatest equipment and she has got the tools to handle me. But I've got to wait for her.

I might lose another 15 lb and I should be done with both the tooth and the weight loss. It's actually 5 lb past my goal of 25 lb but I don't mind.

Once you've adjusted to a different level of calories, the hunger settles down and it is no longer nearly as intense. So now I'm getting a slight hint of what it's like for people who starve themselves either by situation or on purpose.

When I dieted in the past on purpose I was always intensely hungry and it never went away. It was always an intense struggle not to go running to the fridge. It's not like that now.

My tooth doesn't hurt anymore. I've gone through the consideration of canceling the endodontist appointment or showing up and then just telling her to check the nerve to see if it's still alive and if it's still alive then we will just ignore this.

There was a time of swelling, a time of pain, and a time of no eating. All better now.

I'm not on the major painkillers. It just seems to have resolved and now I am really annoyed.

Oh, and I lost 20 lb without trying. And I am still in that mode. I have to start eating bits slowly. Gatorade is my friend.