Status: Not Dead of Heart Issues
And beginning to get a bit broad in the shoulders
Hey Clinton! Where are the posts?
Well, I've been a scrawny computer nerd right into my mid 30s, and I figured I'd best not wait for my first heart attack to push me to get in shape. So I've been at the gym between 3 and 5 days a week for the past month lifting weights (and doing aerobic/light weight training classes for a few months before that). I do cardio on my off-days. So my time has tightened up; I've actually begun writing this post on my lunch break at work.
Walking for hours across town has been a thing I've done regularly most of my life. Often until my legs are sore. So, in my still-early progressions in the gymnasium, I've quickly reached a plateau where my upper-body isn't yet strong enough to carry the weight I need to challenge me on my leg exercises. Rather than go work on the dedicated leg machines, I'm just going to go through the motions and wait for my fingers, arms, back, chest, and core to catch the hell up!
Being a beginner—worrying about form and safety and etiquette and not forgetting to pack clean socks or whatever—has provided a very pleasant case-study in adaptation to a new environment. My habituation is developing well. I've had a few false starts in the past. In all those cases, I never pushed through to actually looking forward to my next workout. Exercise was a chore. A slog. But soon after kicking it up a notch in early December, a switch flipped. I caught myself happily anticipating my next workout! Never thought the day would come!
Its been interesting for my detached, self-analytic side to witness how my habits are reforming (that side being, among other things, the voice writing this blog). There is a whole ecology of changes. I had begun working on the habit of cooking more many months in advance to actually getting into the regular weight-training—it’d have been impossible to work out without the increased food and difficult to develop both habits simultaneously. In proportion, many things have been pushed to the sideline. Most notable of these is my regular habit of socializing at the bar. Drinking at home, even more, is becoming a treat for special occasions. Effects on my mood and self-esteem are the predictable ones, happily.
So I may have saved myself from scrawny-fat heart-issues without first suffering a initial health calamity to spur the prevention! Yay! Agency! Self-motivated change without reaction to external conditions forcing my next action! Authoring my future!
Of course, environment facilitated everything, and I could easily make a deterministic case against the above claims. What if my work didn't offer gym-membership discounts? What if the routine I'm doing hadn't been made available? etc.
But I won't sell myself short like that. My years of musings on media, agency, my paranoia about playing into traps or manipulations of others: all these things required resolution in an honest, natural feeling of agency and self-direction. Escape from the negative feed-back loop of fantasizing change, half-halfheartedly implementing it in a self-sabotaging way, and then further reinforcing a perception of one's own impotency of will.
Here’s my compromise, then: I’m pretty sure that everything I’ve written on this blog has contributed to the change—the act of writing it, of re-reading it, of knowing that you’re reading it. So I’d like you to take some credit, my lovely readers. Thanks for being here with me—I will concede that I couldn’t have done it without feeling that you are.
More theory and analysis and schizoposting coming down the pipe for 2025—I'm getting a lot bolder lately in person and am look forward to seeing how that comes across the screen. :)