In my quest to be capable of doing 100 push-ups, I have noticed that the manner in which I count the push-ups can help or hamper my performance. When I count right to 20, it kills me but counting to 10 and then counting down from ten isn’t so hard. If I have to do 25 and I just do 5 sets of 5, its easier.
So, when I do my sets of 20 during the day, now I start from 100 and count down to 80, not only keeping my mind off of quitting but also keeping my eye on the final goal, going from 100 to 0.
“Plan your work; work your plan.”
– The Dead Prez, Discipline
When I say perfect morning and perfect week, I am excluding cuddling and smooching and all that stuff that makes life worth while. I get that as often as I can, whenever geography permits and don’t feel like I’m missing opportunities to do so because of my lack of organizational skills.
But I do feel like I waste a whole lotta time.
So, here are some blueprints for a perfect morning and a perfect week.
My good morning starts the night before. Before I get to sleep I have to:
– Make sure my bags are packed
– Make tomorrow’s lunch
– Sit down for fifteen minutes and prioritize my tasks for the coming day
– 8 hours of sleep, please!
A great morning means:
– No Snooze bar (yes my phone has a fucking snooze function)/No Internet
– Breakfast, look over day’s tasks before reading something
– Exercise
– Shower
I’ve written down a few work-out routines for the morning, just a few fast bits that will get the blood going.
A good week means:
– School work got done early, on Sunday and Monday with only little bits to do during the week
– Clear and reachable writing goals
– Clear and reachable exercise goals
Once I set weekly goals, I know what I have to do each day and the week is more manageable. I woke up after re-setting my alarm and hitting the snooze button half a dozen times really just mad at myself this morning. Something has to change.
So, rather than beat myself up over what I did or didn’t do, I’m thinking about what I can do better.
One exercise bit that is going well is I’m doing sets of 20 push-ups at work. I brought my push-up bars to work with me and I will get in 100 push-ups during the day. Feels good.
I’m losing weight due to my weekly exercise activity and body-weight exercises are getting easier and easier, which is nice. Dips aren’t quite as easy as they were when I weighted an even 200 but its getting there. I can do up to 8 dips in a set, as opposed to the 4 I could do when I first got the pull-bar/dip dingus in my room and chin-ups are slowly but surely improving too.
Feelin’ good.
Have a good weekend, folks.
This past weekend I threw a shindig for Janaki’s birthday. This entailed getting her best friends from high school into town for dinner, notifying her still-local buddies that we were meeting for drinks that late evening and conspiring with her sister to get her into town from Portland.
Everything but her sister coming to town ended up not being a secret but Janaki was so shocked to see her sister, the context-shift was so intense, that she just stared at her when we drove up, not comprehending who she was seeing. It was fantastic.
And the weekend was successful; Janaki had a great time.
Janaki said I got an A+ in Boyfriend this weekend.
The horizon looks bright too.
In the weeks ahead I will:
– try out some interesting new stuff (a class at Cornell and an MMA style gym in Cortland) for working out and shedding some of this 230 pounds.
– attend Dreamation
– record episode 55 with Jeff and Storn
– see Janaki’s new apartment, complete with porch and woods for the Z-man to cavort through
For some reason today, my push-ups feel easy, a nice change from how much even sets of ten hurt last week.
How’s your weekend feeding into your week?
Bret and I went for the mile and a half run around the block against last night after he got home from work. We finished in fifteen minutes and twenty five seconds but we were keeping a pretty non-aggressive pace. I’m sure we can improve that without too much difficulty.
There was a fifty-five degree difference in temperature between our first run and our second.
I think it was the run that led me to have odd dreams about soccer practices from my junior year of high school. The stress in the dream came from drinking water after the run for some reason. The water was muddy.
I’m considering adding some basic squat/sit-up/push-up conditioning sets to the end of the run if I’m not too beat up afterwards.
Tonight is the much-needed Tuesday Night Cleaning Party for the downstairs apartment.
Bret and I made plans to run, make and eat chili afterwards and then play Beast Hunters. Two out of three isn’t at all bad.
I called Bret from the hardware store, letting him know that if he wanted to go running without me, I’d understand. That was me trying to punk out. He said he’d wait. Once I picked up the last few pieces I’ll need to re-assemble the ole heavy bag in the garage, I got home with the last of the chili fixins.
The hardest part of running was getting out there and actually running. I meant to keep time but I pushed the wrong button on the stop watch. We ran a mile and a half down the backwoods roads with our bright neon hunter’s vests on. Once we got moving, it was no thang.
And once home, it was chili-time, made thick with polenta and mushrooms.
That was a good night even if the chili and rice did take too long for us to hunt some beasts.
Tomorrow: push-ups at work!
Happy New Year
I’m not sure that I have ever spent quite so much of a vacation on a couch as I did this one. Janaki and I chewed through the third season of Lost, this season’s Avatar that she’d missed and a few more episodes of the Wire. That futon has the shape of us lying on our sides forever imprinted upon it. I picked at Lovecraft’s Kadath short story but it feels like I still have fifty pages to go no matter how much I read.
I tinkered with resolutions and busted it down to a few areas.
I’ve got physical stuff, the creative menu, authors, MLS and Short Story a Month. I was thinking it’d be short story a week but while in graduate school that is a whole lotta time. So, I’ll aim for one a month and be happy when I surprise myself.
Githyanki Diaspora 