Jigme

Oh my gosh, thank you! This looks so cool! I can't wait to be able to do this kind of stuff!

After reading up on HIIT, I decided to go for an interval walk today, using the Zombies, Run! interval missions. Holy crap! That was surprisingly hard! For the ‘sprinting’ part, I just pretended I was going to miss my bus and power walked through the park. Despite below freezing weather, I was pretty warmed up. PT goes a lot better with the Habitica checklist, so I’m going to keep up with that.

Right! My brother and his wife, with their big hearts, have adopted eight cats and a dog from a shelter. I love animals, but I wouldn’t be able to handle that, with all the feeding, medical care, and being restricted with travel. Last year, when they had hurricanes in their are, the whole family was worried about how they would get evacuated with nine pets in their Prius. Thankfully, the storm passed them by!

Ah, yes, meat jello.

And now, time for animal drama! 1) My brother's dog has anxiety. It gets especially bad around rain and storms. I have never seen a dog hyperventilate, but this little guy sure does hyperventilate! I have also never seen a dog on Xanax until now. 2) I have been graced by the presence of 3rd Cat. My parents have two cats, plus 3rd Cat, whom my mother picked up off the side of the road, where the cat got hit by a car. You know that nine lives thing? The cat had tire tracks on her face and a concussion, but she was somehow alive. Up until this very night, she has never willingly interacted with anyone, animal or human, but she came up to me and licked my hand. It's a Solstice miracle! 3) Now, some people have superpowers. They can do a thousand pushups or run really fast or memorize the Periodic table. I have the superpower of being able to not smell ammonia. I can clean out multiple litter boxes in a single bound! Which is why today, when I questioned why it was that the shirt I was about to put on was wet, and so were all of the contents of my travel backpack, it was my brother who had to step up to the plate with the "hey, smell this" test. It was, indeed, cat pee. It was not 3rd Cat, but my mother's tiny, beautiful, exquisitely dumb Persian rescue who has a history of peeing on things he disapproves of. Goodbye, last year's bullet journal! I wasn't that great at keeping up with you anyway.

My brother got the results of his 23&me genetic test and aside from being surprised that there was like one Italian in our anscestry, I am quite intrigued by the fact that he has the ‘power athlete’ genes. Now, who knows if he and I share that one, but wouldn’t it be just my luck...The exercise that I am genetically predisposed to be good at is the exact opposite of what is recommended for this other genetic condition that I have. Ex: when it comes to martial arts, I’m ‘good at it’: I’m fast and I hit hard - and then I get super tired and blow out my joints. I can lift unexpectedly heavy weights...but only once. I can sprint relatively fast, then collapse. So, just like most of my D&D builds, I am a fricken glass canon. How appropriate. My retroactive apologies to the overly optimized characters that I have played over the years.

Eh, just sore this morning, so I think I'm good.

So, I traveled to my parents’ home for the holidays, and my brother invited me to a barre class. He’s a big fan; I’ve only been once, and that was years ago. Well, about 10 seconds into it, I could tell this was one of those ‘not for me’ things. My left hip just kept rolling out of the joint like it was party time. Everything hurt. Glad I tried it, but it’s a hard pass for me.

Update on shoulder pain: I went to the PT yesterday and found out I subluxed my second rib. He assured me that this happens all the time, not just to people with connective tissue disorders, and was likely caused by trying to reach something on a high shelf or any other pulling motion. Pretty sure I did it trying to wrap myself up in my weighted blanket, actually. So there it is! I popped it back in and it feels better now.

This article suggests having a dog as your social tank!

Hey, guys, have you seen this baby monk? Crazy stuff.

Feeling you on Raynaud’s, shooting a bow sucks right now.

Weirdly enough, Zombies, Run!, an app that I love, is not really catching on for my daily walks. I’ve been using the walking time to escape from the constant input into the ole brain pan at work, so silence feels like a relief. Makes me think of meditation, even. Despite what that Blue Zones guy says about optimal amounts of socializing a day being upwards of 6 hours, I just need everyone to stop talking to me periodically, zombies or no. I don’t know how much stock to put into the whole idea of introversion, or if one can train oneself to enjoy a crowded room. Simply decide that you’re an extrovert, and act accordingly, self-help blogs say! If they’d also let me know how to decide not to have migraines afterwards, I’d really appreciate it.

Foods prepared today: Breakfast: pan-fried butternut squash patties with walnuts, strawberries, and grapes. Used leftover roasted squash. Lunch: grilled salmon (leftovers) with wild rice & beans and a radish salad. Dinner: beef chili! Probably going to roast the rest of the radishes tomorrow. I didn’t realize they were a roastable vegetable until looking up recipes today.

PT takes me half an hour right now, with some bizarre findings. For example, standing on one leg for 30 seconds makes my back hurt. Especially if I’m standing on the right leg. Kneeling is weirdly hard, but not just because of my knee, but because I have a hard time keeping balanced. I mean, I can totally see why I was bound to hurt myself with lifting and why I need a bunch of PT to stabilize. I miss how strong lifting a barbell made me feel, though. My right rotator cuff is feeling wacky today, too. I need that one to shoot, so I hope it settles down by Sunday.

Right- I spent 10 years with that group, so it’s hard. I notice, though, that I don’t have as much anxiety now that I’m not involved in all the community activities. By the end of it, I volunteered so much that I couldn’t really practice. So, aside from the ethics, there is some good that came out of it. Re: losing weapons; I always thought the jodo folks had it going on. You got a stick? It’s your jo now! Did you lose it? Find another stick! Of course, I’m sure it’s more complicated than that and there are the Special Sticks made by the Official Stick Maker to the Emperor of Japan, but you certainly don’t have to carry as much stuff as, say, a giant bow and an arrow quiver and a glove and a spare string, etc...

I had a dream about going on a retreat with my old sangha, which I left over a seedy scandal six months ago. In my dream, they were trying to get me to come back, and I was screaming and crying at them. It was extraordinarily painful. I rarely get that upset about my departure in the daytime, but it looks like there are plenty of unresolved subconscious issues to work out.

Today was a very chilly archery practice, just on the verge of snowing. I tried out the new class arrows and after the very first round of shooting, my classmate comes in, right, with an armful of arrows and a guilty look on his face. He informs me that he can’t find my arrows on the range. He got everyone else’s, but not mine, nope. Well, this is a mystery to me, because I do remember seeing them go off in the general direction of the target, as arrows do when you shoot them. I go up to the range, and sure enough, there’s no sign of my arrows. So, I’m standing there staring at the range and the head of the dojo comes up to see if she can see where they’ve gone. Now, there’s three people standing there staring at the targets — and still, no arrows. We’re starting to speculate whether there is a portal that opened up and swallowed them. Then, the head of the dojo jumps and points: there, buried deep in the thick layer of leaves, is the bright red tape that we put around the ends of the class arrows. I shot them right into the leaf bedding on the range and the brown of the bamboo + dark duck feathers of the fletching blended in perfectly. If it wasn’t for the red tape, we would have never found them. This is still better than shooting arrows into snow and then trying to dig them out, by the way. At least the leaves don’t hurt the glue that keeps the fletching on the arrow shaft. Also, much better than shooting them into the roof. The moral of the story is, I need to shoot twice as high as I think I am.

Oh, I was just going to ask you about how you got into Pilates after I saw you mention them on your thread! Yep, core is super duper important for archery, too, bc we don’t really do as much with the arms as with the back. And according to the traditional instruction, we are supposed to be tightening our glutes enough to ‘pinch a quarter between your buttcheeks,’ so you know...that’s a thing to be sure. Would you recommend splurging for one-on-one instruction, or is going to a class enough?

That’s an excellent point that I had not considered. My sleepwalking roommate in grad school would just unload the dishwasher, which I took as pretty positive, but I imagine it is not so for everyone.

There is also Tibetan religious music that is not traditional chanting: devotional songs, or Doha songs! I think the most prominent modern ones come from Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, and some of them have been translated into English by/for his Western students. They’re meant to have catchier tunes that you can just sing throughout the day or in groups, or call-and-response style: http://www.ktgrinpoche.org/songs/all-these-forms, or a much older one: I learned these songs from someone who sang them quite a bit faster, lol; they sound almost mournful to me here.

Like @ChrisWithaStick said, how wonderfully fortunate.

See, we extend our forefinger towards the target. Some people have it more relaxed than others, but me, I’m a pointer. I point. Vigorously. It’s kinda funny, how martial arts and weapons work expose our habitual patterns. I, for one, have learned that I can’t ever do a thing without overdoing it. If I hold a bow, I grip the life out of it (that’s bad for the bow, it twists the bamboo). If I try to relax my hand, I splay all the fingers out. If I point at the target, then I am going to fricken point.

Because you can’t make bad health decisions when you’re unconscious!

I’d also like you all to know that I didn’t even get slapped once at kyudo practice last week! That’s a great improvement over big purple welts. I guess the bow was in a better mood that day. Also, probably because of the holiday weekend, we only had instructors in class last Sunday, and I was the only student, which meant that three people watched me and offered feedback for two hours. It is a humbling experience, I tell you. I found out that my bow grip has been incorrect for the last five years, but apparently it takes ten years to start getting it right, so, you know, halfway there. I am still overgripping, but to correct for overgripping, I was splaying my middle and ring finger out. Hey, the pinkie is doing all the work, so who cares what the rest of them are doing, right? Wrong. Ya gotta stack your fingers so it looks pretty. Gotta love ceremonial martial arts. Gosh, I just realized you can actually see it in my avatar photo. What’s that middle finger up to? Partying it up, apparently. At the end of the class, the head of the dojo told me ‘gripping is hard.’ She does the same thing I do on occasion, even after a lifetime of practice. So, I felt better.