It’s Monday, August 11th, 2025, and that means it’s time for… I skipped Friday Fit Check again, is what that means. The Fit is good., by the way. But also, no real change, and that’s also good. And also, this might be the last Fit Check Friday (Monday).
Today is going to be very inside baseball, so to speak, on the state and future of this journal. It’s also going to be rambly. I was thinking this should be something I keep to myself, but as I was working out my plans in my head, I remembered that this lil’ blog has already played host to similar thoughts, so might as well continue with that trend. This is largely about what’s going on with me and my changing life and self, I suppose, so it seem appropriate. So that’s what today’s post is, and now you’ve been sufficiently warned, so if that’s not something you fancy, than you can feel safe in the decision to skip.
I had been thinking that it’s about time to level up the Fit Check, but instead I think rather now is a time to level things down, just a smidge. The Fit Check Friday should really just be a Check… a general check-in. As a blog, like what this is? This isn’t meant to be exclusively about my fitness situation, though I do want to keep up with that. It’s also not just fitness and learning, though lately it seems like all I post about, when I post, is fitness, learning, and like meta-analysis of either of those or the blog itself. The feeling of doing exactly what I’m saying I’d rather not be doing is creeping in, but let’s ignore that and continue.
I have trouble, sometimes, keeping things neat and tidy. In my day to day life, I’ve been developing some methods of combating these tendencies in myself. I’m not great at any of them, but I keep getting better bit by bit. Stuff like cleaning as I go, immediately cleaning or fixing little problems, and getting on top of scheduling things. One thing I find is that a lot of little things can really quickly steamroll into bigger things if left unchecked. I know that’s not profound, I’ve heard it many times before myself, but please indulge my personal recount of this for a few moments.
It’s one thing if I leave my stove top untidy and unclean for a few days. It’s gross and I shouldn’t do it, but if I leave a mess on Wednesday and get it Friday morning, I’m not that bothered and my kitchen is still pretty easy to keep clean and tidy. However, if I leave it much longer, as if the mess itself is a living organism, it just starts spreading. Now there’s all these spices out on the counter, dirty pots and spatulas, and greasy floors. The loss of that little counter space then somehow leads my brain to think I need to leave some other stuff out, and now I’ve got no counter space, just clutter space. So next I’m doing something that needs counter space, and I’m out of counter, and it seems to messed up to clean. That’s obviously wrong, but I want to deal with what I’ve deemed the task at hand, which isn’t cleaning. So I either spread out to another area, like my dining room table, or just do stuff on top of stuff. Now the unnecessarily cramped space leads to avoidable accidents, and I’ve got spills. Now it’s not just untidy, it’s actually dirty, and quite so. And that compounds over and over until I finally catch myself and fix it.
That pattern continues in spite of regularly both knowing logically and showing myself through practice that this is all much better and easier when you keep on top of shit. It never needed to get to that point. It would have all been easier if I’d just put things away. Even better, everything stays cleaner if I take things out, use them, clean them before putting them away, put them away, and clean anything that may have been even slightly mussed by the using of them before moving onto the next task. And when I do this, I almost never feel like I’m cleaning, even when I am, because all the little things that could have become big problem never do. They stay small, easy to fix things, which in turn makes the remaining things, some of which are bigger, feel pretty small, quick, and easy as well. I suppose it’s one of those virtuous cycles, but that feels like something an asshole would say.
Anyway, the bad version of that cycle is how I was starting to feel about this blog, and I want to nip that in the bud. I’ve made myself a nice box that can be used for anything and should be used for everything, but I’ve inadvertently hemmed myself into a specific pattern, and it’s messing things up.
The fitness part was very much top of mind when I started this. There are other topics that I’d planned to make regular check-ins of. I’d also planned that those check-ins would be regular posts like the Fit Check and that they’d have a more regular cadence… like a few posts a week, with one or two days always on the same subject. Fit Checks are on Friday, Academics are on Wednesday, and some third thing, etc. I think that might still happen, but sometime in the future and not now. Right now, I’m still working out my overall time management problems, and adding unnecessary tasks isn’t a good solve. Additionally, a part of why I wanted to blog more was to work on my writing, which is something I still want to do, but also not top or even middle priority right now. If I could afford myself some more time, it would easily move up to middle again, but I haven’t. So having a higher cadence of regular, planned posts is an idea that’s gotta stay shelved for now, and I think enforcing specific posts on specific days also needs to get shelved, but maybe not forever.
Now I do plan to keep a once a week cadence, but Friday wasn’t working as well as I had thought it would. I am quite focused Monday through most of Friday on my studies and home projects. I’m also a pretty slow writer and editor, and when the posts are meant to be topical of my recent life, that complicates things.
The other thing is the reason I picked fitness and learning as my regular focus, which is that I thought they’d be an endless supply of regular topics. That turned out to be true, but it also turned out that most of the interesting subjects that popped up really needed more time to explore. I now have a google doc chock-full of half written posts, each requiring their own focus time. So my overall time management problems coupled with my amateur writing skills and unnecessarily crunched schedule meant that I’d never find time to actually write about those things. That meant that all I’d really find time to write about are the weekly check-ins themselves. Now that I’m in it, I find my progress to be slow. Not to the degree that I think I’m doing poorly. I’d like my pace in both fitness and learning to be faster, but slow is better than nothing, and I’m happy to see I’ve made any progress at all. So it is what it is, and that means that the check ins are always going to be boring. The most exciting thing would be if I have a massive fail, and I’d like to avoid those where I can.
So making space to write over the weekend feels like a pretty good move. De-emphasizing topic focus and removing restrictions for the blog also seem like good moves. I do like a good strategic restriction here and there, though, so while I won’t be ironclad on my Monday posting schedule, I will plan to post at least once per week and for that to usually be Monday. Fitness and learning are likely to remain common topics, but I’m removing the topic restriction. My social life has been top of mind lately as well, and I’d like to weave a bit of that into my posts. I also want to reopen the option to just write something not related to any of this. I really enjoyed writing about my run practice a few week ago. Granted, that was very much on topic, but the style was quite different from usual. I think I might do more stuff like that, as well of off-topic writing.
Alright, I think that’s about enough for today. Though I talked about not posting more than once a week, I actually have a few close to finished topics, enough that I might start peppering them into mid-week extras in the not-too-distant future. But we’ll see. Alright, here’s to hoping for a good week for all.