I’ve reached a point nowadays where people have begun to ask me what I do because I am noticeably slimmer. And while I try not to get into too much detail—since I already know that people react to the cold, hard facts differently—I don’t hide what I do either.

“I wake up at four-thirty in the morning to run almost five miles a day.”

Sometimes I wish I could just say “I work really hard on it,” but even if I did, they would think I’m a smug bastard anyway. The general reaction from folks is “I wish I could do that,” or “I wish I had the will power for that,” or “I wish I could find time in my life for that.” Most of the time, sentences like those are said with almost a sense of longing, or self-pity, as if they lived a life that didn’t have enough time for it.

Well, dear friends, everyone gets about twenty-four hours a day. It’s what you do with it that counts.

Want to lose fat? You have to really want it.

Want to be good at something? You have to really want it.

And not only do you have to want what you want, you need to be willing to change things, make sacrifices, suffer through some discomfort, and set measurable goals for progress. Lastly, once you’ve reached your goal? It’s not over. You want to keep what you’ve achieved.

Life may be the longest thing we will go through, but life is too short to simply sit back and wish you had what you wanted without going for it.

[EDIT: I was just reading through some of the blogs that I like and found out that an old friend, Venomous Kate, is having a bad day with the way she's receiving orders from Amazon. So, read about her plight, of which I have experienced too when I built my computer four years ago. And by sending her a link, I get a link back, too.]

There really isn’t much I’m allowed to talk about when it comes to work. I can’t talk about the donors who have given their bodies over to science, since not only would that violate the employment agreement I signed, but it’s also not a decent thing to do.

I can say that the pace here is far less busy than my previous job, where there is plenty of downtime and I spend quite some time finding make-work or else I might just go nuts.

The dissections are not an all-day factory-type thing, rather one or two a day is pretty typical for me and since I’m still new I don’t do them alone.

The job is far, far less educational than I thought it would be—at least when it comes down to the dissections themselves—but I do have a lot of time where I can read a book and learn other stuff.

As long as I work my 40 hours a week I’m being paid a constant amount of money, not like where I used to work. I can even make more if I have to do after-hours work too.

Altogether, not only do I not regret coming to work where I do, I think I like what I do now.

Last week I started my new job as an anatomist at a local tissue bank. “Anatomist,” you say? The main duty, though the one that takes the least time doing, of the position is to perform dissections on cadavers in order to procure their parts for research purposes. Researchers who need body parts then contact us and we provide these tissue samples to them.

Sounds simple enough right? Well, I’m having a great time here. The hours are set, the pay is satisfying and I get to live my life after work, at least most of the time. Sometimes I have the other paying hobby to do—web design—which I intend to build back up in the weeks to come too.