Author: Aaron

I don’t know if I need to say this, but I worry that I sounded harsh on my friends in my previous post, and that won’t do.

I had most of this written over the weekend and planned to post yesterday, but I’ve kept myself busier than initially expected. I’ve been stewing over whether or not my last post made it seem like I was mad at my friends – I am not. They are the bees knees. No, I’m worried that I want something they may not. That’s pretty normal stuff, I think, but I can also be a bit intense, which might lead someone to say they are interested in the moment when they really aren’t. I’ve done this, and I bet you can relate. You know, you like the guy fine, but you’re not really lookin’ to join their book club? But they just keep talking about it, and they corner you on the way out of the party, and you’re like, “Yeah dude, I’ll think about it.” and they take that as a definite yes. I worry that I’m taking their polite agreement as an enthusiastic engagement. I’d rather not put them in such a crummy position. I don’t know, I have a lot of social anxieties, which I’m sure is coming as a massive surprise to you, dear reader. Also, at the time of my last post, it had just been a few days and everyone is a busy adult, so I was jumping the gun as it was. Well anyway, before I managed to correct myself, one of them did text back, which is very kind considering. Here’s to hoping neither is aware of this little bitch-session webpage of mine. I’ll see about more politely giving them an out next time we hang, or maybe just not mentioning it.

Actually, I still feel a little hung up on my potential carelessness. I know I mentioned ending other friendships, entire friend groups, in fact, and I don’t want that to sound like some frivolous action. Nor do I want to imply that this one remaining group is perpetually on the cut list. It is not. It is a good group, and I’m happy to still be a part of it. It’s more that the group seems to have been experiencing sort of a collective revival, you know, folks in this specific circle getting back together more regularly. It’s a thing and I’m not the only one to have noticed it. I think I just got a little swept up in the idea of this being an area we could collectively enjoy expanding into, and I suppose it still could, but I gotta cool my jets either way. Now the other thing I mentioned is also true, I do think I need to get out and form some new friendships. I do need to find people I can study with, for one. For another, I have a few esoteric hobbies I’m pretty sure none of my friends share. And then there’s the whole romance thing, which… well, I think I might still just not be ready for. But when I am, I’ll need to be able to talk to strangers without seeming like an alien. But you know, anxieties.

This past Saturday is a good example of that, actually. I’m looking at doing a bit of a wardrobe refresh. Well, maybe more than a bit, to be honest. I’ve got a bunch of clothes that I not only don’t ever wear, but can’t really think of a time when I would. Getting rid of those is easy, but then I’m left with mostly t-shirts and jeans. Now, I love me some t-shirts and jeans, and even if I never wear any of those to work, school, or most social outings, there are still plenty of times when I would wear them. That’s not a problem. I mean, some of those are already in piles that will get paired down and donated, for sure. I’ve got a bunch in sizes either too big and hope to never have to wear again, or so small that it’s incredibly unlikely I’ll ever fit them again. In either case, if I do ever fit those sizes again, I’d still be better off shopping for that time rather than wearing these outdated items. However, I do not anticipate an occasion when wearing a graphic tee with “Cougar Hunter” printed above a saucy silhouette will be appropriate.

Actually, this story is not very good, so instead of a full recap, let’s do a short one. I went to a Nordstrom’s Rack (I should look up that spelling, but I won’t). The line for the registers was exactly in the direction I was headed, was super long, and they all seemed to be looking at me. I was certain they couldn’t be, and looked behind myself to see what crazy thing they must have all been looking at. There was nothing, it was just me. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure it was just because they were bored and in line and here’s some motion or whatever. But my dawgs – this was super uncomfortable for me. Especially when I turned back and watched almost all of them immediately moved to their own “Oh, I wasn’t looking at anything” default stances – pretending to look at a locked phone, fumbling through a bag, or surveying the items they were in line for as if they suddenly weren’t sure about them. Ultra-yikes. It took everything in me to just keep going and pretending that I didn’t see them pretending that they weren’t all just watching me. Very unpleasant.

Anyway, I do want to talk about the styles of clothes I’m looking at, but not today. It’s already late, and I’ve got a celebratory creamsicle to smash. Oh, is there something to celebrate? Yes, that’s right, I had almost forgotten – I finally made it under 250 pounds. And no, this one creamsicle will not bust my diet, so get off my nuts already. Cheers!

It’s Friday and I feel like writing about stuff. Not a story or theme, just a bunch of little things.

I still can’t seem to get under 250 and it’s kinda driving me crazy. Yes, this is a weight loss complaint. There are a few possibilities and my guess at the two most likely are on opposite ends of upsetting. One is that I’m still overeating and under exercising. I don’t see how. I’ve been pretty good at tracking my calories, usually coming in below my target. I’ve also been getting that exercise in, rarely skipping, occasionally getting in extra. But whatever, it’s possible, maybe I’m sleep eating. The other likely possibility reads like some hard-internet-ass-cope, that I’m both losing and gaining at the same time. The loss is the fat and the gain is some muscle. Muscle takes more calories to maintain than fat, so that should speed up my weight loss. I don’t know, it really feels like some wishful thinking. My frustration over this is that I don’t know what, if anything, I can do with this knowledge. I’d add more exercise, but I’m still much weaker than I used to be, and I’m not getting any younger. I can cut a few more calories, but that’s it. I’m already hungry all the time.

I turned in my English Comp. personal narrative essay. It was the second attempt and I was still not totally sure about things, and figured another round of teacher feedback would be great. Well, it turns out you only get two attempts on these, so that was it. And that’s not great, because even though my writing seems much improved, I deeply veered off theme with my thesis. So… that’s not great. But I can learn, slow as I may be. So I’m going to roll up some more good advice to approach the next one. The most relevant advice sticking out now is to start with a plan already setup for the topic/theme and write around that. Basically, it’s time to actually work with the tools available. I think that means my plan is to pick my topic, write my theme, and construct an outline around that. The paper is supposed to be a persuasive letter, so another thing that I don’t really have any desire to write about. I read all of the materials available, including examples, and I’ve got nothing. The only things on my mind that I want to persuade anyone of are way too big. My immediate ideas outside of those are all really trite and I just can’t get excited to write about them. Convince someone to read a book? I guess man, I just don’t care. So it seems like I’ll have to just convince myself I care. I don’t love it.

To continue on writing, I talked about wanting to wrap up some fiction writing and send to a few friends whom had expressed interest. I did that, both of that. I finished the story part, put it in a google doc, and texted the link to my friends. That was Tuesday. It is Friday. They have not replied. And now I remember how I became a lonely hermit.

I used to have a bunch of little friend groups. With my recent problems, I’ve had to end almost all friendships except from this one group that’s mostly made up of close friends from high school. I can’t deal with the others, they just aren’t safe for me anymore. This one is still good, but I think I’m trying to get things out of it that just aren’t there. So I think I now need to do the thing I dream the absolute most, be social with strangers. I need to make new friends, specifically friends that both share my unfulfilled interests and also will participate with me in them.

I’ve got a few projects that I want to undertake, and I’m really thinking about a few of them. Once I think I can turn into a product, and since business is the only thing respected in this shit country, I feel increasingly compelled to do a business. So if I can make this thing and turn it into a product, I can have a business, and that’s that. But the process of turning it into a product means I either have to learn everything from design and manufacturing to finance and marketing. Some of those parts, I actually really do want to learn, and I’m game to learn stuff I don’t care for if it supports the things that I do. I mean, that’s a big part of the school stuff I’m doing right now. But doing so does probably I either need to put the other school stuff on hold, or I need to find more time… and that’s another area that I just don’t have much more to trim.

Looks like I haven’t put in enough work on that brevity problem. I was planning to just do a bunch of little paragraphs, but them paragraphs ain’t lookin’ little. So let’s wrap up for today. I should really make a list of this shit… did I already make a list of this shit?

It sure seems like the population in Florida is going to drop down considerably over the next decade or so. I feel sad for the Floridians that did not vote for this and do not have any means to escape it. What a shit show.

I am currently caught between a number of writing projects, including that college essay I’ve been working on. In the course of a check-in phone call with my Mom last week, she agreed to give my paper a review. She must be pretty bored in her retirement, because she turned that review around in a few hours. The next morning, she gave it another look, and sent me back a second, even more thorough review. Me lacking a cohort, my Mom’s post-retirement boredom is quite the boom.

I’m quite thankful my Mom did give my work a review, because I’m very much in need of the feedback. The feedback provided by the teacher(?) of the course on my first attempt was quite helpful, but I’ve made a lot of changes in my drafts since then. Now I’m working on incorporating both sets of feedback into my work and I keep finding myself stuck in the same half a paragraph and just doing endless rewrites on it. That is not a sustainable process. I’ve got to start looking at other writing techniques. The biggest one I’m both aware of and also not using is The Outline. The course also introduced me to the concept of a “reverse outline”, which I have given a try but don’t think I’ve done correctly. I think I need to take that part of my process more seriously, so maybe that’s something I’ll focus on this week. Or maybe, more likely, I’ll forget and just keep rewriting shit until I give up and roll with the latest version as my second attempt.

I like the idea of an outline and want to use it for my fiction writing, but I gotta be honest… I think I’ve forgotten how to do one. Or maybe I never really knew? I mean, I definitely did this in grade school, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t bad at it. But these days I’m not entirely sure I know what I’m doing. In anything, really, which is sometimes a bit daunting. Odd as it may seem, I actually feel a bit encouraged when recognizing my vast ignorance.

The outline as a tool was last planted in my brain by a friend that is also interested in science fiction writing. Well, I suppose I’m not entirely sure I can count her as a friend just yet. She’s the sister of a friend, but we’ve chatted a fair bit over the past few years, and she’s shared some of her ideas. They’re fascinating and I’m excited to read what she writes. The outline came up because she’s planning on using one to lay out her story before diving into the writing. I’m not sure I’ve quite captured her plan there, so take my recounted with a grain of salt. Anyway, I wonder if it would be rude to ask her to share how she does her outlines.

Along with her is another friend of mine that I’ve known since high school. He’s a great friend, and also someone whom is interested in writing some science fiction. Oh, I guess I’m not entirely sure that his writing interest is actually in this genre, but I seem to recall him mentioning it. Did he? Hmm… Anyway, he’s a much more serious reader than I, and I was delighted to recently find out that writing and the written word more generally are in his top interests. I’d really like to lean on him for my pursuit of poetry, because outside of a few popular poets, I’m really not sure where to start. He, on the other hand, used to write poetry. And his wife backs up his work, so you know, I’d like to see it. I do mostly want to see his work because he’s my friend and I want to see what my friends are up to. But also, yeah, there is poetry that I have liked and while I’m not sure I’ve got poetry writing in me per say, I do think it would help me in all of my writing. It certainly can’t help but improve the lyrics in my shallow music writing. Maybe that’s a class I should line up next. Can I get through some literature and art appreciation more quickly than I’m getting through this English Comp. stuff? I really hope so. Goddamn, this is all taking so very much time.

I think the three of us have all talked about sharing our work with each other, but I don’t know that we’ve really nailed anything down yet. I have personally promised, at least twice now, that I would clean up a story and share it with them… and I haven’t. Just like the essay, I just keep getting stuck on a very small part of it and spinning my wheels on rewrite after rewrite. I guess I don’t mind that as part of the process, but I also feel like I need to put guard rails up around rewrite sessions. Like I need to use the full tool set, not just gesture at the box while dicking around with the same beat up old hammer.

So I’m committed to wrapping up a draft of that this week as well. I had meant to send it out last week and didn’t… not a great look. So I’m going to spend some time on it tonight and if it’s good enough, ship off a draft to them tomorrow. If it’s not done tonight, then I will put all other projects on hold tomorrow until it’s good enough. Then I’ll send over the first volley, ask for feedback, and encourage them to send me theirs.

Well now, that’s starting to feel like a plan. Okay, then it’s settled, that’s what we’re doing. I’ll report back on how that goes later this… hell, I don’t know when, I guess if and when anything comes of it. They, frankly, have day jobs and might be too busy to entertain my bullshit.

But that’s it for today, one more in the books. I should start working on a sign-off. That would be fun.

I used to complain about not having enough to write about. I now have so much to write about, that I don’t have time to write about it. And I’m not even a busy guy. Okay, well, let’s take this as an excuse to work on my brevity. Let’s start by constraining today’s post to two subjects only, and they will both be on the same theme.

First up is on my fitness. I’ve had a lot of soreness while trying to get back in shape. That’s to be expected, but I’m still going to complain about it. I’m so out of shape and so old and every time I lift, or do calisthenics, or just exist, my whole fuckin’ everything starts to hurt. Do you have any idea how annoying it is after spending just fifteen minutes doing leg exercises to then spend the next three days with your entire thigh-and-ass zone be so sore that you make old-man sounds each and every time you stand up? If you do, then you can come into this club. We’re drinkin’ diet sodas and rubbin’ ourselves down with Tiger Balm. No you may not rub down anyone else. My most recent addition to the “taking way too long to recover” team is my lats. I used to be able to do pull-ups, but this situation has me wondering, was I? They sure didn’t hurt this much then. Now I’m starting to wonder if I’ve been cheating at pull-ups. Have I ever actually engaged my lats before now? What are these dang muscles even doing all day? Apparently nothing. Now that I’ve registered that complaint, this check-in is actually about how… well, lately, it hasn’t been that bad, actually. I’m still getting sore, for sure, but it’s no longer making me rearrange parts of my schedule. My general overall recovery time is way quicker, like the next day is pretty rough if I’ve hit it hard, but then I’m fine.

Okay, the second bit is a follow-up on my slowly developing academic… career? Is that how people refer to this sort of thing? I have so many subtopics to get into about this, and many of those are very much top of mind for me. Today I’m going to focus on that Statistics class that I started. After complaining about not really understanding how the specific course I’m taking is meant to be paced, I’ve kinda started to find my own groove with it. And also, it’s really working for me. It’s working so much that it’s starting to build a bridge between other interests of mine, like the mathy bits of Economics. I got really good at spreadsheets in my last job, and had to do some spreadsheet magic and some math that I can now see was basically some diy amateur statistics. This manifests for me in a pair sad realizations, the first being how bad I must have looked at the very many times I got my diy stats wrong. The second comes from the other side, on just how many things I actually got right but then seeing salaries for jobs where this work is recognized and having to contemplate just how much less, how very much less I made for very similar work. Super cool. But this isn’t meant to end on a downer, and that’s all life in the past anyway. Life in the present has me rather enjoying the Stats class, and once again feeling like this scholastic adventure isn’t going to be another waste of time. I think I can do this thing. But I’ve got to speed up. Maybe I can use some stats knowledge to figure out how to better plan and pace my learning.

Alright, that’s it for today and probably until Monday.

I just realized that I’m very inconsistent with how I title these posts. If I ever start writing a regular thing that matters, I should pay attention to that.

I’ve got a midpoint follow-up on my English Comp class. I made another draft trying to follow the feedback from my first attempt, and came up with way too many words and way to little of what I’m pretty sure it needs. The assignment is something like 550-700 words (I don’t have it open), and I’m at like 1,000. So were last I left off, I was thinking a lot about brevity, you, ’cause I’m about 90% too wordy. I spent some time with friends over the weekend and many of them have experience, and also many of them have interest in writing, language, or both. One is actually a teacher. This is a great asset that I rarely think of.

Well I thought of it this time and asked around. The advice I got from them really built on and fleshed out the feedback from the class. So now I’m thinking of basically cutting all but the most baseline of concepts. The attempt I turned in and the rewrite draft I have now are both covering a really big swath of time, and I had to add a character to explain things. I’m going to keep my main subject, a great boss that I am genuinely appreciative of. I’m also going to keep the basic premise, that she helped me develop my career… it just came to me that another angle could be my overall professionalism, so… so maybe we’ll change that, but that will take some more thought.

Like, maybe I should tighten it down to just one promotion or just one big change. Is that the jam? I gotta tighten up. You know what, I think I can work with this. I’m off to school, catch y’all laters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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