News: Setting Goals
*Breeath*
I'm at work. I'm being competely horrible and working on my blog while I'm at work, getting paid some stupid rate. I'm a bad bad person.
'The pre-processing handler for ECX job # ATD20182 has failed.'
Orrr, I could say I'm baby-sitting a semi-automatic process that fails half the time. This is not a way to achieve job satisfaction.
Anyway, I took some down time on Sunday. I didn't go to the markets at some stupid hour of the morning, or go to the gym, or the library. I did manage to reply to some emails that I recieved nearly two weeks ago though.
I needed downtime because I've been overdoing the exercise. This was last weeks set of exercise related activity;
Monday: Gym (30 minutes cardio + weights)
Wednesday: Ceroc (two hours)
Thursday: Gym (PT assisted work out, one hour)
Saturday: Ceroc Dance party (four hours)
Sunday: Ultimate Frisbee (50 minutes)
Despite all this, part of me is insisting that I should have gone to the gym on Saturday and/or Sunday morning. That I must do four full workouts at the gym every week, and a couple of nights of ceroc and frisbee, and maybe rock climbing with my flatmate. For a month or two, I actually managed to keep up with this insane ideal.
But! This didn't actually make me fit, it just made me tired and cranky and sore. I started getting sick without actually being infected with anything. I started having days where I couldn't get out of bed due to the pain in my stomach, the pounding in my head and the way the room swirled whenever I tried to sit up. I don't reccomend this at all.
On top of this, I was trying very hard to recreate a social life and my opinions and everything else after my hard disconnect with religion/Christianity. It really didn't work that well. For the most part, we're a big ball of pre-programmed responses. I'd talk to someone about something, and I'd have nod and smile like a retard because I hadn't thought about things properly enough to have an opinion, and then the same topic would come up a week later and I'd be nodding and smiling like a retard because I still hadn't had time to think it through.
I was still in a big sulk about anything to do with religion for the same reason. I was angry at the church for various things, and I was still dragging around those responses and thoughts instead of getting over it and getting on with my own life.
Anyhoo. After getting sick again last week (Tuesday, if you wondered where I managed to fit it in), and having some enforced downtime, I took it on me to sit back and have a beer and relax, and let my brain work through a few issues at it's own speed.
The whole exercise thing is clearly an over-response to my 'fat days'. To briefly throw numbers, I'm 183cm tall. I used to be 110 kg. That's 17.3 stone, or 242.5 pounds at 6 feet tall. Several years ago I jumped on the scales, got the three scary digits, and said 'Right, this has to change.' S, right now, I weigh in about 82 kg. (180 pounds).
By the start of this year, I was down to 85 kg, and I had decided it wasn't enough. According to the horribly inaccurate BMI, I was on the border of overweight. According to the gym's equipment, my body fat percentage (15%) was smack bang in the middle of the healthy weight range, and on the border of the lean and normal ranges (10-15% and 15-18%).
But I still had (and have) love handles! Clearly those had to go. And damnit, where the hell is my six pack? Well, I have abs, but it's covered by this stupid layer of fat! More cardio!
This started to impact on my work. I knew I was getting more and more unpresentable as time went on. I could ussually manage to show up spick and span on Monday, and casual Fridays I could pretty much get away with whatever I wanted, but the other three days of the working week were a hodgepodge generated by the nightmare of trying to get up, and shower and shave and iron my shirt and make lunch and still make it to work on time. Naturally I was late. So I worked late, then went to the gym late, and got up late... and the cycle got a bit deeper and hard and later.
I still wasn't loosing any weight.
Worse yet, I noticed a change in the way woman were responding to me at ceroc. For a time there I couldn't get away from woman at ceroc, I was either on the floor dancing, or in conversation. While I didn't have any interest in any of them, this was quite pleasent. However, now I was practically being shunned. Was it the drawn expression, the shadows under my eyes, and my inability to remember more than half a dozen moves? I think it was.
Clearly, it was time to slow down.
I didn't wake up this Sunday till two in the afternoon. I didn't get out of bed till three. It was awesome. I felt so much better. I sat around and read books and did my washing. If I had a cat, I probably have amused it with a laser pointer for a couple of hours. Instead, I lay on my bed and thought about what the hell I'm doing with my life.
Right now, it feels like I'm just freewheeling. My job pays well, and is stable, and my own inability to concentrate notwithstanding, is not particularly onerous. But it's boring. I've been here just over eight months and I'm bored. It was fascinatingly easy to fall into a trap of work and ceroc and exercise and not much else. I haven't cooked anything interesting or new this year at all.
So, now what? Well, I want to travel some. Or maybe I don't, I don't really know, but right now, it's still possible to fly around the world, and in ten years, either due to economic meltdown or peak oil, or plain just being over thirty and possibly being married and/or having kids, this is going to be a whole bunch more difficult. So, I should do it now, while I still can. But being honest with myself, I hate being in social situations where I don't know the culture. There are some people that love jumping into a new situation and being all lost at sea on their own.
Good for them. I fucking hate it. I have some private theories about why that kind of thing doesn't work for me, but the reality is that jumping into a foreign culture without a guide where I don't even speak the language is likely to make me go insane.
So...
Friends of mine are going to the UK in a month or two. UK is close the Europe (so I'm told), so my plan is to go there at the end when everything finishes up here in Jan 2009.
There. I now have a plan. A goal, and in the mean time, possibly a saner lifestyle.
And having concluded all that, I folded my socks, feeling a lot better.
Why was this so important?
Because... I was stagnating. If I don't have something to work to, I get bored, and have trouble justifying anything. So now I have a goal, and even if I don't get there, I'll have a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Soleil-Raid
srwofb @ murrell DOT co DOT nz