(CNN) — Acolytes of “Food Rules” guru Michael Pollan and other well-meaning foodies who’ve made corn a scapegoat for the nation’s health crises have welcomed a new study from Princeton University that suggests high-fructose corn syrup causes more significant weight gain than table sugar.

But the findings have been criticized by food science experts and industry veterans, who say the study unfairly demonizes corn syrup and implicitly absolves cane sugar of responsibility for making Americans fat.

“The debate about which one is better for you is a false debate, because neither of them is good for you,” says Elizabeth Abbott, author of the forthcoming “Sugar: A Bittersweet History.”

Okay, wait. Which is better for me, half of a fatal dose of poison, or a full dose?

It is totally relevant which one is better for you!

I get so tired of this all-or-nothing attitude. It’s nothing but perfectionism. And as anyone who has ever tried to do anything can tell you–perfect is not possible. This perpetuation of the myth that if you can’t do it right, you’d better not do it at all is insane. It’s stupid and paralyzing and harmful.

Once some fitness expert on the radio was ranting about people who had a granola bar on the way to the gym. According to him, they were negating the entire effect of the workout. Excuse me? If your workout only burns ninety calories (that’s how many are in my chocolate chunk granola bars, your mileage may vary), then yes, you’re canceling out the calorie loss, but how about–gragh. Not even. The point is, perfection. If you’re going to the gym to lose weight, how dare you eat a 90-calorie granola bar to offset the at least three hundred calories you’ll burn in a hearty half-hour?

The problem is that people buy this bullshit. We’re busy. We’re thinking of other things, and that soundbite gets in there without analysis. Sure, if you’re stuck at a stoplight with nothing to do but think about what this moron just said, you might see he’s wrong. You might remember that even if he wasn’t off on the calorie count, that even if you lose no weight, moving is good for you.

Or you might get “no granola bar, got it,” go without the next time you go to the gym, get sick because of too much exertion on too few calories, and decide that the gym is really not for you.

Unlikely? Maybe. Maybe not. Some people know the joys of exercising and won’t give it up that easily. Others of us are just looking for a reason to stop. And this fitness “guru” just gave us one.

Well, if we give up that easy, screw us? Yeah, there’s that perfectionism again. Congratulations on your perfection. Sorry we don’t live up.

How many Aries does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

• One, and you’d better get the hell out of the way!

How many Pisces does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

• …the light went out?

Despite how that may sound, Pisces aren’t idiots; we’re just distracted. We have a lot on our minds. )( is the symbol for Pisces (ably represented here by two parentheses and a strike-out). Two fish, linked together, swimming in opposite directions. As you might imagine, being the complete opposite of ourselves takes a lot of time and attention. For instance:

I’m an optimist. I believe that people are basically good, that our leaders ran for office to serve and care about the people they represent, that climate change can be stopped, that corporations are made of people (see “people are basically good” ), that putting extra tomato on my Whopper with Cheese makes it better for me.

I’m also a pessimist. I believe that people will screw you if you let them, that our election process is roughly comparable to a buy-the-title beauty pageant and has the same worth for choosing leaders, that we have fucked our one and only planet big time and it’s corporations that did most of it (corporations run by people who are utterly insulated from the consequences of their actions; see “screw you if you let them”), and that my Whopper with Cheese doesn’t matter a damn, we’re all going to die.

I’m a Christian; I believe in love and truth embodied in Jesus who died for us. I’m a Bokononist–I believe that all religion is comforting lies. Sometimes I’m a nihilist. And I’m pretty much always a scientist. (Have you read the theories that “reality” is just a projection? coooooooll–especially when it’s astrophysicists talking, not philosophers.)

Pisces do well in the arts, supposedly, because of intuition and understanding. I’d like to think so, but I’ll tell you what else helps with my writing–I have a huge curiosity about everything. Theoretical physics. The foundations of language. The city of Prague. Ghosts. Magic. Dark matter. LOLcats. Brainwaves. Chemistry (especially demolitions. >_> ) Gadgets. Astronomy. Astrology. World music. Megaliths. Squid. (Did you see where the found a squid with a hard-on? No, really! It’s not porn, it’s science!) Drawing. Dinosaurs. Cryptography. Folklore. History. Maps. Medicine. Monsters.

The problem with all this? It takes time. Time when I could be writing, or worse, should be working. Exercising. Cooking.

So yeah. All that for my at-least-quarterly cry of “I need more time!” Because, really–I do.

_____

¹ The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Astrology

Maybe I’ll do it a bit more often if I talk about it.

Lately I’ve been trying to pull the family diet towards more healthy things. We’re not as bad as we could be. We don’t subsist entirely on cheese curls and soda. Our snack food is usually cheese, or maybe a bowl of cereal. But veggies don’t make an appearance nearly as often as they should, and we are kind of addicted to the convenience aisles of the grocery store. Microwave meals, ‘helpers’ of various sorts, canned stuff you just throw in a pan…

You know. All that stuff that’s loaded with high fructose corn syrup. And not just that–I only pick on that because I can type it without looking it up. Have you looked at what they’re selling us as food lately?

So I’m investigating vegetables. I’m looking into local foods. I’m pondering things like pesticides and hormones that I’ve been bringing in my house without realizing. I won’t be going all organic (no way I could afford it) and I won’t be going vegan (good God no!). But I’m going to think.

I follow Elizabeth Bear on Twitter and she talks about her CSA (community supported agriculture) share. I’d never heard of it, so I went and looked it up. The one near me sells shares, 13 weeks at $250, and then once a week you go and pick up a share of locally grown produce. You get what they have, but apparently you get a lot, and it’s all local-grown and pesticide free. I won’t be doing it due to the aforementioned money issue, but you can find one near you (in the U.S.) by looking here.

Recently a friend linked me to Chuck Wendig’s blog (Watch your step–he’s not for the faint of heart) and I’ve been browsing it since. Today I stumbled on his cooking posts, and in one of them he talks about farmer’s markets. He talks about food, and stuff that looks like food but really isn’t, and how it’s just a good idea to give your body food it knows what to do with.

Here’s what I’m getting: there’s a lot of stuff that isn’t food in most food. One reason it’s there is to keep the food appealing longer, so people have time to buy it. People want their food to look good, too, and some of the problem is that. I grew up on a farm, and we had a garden. I can tell you that food that hasn’t been tampered with does not look like what you usually see in the store. Strawberries–merciful heavens. Normal strawberries are about a fourth of the size of the mutants you see in the store. And they are oh so good. I love strawberries. I can’t eat those mutant things.

So here’s the takeaway:

• If you buy food from a farmer, she gets more of the money while you support a local business.
• You know where your food came from, and if it looks funny, you can ask her why.
• The less distance that food travels to get to your table, the less abused it is.
• The less distance your food travels, the less not-food needs to be added to it to keep it edible till it gets to you.

Makes sense to me.

The problem isn’t my procrastinating–that’s a symptom. The fact is that when dealing in creativity, one can only work so fast for so long before things blow up in one’s face or worse, get predictable.

If I had to get this novel done because someone was waiting on it? I could do that. Hell, I got Holly Lisle’s plan to do it in a week, and it seems completely do-able. However, I don’t have to. So why would I?

One of the big things HL stresses in that revision plan is figuring out what must be fixed, and what you’re just going to have to let be. It is, as in so many things, a balancing act. Like doing a crisis clean–get the trash out and wash the dishes, don’t go scrubbing the blasted grout. I’ve gotten through a lot of this edit going “don’t worry about the details, get it next time, GO GO GO!” And that’s fine. But now I’m at the point where to have any hope of my deadline at all, I’ve got to be even more ruthless. I’ve got to start Xing off big sections and writing “put this in Ben’s POV!” or “makes no sense! Write a new scene!” and that’s it.

That…doesn’t work for me. I’m not on a real deadline. Doing it that way will only make me tons more work later–I’ll have to go through all the flailing of getting into Edit-THIS-Book mode all over again, for at least one more major edit than I’d planned on. (it’s different every book, believe me–which is why I don’t normally just edit everything once I’m finally in edit-mode. If I could get in edit mode and not flail with each and every book, you BETCHA I’d edit everything at once!)

I hate that flailing. It’s hard on me. It makes my kid and my cats miserable. And my friends have to listen to so much whining. Why would I put us all through it more than absolutely necessary? Especially when I’d lose so much progress. Because don’t ever let anyone tell you that you can just pick up where you left off in something like this. You can’t. A novel is a huge and intricate tapestry and when it’s in your head the threads are everywhere. You’re the loom. An ever-changing loom. If you drop those threads you will never get them back the way they were. You may, with a lot of time and effort, get them another way that works. Maybe–I’m stressing that maybe–you’ll even find one that works better, but it will cost you a lot of time and effort, and who the hell wants to do that to themselves for the sake of a silly arbitrary deadline?

I don’t want to spend my life on this book. I have more to write.

So. I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it further.

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

As I was saying *cough* I’m thinking two manuscripts, two months. Hiro’s book took me two whole months, so the element of crazy is still there. But it’s a possible mad goal, because I know these characters and this world a HELL of a lot better than I did/do Hiro’s.

So. Umm. Guess I better make it official.

*ahem*

I hereby announce and declare that I have decided¹ to adjust the goal of the Doomy Summer of Editing DOOM to a more reasonable but still crazy major revision of two very messy manuscripts.

¹tentatively, in the cold clear light of (my) morning, pending review from the crazies in my head, because good God do I hate missing deadlines, even silly, arbitrary, drive-me-mad-for-no-reason deadlines.

I wonder if it’ll work. I’ve always figured that urge to bounce to the next project was my muses being lazy and tossing out distractions. But apparently that’s how Isaac Asimov was so prolific–when he got stuck on one thing, he went to the next. The key here is surely being circular–eventually I must come back to things–but I don’t think that will be a problem. Though I try not to, I have been doing this for a while. What else is my end-of-book stall? And yet I get things done.

So I know I can do it. The question is, will it work? Will it let me write as fast and as much as my muses are always capering to do? Will I finally be able to keep up? Will I catch those grand new vistas I always miss, plodding slowly behind, gathering the scraps they drop?

Yeah, I think we know the answer to all that. But I’m still going to try it, and see if it makes me move even a little bit faster. What else can I do? There’s just so much to write.