So my ten week fitness thingy starts tomorrow. As I know myself quite well, I am predicting that I will be full of enthusiasm for the first week, and that it will slowly decrease from there. Though I am quite determined to at least get somewhere with it, so that my work clothes fit me properly again. I am giving myself an incentive, which is that I am not allowed to purchase any new item of clothing until I have lost my pad thai pudge. Which works well because a) it makes no sense to buy clothes if I am trying to lose weight, b) it hurts me deeply, because of my addiction to wandering around and buying random clothes (most of which I never wear), c) it saves me money, and makes me feel like a sensible grown-up person.Whether I have the willpower, time will tell.
The trip away had me thinking about a lot of things, aside from my gut:
- Work. I was constantly thinking about the two jobs I had applied for (which both came to nothing, bah), but more than ever, having three weeks away made me really dread coming back. I guess this is a normal feeling, and there's not many people who love their jobs, etc. etc., but I am thinking that I should at least be trying to find a job which makes me happy. I suspect I have dug myself into a bit of a hole with the career path I have been following, as I'm just racking up more and more experience in people management/team leading when I have no desire to do it, whatsoever. I hate that with each day that passes, I am losing more of the technical/system knowledge that I need to go where I want to go. But what to do? Keep looking on Seek, I guess.
- Achieving something. I was dreading my piano lesson yesterday. Not only because I hadn't played for three weeks, but because I thought I was doing My Usual and getting to the point of quitting, because I'm a lazy cow. But I went along, and ended up coming home all inspired to keep trying. My piano teacher is in love with music, and I don't mean following the Top 40 or what's new; she lives and breathes the sounds and the feelings and gets so excited over new pieces. I know that I have the capability, I just need to keep the lazy at bay. Perhaps one day I can add "can play piano" to my list of talents, which currently contains "can spell reasonably well" and "can type fast".
- Other people. I am constantly analysing both myself and others. People with incredibly active social lives, who are constantly replying to phone calls/text messages from friends, who have every evening and their entire weekend planned from start to finish with non-stop excitement. I look at myself, who may go to drinks/dinner/etc. maybe once in a fortnight, and whose main contact with another person is Beardie, sometimes virtually through an MMORPG, and I wonder if I'm missing out on something? I've done personality tests, Myers-Briggs and all that jazz, and they all tell me that I'm an introvert (no shit, eh?), and I am pretty accepting of this. Yet I still feel inadequate, that I need to make more effort to interact with others, join a club or something, I don't know.
I hope that yours has been tip top.
2 comments:
Re: other people, I think it's worth paraphrasing Hannah Arendt. She says that the only part of your life that means anything is the part you share with others. Everything else just remains in your head and eventually falls into oblivion. Arendt thinks, quite rightly, that this explains why people spend so much time talking and writing things down and painting and composing music.
So I suppose it's not important whether you're an introvert or an extrovert, just as long as you share something of yourself with the world. Which, actually, I think you do quite well.
Hey, long comment.
Long and awesome comment, Mark. And thank you. I think I spend most of my time measuring myself up against others, particularly in relation to the social interaction stuff, rather than looking at what actually makes me happy. And despite thinking it through rationally, I still have something niggling away that tells me that I fall short. Maybe it's a confidence thing.
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