Feeling Blue

[seryn]

Today was the opposite of yesterday in terms of how I felt about stuff.

My SO ordered a remote control for the laptop. It's by Lenovo. I ♥ Lenovo. (Mostly because one of their muckymucks wants to stop wasting keyboard space on CapsLock... and seriously, for laptops? there is absolutely no excuse for CapsLock being its own key. The 2 people in the entire country who actually need CapsLock on their laptop can hit Ctrl-Alt-PrtScrn to toggle it. Everyone else can turn on sticky keys or get a fucking macro program. Currently 99.9999999% of people using laptops have to find a macro program to turn the CapsLock key off and most of those don't repurpose it. I hate that key so much. Therefore I ♥ Lenovo for even saying that they're looking into getting rid of it.)

Anyway. The remote control has sat in the shipping envelope for weeks now. Finally I wanted to watch Lie To Me on the bigger screen so while the intro ads (hulu) were playing I read the directions. It was, "remove battery cover. remove USB dongle from battery compartment. install batteries (provided, AAA), plug dongle into any USB port, turn remote on (switch on underside)." I did this. There was a small chime while windows acknowledged the new thing. It magically works. I now have a palm-size keyboard and trackball thingy that is actually more adroit than the laptop keyboard.

AND! The mute button works!

I was so stoked that I went out to Best Buy to look at TV antennas in person. We have one of those laptop-does-TV adapters but it needs an antenna. I found a faster and easier way to get to the store from here (also awesome). I went to lunch. I shopped for antennas. Best Buy doesn't have anything from the most recent 2 years model-wise. And they're hella expensive. So an antenna model from 2005 is $90 at BB, but the 2009 model (same brand, higher ratings) is $40 on Amazon. So even though if I hate the antenna I will have to pay return shipping, I'm getting a much better deal ordering. So I came home and actually ordered it. Free shipping.

My lunch was a club sandwich with fries. Totally awesome. I ate half plus all the fries and took the rest home. Which I ate this evening after going to the gym. It was a slovenly gym day, but I was thinking about skipping. This makes 8 days in a row! (Yesterday was tai chi for an hour.) .6ish miles elliptical, 1 mile biking. (13.5min/5min). Lat pulls: 60 lbs (3 sets: 15, 15, 10); Row: 50 lbs (2 sets: 15,15); tricep underhand: 70lbs (2 sets: 15, 15). Breakfast was an egg scrambled with cheese and cream divided over two warmed corn tortillas. Dinner's going to be ravioli with meat sauce. Total water consumed: 1 glass plus half a liter. I was also outside today because I was laying out the towel with the blocked scarf. (I'd pinned it last night and rolled the towel up, so I took the whole roll out and spread it to dry in the sun.)

Comments

[pj]

Wow, you really are a gym rat! Congrats. :-)

I ♥ your laptop remote.

[seryn]

I love the new remote too. Mostly because it just magically works. That's what it's supposed to do, but technological stuff is so easy to get into a demented state.

(Tonight my computer couldn't understand USB devices... I don't know what happened to it, but I went in and told it to delete the driver. Lo! it goes back to magically reading thumb drives. But finding that menu took 25 minutes. "What did I do last time this failed?")

I joined the gym because I wanted to lift weights and had exceeded my dumbbells twice. So instead of spending $25 on heavier weights, I opted to spend $30/month... not exactly cost effective, but the exercises at the gym are different. And I like lifting weights. It, you know, doesn't suck. For me. And I'm demonstrably stronger. I can lift the whole stack of plates over my head from the dishwasher to the shelf without them wobbling audibly. And when my SO is trying to tickle me to be cute (which it's totally not) my blocks are actually effective and not the tissue-paper resistance they were.

The cardio stuff.. well, it sucks. A lot. But it burns calories and I'm already moving into the "Stew sounds good. With cheesebread. and cocoa with whipped cream." season, so it might be a good idea to actually try harder in compensation.

I'm 5 feet tall and I weigh more than 200 pounds. Some of that is not my fault. And some of the problem is that when you don't feel well, you optimize the hell out of your life. It feels idiotic to de-optimize things purposefully now.

I started at 225 last November and by April had reached ~212. Now after 6 months of going to the gym regularly (never skipped an entire week, though there were some weeks with only 1.5 hour-long visits) I weigh about .... 210. WTF. I went from no exercise beyond pushing a shopping cart around the grocery store and dreading walking to the farmers market because it was 3 blocks away with stairs. (Those are some serious stairs, but still.) ----To averaging about 4 hours a week at the gym... and tonight on the scale I weighed 211.8 (jockey weighing. all my stuff in my pockets and water bottle in hand, easily 2 pounds of stuff.) It's zero progress if you only care about weight. I personally try to measure other things so I don't get discouraged.

I don't think I'm eating more than I was. I know I'm eating better than I was (more salad, more fruit, no sweets except the apple juice in my yogurt or granola cereal.) I don't feel like I can actually work harder sustainably. I'd rather go to the gym less, especially on days when I'm carrying 6 bushels of laundry up and down stairs and through 5 fire doors each way (the kind it's illegal to prop open).

I'm not willing to actually diet beyond giving up soda and sweets while eating more fresh veg. But I really would like to hit that magic round number of 200.

[pj]

But you know that muscle weighs more than fat and you can see more strength in defending against The Mad Tickler, so you know the scale numbers are just being assholes right now, yes?

I admire anyone that goes to a gym or exercises regularly because as much as I think I want to get into better shape and as much as I chide myself for sitting on my butt I still remain planted firmly in inertia.

[seryn]

I went down three sizes in jeans. In 6 months. My blood pressure is lower. My resting pulse rate is lower. My face looks thinner and I get fewer spots. So, I do have documentation that this isn't useless, but I did have some expectation for losing 10 pounds in 3 months, so not having lost any in 6 months is a bit disheartening.

Isn't muscle supposed to burn more calories maintaining itself than flab does?

I can't explain how it happened, but once I discovered a form of exercising that I like the experience of and the results of, it was easy to keep it up. I can't run, so that eliminates 98% of all adult sports--- leaving golf and that's too expensive. I can't stand walking somewhere and just turning around. (Walking to the library and back is different because there was a point to going there.) I live in a poor city, so swimming is out--- the only public pool is at the YMCA which is also a homeless shelter and it's really not safe to go there alone (even if you could afford the parking).

I remember it was easy when I was a kid. There were always games. There are at least 2 dozen kinds of tag, some of which were somewhat intellectual--- like the freeze tag variant where one must name an un-used TV program to unfreeze a fellow player who has been tagged. Toward the end of the game that was hard to do in 1979 before there were a billion channels.---- Even on weekends there aren't group volleyball games where you can just walk up and join a side. When I was 12, it didn't matter if there were 20 kids on a side (we still struggled to get the ball back over the net).

When I was a child, adults still played weekend sports. There were community baseball teams. Now baseball is something you watch your kids play or pay megabucks to attend or waste your weekends inside watching on TV. Sports now aren't about building community by forming a team and learning to work together. Sports are now about dividing neighbor from neighbor based on team preference. And it's considered disloyal to ever change one's team so anyone who has been forced to relocate due to employment has an automatic wall between themselves and belonging. They're not really welcome because they don't root for the home team.

I think I might have liked soccer (I played for one season in a youth league 25 years ago.) if there had been say 30 people on each side of the field. It was way too much running otherwise. Those fields are huge. Or maybe if the field were a quarter the size. But standing around in the sun and running back and forth for an hour only to have the game end 0-0... that was completely pointless. And families came to watch, so it was a hundred people wasting about 2 hours each. Think about what could have been accomplished! If the game had been a scoring one, finishing at 18-16 or something, then it might have been something to see. No one thinks it's a good use of time to watch paint dry, paint will dry without you watching it. Soccer can play itself with the same results.

We, as a society, have done absolutely everything we possibly can to make sure adults cannot do anything fun to exercise outside as a social thing. Exercise has become all about being sweaty indoors while being as isolated from the person within arms' reach as possible. Treadmills with cup-holders so no one needs to use a drinking fountain. Earbuds that seal away external noise and make it sound like your personal soundtrack is filling the whole "theater".

I think "exercise" is about doing stuff. But the way it's used currently seems to mean physical running, as if nothing else counts. So [sarcasm warning] Š I just can't imagine why you might find it difficult to exercise. When you're only working full time and only have three generations of family relying upon you. Women used to do all that and plow the fields for winter wheat while homemade catsup was cooking on the stove. š [/S]

[pj]

Hhhmmm .... adult sport weekends weren't going on when I was a kid, but I'm older than you so it must be an age ting. ;-)

I don't exercise because I am lazy. Or, more accurately, the desire to do so has not yet outweighed the desire to do every other thing except exercise.

When you're only working full time and only have three generations of family relying upon you. Women used to do all that and plow the fields for winter wheat while homemade catsup was cooking on the stove.

This amuses me. Especially since I am not full-time, I am part-time. The problem is I have been working full-time hours since January. ~le sigh~ I am hopeful that sometime soon we will have the staff to return permanently to part-time. *bliss*

[seryn]

I don't have an outside job and I still find it difficult to make time for exercising. I'm sorry you're working more than you want to be. I'm sure there's some part of you which is grateful you have a job since it's something like 15% of people now who are functionally unemployed.

Yesterday I was telling myself, "I could spin yarn, that's almost like biking-to-nowhere. And I'd have yarn at the end of it. Plus I wouldn't need to change shoes and bra."

It amused me because I've had homemade catsup and it's hideous.

If you want to know where I started exercising, it was with a 3 pound dumbbell that I kept on the coffee table. Then I realized I could do that for an hour without noticing it (or being sore afterward). So then I bought 5 pound dumbbells. And when I could lift those for an hour without noticing it, I figured I should find more stuff like that... stuff that didn't suck. And my phone has commercial-free TV included in my plan (Sprint, not a huge selection though) so I can watch something I was going to watch anyway. Now I'm to the point where I can bike for 30 minutes without really noticing it, certainly it doesn't make me feel like I have muscle hangover the next morning.

I'd love to encourage you to be more active and to find joy in moving your body, but that's not something that anyone can encourage. I know I thought those people were freaks because all exercise was completely lame.