Author: Aaron

Fitness first, and it’s a quick one. I’m not going to make my goal of getting below 250 by the end of August. I’m not bothered, but I am going to shift into a more intense plan for a short stint. Given the state of things, this shouldn’t be much more intense, more like getting back to more accurate measuring and logging of my caloric intake and making sure I’m getting enough exercise in. Thankfully I haven’t gone up in weight, and I have been trending generally lower for this month, so this should be fine. I am in search of some more HIIT routines, preferably those aimed at beginners and olds, and without jumping. But as much as I hate them, burpees have been the most effective exercise by far, so maybe it’s time to just start getting used to them again.

Alright, the rest of this is on how things are going for me academically.

I turned in my first paper for the English Comp. class I started on StraighterLine, and it came back with a pretty bad score. For a moment, I was quite upset at this, but that faded. Given it was top of mind, it didn’t take too much effort to remind myself that this is what I wanted. I did, then, briefly scold myself for having the reaction of a petulant child, but sometimes you’re just gonna feel what you’re gonna feel.

I went into the assignment thinking I didn’t really understand the ask. I’d spent some time looking around the site and the materials provided, which helped quite a bit. But at some point, I just couldn’t find anything that felt like a good foot hold. They did put up some examples, one of which is color-coded, and those gave me enough to get started. But I just kept rewriting everything over and over. I’d write a little, read a little, write some more, go to a different subject, come back and try to re-read the materials, then try and revise what I’d written. I felt like I was just running in circles around a cold pool, stalling, when I really just needed to jump in. So with my best understanding of the assignment, I sent off my first attempt, expecting to learn from the feedback. Of course, in the back of my head, there was always the thought that what I’d turn in was perfect, actually, I’d understood it all along, and I can just be done with this and all other classes. I am being a fair bit flippant, of course. But what came back was definitely worse than I was expecting.

Part of the initial frustration was with what I had taken as conflicting objectives of the assignment. The story needs to be pretty short (550 words) and yet completely develop the story and all characters within it. “You can’t develop characters in under 1000 words, what is this nonsense?”, I’d thought.

This is a pretty big takeaway for me, unspoken in the actual feedback. Yes of course you can develop characters, you just need to write more tightly. But I’m quite verbose, a characteristic which is occasionally quite helpful, but which is clearly not an asset in this situation. I do understand and value the utility of brevity, though I seem to have lost my touch for it. This exercise shows me that I probably don’t value it enough, and I certainly need more practice.

The rest of the frustration comes from the lead up to turning in the first attempt. I’d already made a good number of passes on the essay, tweaking here and there. I’d cut a lot of what I’d viewed as character development, trying instead to focus on the story. I also thought that what I was writing explained what things meant to me, but with the feedback, I can see I really didn’t explain that at all. Its more of a recounting of events, and lacking any human touch to how those events effected me. I also kind of didn’t think that’s what an essay was, and maybe that’s part of what has always bothered me about personal essays. The class is making it clear that I have seen this incorrectly, but I am still having trouble shaking the feeling that the personal, deep, important things in life don’t belong in a 500 word essay. Guess I’ll just have to get over that and give it another go.

You know, a part of the feelings come from thinking that I was doing things right to begin with. That I intrinsically understand the ask, put in the work with my revisions, and so I’m good to go. But that’s silly, it’s like a bad emotional habit I’d picked up from scenarios in grade school and a corporate job that I might now describe as “toxic”. It’s like having to deal with the shithead from work who is absolutely certain that anyone working from home is just slacking off at all times, or at least more so than they did in the physical office. In the office, this is the type of manager that acts like a warden, making sure the gen pop always stays busy, never an idle hand. My experience since the 2020 Lockdowns was finding that many daily tasks were actually easier to complete ahead of schedule when you worked from home, including a fair amount of collaborative work. It would force you to communicate clearly with coworkers, even in iterative work, and you’d end up with better work with fewer hurt feelings. Collaborative sessions that could have either been in person meetings or the dreaded Zoom Call were perhaps a bit more complicated, but thems the breaks.

Anyway, it was good to get the feedback. It also introduced me to at least one bit of grammar or syntax (I guess I’m not sure which this counts as) – the Introductory Comma. I must have heard of this before, though I really can’t recall. The way the website is organized is maybe less intuitive than its administrators might think. Following the feedback, I went looking for a section on the site that covers the topic and didn’t find one. But no matter, we live in the information age and I’m already at a computer, so I found some passages, a wiki article, and plenty of videos to fill in my lack of knowledge.

I also have some unrest regarding my Programming / Computer Science stuff. I’m still on the CS50x class, which I think in-person Harvard students do in like 10 weeks. I’m on the third week’s problem set now, and it has been months since I’ve started this program. I am just dragging behind, and I’d like to speed things up, but even if I dropped everything else, I still don’t think I’d be much quicker. As stupid as it must sound, I kind of feel like I actually need another class, maybe two. Some materials that focus more on the logic and problem solving skills related to the class would really help. All of this does reinforce the utility of my plan to do as much in a self-paced environment as I can. I have some subjects I’m quite good at… I presume, I haven’t really hit one yet, come to think of it. But the subjects I’m not great at are a lot easier to stomach when I don’t have extra stress from external deadlines or missed lectures bouncing around my head. It takes me for-fucking-ever to understand anything, so being able to take my time and really settle into a thought has so far been beneficial. However, I do feel I must challenge myself to increase the pace. Not only do I not, in actuality, have infinite time to do this, I’ve also done some of my best work under some stress and with pretty tight deadlines. Less room to either destructively ruminate or just straight-up slack off. So maybe I could do with a smidge more stress.

Lastly is the Stats class. The way the class is organized in the StraighterLine modules has been a little hard for me to get my head around. When you put things into neat little piles the way this program has, I am inclined to think these little piles are meant to be sifted through in a single session. But these sections are pretty damned long. Do I need to read faster? No, I can’t get myself stunlocked on that again. I read as fast as I read, and that’s just how it is.

That drawback aside, the way some of the individual lessons are structured does seem helpful. It feels like the authors read the same studies and advice on learning that I did, and they have the lessons laid out to pull from as much of that wisdom as they can. Like the end of almost every lesson does a summary of what was in it, and the beginning of almost every lesson has a recap on the last lesson. That’s pretty dope. But not everything works for me, like how every so often they try to introduce some mnemonic to help remember terms or sequences. These have basically never worked for me. I’m sure they work for most people, and them not working for me is just a “me” problem, but I get nothing from these. I think their effectiveness is a big part of that time that half the country lost their dang minds and got pretty angry with Science in general, all because Pluto got re-categorized. You guys, it’s a dead rock that too far away for you to ever even visit, why are you so pissed about this? Well, we all learned that our very educated mother something something pizzas, and if the pizzas ain’t there, then I’m not as smart as I think I am! Rah!

I do remember PEMDAS just fine, which I guess implies I actually can do that type of studying… but I’ve never really grasped why we’re excusing our Dear Aunt Sally or whatever. Also, some of these mnemonics are a real stretch, one I read today is something like “FUFFL”? Can’t be that, but you get the point. What am I suppose to do with FUFFL? Get stuffed.

What I’m hoping is that I’m on the wrong side of a learning curve. I don’t know if that’s actually a thing, but I remember times I’ve had it tough with learning before, and usually there had been a learning hilltop to crest. It’s a real hard climb to get up there, but once on top, the rest of the subject is riding the downhill. This isn’t to say easy, and especially not to say that it never gets tough again. But it’s like when you’re in hill country, cresting that first hill reveals all the other hills, which can be disheartening with the wrong attitude. However, if you know that field of hills is going to stretch out before you the second that crest the first one, you don’t see the field as a monster. You can start to plan how to crest each, and with each you work your way through, you get a little more capable. I’m really hoping something like that starts happening, ’cause I am feeling pretty weak right now.

Lastly I’ve been having more thoughts on how to organize all of this. One thing that really helped in my last job was organizing the work around the intended output. Like, some of the work, you just do. You know the work, you’ve been taught a few tasks, shown how to do it, and you’ve since done it a million times. You don’t even think about it, you just complete it, it’s whatever. Upload this, make that phone call, work out these numbers. But as the complexity of my work increased, more and more the pre-work would become a task unto itself – you’d need to spend time mapping out the work you needed to do before you could do the work itself. Sometimes I’d have to spend a few days or even a week just reading stuff to even get my head around what was being asked of me, what tools were available, or what types of solutions would be acceptable.

Should I have learned a lesson from that? Can I, should I organize my studies around the assignments? I have a bit of a distaste for the Self Help genre, but lately I’ve found myself reading a lot in that realm, particularly as it relates to learning. A common point of focus in those works is on autodidacts, and they imply that self-learners pick areas of study around one big idea they want to know, or a problem they want to solve, something they want to discover, or invention they’ve been trying to build. That’s kind of how I’m looking at the classes that I’m choosing, but maybe I need to extend this thought into the subject itself. Is that how that Stats class is organized? But the checkpoints only have three attempts… should I just plan to burn the first attempt on a likely failing grade? Dawg, I do kinda like that idea. Burn the first one to see just how far from the mark I am, gaining the knowledge of which areas need the most focus? Oh snap, that kinda sounds like something, doesn’t it? Hmm. Gotta sleep on that.

Oh! Last thought on the writing stuff. The course very much did offer a rubric, which I promptly ignored. I can, and will, at least partially blame this on the website’s presentation again. The page was all squished and you couldn’t scroll… I couldn’t read the dang thing! The results and feedback included a version that showed the rubric and my specific place in each measured area. It is also a lot more clear and I can actually read it now. So I’ll check that regularly, and see if I can find better versions of the rubric for future assignments.

I’ve started a Statistics class on StraighterLine and I’m rather excited about it.  I’ve also started another English Composition class.  

I’m using that “class” term pretty loosely.  I’ve been asking folks I know with college experience about their time with it, along with study habits and stuff like that. Every response I’ve received has been interesting, but the most helpful have been those in response to more clear, direct questions. The types of questions that imply a more specific response. I had some friends with slightly more recent college experience than others recount some study strategies, which I found particularly helpful.  A big bonus was how they each reinforced strategies independent of each, and how those line up with research backed advice. One takeaway emphasized in the book “A Mind for Numbers” (by Barbara Okaley) is to personalize things. I tried to take the advice from the book seriously, but I haven’t really been able to do much with it. The examples from the book and that I come across from other sources are always so hokey and goofball. Look, I can be a real goofus, and I’m not going to rag on someone else’s cornball humor. As dark as I can sometimes get, I am more commonly just teetering on a barely funny pun, and when I’m all on my lonesome, I’ll often say them aloud and get a good laugh out of the only audience available: me. But the weird, esoteric wordplay they site just never comes to me while I study, and when I try to force it, it does the opposite of help me remember my studies.

But the advice to personalize does sound good, and hearing from family and friends about their own experiences has shown me that they’ve personalized things without trying to be dad-joke factories. So it is possible, and I can reflect on my own well of knowledge and recognize just how many things I’ve internalized have been so mentally enshrined because they were, in one way or another, personal to me. So that’s something, I think, I can work with.

So that’s one of the pushes for starting yet another English Comp. class.  It isn’t that I think the previous courses were bad, and one of them even earned me a voucher to take a test that could save me a fair chunk of tuition money.  However, I don’t feel like I got out of the experience what I wanted from it.  On the subject of the tuition, yeah, I could probably test out for free and that would be great. However, that specific class is often required by schools that students take their version of the class. This definitely stands to reason, less that they think the class is subpar, but that these classes also teach non-universal language rules, like what you might find in a Style Guide, and that those are the rules you are expected to adhere to when writing in other classes at the same college. So I have to keep in mind the expectation that I might have to retake the it, yet again, but this time at the actual school that I attend. I think there will be classes that I just can’t stomach such a blow, but for at least this one, I really don’t mind. It fits right with one of my goals, which is to actually be a better writer. So if I need to retake this class, I could just lay back in the cut for an easy A if needed, but I plan to juice it for every once of experience and feedback I can get.

This falls under some of the most consistent advice being readily given by professors, teaches, and writing coaches, that the writing process is best done iteratively. I have noticed this in my own writing, that it improves with iteration. I think I’ve been seeing this across my other subjects as well, that while there is definitely some property of diminishing returns, it still stands that at least some amount of repetition is helpful.  My writing speed, though, is another place that I struggle. I have a variety of things that slow me down, and I’m pretty sure that each of those would improve with both practice and feedback.  This class will offer me both, and that will still be true if I do need yet another retake.  Plus, it would better help me set up for the next level classes.  I don’t know, I don’t really have a lot of experience in the world of writing outside of production manuals and business communications.

The Stats class is a biggy for me as well.  Similar to the English Comp. classes, I feel I would benefit from the repetition of practicing on the same basic math skills but from a different angle.  I finally feel that I’ve adequately proved to myself I can understand the Algebra expected at my level, and that’s great.  However, I still feel like I need a lot more practice.  And I really don’t want to spend another two months retreading the same classes and same problems, though I do see exactly that as a likelihood just over the horizon.  Though I don’t know by how much, it iss my understanding that there is a fair amount of Algebra in Stats.  That makes sense, and if so, I could use some more examples to work through.  Hopefully some of those will give me some of that personalization.  I’d love to have that internalized understanding of the operations available to me that Math teachers so regularly demonstrate.  I guess it doesn’t need to be that good, but you know, it’s a pretty good example to shoot for.  

Also similar to the English Comp. study, Stats is a subject that I will almost certainly use.  It’s also something that I enjoy, so I would like to explore it to a good enough understanding that I can mess around with the lessons in my everyday life.  The various tastes of Stats that I’ve had throughout my life have already shown me its value.  It’s always possible that I’ll take another regular Joe desk job, and if I do, I want to be better equipped to really excel at it.  I feel like there were a lot of good people in my corner in my last job, people that I like and respect, and I think excelling at whatever I do next is the minimum I can do to repay the kindness.  Speaking of excelling, I got pretty good at Excel in my last job, but that could use some polishing as well, and I’d love to learn some new tricks.

Anyway, I’ll report back on how things go whenever that’s, I don’t know, something I can do I guess.  But that’s it for today.

Don’t get your hopes up too high, I haven’t gotten below 250 just yet. However, I have had a feeling for the first time in a long time, maybe ever, and I want to share it.

It feels a little strange saying this, but here it comes – lately when looking in the mirror, I haven’t hated what I’ve seen

I need to immediately pump the breaks on this post and make sure you, the reader, understand that I am not interested in feedback or advice or anything like that on this thought or subject. I’m just logging the event, and we’ll see what happens as time moves forward.

I have for most of my life struggled with how I look. I know I don’t look bad, logically, but I’ve always found myself extremely unattractive. As a boy I would regularly have the experience, one that I’m told is common, of being mistaken for a girl. For most of my boyhood, this was in no way a bother. Boy, girl, what the heck did I care? I didn’t. At first. But as I grew into adolescence, an age where this mistake usually stops being made of other boys, it was still quite common for me. This started to bother me quite, and before long it bothered me a lot. It’s odd typing this now, honestly, I haven’t thought about this probably since that time. As I moved into my teenage years, the previously regular mistake sublimated and seemed to disappear altogether overnight. However, this wasn’t something I could take as a victory and enjoy the spoils of, as it was quickly replaced by the social stigmas common with being overweight.

Somewhere near the end of my boyhood and edging into that fraught adolescence, I had a medical procedure that cured an intestinal problem that kept me perpetually sick and quite underweight. With my guts repaired and my body finally able to keep down all that I’d eaten, I found that I was predisposed to be heavy. I remember when my Mom started to take me shopping in the “husky” sections of the retail shops around town and at the mall. At first, this was kind of fun and novel. I was bigger than the other kids, and that made me feel strong. Also, I like dogs, especially huskies, but when the meaning of the euphemism finally dawned on me, it was beyond disheartening, it was downright soul crushing. I wasn’t the energetic, plucky, precocious young person I’d always thought of myself as. I was a fat kid.

I don’t know what it’s like for kids these days, and I do worry that while some ills of our past have been cured, we certainly haven’t cured them all, and some of what was cured only made way for all new ills that plague our youths just the same. But back then, every single other thing that very well might have defined a person was lost entirely to the one singular attribute you had if you were the dreaded “fat kid”. It didn’t even take much to be a fat kid back then either, just being a little thicker around the waist was too much. I had been born in the early 80s, a time beset on all sides by images of a strange beauty standard. A standard of being so thing as to seem unwell by any other measure. I do apologize if the previous statement reads as though I think all thinness means a lack of health. I have become a firm believer that we not only do have all types of bodies across our population of humans, but that we should have such. The diversity is critical to our species special adaptations. Less coldly, I don’t think the different bodies look bad, I think they look good, though I’ll save any further chat on that for another time. I also don’t mean to say that simply to be thin is to be unattractive. There are plenty of people today whom are as thin as the models of the 90s, but those people are by and large people for whom being of that size is healthy for them. At least, that’s my understanding of things.

But back to my story and to back up my claims, let me state for those that weren’t alive or otherwise aware at the time, there was a preference, at least in media, for an unnatural thinness, so much so that it gained the label, “Heroin Chic”. Yes, people were, on purpose, becoming so much thinner than their own bodies could support, that the models of the time tended to look like they were strung out on one of our societies most notoriously unhealthy drugs.

When my insides were repaired sufficiently enough for me to keep down food and get some meat on my bones, my body overshot the goal. I’ve struggled with my weight ever since, which should be no surprise given how often it is a topic on this blog. The only respite I had was during my time in the Air Force, and not even that spanned the duration. Even during those periods where I was medically considered very healthy and fit, I still hated the body I inhabited.

I actually find it more difficult to explore how I thought of my looks in my post-military adulthood, though not from shame or anger or any of the other many complicated feelings from my youth. It’s more that those times in my life are covered in a fog, and that I was lost in the shadows of a past that stalked my every moment. A complicated and difficult topic all of its own. But I what I do know, and what I’m sure will come as no surprise to read, is that I was quite unhappy, not the least at how I looked.

I was always too girly and small. Then I was too big and ogreish. I was never handsome, athletic, or popular, like my big brother always was. I was always awkward, my clothes never fit right, and each region of my own body felt ill fitted against the other. I was short, stocky, and somehow both blocky and curvy at the same time. I’m still short. 5’7″, so not actually short but average, and I’ve rather grown to like my height. Baring the occasional extra-high shelf, I’d say I’m just as tall as I ought to be.

What bothered me most of all started somewhere around my mid-30s. When I looked in the mirror, I could not see myself. The actual person, Aaron, his body was not there. It was someone else, someone who looked similar, but the form had been so radically distorted, eyes sad and unable to fully open, smile incomplete, with sacks and sacks of overcooked grain and mashed potatoes rubber-banded together and stuffed under my shirt, like a bad knockoff of the original Aaron. It was impossible to overcome how little I thought that I looked like me, and I began to not even feel like me. Even just sitting in a chair, I could feel the overabundance of my existence spilling over into space I wanted so desperately not to fill. It was suffocating.

Speaking of which, I fear I could suffocate endless notebooks with my laments over my distaste and disgust for my own looks, but I must stop myself short or I’ll never finish this thought. So let’s finally get to that end and bring us up to the present. Lately, when I look in the mirror, the man looking back at me is me, again, finally, or perhaps the first time. Much of the sadness remains, though I think I’ve done well to chase away some of the darker clouds, and mask what lingers. But I can see the wholeness of my eyes again, my cheeks are once again my cheeks and not the overfilled squishy puffs so long have been.

And then there is another dimension. Something new. After over forty years of yearning for that feeling of being a man, for the first time ever, I can see a man when I look in the mirror. I’d lost my shoulders years ago, and my chest was never how I’d wanted. Always too small or too big, round and pointy in ways unbecoming of my desired self. In truth, I am many months and perhaps years from, if ever, achieving the fitness level and visible body definition that I’d like to see, but still, in this form, I can see me. I am there. My shoulders are beginning to return, and quite robustly at that. My chest, which I have loathed for my entire awareness, is finally something that I notice in the mirror with delight and pride.

So that’s been pretty nice. Anyway, it’s late and this is cutting into my dinner time, so let’s leave things there for now. Otherwise, you know, notebooks.

It’s Monday and I’ve been thinking. About what? Just a bunch of silly little things. So I’m going to just… yap about those for a hot minute.

First thing’s first, I spent a lot of the weekend kinda… decompressing, I guess. I did some studying and a lot of fretting about things, but mostly tried to just take a load off. Part of this was a decision I’d made to not attend something.

A while back a friend of mine got me in touch with a friend of hers that works at my county’s community college. I chatted with him a big and he gave me some really great information, which included that the school had an Open House coming up. I’d been thinking about whether or not to go, and even planned to. Earlier this month I’d started thinking I might skip it, which was paired with my considerations of just when I would actually enroll. I ultimately decided last week that I wouldn’t enroll for the upcoming Fall Semester, which back-burnered my thoughts about that Open House so hard that I just completely forgot about it until the morning of. I still had time to make it, plenty of time, and I was already ready. Given the plan, I decided against it. Now that it’s a few days later, I’m kind of wishing I had gone. Going wouldn’t have started any commitment to enroll or anything, and I would probably have had a chance to meet the friend of a friend I’d been emailing with. But I also don’t think it was a terrible decision, and there will be other chances. So I’m now resolved that the next time I get a chance, barring if it does force a commitment, I’m going to go check things out.

I’m a little bit stalled in my weight loss again. Given recent history, I’m not worried about it. But it is worth noting, especially as a reminder to myself to get back on course and stay it.

I had a potato explode in the oven today. That shit was wild! I’ve only had a potato explode once, and that was in a microwave, and I was trying to make it do so. This time, it was three of those thin, white, Japanese sweet potatoes. I usually only get those when there’s a deal, and well, there was a deal. I also don’t usually bake them whole, but I did today. My own experience with whole baked potatoes is that you usually really don’t need to prick them before cooking, and there’s a particular method for keeping medium-smallish russets from getting too dense or tough by both skipping the pricking and the foil wrapping. I wasn’t even thinking about it when I threw these in, I just kinda did, and then I heard them pop and that was very novel. They turned out fine, by the way. It wasn’t a full blow-out. A little splattering and speckling, but fine. Pretty good, actually.

I’ve been doing a little more of that writing I keep telling myself that I’ll do. I’m pretty happy with some of the fiction writing I’ve been trying out. I’m less impressed with my attempts at poetry. It was bad, like turned ranch over a wilted salad.

I restarted a video game I’d stalled out on a good long while ago. The game is named “Tunic”, and I love this game, and I got completely stuck in a section called The Cathedral. Wait, is that right? I think it’s also called The Gauntlet? It’s the big boss-rush after the huge turn in the game. Well I finally made it past that yesterday, and that fuckin’ ripped, dawg. I also found a collectable that indicated to me I could have guessed that turn before it came… but I refuse to feel stupid for that one, that’s part of this game’s charm.

Some of the other things I’ve talked about struggling with on here have started to feel like they’re coming together. I’ll likely write more about them as I go forward, but it’s just nice to not feel completely lost for a bit.

I always have way more to talk about and never make time to do so, which I guess is a complaint I can add to the list implied by the above. But I’m not going to fix that today, so that’s it for now. I’ve got another mid-week post planned, but with a few different half-written subjects, I’m undecided which to cover. I guess come back later this week to find out what I went with? Alright, I’m out. Watch ya’self.

A fair portion of my youtube viewing goes to folks I might describe as “good internet weirdos”. The world is full of weirdos, good and bad. The weirdest of the weird, at least in my estimation, are those that are absolutely insistent that they are normal, so normal, in fact, that it frustrates their every waking moment that other people aren’t living exactly the same as they are. I could launch into pages and pages of good vs. bad weird and how the worst, darkest, and most dangerous of the weirdos out there come from the Conservative Dad Class and the, likely much worse, Conservative Dad-Coded but actually Incel goobers. Today is not a post of politically dunking on right wing creeps, but rather I wanted to mention a youtube video and wanted to describe the presenter as weird without giving the impression I think she’s bad. I think she’s good, in fact, but this isn’t actually about her, either.

The host of the video I mentioned above is, in my estimation, the type of person I would deem a “good weirdo”. I’m not saying she looks like a weirdo. In my eyes, there isn’t anything about her that physically that presents as at all weird to me. Granted, my gauge on what is and isn’t weird in appearance may not be a common take, but regardless of whether or not I’ve sported poorly dyed blue hair in my past, I really can’t see anyone looking at her and being like, “What’s up with that weirdo?”. The weird, and mind you “good weird”, that I catch from her is attitude and stuff like that. Watch a video of hers and I’m sure you’ll see it as well. I don’t know why I’m two paragraphs into this concept, the point of today’s post doesn’t have anything to do with that. Oh, the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gxM0Hg1oNI&t=220s

I like the cut of this lady’s jib. I think her channel’s title, “sincere on main”, does a fair amount of working to getting on her level. She very much gives the vibe of the fabled Cool Aunt whom is actually cool and not just try-hard attempting to seem cool. Like you get the feeling you could ask her some shit you can’t ask mom and she wouldn’t shy away or demur, but rather give you the straight dope without it feeling weird. And now that I’m feeling like I’ve just described a modern parasocial relationship, let’s finally get to the actual topic of today’s post.

In her video linked earlier, she relates some advice on running. At about the 11ish minute mark of her video, she starts talking about the feelings that accompany exercise. You should really watch it for yourself, but to summarize, she really likes lifting, and even gets excited for it, but she doesn’t feel the same way about running. For me, it’s the opposite. I mean, I’m not getting the full on runner’s high, but I have in past sessions, and have again started getting something approaching it. With each new run, I get a little closer to the full thing. As I’m mostly going for long walks that I finish with an interval run, I often enjoy mini-body-highs in the middle of each run-walk cycle. A very enjoyable burst of energy, clashing against the hard-tired setting in behind it, rushing through me and causing a subtle but delightful tingle.

I get more out of the run than that, of course. Yes, there are the results, and those are great. That’s the whole reason I restarted it, and more specifically, I’ve been really happy with my recent results. However, the results themselves don’t work for me as a singular motivation. I don’t know, I guess that even though I completely understand that A leads to B and all that, it just doesn’t get me excited for it, and maybe that part actually doesn’t match up with hers. What does motive me usually comes in the moment, and thankfully stays with me after. The memories of those feelings encourage me to get back out there next time, to the point where if I haven’t hit my daily cardio, the whole day feels a little off.

I said earlier that I’m not motivated by the results, and that’s not actually true. Thinking it through now, I definitely get that special thing, that sort of slow-burn feeling of accomplishment that starts to accompany the mundane rigor of progress. I think that’s why I can relate to how she describes her experience with weight lifting. She makes it sound exciting, actually, and lifting has never once felt that way to me. Granted, she and I have different goals and modes of lifting, so it stands to reason that our feelings would be different. I also haven’t really gotten the any of the physical rewards generally expected from lifting, so it’s hard to feel any sense of accomplishment from it. At best, lifting for me feels like slightly helping myself avoid an early death.

I find our experiences in lifting and running to be opposites, though maybe not mirror perfect. I find lifting to be so boring and so just, “doin’ this for the maintenance”, that I never look forward to a session. But the progressive mundanity of the run is something I do enjoy. But then there’s the parts that I actually love, like the brief escape from the world. When I get to pace, all of my worries and the whole rest of the world just vanishes. The act of running forces my otherwise always overactive brain to shut out all nonessential functions and just focus on the task at hand. Just moving forward feels good, but also challenging myself feels good, moving my big shitty body feels good, breathing that deeply feels good. When I find my stride, I feel nimble. Imagine that, weighing over 250 pounds and feeling nimble for goddamn once. It really does breath life back into my otherwise decaying soul. The focus zeros out the world and completely centers on my most immediate needs, which is a very nice feeling indeed.

Anyway, she also made a video on her lifting experience. I didn’t grab a link to that, but with the link above, it should be pretty easy to find. And you should check that out. I’ve gotta get back to studying.

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.

It’s Monday August 4th, 2025.  I have a few things I want to talk about, including completing the Fit check that I skipped this past Friday, August 1st.  The rest is about my academic and career situation.

Okay, first up but perhaps least important for the day – The Fit is Good.  No real big updates here, and things are generally trending in the correct direction… which is down, for now, when it comes to weight.  The rest of the things are also in line with the plan – I’m continuing my walks and converting some of those to increasingly longer and/or more intensive running sessions.  To follow up from a recent Fit Check, I’m still not getting in as many or as intensive of strength, calisthenic, or HIIT sessions.  Solving that is partially solving my ongoing time problem, a problem I know how to solve if only I could commit.  Another part of that is just motivation, also in progress.  So you know.  That’s that.

The rest is about my current learning situation, and this is going to be another “thinking things through” type of post.  In this one, I’m not walking away with any real solutions, just trying to gather my thoughts into a type of ball that I can ponder over.  So a real blog-ass blog.  I’ll try and do something like a real solution another time.

It’s particularly on my mind right now because some of the available possibilities have deadlines for starting them. You know, enrolling in college. Colleges tend to organize their classes by time into semesters (or trimesters, which I recently found some do). The big standard starting semester is for Fall, which usually starts at the start of September or end of August. And it’s August now. I kinda really just want to get started on that now, and I’m really wanting to just sign up… but every part of me that resists impulse is telling me I should wait. And now we get to today’s real subject, let’s see if we can find a crux.

I have never taken college level formal classes of any kind, and I think it would do me some good to take some traditional, in person, real college classes Also, while I know not all community colleges are great, my county has one that’s considered very good by any number of measures. I’d be stupid to not at least give that a go at some point. I also really like the option. I know a lot of people that speak extremely highly of this school and the experiences they had there. However, time and money are huge parts of my planning equation, and even this highly rated low cost community college isn’t a perfect, single-option solution.

Look, I’ve come to the conclusion that this just is going to cost me a shitload of money and take a shitload of time.  I’m going to have to take out a loan or perhaps a series of loans in order to do this.  It’s going to take me years to complete, even if I manage to greatly accelerate things. But this is not the end of things, it is a phase on the way to something else. I need to keep that in perspective, because however long this phase takes and however much it costs, I need to come out of it with something, and I need that something to count towards whatever the next phase is.

There are options out there to do cheap and there are options to do quick. Some of those options are both quick and cheap. Some of those do include real, actual degrees from serious colleges with accreditation. However, there is then the question of the Quality of Credits.  This is important to me because, however unlikely, it’s possible that cheaper, quicker credits appearing on a transcript may complicate future prospects. 

From my research so far, it seems true that most employers never check transcripts, don’t care about grades, college is done and dusted to them.  But some do. It very much depends on the kind of job you’re after, and I might come out of this experience wanting a career where that matters. Additionally, continuing in higher education looks like it often requires a review of transcripts.  What if I want to enter a Masters program or something even higher than that, and what if an option pops up to go to a school I’m very interested in, but they care about the details of my credits.  Well if like 50 of my undergrad credits come from CLEP, Sophia, or whatever, does that hurt me? If they’re pass/fail type grades, will they just tell me to pound sand? And I’m not sure if you can fix that, or what fixing that would look like if you can.  Retake the classes?  I guess that would be fine, but if the credit I got in the first place was of a low enough perceived quality that the school makes me retake it, then does it then stand to reason that the actual quality of the credit isn’t just perceived as low but actually is low? If there wasn’t a transcript check and no one to challenge me, when do I figure that out, first day on the job? Is that then just wasted time? Or does it matter? If I just want to play the labor market game, then it doesn’t matter if I know things. Who gives a shit, modern employers are clearly lying in their hiring, so why shouldn’t I cheat at selling my labor?

Something that’s helped me in the past is to try and actually look at my bigger problems I’m working to solve for, goals in this case, and work out a, for lack of a better framework, sort of strategy that can get me further toward that end.  Right? What I need is a plan. But I’m having trouble not just making the plan, but even getting a start on it.

Part of what’s making this goal hard to plan for is that I’m not entirely sure what that end goal… is.  Most of my current end-goal outlook is pretty squishy.  It’s like, I’d want to have the skills to do my own thing and also to have something recognizable as valuable to potential employers in a jobs market.  So basically, what I want is both the skills and the proof of having those skills (which is why college seems like a good idea).  I especially want both and not just one because what I think my best future looks like is one where I do both – I do my own shit, make my own whatever, but also find paths to working with others in enjoyable ways, and that the two together also pay the bills.  Unless I can manage to pay the bills some other way, in which case, I don’t give a shit if I make any money off of my tinkering or collaborations.  I like my solo tinkering and I like my collaborative work, and those need to be in my future plans. Paying the bills also needs to be in those plans, but as problems, they do not need to be solved by the same equation, so to speak.

Maybe worth mentioning is that if all I wanted was the piece of paper, then fuck it, let’s find a degree mill!  Or split the difference, do college hacking and hack it real hard, where I prove that I get enough of enough things, don’t care about quality of credits, and just get the labor market advantage of a degree to try and land another job.  But that’s the only thing I’m certain I don’t want.  I don’t want to just land another “good job”.

I can’t survive another good-on-paper job that slowly eats away at my soul.  It’s so frustrating, because so much of the last job I had was good. There were only a handful of things bad with it, but even so, that handful of bad was too much.  At least some of the bad was me, but me by position, so if I were to get hired at a similar place but with a better position, am I not then just shifting my suffering onto someone else, someone even less deserving of the suffering?  I’m off topic again.

Alright, I’m spiraling again. I want to end on some of the better thoughts. The first is that I at least know I want in on the sciences and that, even if I don’t pursue a career in Computer Science, Programming, Data Blah, or whatever, I absolutely need to bolster my tech related skills. I’m not terribly lacking in those skills, compared to the general population, but I’m not good enough in any of them to really get shit done. I don’t recall if I’ve mentioned this or not, but so far I’ve been mostly focused on things that I either know are needed for every degree (English Comp. or equivalent), things that will very likely be relevant to whichever degree I pick (Statistics), or things I know will help me, even if they don’t directly translate. For that last category, I’m still very happy that I’m working through that CS50x course, and that I took watched those Econ lectures. I’m certain I’ll pick up some Python, probably some PHP, and if I can find something else that fits nicely with the little bits of programing and app dev I’ve already done, I’ll add that, too. Where would a college cover something like SQL? I’m dangerous with sql, and I’d like to be actually good at it. Hmm… I’ll keep an eye out.

So I guess I have some starting parts of a plan, which I suppose is something. Anyway, part of how I’ve been able to keep the wheels on this thus far has been planning, including weekly breakdowns, and I haven’t gotten to this week’s yet. So I’m going to wrap things up here now so I can do that before it gets much later on this Monday evening. Maybe I’ll finally get to bed on time and start working on that whole time and motivation problem. Maybe.

Today is Friday, July 25th, 2025, and it’s time for a Fit Check.  The Fit is Good.  The trends of losing weight and gaining in overall health and fitness continue, and I’m pretty happy with that.

I’ve hit most of my daily walks, and most of those included a run or otherwise increase in intensity. I’ve been back on my strength training schedule. I’ve been back on my calorie counting. I’ve… not… been back on my HIIT or calisthenic exercises… maybe I’ll get one in over the weekend. It would certainly be good for me if I did.

Okay, that’s out of the way.  Last week was a lot more artistic and I very much enjoyed writing that bit, so I’m thinking I’ll stretch my writing on the blog from time to time. More so if I continue to like it. But not today. 

Today I’ve been thinking about my weight loss goals, and this time actually focusing on the numbers. Like, I’m looking to slap some numbers on my spreadsheet.  After the jump, the rest of today’s post is me walking through the making of those goals.  It is very loose and barely edited, and I’m guessing it doesn’t make for a great read.  But it’s something I feel like documenting in this space, and hey, maybe it’s worth a read if you’re in a similar spot.  Otherwise, you ain’t missing much.  Go ahead and skip, then catch me at the next one.

Above is a chart of my weight tracking for the past couple of years. That big spike might not be entirely accurate – I really did get that heavy, but in truth, I may very well have gotten even heavier. Over 300 pounds certainly isn’t the heaviest I’ve ever been. Somewhere back in the 2010’s, I maxed out the top end of my home scale. The scale I had at the time maxed at 350, so with that needle pinned, well, who knows how big I got. This latest spike in 2023-2024 was the big hospital visit, which had more to do with my dying insides than my meal habits, but that’s a story for another day. The chart also has a lot of empty spaces, which might remain empty, I’m not sure. I wasn’t keeping super tight records for big stretches of my recovery. Really, if you’re having trouble just walking, kinda who cares, right?

I’ve been trying to remember what my End of Summer weight goal was, and I’m no longer sure that I had set one.  Some of my goals have been a bit squishy of late, which is fine. Squishy goals are better than no goals.  However, I do like having a thing to strive for, and having a bunch of smaller things along the way is quite helpful as well.  So let’s see about setting something long term and something short term, starting with the shorter end of things with that End of Summer Goal.  But first, let’s think this through.

From what I’ve read regarding health and fitness, it is regularly stressed by physicians, nutritionists, and sports medicine practitioners that you shouldn’t lose more than two pounds per week.  I have also come to an understanding that this is like a rolling averaging type thing – some weeks you won’t lose any, other weeks you’ll lose three pounds, you get it.  Most of this knowledge is years old, and if I were to be more rigorous about things, I’d include some references here.  As I would like the excuse to both spend time reading about fitness and also stretching my research muscles, I am very much interested in that project. However, the time I would need to commit to a project like that is currently taken up by more pressing matters, so that just ain’t gunna happen.  But I haven’t recently read anything that seriously challenges that baseline understanding, so let’s stick with it – the upper limit of healthy weight loss is about two pounds per week.

I’ve definitely lost more than two pounds per week in years past, so if I manage to hit a higher pace, especially at my current weight, I’m not going to stress over it. I’ve also had a few weeks just this year where I’ve lost more than two, but I think that’s to do with a rubber-banding effect, so let’s not include that in our estimates. But thinking about that upper limit and trying to get a feel for my best and worst rates of weight loss is, I think, a good start.  I don’t think it would be fair for me to expect a sustained, ongoing trend of losing two pounds every week.  Sure would be nice, it would mean I could drop more than twenty pounds over the summer, but we’re more than halfway through that summer, and it hasn’t happened.

Summer is about three months – we’re gunna be pretty loosy-goosy with the math in this session, so let’s not get too hung up on details.  Let’s call these “gross estimates”, shall we?  So Summer is about three-ish months, depending on where you measure from.  I mean, where even is the base of a season?  Probably just below the volleyballs, right?  

Around the start of June (which I know is not the actual start of Summer, again, please, just stay with me here) I was just above 260 lbs.  A couple weeks in, I got down to 255, but that wasn’t a perfect drop – I gained a little back, lost a smidge, gained, and so on.  I suspect I overshot a loss and the reality of my situation bounced me back up.  This gave me a little worry that I wouldn’t be able to get over this hump, but I did.  Mathing things out, if we assume about three months, about four weeks per month, and about 2 pounds per week, I could drop 24-ish pounds.  There is no way in hell that is going to happen.

I think my current rate is, at best, one pound per week.  Actually, no I don’t.  I think it’s more like one pound per two weeks.  Is that right?  I don’t think that’s right either.  Let’s step back a sec…

Okay, I want to get down to 210 pounds, or at least see how close to it I can get, before making any overall shifts in fitness goals.  So let’s call that my End Goal.  End Goal = 210 (for now).  At the start of June, I was a little over 260.  It is about the end of July, and I am 252.  About eight weeks, about eight pounds. Likely another three to five in the next few weeks. For the overall, it’s about 42 pounds to go.  If I lost two pounds per week, that would be 21 weeks.  That’s somewhere in mid-December.  Possible, but unlikely.  

That measure of time, though – about eight weeks, about eight pounds – does reinforce the idea of about one pound per week.  The end of August is about five weeks away.  If I maintain roughly this rate, I could be down to 247.  That would be nice.  However, I do have at least one birthday party, a possible road trip, a possible school open house, and some other complicating factors that might derail me a bit.  I don’t think they’ll throw me off by too much, but let’s not add additional undue stress to the pile here.  I’ve got my current weight, my overall goal, and roughly my rate.  That should be enough to scratch out these goals now.

Keeping with that logic, let’s say I do end August around 248.  From there to the end of the year is like seventeen weeks.  If it were at the 2lb/week max, that would be like 34 pounds.  Hot damn.  Still not gunna happen, but it’s a good reminder of what’s possible.  If I really got down to it, I could basically be at that 210 goal by the end of the year, give or take.

Let’s take another quick step back here, because at some point earlier this year, I got up over 270. It was brief, and may have had more to do with water retention, but true nonetheless. I was back up around that weight as recently as the beginning of May. That’s like 16 pounds in 13 weeks, so a rate of like 1.2ish pounds per week? Okay, that’s another good data point check in, and more evidence to stick with that 1lb/w plan. Let’s stick with this.

Here’s a snapshot of an old spreadsheet I’ve been using to track this.  I’ll probably gussy it up a smidge at some point.  I really love a pretty spreadsheet, and all the modern spreadsheet tools just make it so easy.  It’s also got a fair amount of silly math in it.  What I’m calling a “Trend” is particularly egregious… yeah, maybe I should get to that Statistics class sooner than planned.  Well whatever, we’ll fix things up at some future date, but not today.

Let’s shoot for 248 by August 29th.  We’ll not fret if we’re still around 252 by then, we’ll just adjust both the expectations of when I reach my goals and also intensify my exercise plan to pick things up.  If I manage to get heavier again, same but harder, I suppose.  But let’s not expect to fail just yet, we’ll just anticipate it’s possible and also that it will be fixable if so.  We’ll be quite happy if we make it under 250, even if it isn’t the 248 goal and even if it doesn’t completely stick. 

Longer term, at this rate I could be in the 230s by October, which would also be quite nice. However, it really is hard to stick to plans the further things get into Winter.  So let’s plan to be squarely in the 230s by the end of the year.  Anything more is a bonus.  We’ll do some little goal check-ins as we go, and adjust on the fly.  

Yeah, this feels pretty good for now. Alright, that’s what’s up. Have a good one, y’all.

Today is Friday, and that means it’s time for a fit check.  How is today’s fit?

I’m on the last stretch of my daily walk and I am going to absolutely crush this last hill. But let’s back up a bit and put things into context.  

For my health, and now to meet some additional goals, I take a walk, almost every day.  It is fortunate, given this, that the town I live in has many sidewalks and footpaths.  My daily walk is a round trip, starting at a section of one of those footpaths that runs behind my home. This path snakes between various neighborhoods opposite a forested area complete with streams, whose outer edge is defined by a local arterial road.  This path connects to some others, which I suppose means it has no end, but there is a technical end, one which is also an opportunity to make my trip into an actual loop.  At not quite two miles from my starting point, the footpath has an underpass, the topside is a road, barely noticeable to drivers as a bridge.  On the other side of the path is a standard, street level sidewalk, and if I continued on, it would go down some familiar neighborhood streets that would eventually bring me home.  But I prefer, once I’ve made it to the underpass, to stay in the relative calm and serenity of the path by making an about face and heading back the way I came.  Small changes in elevation, proximity to the streams, and tree cover makes for differing qualities in air, temperature, and pressure.  There is a big clearing that I pass through, it’s a familiar spot, and I sometimes wonder if it was one of the places that I would occasionally gather with friends in the summers of high school, but that was lifetimes ago and I don’t quite remember.  These days, to me it is about the halfway of the halfway, either the first or last quarter of my trek, depending on which side of it I am on.  

From previous walks and a few too many meandering thinks without substantive geographic reviews, I’ve surmised that somewhere on this stretch, which lies between a foot bridge and a steep hill, is about one mile out from my home.  The overall is just shy of four miles, so logically, the underpass flip must be slightly more shy of two, so if I bisect one half and push out just a little further than exactly, that must be right around one, or at least that’s how I’ve figured it, and the little map on my fitness app corroborates well enough. I’ve been training to start running again.  Training seems to formal for how I’m going about it, I have no stop watch and as I’ve already mentioned, I don’t actually know how far this is.  But it seems about right, and a mile would be too long anyway right now, but this seems well enough for the current needs.  But for my training and in my expectations, I imagine this about the best place to spool my legs up to sometimes take my walk to a run, or at least as close to what a run looks like in my current state.  On this side of the leg, the hill I mentioned is just up ahead. I figured, lacking in specifics though I am, that this is probably enough lead for me to warm up my stiff joints and aging muscles to really give that hill a go.  It’s also the biggest hill, I think, and something about starting with this challenge right away also feels right.

It’s the first few yards that feel the worst.  I called my joints stiff, and that is the common euphemism, but it doesn’t quite capture the reality.  My ankles feel like stuck pivots on an old control arm – years of paradoxically overworking and under-using have stiffened the rubber gaskets, a few too many cycles of rain and shine have rusted and swollen the housing, and the Teflon washers must of cracked away in years past, ‘cause they just don’t glide like they used to.  It’s rough, enough so that at the start of each of these, I wonder if I should even continue, lest I risk greater injury, but I press on and by the time I reach the bottom of the hill, I’ve started to find my stride.  And I charge it.

In my days in the Air Force, I was fortunate enough to receive a few different and key tips regarding exercise.  I find that I’ve grown quite cross with my younger self for not so diligently adhering to the best of them, but I suppose there’s no changing that now. One of my favorites was the least formal, not something I read in a book or was instructed on from a coach or medical professional, but from a colleague.  A boss, really, one of the Sergeants in my unit while I was an Airman, though I don’t recall being in his direct chain of command.  He said, “Whenever you get the chance, always charge the uphills and ride the downhills”.  I’ll never forget that and though I can’t fully explain it, I know that when I’ve put this idea into practice, it has always served me well.  And so as I shake the rust out of my ankles, I feel myself preparing to charge that uphill.  I try to pin my shoulders back, reducing that motion can conserve energy, but if you do it too much you might also cut off momentum.  A few more rules from then, likely nonsense of course, but they too have served me well.  Try to flatten out the hands a bit, so they glide through the air on the way forward and scoop it out on the trip back, like the cut-and-paddle in a freestyle stroke.  My knees start to rise higher, faster, longer, and my stride lengthens, then shortens for the staccato bursts required to pull up this incline.  My thighs start to burn and my lungs just can’t fill enough without feeling like they’ll burst, and I am on this hill, halfway up it, and it hurts, and a euphoria takes over me as the angle steepens and I drop my head and rise my elbows to make room for more air, and I fly, the wind that was pushing me is now carrying me, and I crest that hill.

And it feels exhilarating.

In all of my previous runs, I’ve yet to make it much past this crest before having to slow to a walk, and today is no different.  It doesn’t help that the wind shifts again at the top.  At the crest is a turnabout that forms the end of a quiet neighborhood street, and in midday, while most people are at work, the wind is free to wash across street in cool, clean smelling notes, calling me to just stop here, enjoy the nice day, and walk the rest of the way. I’ve done enough.  Mercifully, the street is quite narrow, even with the turnabout, and the other side comes about quick enough that the feeling to stay can’t grab hold. On the other side , the path continues and the hill runs back downward, past a small children’s park, a footbridge, and another neighborhood street, this one connecting through.  The stream is back, and its here that I often spot a big, funny Blue Heron, strutting through the waters. There are no more streets between me and home, but many additional landmarks significant to my journey.  More foot bridges, another children’s park, a “Y” that could lead me to a different neighborhood, if ever I felt the urge to explore.  The land here is a little lower, and the stream is both a little nearer and a little higher.  The foliage is full here, green on all sides.  The air is heavy and thick, more a potato leak than a crisp consomme.  I try to push my running stretches as far as I can, picking out points of interest as markers to strive for.  Today, I make it past the park and all the way to the big rock, but just barely.  Happy still, I don’t mind the strange looks thrown my way as I huff and wheeze through another walking stretch.  There are two more hills to go.

I want to stretch out these rests as much as I can, but I also want to hit as many hills as hard as I can, as both challenges are important to my progress.  My goals are many, and some are quite far off, like being able to make this one mile run without needing to walk or take breaks, and that I’d like to do that by the end of this year.  With each extended stretch and each hard pressed hill I get closer, and I’ve finally come to see this as a goal that I might just accomplish, which would sure be something.  I have taken the tallest hill already, now comes the steepest.  Two footbridges, and I like to start at the end of the first, as the foot of the upcoming hill lies at the start of the second.  By this point in my run, I’ve shaken off enough of the rust that I’m starting to glide.  I’m also starting to flag a bit, as my thighs are now burning even when I shift back to a walk, and they’ll be sluggish soon, too filled with sludgy wet concrete feel of lactic acid. My lungs are bursting, and my heart is in overdrive, just trying to keep myself going, one foot after the other.  But I want this, goddamn do I want this, and I push on, over the bridge and up the hill and I am exploding.  The joys of being a bomb.

The hill is short but it sure makes up for it in height.  Like that first hill, I always plan to crest it and keep pushing, but I usually top out just beyond its top.  My thighs still hurt, but who could hear them over the screaming of my lungs.  I am so far past sweaty, and in the sticky churn of this air, I am absolutely dripping, soaked through all of my clothes, soaked to the bone, even my shoes are sopping, and there’s one more hill, just up ahead.  I reassure myself that I wouldn’t have made it without a slowdown anyway, and take the moment to recover as I can.  There are a few bends ahead and then it’s the last hill, a compound hill – two humps with a little dip in the middle.  I’ve picked it out already, just around one of those bends is a tree, not so different from the other trees but nonetheless sticks out, distinct, easy to keep track of, and that’s where I am going to begin my final attack.  Better rest up before I get there, ‘cause I get there, I am gunna get it. 

Here at the tree, my legs loosened again, shoulders back again, elbows pointed, chest out, stride open, I’m going for it. 

I am on the last stretch of my daily walk, now turned run, and I am going to absolutely crush this last hill.  

I’ve not much left, so might as well spend it all!  I can hear myself now, over my earbuds, over the wind and birds, over the honks and whirs from the street through the thinning trees, I can hear my own self and my labored breaths and groans, giving it all to take this last hill and I feel a happiness and relief, one I have known and forgotten, and when I crest this final hill, once again planning and once again failing to keep stride, but not in anger or disappointment, I crest it in joy for having done what I have done.  And I am happy. My run gives way before I can ask it and I slow, this time way down, now leisurely crossing the lawn and easing back up the steps to my home.

Today is Friday, July 18th 2025, and The Fit is good.

~Aaron

It’s Sunday July 13th, and I need to make my check in late again.  Things have been fairly busy, so I had to skip my Friday due date.  Life has got to come first, after all.  One casualty, of course, was 7-11 Slurpy Day.  I guess that will have to wait for next year.  

Alright, let’s do the journal, the Log part of this thing, and get to the Fit Check.  The Fit is Good.  No big gains or losses by the numbers since last week, but things are moving along and in the right direction.  This last week, I didn’t get in as much strength training as intended or even one HIIT session.  I’ll have to correct that next week.  Slacking on those doesn’t seem to have had any measurable setbacks, but I also haven’t been getting the associated gains from them. That’s expected, but I find that by documenting these things, they become more real in my mind, and then I’m more likely to actually do something about them.  On top of the other reasons why I am not going to beat myself up over that, the slacking was also a response to upping exercise in a different area, the running area.

I’ve been taking my daily walks pretty consistently, which I’m fairly certain has been the main driver of my improving health and mood.  Well I suppose diet is probably the real winner there, but meh. Anyway, I had complained in a previous post that my preferred path was blocked off, and how that had put a damper on my plans to get back into running.  I then found a bit of a workaround, but also adjusted my expectations down a smidge.  But I did coax myself to do a run here and there, usually more than once a week.  However, in the last week or so, the construction on my favorite path finished, and it opened back up!  I’m very excited about it!  And I have been adding a lot more running to those walks.

I wear a fitness watch that has a GPS tracking function, and that clocks my path at just under 4 miles – a little less than 2 miles out, then I turn around for another 2ish miles back.  When I’m on my return trip, right around where I think is 1ish miles out, I rev that walk up to a run. I suppose it’s more of a labored shuffle, but for now that’s passing for running. I don’t know that I can actually make it the whole mile back, but I don’t think so. Instead I opt for a semi-structured interval run, which is building both the fitness and confidence to get to my goal.  I regularly challenge myself by upping that pace and/or the length of the stretches between walks, and I try to work on the important aspects of running that I remember being told to watch out for in my youth. Stuff like how I land my feet, trying to widen my stride, opening up my shoulders and lungs, you know, all the run stuff.  And I’m pretty happy with both my progress and the incremental results. I would like to get a look at where the research is on running these days, and see if I should adjust what I’m up to, but this has been working for me for many years, so I’m just going to keep it up for now.

Alright, let’s jump over to my academic situation.  I finished another couple of books, chief amongst them was another book on learning – “A Mind for Numbers”, by Barbara Oakley.  I think that’s the third in this unofficial series. I haven’t finished processing what I’ve read,  so I’ll talk about it and the others I’ve recently finished another day, but I can at least say that I liked that book.  Have I done a book talk post yet? I don’t think so… gotta make note of that.

I’m also just about to finish my third read of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”, which I’m way more positive on now than I was in my previous reads.  I still have a negative opinion of the bulk of dorks who quote the book, but many things that I enjoy have been over quoted and fawned over by absolute shafts, so I should try not to hold that against it.  

In the Math Zone, I’ve made a lot of progress in my Algebra review/revision, and I’m feeling great about what I’ve reviewed so far.  I feel a lot more confident in the idea of jumping back into Calculus, but I think this Algebra experience is trying to remind me of the lesson to not rush things, that I shouldn’t expect to just “get” something right away.  I think this has been a wrong headed attitude I’ve held for too many years and on too many subjects throughout my life, one that I really have no excuse for keeping.  Everything I’ve ever gotten really good at has been hard won. 

When I first joined the military, I was terrible at running.  I wanted so badly to just wake up better at it, and I didn’t.  I got a little better during Basic, but I definitely didn’t get good.  It wasn’t until after I’d finished all of the training and got to a base with a long, empty road that I could just hammer the work over and over on that I really improved.  In high school, I had wanted so badly to be have some semblance of musical talent, or at least just be able to play a few recognizable songs here and there, and I just wasn’t.  I’m still not very good, but after over 20 years of self teaching, I’ve become significantly better. My strongest progress unmistakably maps to periods when I kept consistent, focused practice.  And when I was in my corporate job, I got extremely good at a few important office skills (like Excel and SQL queries), and that shit did not come overnight.  I had to do a lot of research, trial and error, listening to colleagues, you name it, but I eventually got there. It’s a bit maddening that I still sometimes get frustrated when I don’t immediately understand some new concept, even though I know logically that isn’t how things work.

Anyway, the plan was to dip back into Algebra and then move into Trig & Precalc.  The Algebra revision portion was expected to be pretty short, like a week or two, and it has been much longer than that. I am finally close to finishing this phase, and I think I should wrap things by the end of this week. I’ll reevaluate the plan when I do.  Right now, it seems like I’m going to stick with it.  The only thing that has me second guessing isn’t the notion to increase speed or ratchet things up more, but rather that I might take another step-back.  I have really found my time going back through Algebra to be well spent.  I feel so much more comfortable with the material, and when I do sometimes gaze back into the Trig stuff, I find myself a lot more rusty on the underlying principles from Geometry.  I seem to recall being pretty good at Geometry.  In fact, I think it was one of the subjects that gave me the undue overconfidence that I once held in my general Math skills.  But it’s not a skill set that I exercise with any regularity, so it takes me some doing to recall even the more basic concepts.  I’m pretty sure those basic concepts are going to be key to building up the next set of skills.  So I think I’m on the lookout for a good, and hopefully quick refresher.  However, if I can’t find a refresher that is both quick and sufficiently thorough, then I’ll take another remedial break.  I really can’t keep trying to build on bad foundations.

Next up is coding.  I’ve been doing that free CS50x from Harvard, and I’m really liking it.  But after getting a few weeks into the lectures, I decided that I really wanted to do the actual coursework, and since they offer to let freeloaders like me actually submit our work to be graded, that seems like too good of an opportunity to leave on the table.  So I have been submitting my work, but that’s been very slow going.  I felt pretty bad about it, actually, which now that I’m thinking about it ties back to my frustration with not just getting shit right away.  I was especially frustrated on the very first problem set, which has students making a simple game in MIT’s Scratch coding platform.  The program is extremely easy, made for children, and I think that kind of put me on my heels.  In retrospect, I actually think that’s the point.  It was humbling, but as I pushed past that, I was starting to get the feeling that the exercise was trying to teach something truly fundamental.  I think I might be oversimplifying it now, and hope I’ll expand on the idea as I go, but I get the feeling that the course desperately wants its students to understand the importance of pseudo-coding.  That the overall work of coding is about problem solving, and that writing the code itself isn’t where you solve those problems but rather how you apply your solutions once you’ve worked them out.  I kinda get the feeling this is also my problem with my fiction writing, that I’ve been approaching it all wrong, that it isn’t just having a great idea, it isn’t about just knowing how things should be, but it’s about having stages or modes, being able not just to switch between them, but to also catch yourself when you’re in one mode and need to be in another.  That you need to do prework, then do the work, then review your work, and not just expect but actually plan to have rework.  That some of the best work comes out of your revisions and recapitulations.  I also need to reign in my lifelong problem of scope-creep, but I knew that years ago, and that ain’t gunna change overnight, either.  

So I spent a lot of time in a notebook mapping out how each part of this children’s programming code would work in pencil. I also scaled back my grand plans of having complex scoring, multiple levels, powerups, and all the fixin’s one might expect in a top down shooter.  I put together a functional if a little light and boring game, with room to grow if I should later return to it.  I feel good about it, though I do wish I’d spent more time with some of the extra, included tools.  Like I think I should have made my own sprite or two, that I could have benefited from that experience. It’s fine for now, though, and I’m overall happy with what I’ve done.  I’ll look forward to the grade, even if it’s bad.  At least then I’ll know where I need to polish up.

The other subjects I’ve been pursuing have been mostly on the back burner.  I completely shelved my English Comp after passing the practice test, but I need to plan a serious revision of that.  I have decided I am going to try to test out of that with the CLEP voucher I received.  I’m a little trepidatious about the whole process, given that I’m new to it.  But I’ve been new to stuff before, which I’ll try to keep in mind while I give a closer look into scheduling that over this next week.

I’m also very seriously looking at Economics again, and I think when I’m at a comfortable enough space with my Math and Programming, I’ll make space for more of that.  I’ve gone over Microeconomics more than once, but I want to give a deeper look at the materials.  Most of what I have looked at hasn’t had much actual coursework, it’s almost all been questions on concepts and extremely simple math.  More than one of the instructors has said that basically is the first year for both Micro and Macro, which I guess makes sense, but I’m just not going to feel comfortable with any of it until I can get a few good practice tests under me.  So I’ll need to make time for that, and I want to make it soon.  I’m coming up on the end of the summer, and I’d really wanted to have been further along by now.  I wanted to be starting at the community college in the Fall semester, but time is an ever present constraint that I need to respect, and I’m wondering if I might be able to spend this time best by reevaluating that part of the plan as well. That maybe I would benefit by pushing enrollment out into the Spring and knocking out as many early courses as I can beforehand.  You know what, I really need to give this last bit a longer think.  Let’s plan to write about this a bit more in the next few weeks, and let’s wrap things up for today.