Author: Aaron

My mouth still hurts and now my ass does, too.

Not terribly, I’m  fine, really. The mouth has healed a lot from the dental visit that turned out to be minor oral surgery. The dentist gave me a warning about this along with potential concerns to look out for, which I really should have written down. Given that I have a bad tendency to ignore pain, it may not have mattered anyway. Well, he said he’d check in with me in a few weeks, so I guess I’ll keep an ear out for that call and ask about it then. As for the ass, I switched up my exercise routine. That included leg day, and that is why my rump is wrecked.

I had been doing squats in the previous routine, and quite a few of them. The old routine was a modified version of Germany Volume Training, but not for gaining muscle volume, rather for using the volume of sets x reps to accelerate progress. It was a 10 x 10 routine, which I thought was pretty brutal, and it gave me the apparently false sense of having bulletproofed my legs. The new routine has about the same volume of squats, but where the previous program was all just standard squats, the new one uses a combo of three types: Goblets, Cassocks, and split squats. That combo absolutely beats the tires off of me. Glutes, quads, hammies, whatever that part in the inner thigh that I didn’t realize was a muscle until it started hurting is, all that stuff. It’s all on fire and also completely stiff. I’m taking this as all good news. For one, I don’t think I could have done a Cassock Squat a few months ago, as I did try to do split squats and failed. For another, I think the soreness is indicative of some gaps my original routine had towards my goals, and while I can’t be sure this has filled them all, I am at least confident that I’ve at least filled some important ones. I’d really like to keep walking around without help as I age.

It’s a 4-Day plan, and I’ve not really had a chance to give it a full test. Hopefully I will in the next few weeks, as I think the power of this is in the full and short cycle. We’ll see how things go.

Also happening right now, the gas is out in my building, which is super fun. My heating is gas, my stove is gas, and my water heater also runs on gas. The condos I’m in have some extremely janky pre-1980s-assed plumbing and electrical systems, so when another unit in my building developed a gas problem, the nature of which I’m unsure of, it meant the gas for the entire building needed to be shut off. Oh, actually, two entire buildings, because the jank means that any one unit’s gas, water, or electrical problems are actually the problems of two entire buildings that share a system, containing at least 24 units. But the lights are still on, the water still runs, and it’s not yet freezing outside, so I’m fine. Though if it doesn’t get fixed soon, I will have to figure out another solution. 

It’s mid-November, so the temperature is about to take a dive. It already took one as of today, dropping to the 50s-60s during the day. It’s not quite to freezing at night, but easily could be. With the day time temps as chilly but moderate, that can be solved with a space heater, which I should get if this is expected to last a few more nights. But it prompts my thoughts because as is, freezing showers are a complete no go for me. In my younger days, I was in the military, and cold showers were just a thing you’d sometimes have to do. I’ve also been varying levels of poor which can also come with that price tag. Fast forward to now, if I absolutely need to hop into a cold shower, I’ll do it. But I’m older and more accustomed to a life of comfort, and I have so many other options, it’s neither preferred nor necessary.

For the time being, I have plenty of warm clothes and blankets, many cooking options, and my electric kettle makes bathing in the sink viable for a few days It’s far from my favorite, but works just fine for the weekend+ that I’m hoping this won’t extend past. The timing kind of works out, too, because I needed a little fitness break from apparently overdoing the workout routine turnover. Less sweaty means less shower concern, but if this outage persists into the week, I’ll have to relocate for a while. Honestly, it’s nice to know that I have the options, and maybe a little hotel stay could be fun. 

But the thought prompt mentioned earlier stems from the stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about lately. This situation has me thinking what I would do if I were in a relationship. The last time that I was in one, it wasn’t a long or serious enough relationship that we were living together. It did last long enough for both of us to encounter similar needs, easily solved at the time by just staying at the other person’s place for a few nights. So I guess it was fairly serious, now that I look back on it. I personally wouldn’t even consider the option of staying with a romantic interest for more than a night if the relationship wasn’t already fairly far along. It baffles me that I’ve known folks letting new partners stay for longer than one night.

So you’re basically letting a stranger stay for over a week, including when you leave for work, in the place you sleep, shower, and keep your favorite toys? That’s fuckin’ crazy. Have you even known them long enough to figure out if that weird thing about them is actually endearing and not just an obvious red flag? You’ve known this dude for a month and they have family in town and they still needed to move in with you, and that doesn’t seem sus? Just how good is that dick? I guess it must be pretty amazing. Sorry, I’m just remembering two different friends/acquaintances that did exactly this. Both women, both had literally every friend (sex/gender agnostic) in their circles telling them not to do this, and both had the situations end badly. I could never.

If I were in a relationship where we already lived together, I don’t think there would be a question – we’d stay somewhere else. Unless she, like me, is always down to tough it out in favor of some other convenience, I wouldn’t want to even suggest that being cold and smelly is a viable option. Though I guess there would still be a question of where. We’d have to consider money, location, and any other needs. I know plenty of folks that I can ask to stay with and many would be cool with it, though it always makes me feel a little weird. If it weren’t financially or otherwise burdensome, I’d lobby (ha!) for the hotel option 10 out of 10 times. But I’d also be pretty open to her preferred option, because I just can’t see this being a hill I care to die on.

So that’s what’s going on with me this week. Other than that, I want to try to make a strong academic push with what remains of the year. I want to make sure that I finish my current set of classes, and preferably more if I can. I think the English Comp. class should be an easy win, now that I’m starting to get a rhythm for it. If I can, I’ll move right into English Comp. 2 and try to nail that this year as well. I feel the same, individually, about my Stats and Computer Science classes, but the three together reminds me of my time management gaps. I was also hoping to get into Calc I this year, but I think I need to reset my expectations on that. I think it’s possible that I’ll get started on Precalc, but probably won’t finish that before 2026. That’s fine, I want to make sure I give myself time to actually study and understand the material, but I need to keep an eye on the speed of my progress so I can better plan for the future. You know, enrollment, tuition, grants and financial aid, all that stuff. I want to finish quicker than four years, and there are definitely ways to do that, but I’m still skeptical that I have the capacity to do so.

I did finally make it to Week 6 in CS50x, which I’m told is the start of the down hill. I can say this much so far, Python is definitely easier to work with than C. The amount of stuff that I don’t have to worry about in Python is already quite the boon. Hopefully it will continue to feel that way, because I could use some momentum behind this push.

I mentioned on Monday that I’ve got something cooking about romance and hinted that I’d throw that up sometime this week. That’s not what this is, that idea is still cooking. I’m trying to work out how to be honest without being too presumptuous, too specific, or too vague. It’s possible, but needs editing. But I’ve had a lot on my mind, and those conflicting wants to both write more but also be cautious with my time. I’m half-watching a long lecture and stewing on some things, so I’m gunna split focus and slap some keys.

I’ve recently had a few incredibly unsettling experiences from data apps. A quick note, this isn’t an academic paper and I’m likely to get some facts wrong, also I’m not going to be a stickler on language. Off the break, I’m going to use the term “app” for all internet dating options, many of which somehow don’t have actual apps in 2025. There are reasons for them lacking apps, but that’s not the point of this. I’m also using “dating” pretty liberally. Some of these apps are meant for what I’ll distinguish as traditional dating, with room for anything from somewhat casual to the most serious. But we all know that some apps aren’t meant for a shred of romance, just the hookup, and many apps that are advertised for classical dating don’t get used that way.

For my part, I keep coming to the same thought that the apps aren’t what they used to be, that what they used to be may not have been good to begin with, and it’s probably not what I’m looking for now even if it was. I need to just quit them, but I don’t. Most of the last year or so not deleting them has been more about laziness and convenience. I would not go on them most of the time and then pop in when bored, not really having expectations and just having an alternative to doom scrolling. But I’m not much of a doom-scroller otherwise, and I have plenty of idling alternatives. So it’s really just a part of me that holds out hope there are real people still on these app and that one of them might just be interested in me. It is, frankly, not a sound theory.

It stems from an era that I think has long since past. At the risk of making it sound like this is all the apps were ever used for or blowing up someone’s spot, there was a time when you would just get on one and you’d have a “date”. That “date” was usually just a pretense to a hookup, and sometimes you wouldn’t even bother with the pretense. You’d just hook up. Actual dating did exist, and I have met a surprising number of couples that started from online dating. Go ahead and add that to my growing list of regrets, because I don’t think I used it for that even once during that era, and now I wish I had. I worry that might have been my best chance at something real, but we’ve gotten off track.

Then or now, there is a sort of dance, somewhat a simulacrum of the real world version of an opening. There are many versions, one goes a bit like as follows. You match in the middle of the work day and spend the next few hours excitedly pinging each other with questions you hope will help you learn more about each other and get you closer to finding out if you like them. If you do, you start working on closing that deal. But while the questions seem good and useful, they don’t really help, and sometimes get you to resent the other person for some small thing that, if you really knew them, you probably wouldn’t care about. With every message, you risk either side of the dance, endearing yourself to or alienating yourself from them. You need to make a move to get out of that app quickly or the momentum you had at the beginning starts to accumulate drag. As the days drag on and the rapid back and forth draws down to a trickle, if something hasn’t happened, one of you just stops contacting the other, and you both stay in each other’s match list forever as ghosts of what never was. But you do that dance because if you make a move too early or improperly, you risk ending the entire interaction without satisfaction.

This is not true for everyone, but since everyone has their own pace and their personal set of dating rules, often specific to just that app, it can be hard to intuit just when it’s appropriate to ask for more, and what that more should be. For a while there, I would throw out an option to meet at a local bar within the first few messages. I don’t drink anymore, so that option doesn’t really work for me, but similar options exist like cafes, movies, or other tried and true dating staples. But people are very cautious these days, and rightfully so. As frustrating as that dance could be, these days you’re lucky if you even get to it. Sometimes people will make their decision based on your very first message, and while it’s not uncommon to see the phrase, “‘Hi’ gets blocked” in a profile, it’s even more common for people to have this attitude without the warning. Fair enough, we can all do better, but the alternatives that this attitude generates can often be far worse. With the shift in attitude in genuine daters, it means that most friendly interactions on these apps are now suspect, and you should also be cautious. The new game is also to get off of the apps, but that has become an incredibly dangerous gamble, whether you’re being asked to move to another app or meet in person.

Crucially, it’s not to meet in person. It’s never to meet in person, which makes some real world sense, given the various dangers. There is a whole set of meeting etiquette that I’ve yet to decipher and seem to be getting worse at, because the game of jumping from app to app is both tiresome and worrying. Moving from a dating app to a chatting app always strikes me as a little crazy. I know there are dating apps that made staying on them difficult. The business models often mean that users need to pay for a subscription to be able to have conversations and some require it to contact anyone at all, which like, how exactly is this thing supposed to work at all? So it makes sense that people got used to the idea that they might be able to spit out a few short messages to get to a free chatting app, but most of the dating apps today don’t have that model. So ignoring how unnecessary this jump is, it still happens almost always.

Some chatting apps are probably safer than the dating apps, but that bar is extremely low. More often, most chatting apps aren’t really safer, they just give the impression of being safe. Some should be obviously unsafe, as they tie directly to your cell phone, so moving to that app means you just gave a stranger your actual real phone number. Sometimes your matches will just bypass the safety theater entirely and just ask for your phone number. In an earlier era, this would be great – it meant you were about to meet up very soon. But over the past decade or so, the technological bad actors have become incredibly sophisticated and giving them any bit of personal information, no matter how disconnected you think it is from your important stuff, can give them a foothold on scamming you, especially your phone number. I need to recount some of this, but I can already see this post being far too long, so let me borrow some lessons from that English Comp. class and try to tighten up. I’m going to tell you about three levels of current, unexpected dating app problems.

Sex workers

This is the first level, and while I do find it disappointing, I’m not terribly bothered. 

A week or so ago, I got into a fun conversation with a woman on one of the apps. It was playful, a little sexy, and it seemed like we were both interested and having fun. She even took my many faux pas as charming, which is nice. Then I did an image search on her profile picture, and it turns out that she’s an Instagram model. That’s not immediately damning, but it usually means one of two things. For the first, if she isn’t using the same name or a similar handle, that isn’t the same person. It’s someone who stole her pictures and is using them to scam you, more on that in the next section. The second version used to be less likely, but seems very much on the rise, and it’s exactly what my experience was – this was advertising. She is a real woman and that real woman is the one with that Insta account, but she is never going to date me. She was trying to get me interested so I would follow her to an Onlyfans account, and become a subscriber.

My view on sex work is that it is extremely common, perfectly normal, and frankly and good service that should exist. What bothers me about this, I think, only exists because many forms of sex work aren’t legal, and those that are legal are also heavily stigmatized. As such, the market that undeniably exists for people to pay for sex, companionship, or sexually related materials as was this case gets pushed into hidden, creepy, and dangerous corners. Since there aren’t legal and fair places for providers to advertise and manage their work, they are naturally going to make space for themselves in the closest versions of existing infrastructure. Sex workers are selling sex, dating app customers are often looking for sex. So they are, of course, going to join dating apps to look for patrons. Many legal versions of sex work suffer from the same stigmas and can’t really practice their profession anywhere but places already considered porn. Yes, you can have an Onlyfans account, but you can’t advertise it on Facebook. Because of the legal and social mess, sex workers can’t even be fully honest on the dating apps and find themselves having to pose as potential love interests, later springing the sex transactions on their confused and likely upset matches. That has the potential to ruin the matches’ day, and the impression I get from sex workers is that they don’t much like it either. While it’s fair to be upset for being tricked, when that’s how you put food on the table, I frankly can’t blame the sex worker, either.

From what I can gather, sex workers would much rather have things as I described earlier and there is a ton of evidence from places with legalized sex work that it benefits basically everyone. Perhaps surprisingly, that everyone includes people who don’t want anything to do with sex work, and even those that actively dislike it, as it gives the activities places to go that aren’t the back alleys of literally everywhere else.

Classic scammers and bots

If you’ve not been on a dating app before or in some years, count yourself lucky, because the scam game is out of fucking control. The story I related above is not uncommon, and frankly the best version of what could happen. I had a pleasant conversation and declined to become a patron, not a big deal. Most of the time, when you get a match on almost any dating site these days, that is not someone there to date. That is someone, or some thing, there to take your money. Not a provider looking to exchange materials or services for money, but rather someone looking to get a hold of your personal information so they can hack, social engineer, or otherwise scam their way into your bank account.

I don’t have a story for this one, instead I have what feels like a million instances where I’d have a somewhat off but otherwise OK seeming conversation that always ends up with them trying to get increasingly private and unnecessary information out of me. Phone numbers, email address, locations, names, all the stuff that you should not be sharing with strangers. It’s kind of amazing how many of these scams are going, and how few apps seem to even try to stop them. They certainly take no responsibility for them.

The new AI scammers

The scammers and bots have been a problem for a good while now, and usually, it’s not very hard to catch them. There will be something obviously wrong with their account, or a picture that’s way too professional or clearly something from the late-90s or early-2000s that the scammer scraped off of a different app, facebook, or a porn site. But sex always finds its way around every new technology and social movement, and with the improvements to AI chatbots, it was just a matter of time. And it seems like the time for dating app AI scams is now.

I was on another dating app, I don’t recall which. I was in good spirits and feeling charming, so when I was contacted by an account with the pictures of a very good looking woman, I was suspicious, but completely game to give it a go. We shot a few messages back and forth, and before long, she wanted me to go to a different app. She didn’t opt for the normal shady apps already known to be scammer friendly and she didn’t ask for my phone number. She suggested going to google chat, which is both practical and, as I don’t have any important information attached to my account, safe enough for my estimates. But things did seem off, and this extremely good looking woman was a little too into my extremely not good looking self. I can be quite charming, it’s true, and every woman I’ve ever dated has been entirely out of my league, but this woman has never met me in real life and she’s acting like I’m the most attractive and most interesting person to ever live. She sent me some pictures, tasteful and not nude, and asked me to share one as well. In retrospect, I perhaps should have been more cautious, but I agreed. And then I was absolutely sure she was not a real person.

In the background of my picture were posters from a podcast that I listen to. Now, I love this podcast, and it’s probably my favorite, but it’s not well known. When my match casually mentioned how I’m interested in “some good old tabletop games”, it became obvious that my Spidy-senses were right from the beginning. Below is a screenshot of that conversation, if we can call it that. I’d normally redact the name, but being that this isn’t a real person and googling it only produces various celebrities that look nothing like the person in the photos, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about. Though I won’t share the photos, because I have a strong feeling that they are of a real person, probably not going by this name, and they don’t deserve to get their spot blown up because some shithead scraped their pictures to support their weird scam. Or maybe the pictures are also AI. They didn’t include hands or spaghetti, so it’s hard to say.

This response is off the charts unsettling. People do not talk like this. What the fuck are we even doing, some pretty lady with the boots with the fur isn’t going to casually be all “that’s a great TTRPG podcast.” and then recite almost verbatim the ways the podcast is often referred to on streaming and review sites. 

I almost gave up the game too early, though, asking if she’s an AI chatbot. Rookie move on my part, really, but I was caught off guard and I didn’t know how to proceed. But her claiming to not understand what I meant and trying to pass it off as her being super fluent (whatever that means) gave me room of my own to pass off my comment, claiming that I was just being silly. So I asked if she listened to any other podcasts, and she gave me a pretty strange response. If you read through it quickly, it seems passable, but pay attention even a little and it’s pretty obviously the results of LLM processing. Can you imagine a person writing like this into a google chat? I figured that I’d string her along with some simple questions and eventually trap the AI, but I accidentally stumbled into confirming my suspicions immediately. I asked her for recommendations, and boy did she ever deliver.

Four popular and acclaimed podcasts in a perfectly formatted, numbered list with standardized blurbs that must have come right out of an AI generated slop article, complete with technically correct but socially weird punctuation like semicolons and, as always, the em-dashes. Absolute madness. I’ve been too disturbed to look into it, but I am quite curious just what the point of this is.

I’m going to now speculate wildly, please don’t take any of this as confirmation of anything, I’m just guessing and trying to make some sense of things. The time between responses was very long, which suggests that there was a person in there somewhere. Perhaps someone at a desk in a scam farm hilariously copy/pasting between the chat window and an AI chatbot window. But is this just an improved version of the existing scams, or is this a (slightly) more sophisticated operation? Could this be part of the legit AI companies trying to gather more data to make more natural sounding bots? Make no mistake, the existing AI companies are extremely unethical, so I don’t think any of them would have qualms trying to train up a “digital real girl” by seeding feelers into existing dating apps. Given that both the dating apps and the AI chatbots are rapidly approaching an oncoming bubble burst, I could see them doing this as part of an agreement to try and find the money from each other’s products. I should really look into this, but I don’t want to, and I’m hoping someone who knows what they’re doing like some Jamie Loftus or Ed Zitron sort could take this on. Because this is absolutely bananas.

The Takeaway?

I don’t know what to take away from this. I’m going to open up the comments on this post, at least for a little while. I don’t think I’m getting any traffic, but on the off chance that someone drops by and has something to add on the subject, I’m extremely interested.

Honestly, I can’t see a way forward for the apps. That’s not true, in fact, I can see many ways forward, but few that actually make any of them sustainable and useful. It’s entirely possible that the current owners of these apps might make them financially sustainable, albeit on a foundation of stacked bubbles. They could convert their business model to advertising and fill their slop app with slop ads being viewed by endless slop AI bots. The advertisers won’t be advertising to any real people, but whatever, a significant portion of the advertising game is bullshit anyway. It’s just rich pricks passing the same bullshit money back and forth between each other, so who cares? But the apps are already a mess, and this sort of thing isn’t going to make them any more useful. No, I think for the actual humans, the dating app world may very well be dead. I guess we’re all going to just have to learn actual interpersonal skills, and man, that’s a real drag.

That’s it for now and probably until Monday. Have a good weekend and watch out for overly friendly matches.

Another pretty good week, let’s check it in.

I’ve been thinking a lot more seriously about my plans in academia and beyond. When asked, “What are you majoring in”, I’ve either been saying Computer Science or the more honest answer of, “Oh, I don’t know yet.” I think I’m going to drop the first answer, because I’m increasingly of the opinion that Computer Science isn’t quite what I want to do. This doesn’t really have much to do with the whole AI bullshit of it all, actually, that makes me want to study it more. You couldn’t possibly ask for a more exciting time to be studying a subject than when it is in total upheaval, at least as far as I’m concerned. However, I’m getting both a different idea of what CS as a college major is all about and also a better idea of what I want to do with the education I’m hoping to get. I am also feeling the pressure of not having a concrete plan as the end of the year rapidly approaches.

Given what I do want to do with my education, I think I need to be taking a more serious look at the various schools of Engineering. Since we’re being honest here, I’m also a little intimidated by the idea of Engineering. I still feel pretty behind on my math, and the fields that interest me most are all very math heavy. Add to that the breadth of subjects I want to be ready to take on, it means strictly limiting my electives to make sure I can cover as much ground across fields as possible, which is great, but also means fewer classes outside of the Engineering realm. Like, can I really afford taking a creative writing class if I need to make sure I’ve got three Calcs and every science Intro class?

I should probably figure that out soon.

Also a thing that I should probably figure out, just what the hell am I up to in the world of romance? I’ve been alluding to this for a while, and I think I’m still not completely ready to talk about it, but we’re gunna wade in pretty deep today. A big part of that is just that I don’t know, and what I do know I don’t really have my thoughts together on. I had, at least for a while, thought that I should just put that all aside for the time being. I need to focus on me for a while, right? Health, fitness, school, fixing my various social problems, that’s quite a lot already. I figure those are all things that get easier with momentum, so I’d think more about romance when I got the rest of it all in motion. But it’s starting to feel like it’s coming up due.

I’ve got an additional piece on this subject that I’m mulling over adding later this week, unsure if I should. It’s very personal, but I guess that is the point of this. I haven’t told many that I’ve started blogging again, and I don’t think I’ve told anyone where they can find it. I haven’t checked my site traffic in a good while, but the last time I did, it was exclusively comment bots, so I do feel a bit of security in anonymity. Either way, this will just be an opening on the subject. I want to start by saying, this is like, some journal thoughts, right? So it’s going to come off as a little “woe-is-me”, but I’m fine, just let me cook for a minute here while I explore some thoughts and feelings.

I can’t shake the feeling that I might just not be a person for whom romance is possible. And now you can see why the preamble – we’re in the Sad Aaron Zone again! Look, I’ve had romance before. I’ve been in love and at least one woman that I’ve been in a romance with seems to have genuinely loved me back. Saucy times aren’t really the problem, though having my libido come roaring back over the past few months has not been my favorite. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re pent up, you know? I got a haircut the other day and it took all I had in me to just act like a normal person that wasn’t totally horned up for his stylist. To be fair, she was quite good looking, and while I might have tried some game on her in a different context, I think not having an appointment may have been rude and started us on the wrong foot. I also think it’s just rude, in general, to throw game at someone while they are on the clock. Frankly, it’s a dick move to force someone to deal with your personal-time flirtations while they must adhere to business-time rules. It’s a trap, and a person’s place of work isn’t fair hunting grounds.

It may be that I need to get back into therapy sooner than I had been planning, because I do think I need to work through what it is that I’m thinking and feeling here. I have definitely got to find a safe and healthy outlet for the urges, because the solo method just ain’t cuttin’ it, ya dig? But I don’t really want to cat around like I did in my younger days. Not that I really know how to go about doing that anymore. When I was the age to do so, the romantic landscape was perfectly poised for me to just find someone online, send a few flirty chats over a few sweaty days, and when the weekend came, I’d have company. The online dating scene has really changed, which does make things more difficult, but not impossible. I’ve chatted women up in person, I’ve closed such deals before. But while I do desperately need to smash, that need just isn’t connecting with my otherwise desires the way it used to. Something is missing, and I’m well aware of what that something is. But that takes me right back to it, I just don’t think that I can.

And I’m not sure how to even begin exploring what I mean by that. For starters, I might just not be ready, which is fucking nuts, because I haven’t been in a serious relationship for so long, I can’t even picture cohabitation anymore. None of this is new to me, so there really shouldn’t be a reason to feel anxious about it. But I am anxious about it. It’s been a long time, you know? Even just the sex part, I’m fairly certain that I will be terrible. It’ll be a good bad couple of seconds, and then I guess I’ll awkwardly fish around the sheets for my undies and try to slink out before she says anything.

I wish that were more of a joke than it is, but in truth, that part will work itself out. The anxiety I have for that is mostly surface level. I know what I got goin’ on, and while it may take me a few tries to get back up to speed, I’m sure I can get there. It’s really my relationship track record, though. Sure, I’ve dated a few not great woman, but for the most part, the woman I’ve dated have been pretty amazing. No, it’s me, it’s definitely me. I’ve been a shitty boyfriend, more than once. Nothing abusive, or at least I hope nothing abusive. I certainly don’t remember being so, but I did spend a lot of years being a lot of drunk.

The drunk part itself is pretty shitty, so there’s that, but that was just one part. I was often selfish, distant, unwilling to address my PTSD, and you know, the standard crummy boyfriend stuff. The last girlfriend I had, I never introduced her to family. I don’t think she ever met my friends, unless by accident. I tried to keep her separate from the rest of my life, and I had reasons that, at the time, seemed reasonable. My relationships before here were almost all too clingy, on both our parts, and that made for both bad relationships and awful breakups. In the last one, my being distant and forcing things to stay more casual than she wanted made that breakup quiet. But in retrospect, I think it may have been the worst of them. She was trying so hard and in my malaise brought on by a collective of previous bad relationships gave me the attitude that I couldn’t give her anything or she’d just be another one to hurt me. But by giving her so little, perhaps predictably, I ended up hurting us both even worse.

That pendulum has been swinging back and forth for years, from me being one version of a shitty guy to another. And now, I feel like I don’t even know how to be a good one. Add my general fishy history on top of the shitty dating, it’s hard to feel like I even deserve it. How can I?

I was hoping to put these feelings off for a while longer, but I think I need to confront them now. This needs to be on the list of things that I’m actively working on. Because all of that has the potential to be a real dark cloud hanging over a relationship. I also need to stop acting like a relationship isn’t something that I want. I do want that, and hope I can handle things well the next time I give it a try. How can I expect to give to a relationship what it deserves, what the woman sharing it with me deserves, if I’m preoccupied with the consequences of my own failings and inadequacies? I have embarked upon a journey to become a better man, and while I recognize the mechanical direction and have given myself room for side quests, I don’t think I’ve yet fully accepted the core mission. I haven’t been thinking of delivering the me part, and that’s a pretty heavy pack to carry.

It’s been a good one, so let’s check a few things in.

Okay, health and fitness update first. So my mouth hurts pretty bad. That’s a line that would open up some good good riffs in my friend group… might have to remember that one for the next hang and throw out an easy one for the boys. But honestly, I’d rather it just clears up and I forget. I should explain why it hurts before you come up with wild ideas of your own – I had some dental work done. There are a few items in my dental record on watch, and when I recently went in for a routine cleaning, we added a new one. Somehow, I still have all of my wisdom teeth, and one of them has fared a little worse than the other three. I think it might be the one that took a drumming from a rifle-butt in my 20s, though I don’t think that would have affected this situation either way. Anyway, that one got a filling some years back and that filling popped out recently between dental visits. My dentist, my usual dental hygienist, and everyone else in that office rules, so they immediately got me booked to fix that just a few weeks later.

Time for a quick side thought – with my ongoing schoolwork, I have a strong urge to tighten up that last paragraph. It’s late and I want to just bang this out before I retire for the day, so I’m going to resist that urge. But just so you know, I see it too.

Okay, so the dentist got up in the cavity left by the missing filling and found some rot. He cleaned it up, filled it in, and polished up some of my existing metal fillings while he was in there. Pretty sweet bonus, that last bit, which will hopefully add some life to those old fillings. But this wizzy needed more work than expected, which resulted in some pretty serious ouchiness. The healing and swelling have not been super fun. Well, not that I expected them to be fun or anything, but I guess I wasn’t really expecting anything when I walked in. Before I left, he warned me there would be not only some soreness but also possibly some pain, and he was not wrong. As a surprise, being not constantly drunk and/or hungover has made pain medicine extraordinarily more effective. I cannot believe how quickly and how thoroughly just a pair of over the counter pills can evaporate the unreal pains I’ve been having in my stupid face, but there it is.

In the fitness portion, it seems that my unlikely weight loss may have been real. I had clocked in at 240 a few weeks ago, which was the huge drop, and I had a feeling it was a fluke. I guess I’ve become accustomed to just failing to meet health goals for so long that it’s hard to believe when I make progress, even when I reconfirm multiple times with different sources. On top of that, I also had to figure that I’d lose a lot of progress on the give-or-take week that I had to take off from regular exercise. In case you missed it from last week, I had some serious foot blisters that I needed to stay off of, results of some bad gear and a little smidge of overdoing it. But I clocked in my weight today, later in the day and not with all the measures that help for a lighter weigh-in, and still came up with 243. I even had icecream sandwiches, plural, over the last few weeks. So I guess I must be doing something right.

I do want to also mention that I haven’t forgotten about the things I keep saying I want to talk about, but I am going to note that the timing on when I get around to any of them is now unclear. Though I have started writing on a few of those topics, which puts me further on the path to completing than previous projects. Really, they just aren’t the priority right now. There is room for them to be in the higher priority, because they are writing, and all writing relates to my top goals. However, I need to make some more tangible progress on those top goals before I’ll feel comfortable dedicating that time to what are, let’s be honest, side projects. This whole blog is a side project. At this pace, it feels worth doing. But much slower and things get in question and much faster puts the same questions in a different though equally unflattering light. Still, I do want talk about these things. I especially want to hurry up and talk about this board game I’ve been playing with a couple of friends. Others on the list that come mind include some music practice sessions, some media I’ve been enjoying, my utter lack of romance, and also some new clothes that I’m both a little embarrassed about but also think I rather like. We’ll see how I feel about any of those when I actually get around to finishing the thoughts, but there they are. I don’t know when, and don’t hold your breath, but I do plan to eventually get around to each of those thoughts. Oh, and I’ve been sketching some more, but that’s an easy update – I’m still bad. I mean, better, I suppose, but still very scratchy and not where I’d like it to be.

On another note, I’ve been wanting to take a bit of a train journey for a good while now and never got around to it. I’ve had a lot of things I’ve been wanting to do that I’ve not gotten around to, and there have been plenty of reasons. I think that might be a future subject, separate from this. This specific one has mostly just been dreaming without commitment or follow-up. Right now, it’s still pretty easy to put off and ignore, but as I’ve found myself getting stuck in the idea phase of things, I figure I need to start getting some in order. Ideas, that is. Some of the key ideas I need to start nailing down are when and where to. There are more items that need considering, of course, it is travel. And I haven’t traveled in a good while, so I will need to re-familiarize myself with some of my preferred practices as I approach it. But with a “when” undecided, that basically just means “never”. And I don’t want this to be a never.

So I’m going to use this space to log a few of those thoughts right now. The first is on the when, which I’m still going to leave pretty wishy-washy, as seems appropriate given my current state of being. For a little more solid ground, I’ve decided to tie it to my academic progress, though I’m not exactly sure how. Were I already lined up for a traditional college experience, I would schedule this for the end of a semester or sometime during one of the longer breaks. I’d prefer winter, because I love the cold and the snow, but we’re coming up on that mighty quick, and I know for sure I’m not doing that this year or early next. The other option, which might make more sense if I go with the less traditional self-paced college, is to tie it to credits. Plan the trip for when I hit the halfway mark. Seems reasonable. So by the end of this year, I’m going to decide on what to tie it to exactly, be it season or benchmark. An autumnal trip would be lovely, though.

Location wise, I just found out that Amtrak goes right into Glacier Nation Park. From Baltimore, there are no direct routes, but that’s fine as well. I could either be happy with the most direct route and make sure I have sleeper cars booked for the longer stretches, or make more of a laid-back journey of it, which is currently my favorite idea. I’d have to be careful about my budget and also make sure I’m not missing any serious health considerations, but I like the idea of a stop in Chicago, which is a place I like and haven’t been in a very long time. The destination of Glacier would be really quite great for me. I love that park, and I love Montana in general. I think gettin’ in some Big Sky would do me a spot of healing, too. It’s not the only option, and I can see myself changing those plans for a variety of reasons, practical and otherwise, but it’s at least a good place to start.

And a start it is, albeit a bit loosy-goosy of one for the time being. With that, I can begin looking at the viability of this plan, considering other options, budgeting and comparing, and so forth. You know, the fretting about shit part. I’m pretty good at that part.

And that’s it for today. Wow, just over an hour. Not much editing, which ain’t great, but we’re going to call that a win anyway.

This is going to be another progress one, because I’ve made some and I’d like to check that in. Plus it’s always worth it to log where I’m struggling. I’ve found that both cathartic in the moment and useful to review and reflect on.

Before we get to that, let’s have a slightly related aside. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I should and shouldn’t share on here. In my day to day, I make a lot of irony soaked jokes and comments and those get read fairly well in the moment, but there is something to the tone and context that I don’t think comes across in my writing. Yet. But my writing is among the skills I believe that I am making progress on. And that’s part of why I’ve been thinking about it. I have my sense of humor and all, but sometimes I wonder if it’s coming across or if I sound like I’m a Lincoln Park song. It’s true, I am a fairly depressed person, but all of my whoa-is-me sadness in recent days has been pretty low stakes, and I have consistently felt better physically, emotionally, and whatever that third thing is, at least for the last year or so. Sometimes I’ll read a previous post (which is part the purpose of the blog), and I’ll be like, “What the fuck crawled up his ass?” I’m fine. I am sad, but I’m always sad, it’s my natural state, and I’m quite comfortable in it. Besides, lately, my personal life has been quite joyful, or at least by my meager standards.

Okay, I feel like I’ve sufficiently talked that out for now. I’ve started to feel like I’m making progress on my writing. I don’t have a lot to show for it just yet, but just by paying attention on my assignments and in feedback from instructors and friends, I feel like I’m getting a stronger grasp on the process. I suppose it’s progress just to grasp that it is a process, you dig? Because I’m increasingly feeling like it’s something for me, something for my future, and even something for right now. I feel like every past attempt at taking writing seriously, I was still stuck in a childlike mode of thinking, that it would just come to me and I’d just know, understand, and place the words perfectly and as simply as going for a walk – just one foot in front of the other, and before I know it, I’m there and it’s exactly as expected. It seems so foolish now.

I was in a ride share with friends on our way to an outing. One of my friends is a teacher, and he was relating a story where he combined some of what he’d learned from boxing with with his own personal brand of tomfoolery to get his students more engaged in class, and all I could think of is how common he’d basically just created a Shonen style anime. I’m no anime expert, and I’m not going to write an essay on it today… though let’s do stash that in my back pocket, please and thank you. I do want to just state the thought outright, that one of the lessons I think is often being put out there by many coming of age fictions is that you need to work at shit, fail a good amount, and just keep trying. And it could be years before you get to where you want to be. And I imagine his lesson had some reach, even if it was just a few folks. It seems to me that layered learning and complex problem solving are, of all the creatures we have ever know, uniquely human. Along with our incredible endurance, they are among our super powers. We shouldn’t waste them.

I occasionally lament my lack of progress, but so much of that is rooted in the pace. Though I’ve certainly felt this way before, these days it is rare for me to feel like there is something I truly cannot do, that I am simply incapable of learning. It’s just that I feel like I’m learning too slow, or that my fitness progress isn’t significant enough within the time allotted. It sometimes feels that I’m putting up roadblocks around my progress by missing or neglecting something key. Letting go of some of the past notions I’ve had on what is possible, on talent versus diligence, for example, is freeing up space in my psyche to place more progress. Plus, it’s very fun to kick over roadblocks.

I’m still quite anxious to actually finish some classes. I think once I get a few credits down, I’ll feel less anxious about things. After a lifetime of working, it’s hard not to feel like all I’m doing is spinning my wheels and getting nothing done. But I need to just keep reminding myself that I am doing something, and this is the point of all of that. It does, however, help when I really nail a test or capstone.

I also got a bit bogged down in my fitness journey, which makes me very antsy. I’ve had some surprising gains in the last few weeks, gains that I’m both skeptical of and also concerned that I’ll lose. I didn’t get as much exercise in as I wanted to last week, because I blistered up my feet real bad. Nothing crazy, just being a silly goose. You see, I’ve come to prefer wearing compression socks when I go for my walks and runs. It was a suggestion from my Cardiologist, and also it turns out that they feel great. A thing that I’ve learned about compression socks, though, is that most of them fall apart almost immediately. And price doesn’t seem to be an indicator of quality, or maybe I’m just wearing them wrong? I don’t know, they’re socks, how are you supposed to wear them? Is there a special procedure for putting compression socks on? Maybe I just don’t have perspective on the quality I should be expecting. I have some super-duper nice (and quite expensive) internet-ass socks, and even those caught holes after just over a year’s use. Is that normal? How long should these things last? Do I need a deeper rotation?

As a former TACP, I should really know better. Every deployment, sooner or later, we’re all just dirty, nasty legs. You will be on your feet and for a very long time, with everything you have on your back, and if you don’t got your sock and shoe game right, it will be a problem. And yet, in all of my wisdom, I still found it find to just done some very holey compression socks and go for a little jog. Revved up to a full run on the last mile in, my big dumb clown feet did not like that lack of support, and reminded me of my mistake with some sizeable and quite painful blisters. And I’m fresh outta moleskin. Knowing I needed to give them time to heal but also not wanting to lose the momentum I’d built up, I then proceeded to re-agitate the blisters every few days, including that outing with friends, which was for dancing. You know, a thing you famously do on your feet? And followed the next morning with another round of cardio. Needless to say, I was quite off my game on Sunday’s band practice. I need to remember that I am no longer in my 20s, no longer the Invincible Aaron I once was, and to just keep off my goddam feet while they heal. Wish me luck, or at least the tiny bit of good sense needed to follow through.

Fitness and academics are going about as well as can be expected, and I’m happy about that. I feel like I’m making some good social progress, too, though the bar is admittedly pretty low. I’m also not sure how I want to measure that, because the ways that I see others measuring this just do not suit me. I don’t care about social standing in a hierarchical sense. This stands in all senses, professional and personal. I’m not trying to be king of the cool guys, I just want to be my weird ass self and surround myself with the people that I think are cool. And I don’t want to be in charge of everyone, anyone really, but I do want to be able to pursue my ideas and have a way of presenting them where appropriate.

So to those ends I think I can count things as progress. I feel closer with my friends lately, which I wasn’t expecting. That dancing outing was at a friend’s request. It was the teacher’s birthday / Halloween event, and while my feet might not have loved it, the rest of me had a great time. I think a lady might have even tried to flirt with me, but as I am socially inept, it did not occur to me until well after. It’s extra funny for the in group, as self deprecating around similar situations is a recurring in-joke that came up frequently this night. What fools we’ve been.

In defense of this stance, I have an abysmal track record of mistaking friendliness for potential romance. Frankly, I think I’m better off with the assumption she was just looking for a place to dance, and I had the most open floor in front of me. I must presume woman came that night to dance, so they probably don’t need sweaty-ass me getting all up in their space.

I’ve also been having friends come by during the week for some shared work/study time. I’ve already found this quite helpful, it really is good to have someone I can bounce an idea off of right in the moment. I think they’re finding it useful, too, so we’re turning it into a regular thing. Of course this gives me more opportunity to feel like I’ve been incredibly rude and worry all night about it, but I think that needs to be a part of the mission as well. It’s time to relearn some social expectations and become more adept at applying those lessons, and you just can’t do that while keeping to yourself.

Okay, that feels like we’ve said something today, so let’s call it. I’ve got a smidge more keeping me busy this week, but if I can manage to keep off my feet, I should be caught up by the end of it. I’ll pop in again around then.

Boy, scheduling a simple get together with friends as an adult sure is stressful. Getting easier, though, and I’d say that’s progress. And progress will be today’s check-in theme.

Okay, where am I at today? I talked in recent posts about having some fitness progress (check this out, I’m linking! – 1, 2, 3), and I’m very happy about that.

I’ve also made some progress on my schooling, though I don’t yet have anything to really show for it. Not having anything to show for it is starting to drag on me a bit, but conversations with friends, family, and former colleagues have bolstered my resolve. All of the classes I’m taking now are self-paced, which is great, but I don’t know how long I should be taking to complete a class. I did do a check on my progress against the benchmarks of those conversations and it seems both that I’m doing just fine and also like it hasn’t been as long as I’ve thought, especially given that I’ve ended up restarting some of them. My CS50x progress is by far the furthest behind, but for some reason, I’m not at all bothered by that. For that class specifically, I don’t care if it takes me the whole rest of the year to finish. That being said, we are about halfway through October now, and I am starting to feel a little nervous that I won’t make even that extremely lax goal. Is it extremely lax? I guess not terribly, it is supposed to be a very challenging class even for the smartypants folks at an Ivy League school, and I’m a 40-something dumbdumb, so I think that’s fine.

I have turned in a first attempt on the second essay in my English Comp class. I don’t remember if I mentioned that already or not, sorry if I have. It came out as a B, which if all I wanted was to speed through this class and grab a win, I think I’d be happy with that. I’m really starting to feel like I should have taken this one as an in person class, though. I’m increasingly interested in writing as a hobby and also feel stronger about its importance in all of my potential professional futures, so I think I really need a strong foundation to build on. That being said, I’m not changing classes now. Instead, I’m going to try and get the absolute most that I possibly can out of the class that I’m taking. To do that, I’m going to revise my first attempt and try to turn that into an A on the second. The feedback I got on the paper feels pretty useful, and I’m sure by just paying attention and applying it, an A will be well within my grasp. The process of revision is feeling less and less difficult already, so you know, that seems good.

Stats still feels like I’m going too slowly, but after some review, it actually seems like I’m going at a pretty good pace. I may even be going pretty quickly, which is kinda nuts. Everything else including both Econ’s are kinda on pause for the time being, which makes me a little anxious, but otherwise feels perfectly fine. I think that’s actually the right move for now.

Some of my current set of hobbies got a little pushed aside, but only just a little. Due to some logistics, my workbench is a bit of a clutter right now, which has slowed down my work on the bass kit I started a few weeks ago. Did I mention that? I don’t think I did. I should probably make a post about that. My sketching slowed, but didn’t stop, and I’ve started sketching for a little future paint practice, which should be fun. My solo-journaling RPG adventure isn’t going as planned, but it is continuing to inch forward. I’m also extremely close to finishing Anna Karenina, which I’m very excited for. I occasionally make progress in my music playing, make only the tiniest progress in my music writing, and am not getting nearly enough music listening in. I’ve had some cooking wins that I should really capture at some point, but that would be yet another project, and I just have too many as it is.

Socially, I’ve been trying to get my head around more and more of the things that I just don’t engage in but really need to. This might actually be the hardest part for me. With friends and family, I think I’m really doing quite good. Just talking and opening up has been good, as has the other side of that portion of good friendship – shutting the fuck up and listening. It’s a little surprising just how selfish and closed off I must have been for so long that I find myself constantly surprised at what those closest to me are up to. What a shithead I’ve been. Anyway, it continues to be awesome to reconnect with those closest to me.

On a less sunshine and roses note, I found myself tearing up the other night trying to think through my many piss-poor romantic decisions and how I feel like I’ve left myself in a real romance ditch. I’m honestly not sure how to fix that, or if I even can. I feel somewhat broken as a person, and as I rebuild myself, I do feel like I’m beginning to have some bits of good to add to a relationship. So that’s a plus, I guess. But I still can’t see a woman at all finding me attractive. That’s a real bummer thought, sorry. It was not my intention to send you to the bummerzone, but it is something that I think about and I’ve decided to talk about it. And if you are in the bummerzone, please let me help you get out of there. I am fine, truly, I am not on an emotional island or beginning some fatalistic cope. Look – I have been in relationships before, and I was able to get laid even when I was very, very overweight and clearly not taking care of myself. I’m not that worried about going through the rest of life entirely unsexxed, okay? I’m certain that there is a woman somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic that would be down to clown. It has been absolutely far too long, which is rough, but this is at least in part because I no longer want to just cat around like I did in my late 20s/early 30s. It feels kinda gross for me now. That’s not a judgement, by the by, you do you. But in my current place in life, I don’t think I just want to smash and move on. Such an uplifting way to talk about this… anyway, I’d much rather find a woman that I think is very cool and who is also well into my particular brand of lonely. Maybe we’ll actually want to spend extended periods of time together, but that seems like a lot right now.

I think between that last paragraph and this upcoming one, I’m about to sound fully serial killer. I think there’s a fair chance noone would actually think that without me calling attention to it, as a chronic over thinking, I still want to try and head some of that off at the pass here: I don’t think of people as just objects or of real life stuff as video game pickups. I’m not a tech-dweeb who thinks of everyone else as NPCs, you dig? I say that in worry that what I’m about to say is going to sound like I’m filling up an experience meter… so here’s that: I think I want to approach this in the same way as the handful of things in my life that are good and/or improving. And that way is as a sort of project of improvement. Actually, you know what? New paragraph.

That was the cringe part, hopefully it came off less so than I feel like it might have… I don’t know, I think that study isn’t really what I’m going for here. That also seems like a bad way to treat fellow humans, but in a way it also seems like what we all should do. Like we should be paying attention to all of the people that are in our lives already, and in caring about and for them, we should get a better idea of how to be a decent person in general. Then through that, you can be better at your part of a romantic relationship as well. As for ever feeling attractive again, I think all of the other stuff that I’m doing will suffice. You know: improve my health, work on my education/career, tune up my fashion, and be a better friend/family member. It seems like working on those would equate to me being a less shitty version of myself, and a less shitty version of myself would be someone that a woman I find attractive would find attractive… back… me… I don’t know how to write this sentence, I got lost around the end there. Was there a coherent point? Well whatever, I’m working on those anyway, so that seems like a decent plan.

Alright, it’s later than I wanted to be working on this, and this post is far longer than I intended anyway. But I’m not going to cut any of it because it is all stuff that I want to talk about. Plant a flag in the current position of my life, so to speak. I have, I think, a busy(ish) couple of weeks coming up, but I’ll still try to get a couple posts in here and there. That’s it for today, so keep it easy.

Today, I am wearing a red, short-sleeved henley that I have owned for a few years and never been able to fit into. I like this shirt, and I like more that I can wear it and feel comfortable.

So I’m not entirely sure what’s happened, but after being stuck for a while, something in my weight loss journey seems to be working again. Maybe just a smidge quick enough for me to keep a close eye on, to be honest. But then, I’ve gotten so used things going so slowly and being so difficult, that I may have lost perspective on what still counts as a healthy weight loss pace. Look, I’m in no risk of wasting away anytime soon, so let’s all calm down, but you know, the heart and liver situation is permanent, so I gotta keep it in mind always. Anyway, I clocked in at 245 lbs today.

There is another big piece of fitness news for me, which is that I’m now fairly confident that I will actually make my 1-mile run goal. Is that the goal I set? I think it was. The goal was to complete one unbroken mile by the end of the year. You know how I said I’d start linking to these things? Well, I just took a few minutes to look through my previous posts and have completely changed my mind on that. Wow, I really need to get better at writing. Also, I’m still not sure if I actually stated this goal, or if I changed it after first making it. I think I might have, at one point, planned to make this goal by the end of the summer, but there is no way that was ever going to happen. My progress and recovery are way slower now than just a few years ago. But to stay on the positive note, they are both considerably improved over where I was from my hospital stay.

Okay, here are the two goals I’m talking about now – get my weight down to a manageable zone and run an unbroken mile.

The top goal on my mind is the mile. I used to run all of the time, and I loved it. It’s great exercise, of course, and I do need that. But more so, when I would get in the zone, I would get both parts of the famed “runner’s high” – the body and the mind. I guess we can include the spirit if we want to round out a third, though I don’t know how to talk about that other than it just kinda feels good. The runner’s body high mostly comes to me in form of some good tinglies. You know, when you get these waves of fuzzy-sparky-tingles across your body and then you feel physically lighter? Yeah, it’s a pretty good time. The mind part is when the run is just right, my head complete empties the fuck out of bullshit and if anything remains, it what I want to have in there with perfect clarity. As a chronic over thinker, this is pure bliss.

So the mile goal is really a placeholder for the idea that I can just run again, and work to being able to run both seriously and casually. I don’t really care about the serious side of it, but I do need to socialize more, and some advice on that subject that I’m really digging is to just start going out to stuff that you already like. So if I can get back into running condition, I think I’ll sign up for a race or something. On the casual side, I want to get back to enough of a fitness level that I can just go for a run if I’m feeling like it. Or if I’m traveling and need some exercise, I can just go for a run or jump on a treadmill and it’s all gravy.

The second goal is on weight, which should really be a specific weight goal, but that’s gotten pretty mushy. I’d love to be under 200, but right now it feels like getting there is an impossible task. Also, some of my anxieties on my current lack of fitness have subsided. Now that I’m in the mid 240s and feeling pretty good about things, I don’t feel so put upon and stressed to make that goal. Not that I’m planning to stop or slow or anything, but I’d started this with the idea that I’d reflect and adjust as I go, so now I’m reflecting. Adjusting? well, I don’t fully remember the previous goal. I think my most recent self-deliberations on the topic resulted in something like hitting the 230s by the end of the year. That seems hard enough that it’s not a throw away goal, but also entirely achievable for me. To be clear, for this goal, just one weight-in under 240 pounds before January 1st counts. So honestly, I’m already pretty close. That’s just 6 pounds, give or take a few ounces. And I have just under three months. Last I read on the subject, you can lose up to two pounds per week and that can be considered healthy. If I actually managed that pace, and let’s not go checking my math here, than that’s like 22 pounds. I’d be most of the way to my longer term weight loss goal. Now, I’m not going to manage that pace, let’s not be crazy. But an average of one pound per week is possible, even with holiday eating, so I could be well into the mid-to-low 230s before the New Year. And wouldn’t that be dope? Yes, it very much would, in fact, be dope.

So the current status is the part that makes me feel pretty good. As previously stated, I’m currently at 245. I’m really quite happy about that progress. I feel like it’s a fluke, I mean, I always do. My lifelong weight struggles have really left me with some serious trauma that I’m sure I’ll need to unpack some day, but.. yeah, that shit can stay packed for now. As for my running goal, I have a saucy little secret. I may have actually already done it. Twice.

I’m still doing the majority of my running on that path behind my home. It’s a pretty good path. It’s green, quiet, and just hilly enough to add some useful challenges. I have a rough estimate of the distances along the path, and the two times in question both started before what I think to be about a full mile out. In one of the runs, I made it all the way back to my starting point without ever stopping or slowing to a walk, so I’m certain that one counts. The other one was today, which started about as far back as the first, but then I got rocked by that penultimate, treacherous hill. Not right away, I did get a few strides past the crest, but I had a little cough and needed to slow to catch my breath. It seems that I went a little too hard the way up and there wasn’t a downhill to ride out back to a chill pace. I’ll have to keep that in mind for future attempts. But that hill is close enough to the end that it might have still been a mile.

All of that is sort of inconsequential, right? I’m not really keeping a score here. I’m not doing this against anyone and my real goal isn’t the exact number. The real win here is just how much progress I’ve made. I think this means I need to revise the end of year goal of “unbroken mile” to something about regular, consistent miles. Or bumping the number up higher, like to a mile and a half? Maybe some of these cardio sessions should start with the running part? I don’t know, I need to think that one over. Either way, I’m pretty happy about it.

I have once again been having thoughts about establishing a bit of a schedule here. I know it wasn’t long ago that I ditched that, and it was the right decision for the time, but now that I’m on the other end of that, I can’t help thinking that the lack of a deadline or expected cadence is making it easier to just not do the writing. I also mentioned how I want to write about a bunch of different things, and I still do. I should really start linking to the posts I’m referencing, but not today. I should also really start keeping a list of everything I want to write about, which… actually, I think I might have started. I should find that. And also update it. Anyway, I think not giving myself any deadline at all might be keeping me from making the time to do the things I want to do, which has me rethinking the super free form nature of this. I don’t know, I feel like I’m in the part of every journey, at least all of them I’ve done so far, where I can see that this is a thing that I can do but I’m just in utter awe at how those that are doing it manage. I mean, there is a whole lot of shit that goes into just putting some words on a page. Or screen, whatever. Related, I still haven’t finished that second essay for English Comp.

Hey, side note – What the hell is going on with Miley Cyrus’s voice? Sorry, I’ve got a youtube video on in the background and a commercial just came up. Also, I do not keep up with her or the internet discourse on her. I don’t say that to downplay, but rather, ya’ll can fill me in if I’m missing something here. So now I’m going to be a little snide – did she gargle lava at some point? Has she been smoking a carton a day? Was her singing so intense that it blew out her mid-range the way my brother blew out the bass in his first post-high school car? Can you imagine the show if that happened mid-performance? Either very sad or absolutely incredible. Yeah, you know what? I’m going to choose to believe that one. She sang so magnificently that as if Vocal Icarus she got too close to the sun and something something. Metaphor!

Another thing that I should probably link to but won’t is how I’ve mentioned I’m taking some online classes and that one of them is English Composition I. I really went into this thing thinking it would be an easy win for me, and it super has not been. It’s a self-paced, study-on-your-own/submission driven class, and it only asks for four papers. FOUR ESSAYS is the entire body of work required by this class. I know saying this is really about to put my arrogance on blast, and I know I can be an arrogant prick, but I really thought I’d be looking at a month in this class, tops. And yet I’ve been stuck on the second essay for weeks. The assignments are not long, at least not for an overly verbose dork like me, and they are, though not entirely, pretty dang open ended. These are the types of parameters for papers that my younger self would see as an opportunity to just swoop in and snatch a victory, but my friends, I am not swooping.

In case you missed it (because I won’t link to it), I did complete the first essay. The essay’s parameters were 550-750 words and meant to be a personal narrative with the theme of gratitude. This program offers two attempts for each essay, with a grade and feedback on the first and I think they take the best score of the two. I thought that there were three attempts, so thinking I could burn the second and use that feedback to prepare a near-perfect third, I instead turned in a final that was most definitely below par. I mean, I could (and slightly do) blame my misunderstanding of the submission process, but in truth, I kinda thought that I had it nailed and it would either complete the assignment or just leave some light clean-up work. Like I’d get a high B or low A or something, and only submit the third if it the lost points were grammar, punctuation, or otherwise quick fixes. What actually happened is that following countless rewrites I got super-duper off theme and turned in a final that couldn’t qualify for the biggest chunks of the rubric. Now, it does appear that what I had submitted was otherwise pretty well written, which is nice. Though as much as “nice” helps me cope with my wounded writing pride, it really doesn’t do anything for my grade.

That event did not deter me, in fact it made me that much more determined to rise to the next occasion. However, the open-ended nature of these essays remains, which has really bogged me down. This is usually something that I look forward to, a real chance to just go on and on about whatever bullshit is in my head. I’m a man whom is passionate about many things, some of which I am absurdly passionate about, and I’m sure I could scratch together something quick on virtually any subject. In my younger years, I think that’s exactly what I would have done. I would have picked a current, hot-button issue, collected up talking points like health potions and power-ups in a video game, and then laid them out point by point and wrap up by connecting them with perfect transitions. Let’s ignore how decades of weird video game logic has left me with hangups about using those potions and instead acknowledge the issue that I keep running into in this context – I don’t want to write my assignment about something that I actually care deeply about. It feels flippant and dismissive of the actual situation, and I hate it.

So it took me at least a week just to pick a topic. Oh, right, the parameters – it’s now up to 750-950 words, it’s supposed to be in a persuasive letter. Convince someone of a thing. That’s pretty simple. So I looked up and thought about a bunch of different topics. Most just fully did not interest me, and the ones that did all fell into that space I mentioned before – I’m quite passionate about it and don’t want to just write a couple of ignore-able paragraphs. What I came up with instead is the idea of convincing a close friend to take an online class, which got around that problem, but has a new one. Now it’s flippant from the start. And you know what? I don’t feel great about that, either. I’ve done a fair amount of the pre-writing and I’m pretty sure that I can pull this off, so I’m going to stick with it. But I think I’m going to need to get over this stance.

I keep coming across this notion of writing, one which really fits nicely in my view on work. Actually, I think it might be multiple ideas, but they’ve been swirled together in my head. Let’s see if I can unravel them a smidge. To start, this is a process. To whatever degree anyone can, it is not for me to simple one-shot a paper, or for any of my writing to be simply spewed forth without some struggle. Now to that point add that processes with iteration are easier to find a way through. You treat it as a project, with a beginning, middle, and end. You setup a framework and work your way through, with space left for rework, because the rework isn’t a punishment, it’s refinement. It’s how we get to a better finished product. Add to that another thought, one that I find referenced in the Arts and Sciences, that all works, great and meager, are in conversation with each other. These includes ones own works representing the self, and also the individual pieces representing a time and place, a snapshot of that self of the then, talking with all other pieces of that self from their unique stance in that timespace.

As we expand beyond the self, we find that our pieces have not become but rather always were in conversation with all other pieces, including those of entirely disparate discourse, throughout all of history, well without our active conscience involvement. I feel this way because I am the product of a species that has been trying to learn a better way to exist in the world within which we do already exist. When I write, sketch, or log something in my journal, I am taking a snapshot of how I am at that moment, as is true of when I post something on this blog. But that snapshot of that moment is a product of the life I have lived, here in this world that I live in. So it stands to reason that if I were to write something about the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, I am talking not only of them, no matter how objectively I attempt to approach it, but also about myself, the observer. And I am also talking about the Geo- and Eco-political environment that they exist in now, along with their entire history and how their histories have existed within those previous contexts. Each new piece on the conflict, mine or a professional’s, adds to the discourse, and bends the conversation one way or another by its existence, even if only slightly and if only for the writer. So each of my new pieces is also a snapshot on how I view this, and also reflects back on me to help me refine my next piece.

That’s a very long walk, but I think that what I’m saying is that to write you must write, and no writing is a waste. So I should just write about it, and if my piece is bad, well then at least I’ll have gotten some of my bad writing out of the way. Well, not the Armenian/Azerbaijani conflict – I know precious little about it, and don’t plan on writing anything about it anytime soon.

On that general theme, though, a topic that did come to mind is how I feel about the Kurdish people. Don’t worry, I’m not about to launch into some weird, unexpected racist turn here, in fact I’m probably not going to talk about them much at all, at least not today. I suppose I should make my stance clear, which is that I very much support their autonomy and independence. This is, of course, an extremely dumbed-down and unsophisticated version of my actual thoughts, but you know, I don’t really want to get into right now. I kinda don’t really want to get into it at all, because I’d inevitably feel compelled to talk about complicated aspects of it, including my complex thoughts on diaspora-based governance and also my own personal history with the PKK. Yes, it turns out, I have a personal history with the PKK. Which was mostly good, by the way, but you know, people tend to see liberation movements and terrorists, especially if they can be successfully scapegoated for a hike in gas prices. Multiple times.

However, a good while ago I decided that if I’m going to continue with this whole school thing, then I need to take it seriously. I think that part of taking it seriously means that I’m going to need to treat assignments like this with the same seriousness I would want to read from others. So I think I’ll just have to start taking on topics like that, even though they make me uncomfortable, and it doesn’t matter the why or the how of that discomfort. And if I’m going to do it, I need to make sure I have my shit together about it. And so now I’m looking at some reading material to fill in the parts of that story that I’ve missed, and I’m also trying to get a better handle on the essay format itself. I know that many scholars and experts love the essay, and if I want a professional career where I do stuff that I care about, I’ll need to get better at the format. So I’m also trying to find some examples that scholars and experts consider to be great essays. Look dawg, I’m like Kakashi Hatake – I can copy any master and make it my own.

And with the Naruto reference in hand, this thought is officially over. That’s enough for now, but I really do need to get back around to some of those subjects I keep saying we’ll put a pin in. I think I wanted to talk about fashion? I bought some corduroy pants. I used to hate the material, but I have to admit, I kinda like the pants. Very cozy.

After some deliberations, I’ve decided that I do in fact want to use this personal blog to talk about personal stuff beyond just stuff like fitness updates. Oh, by the way, I have now had several consecutive weight-ins below 250 lbs, which is pretty great. I’m very happy about that. Now I just need to keep up that momentum. I’m still not up to running a full, unbroken mile, but I’ve made it over half a mile, so I’m pretty happy about that, too. As I fill up this blog with more varied work, I’ll start setting up zones arranged by topic and tone or, I don’t know, whatever ends up fitting. But we’re not there yet.

A thing I’ve noticed about myself over the past few years is I’ve gained a strange quirk in my overall mindset, that I’ve gotten so cloistered that I have a deep apprehension to making plans. This is no good. Some of my best work and most of my best experiences came from making plans to do something. I don’t think this is entirely unearned, as I’ve had a few times in my life when my schedule was absolutely jam packed, when there just wasn’t enough time in the day, week, or month to get all of the tasks on my list done. But that’s not now, and that’s not how my life has been in some time. This post isn’t going to be some thought piece on time management, though I suppose it’s another piece of a growing body of evidence that I do need to get better at that. And a big chunk of what I need to improve is the willingness to make plans, and I find joy in the prospect of fulfilling those plans. But let’s put a pin in that.

This last weekend only had one appointment, but it was a good one. I talk about my previous job a lot, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. I worked there for almost 20 years. I learned a lot from the job, and much more from my coworkers and a handful of good managers. This appointment was a lunch with some of those folks. I’m quite grateful for the work that one of my former bosses puts into setting these up, as it’s very nice to see these folks, but there’s more. In recent years, I’ve come to see my time in that job as quite the boon to my personal life. The business of the company is fascinating, and for a time it attracted a wide variety of interesting types, making the company absolutely packed with incredibly smart people. It was quite the boon to find myself situated amongst them, as so many of them helped me along. The power of intelligence and kindness is incredible.

Usually when I show up to a social event of any kind, I try to line up with specific friends and also probably try to grab a seat on the end or a corner or something. On this day, I decided to just go with the flow, and that situated me between one of my favorite former bosses and one of her bosses. The two of them are also lifelong friends, so I felt pretty guilty splitting them up. The unselfish part of me wants to make sure everyone else gets to sit where they want to sit and I’ll sit where ever. The selfish part of me wants to be mostly left alone, which gels with the self-conscience part of me which always feels too big and in the way, hence the finding a corner spot thing. But they had no problem speaking across me, so that seems fine.

The spot I took did turn out to be advantageous. My former boss and, as I believe she coined, “great-grand-boss” – a fantastic term that I fully encourage you to start using – are very quick and compassionate. I feel like I absorbed a massive dose of insightful thoughts just sitting between them. Getting a chance to run a few thoughts by them was also huge, including some strong endorsements of a few of my academic plans.

A thing I think is happening to me right now is that my perception of life is changing. Ah, shit, I am getting into this, aren’t I? No, we’re not getting in deep, just dipping the toe. I feel like I’m finally actively trying to pay attention to the lessons that life and those I’ve shared mine with have been trying to teach me. I’ve done a pretty good job of ignoring those lessons, and that’s been workin’ out great and all, but it does seem like now is a good time to start paying attention. Or maybe I should have started like 20 years ago. You know what? My toe is wet enough and this water is cold, I’m getting back out.

I think the thing that I’m learning from this experience is that I need to stop trying to find rest time. I worry about how that comes across, like one of those hustle-dweebs saying some garbage like “earn your rest time”. I don’t mean it like that, but rather, it very much feels like my balance of doing and resting has been frustrated, and many of my current struggles are tied to my own attempt to push back against that. I have felt this before, and for different situations. I felt it hardest in one of those times when I was far too busy, but busy with one focus of work that shut out all of my other desires. I’m on the opposite end of that, where I have all the time in the world but am trying very hard to make the most of how I use that time. Damnit, I’m in the pool again!

Alright, let me just say this bit and then take off for the evening. I think something I”m starting to understand about myself is that I do like filling up my time, but only if it’s with stuff that I care about. The breadth of things that I care about is still huge, and it will likely still be too busy, but if I can change up my life and find a career where I can mostly focus my working efforts onto things I care about, then I don’t think I’ll feel so quickly and so thoroughly burned out at the end of any given week or day. So I’m trying to also pay attention to what people are actually saying about different career paths, because I’d really like to fill up my time with a steady pace of overlapping projects.

That didn’t turn out to be all that personal, I suppose. No real details there, though I do want to come back to the past couple of weekends. I’ve got some thoughts on some games I’ve played, some thoughts on my pursuit of opening up new or improving existing friendships, and my usual fitness and academic updates. If I can muster the courage for it, I may even try to get into my romantic status, or rather lack there of and so on. But that’s enough for today.

I had a pretty good weekend. Maybe a handful of unforced errors, but nothing terrible, I think.

I want to really get into the details of what made my weekend so good, and I’ve written up multiple versions of a post about it. But I keep trashing the post, because it gets a bit too personal. I’m finding myself writing things I hadn’t thought of, or least hadn’t risen to the top of my conciseness, and I feel like it’s revealing too much. For my part, this has been one of the fun parts of reading other people’s blogs. But to be honest, when I first started this back up, I kind of envisioned it as a different type of blog, something closer to the type that became much more popular, the type that really isn’t what blog start out to be. Popular blogs these days aren’t a person’s personal journal anymore. The modern popular blog type that closest to that original style is something like a Travel Log, but even that has more focus on the doing and less focus on the living.

I don’t now, I didn’t set out to analyze blogs today, so maybe I’m off there. Anyway, I’ve been holding out on posting because I got busy and then I got stuck in a cycle of writing and then deciding that I didn’t want to post what I wrote. I haven’t decided, still, just how much I want to put out there. Nothing crazy happened, to be clear. I’m just not sure I want to dig into my thoughts and feelings like that. I guess we’ll see, but for the meantime, I guess I did get some writing practice in.

Speaking of which, I’ll give an actual update of sorts today. I’ve previously mentioned that I’m taking an English Composition class and that I did poorly on the first assignment. I’m not stuck on the second assignment, and it’s bumming me out.

I feel a lot more up to writing this one, so it’s not that. The assignment is to write a persuasive letter. It is a letter format, and it being a letter who’s intended audience, however fictional it may be, is someone you know. I don’t think it literally says that in the assignment, but that seems to be allowed if not implicated. Furthermore, I feel that the practice from the first assignment and the advice I’ve received during and since has really set me up to nail this. But the key advice that the instructor is clearly trying to hammer down is that it should be something you are passionate about. I’m passionate about many things, but they are things that I either really don’t want to put out there in a school assignment or that would need much longer than the 900ish word limit would allow.

The suggestions I find when I search online are almost all politics. I am rather passionate about politics, but I’m a bit of a lefty and I’m worried about anything I write in the space right now. I wouldn’t worry about putting those thoughts here on my stupid blog, but I do worry about putting them on a paper that I’ll be graded on. I also worry that in the format available, I’ll feel too penned in and end up truncating my real points down to garbage, and instead advance points that I don’t really care about.

The example that comes to mind is the minimum age. When I come across people talking about it, people tend to fall into two camps. The first is what many consider a sort of Libertarian view, though the term Libertarian doesn’t seem to mean what it’s supposed to. These days I find the average person calling themselves a Libertarian is just a type of Republican who’s clever enough to realize that MAGA people are dickwads. So they’re against the minimum wage because they’ve been convinced by the real Capitalists that actually it’s good that people can be paid under a living wage for a full time job. At least they have a job, right? God, they love that one. And the other side really only has the living wage argument. Not that it’s a bad argument, it should win every time, but when your opponents say they believe in the dignity of labor but don’t actually believe it, then any argument on the material condition of the laborer will always lose. They are the party that claims facts don’t have feelings, then get in their feelings and lie to your face. You’ve got to stop expecting reasonable arguments to work on unreasonable people.

But my view is actually also against the minimum wage, though not the concept of one, and also not in the short term. Mine isn’t a crazy or unpopular view, I don’t think, but it doesn’t get talked about in this way. We do need a minimum wage, but as a short term solution to bridge us to the long term one. I’m in the USA where we do have a minimum wage, but it’s terribly outdated in that it doesn’t really address the problem. I haven’t gone through all of the data, but I get the feeling that it never really did. I’m also in Maryland where, generally if not always, people tend to be paid above the minimum wage, and that we still have poverty should be a clue that this solution isn’t a panacea.

And this is where I start to get into trouble. What I want to talk about next is actual stats, go through the histories of labor and payment, and give a recap of American’s relationship with labor overall. Maybe sprinkle in some passages from The Jungle or whatever. But then I’d pivot to my ideas, which are fairly simple, though they would take some explaining. Well, maybe this is a good subject for a future paper, actually, but not for this one.

Actually, yeah, this little bitch session has been helpful. I won’t be writing about the minimum wage in this paper, but maybe I don’t feel so weird about a similar topic. Let me take another read through a few before I get going on it.

As I wrap up, I do want to acknowledge how often I stop myself short on getting into a topic and then quickly paper over it with a “well maybe another time” type of dismissive wave. I’m planning to follow up on a few of those. I’ve already putting together something for a recent brushed-off topic on my wardrobe refresh, so that’ll probably pop up sooner or later. I suppose we can add my thoughts on labor to that as well. But that’s it for today. Keep on keepin’ on?

Yeah, that’s not gunna be the sign-off.