I did absolutely no work on anything today. While that should feel good, it really doesn’t.
Gracious! The sales technique I used on myself—in terms of the plethora of reasons to skip my workout today—could have sold some ice cubes to an Eskimo. Fortunately for me (I guess), I’m not an Eskimo and my ice cube bin is full.
I started my workout at 6:00PM, and they close at 7:00 on Saturdays, so I stopped at 6:55 so as not to keep the staff as I cleaned up and changed.
I listened to a new “gabfest” from slate.com. I hate (such a strong word) their Political Gabfests, but they’re trying one called Cultural Gabfests, which I liked okay. I don’t know that I’ll become a regular listener to it, though. Too many other things that I like better competing for my attention.
That podcast being only about 40 minutes long, I listened to Country Remixes for the remaining 15 minutes of my workout.
Today’s statistics:
Type |
Duration |
Burned |
|---|---|---|
|
Elliptical |
55 |
1005 |
During my workout, I had a, perhaps 5-minute, conversation with myself—in my head of course—about whether I was going to have dinner at the new Sonic they’ve cruelly built—basically in the parking lot of the gym, at Subway, at Quiznos, or a healthier meal at home.
I decided to eat healthier at home, so as to splurge with less guilt on some theater popcorn at the movies tonight.
I’m going to count this as an affirmation, because, well, it feels like one: An anonymous poster, who has been following my blog for about a year, added this comment to a recent blog entry of mine. Sweet!
I saw the 9:30 screening of Starting Out in the Evening due to a recommendation from my friend Steve, in exchange for my recommendation of Dying City to him.
| Movie synopsis: The solitary life of a writer is shaken when a smart, ambitious graduate student convinces him that her thesis will bring him back into the literary spotlight. |
I found this film provoking deep contemplation about several aspects of my/real life:
- Growing old, and one’s perception of it.
- Living alone as one grows older.
- May-December relationships.
- Do people change as they grow older, or do they become more desperately and deeply set in their ways?
- The pros and cons of living such a focused and intentional life. (Which specifically took me back to how I opened this blog entry.)
- The way that, and the consequences of, people in general—and men in particular—shutting down their emotions and retreating within.
- The approximate one-year (~May 1993 to May 1994) I spent working on a novel. Particularly about this—which I’ve heard several times in a variety of venues: That, as a writer, once you create your characters, they take on a life of their own. This so never happened to me in my writing. In fact, one of the reasons I stopped writing my novel was because I couldn’t come up with a good way to get my main character pregnant (and she certainly never came up with any plan of her own). And that, of course, makes me think of one of my own great character flaws: impatience. Perhaps my character just needed more time.
Oh well, while I found this film a little slow-moving at times (impatience?), overall it entertained me for an hour and 51 minutes, and it sparked some introspection. Surely that was worth the $8.00 ticket price.