sarakingdom

One day, it'll be one-handed prison pull-ups, but today is not that day. Once, I was Tophier. I need to learn from Toph. That was a surprisingly apt correlation. I mean, I struggled a bit for earthbending, but firebending was clearly one of two things, and that's the one I need right now. I think it's way more interesting, in a way, because it says something entirely different about the scope and need for meditation and relaxation than, say, thinking about it in the context of Airbenders. (And there are awesome Airbender gifs out there for that challenge. I was tempted.) Pretty sure their opponents also had a magical comet on their side. Just saying. So, not totally unrelated to Iroh-ness, I have ordered some green-tea scented Japanese incense (which is apparently many, many times more subtle than the non-Japanese sort). Because it apparently makes things smell faintly like a tea-house. Or a dojo, according to some people who use it for their dojo. I'm sort of playing with whether I can focus my mind better by controlling the environment I'm working in more. Which basically means I will be working in a meditating tea house, or something. Baby air bison! Super adorbs! Tracking is not something I do very well. Check in frequently, yes, but quantify and total, no. I don't think that's totally behind my failure to think I'm making progress, because I feel the same way about quantified coursework where I do have numbers, but it certainly doesn't help. So I'm trying new tracking things to see how they work. Pretty colors, and a clear link between what I'm doing and the goal I'm trying to reach with it. So even if I get to the end, and routines still don't feel like progress to me, I should be able to point to a finish short-term goal. Glad to have you!

I like your stop-and-pause idea. I sometimes wonder about something like that for the attention problems I sometimes have. Are you using a timer? Being a programmer means too much sitting. It drives me crazy. Standing desks are marginally better, but they're not (for me, anyway) a full-day solution. Sitting on the floor helps a bit, because it at last keeps me flexible and stretching and moving a bit, as opposed to just cramping up in a sitting position. But, man, I am waiting for my treadmill desk. One day. One day, my friend.

But that is my favorite hobby.

That lotus flexibility looks very cool! I want to work on that. I sit on the floor a lot, and I'm starting to think that it'd be worth it to be more stable. I do a lot of stretching while I'm there, butterfly and stuff, but I'm nowhere near flexible enough for half-lotus.

And a template for tracking: 1. Waterbending Did I swim: (Current total: 0/60) Did I do strength training: (Current total: 0/60) Did I practice butterfly: (Brownie points: 0) Can I do butterfly yet: No 0%0% 2. Airbending Did I irimi or tenkan the shit out of something today: (Current total: 0/60) Am I the leaf: No 0%0% 3. Earthbending Did I do some Toph-like shit today: (Current total: 0/60) Did I work on my course: (Brownie points: 0) Is the course done: No 0%0% 4. Firebending Did I meditate: (Current total: 0/60) Why don't you enjoy a calming cup of tea: (Brownie points: 0) Current count of planned relaxation sessions: 0/3 0%0% Ratings on points totals are scored out of two points a day, five days a week, for six weeks. Ratings are: Gave it a shot. :star: Done in full. :star: Did something really awesome.

Yeah, I dunno, I'm still thinking of a challenge here. Let's see. Well, one can never go wrong with more Appa. 1. Waterbending The routine: I'm going to add some strength training in front of my daily swims. My workouts will still be an hour, just with a few sets of bodyweight exercises up front. So I need a routine to split in two, and do half one day and half the next. Squats, pushups, and plank are pretty obvious for the first day, but I don't know about the second. I hear the pool is good for intro-to-dips, so that's an option, and maybe more plank. (I'm not going to bother with rows, because I think the swimming will take care of that.) The accomplishment: I'm gonna teach myself butterfly this summer. My other strokes are good, but I never quite got around to butterfly, and it looks amazing for the shoulders and core. 2. Airbending I am not the leaf. Well, which is to say, I'm either too leafy or not leafy enough. I'm never the right amount of leaf. I need to learn to be the leaf. The routine: Aikido is good for this. The leaf does a heck of a lot of irimi and tenkan. While my tenkan is really damn good, most of life's issues sadly do not involve objects coming towards me. So I need to practice some mental irimi and tenkan. I honestly have no idea how that'll work, but I'll give it a shot. Oh, and I should practice my actual tenkan more, too. The accomplishment: Not sure yet, let me look at my adulting list and pick something. Something I can leaf my way through. 3. Earthbending Toph is great. I should be more like Toph. I need to practice Toph's confidence. You can do reps of confidence, right? I'm pretty sure you can. The routine: Er... something something daily WWTD? Not sure yet. Do something Tophy every day. The accomplishment: I've got an online course that's based in a bunch of mindset and resilience research, I should finish that up. That'll be about six weeks, I think. 4. Firebending There's something really interesting about firebenders, if you look closely. Really counter-intuitively, the best firebenders in the world are the ones with the tea, relaxation, and meditation fetishes. And that's how they manage this shit: I can identify with that. So let's see here. The routine: Meditate. Drink more tea in the evening. It's relaxing before bed. The accomplishment: I don't have a lot of time that's actually dedicated to planned relaxation. I've made a new work schedule I'm trying out, to get in enough sleep and everything, it's kind of a work in progress, but what it does have is a few blocks of time that'd make very nice planned-relaxation blocks. One a week might be a little ambitious for a start, but let's say three times during the challenge.

I don't really come from a kicking art, but I was curious about that, because it might be a very interesting way to practice kicks. The enforced low speed and resistance could help form and power a lot, while mitigating some of the newb balance issues of doing them in air. Yup, cheap waterproof MP3 player, and a slightly upgraded set of waterproof earbuds. (The ones that came with it were kind of uncomfortable, and also seemed to be damaged on one side. The replacement set was super-comfortable, so that was a good choice.) Not sure how long it'll last, but it was only $20 or so, and this is the second summer I've been using it. It helps me get through my podcast backlog and keeps the pool time entertaining, but the best thing is that it's a good ad hoc timer, because I can roughly peg my workout against podcast length.

Week 6: Day Something So the good news is, the swimming is pretty constant. I sometimes start too late at night, but it's basically happening every day, and it's fairly convenient to stick an hour of swimming right before bed. I'm going to start putting some mini bodyweight workouts in front of it, because I want to get more of that in. I'm improving on a couple of life things that I've been having trouble with. The bad news is, I'm kind of dragging mentally. It's not as bad as it could be and some days are better than others, but it's not great. Every bit of my life feels frustrating right now, and I'm not getting a lot of enjoyment or even satisfaction out of much of what I'm doing, so leveling up becomes a bit challenging. On average, I'm adulting better than I have been, but my brain is fighting me hard sometimes. I'm glad I got into the swimming habit while the weather was cold, because now that it's hot, it's doubly good. It's cooling, relaxing, and very convenient. I'm even sort of tempted to do twice a day. I am sort of doing the easy sort of swimming right now, because I've found that jumping straight into laps doesn't always work so well, so lots of kick-and-breathing drills and jogging in the pool... basically slow resistance training and getting my lungs and swim muscles warmed up. The laps will come, we're kinda getting to that point. What I don't know is exactly what I'm accomplishing when I do an hour of drills, because being in the water mutes a lot of the usual cues you'd get that you've worked your muscles. I don't exactly object if it's the water equivalent of taking a walk, because that's an option, but I would like to accomplish more with the time.

Go to martial arts classes, and do bodyweight workouts for lifting. Gyms are great, but lifting isn't the sort of communal atmosphere you want right now. Heck, even if your weight training is just banging out a few pushups before class, that seems like a win over going to the gym, struggling to lift on your own, and not having classes.

You don't have to do them in order, I think you can unlock anything once a week.

I was only thinking the first time I sat down to work, not every time. Mostly I do front crawl, though right now I'm doing more kick drills and conditioning drills. I figure a few weeks of those will pay off when I start the serious laps. I suspect the headphones do a pretty good job of keeping my ears dry.

Virtually no dancing, though sometimes I put on music in the pool instead of a podcast. That probably counts, for challenge purposes. If I were very clever, I'd come up with a good habit trigger to try, like meditating for a few minutes first thing when I sit down to work.

So, with Zombies Run, when it says you can unlock a new episode a week, do you have to use it that week, or can you build up a backlog?

That's some pretty good walking time. Do you have a job where you're on your feet, or is it all from running errands outside work?

Week 6 Swimming basically every day, walking on the rest. Had a couple of sleep fails. (Rushing to avoid another one tonight.) Remembered my supplements today. Did not get the meditation in. I haven't been having a lot of success with meditation lately.

I considered making yogurt! I might give it a try sometime, if I replace my old thermos.

Man, if you had any idea how much stuff has wheat in it that you'd never expect, you'd agree with all gluten-free labelling. Wheat is mindless filler in virtually everything, and other gluten-based flavoring is in virtually everything else. (Pringles. Corn flakes. Soy sauce. Everything.) And a lot of things that show up on the ingredients list aren't specific enough to know ("modified food starch" and "glucose syrup" can be so many things, some of them wheat), unless they label the allergens separately.

I, too, have the free Zombies Run, though I've been trying to avoid running for the sake of preserving my knees. Maybe I'll use it for some brisk hiking, or maybe I'll take up the occasional jog. Do you watch on Crunchyroll? I tried it out recently, and I just have the worst time with their player. I haven't managed to actually finish a single episode of anything because of player problems.

Moby Dick. That should be your next book. I wouldn't worry about orthorexia being heavily built into Primal as a diet plan, it's one of the few that has moderation built into it with an 80-20 rule. The fact that people are berating themselves for cheating or things being off-limits... well, that's a much broader problem in the modern relationship with food. There's something in the modern American relationship with food that drives that sort of thing, whatever dietary guidelines you follow, it's how everyone on every diet speaks. Every low-fat dieter, every low-carb dieter, every woman's magazine on dieting. It's annoying and not particularly healthy, but I wouldn't for a moment blame it on anyone's diet per se... I think it's a sign of people who have been so marketed to about weight being a character flaw that they can't deal with food that doesn't have moral judgments. That's a much bigger problem than just the Primal/Paleo/Crossfit community. That's half of America.

You mean doing that table in GIMP, or something else?

But when you do, you're supposed to be able to throw something at the ground so hard it bounces. What is she supposed to make hit the ground here, Kishi? What?

I'm fairly lucky in that I don't have a strong reaction to trace amounts. (Of course, that also means I'm somewhat unlucky in not knowing clearly whether I've hit something that's causing me a problem or whether I'm just under the weather.)

Week 5: Day 1-3 swimming an hour a daysleep, probablymeditation, kinda... I've nodded at it a few timespopping pills... um, no, I am bad at itBut my productivity has (mostly) been up this week, aside from today, where I had some focus problems and bad-mooded through most of the day.

Just plain annoying.