personal

Hrafn from Think Artificial tagged me a few days ago with a meme to write 7 things about myself. So, without further ado:

1. My love affair with RPGs began quite early. When I was 9 or 10, I discovered a copy of Dragon Warrior for NES at a yard sale and bought it for $5. Many late nights weren’t spent boop-boop-booping around that fantasy land of skeletons and green and red slimes. RPGs are still one of my favorite game genres, 15 years later.
2. When I was a teenager, I avoided haircuts if at all possible; my hair was often down below my shoulders. My bangs could cover my whole face, hanging down to the front of my neck. My hair has migrated now, however; I prefer a shaved head, but I also sport a goatee at all times.
3. I’ve never tried any illegal drugs, not even the relatively minor league marijuana. No desire to, either.
4. My thumbs are double jointed, and I delight in twisting them backwards and popping them out of their sockets to make people squirm. I don’t have any other double jointed fingers or limbs, alas.
5. I have the awful habit of biting my nails.
6. I have a birthmark on my right eye which is more or less like a small cataract that doesn’t get worse (ophthalmologist’s explanation, not mine). My eye appears fine, but my right eye vision is substantially blurrier than my left.
7. When eating, I really dislike for my different foods to get mixed on the plate; I don’t want corn bumping into my mashed potatoes, or my biscuit sitting upon a serving of green beans.

The rules of the meme said I needed to tag 7 people, but I must say - I’m not sure I can. Between Hrafn and Edrei, they’ve very nearly pointed to all of the folks I’d tag. There are a few left, however - Liz at LearningNerd, Gordon from One Man Blogs, and Tom. Of course, you three aren’t obligated to do this - but I’d certainly like it if you did.

In keeping with making myself accountable, I figured I’d let everyone know how my exercise habit is coming along. There’s good news, and perhaps inevitably, bad news. But the good news is really good, and the bad news isn’t catastrophic. So:

The Good

The good news is, I’ve stuck with the exercising. I’ve not been exercising every day, but when I started the routine, I hadn’t planned on exercising every day. My goal was every other day, which I’ve largely achieved. Why every other day? Because my primary exercise has been punching bag work, which, due to its high impact nature, you shouldn’t do every day. I have, however, been doing other stuff as well: crunches, squats, push ups, and some weight lifting.

All in all, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made. I’ve not been obsessive about checking my weight, but I know my arms are already more muscular and a bit more toned. At any rate, exercising every other day is certainly a heck of a lot better than sitting on my butt and not doing anything at all.

But, like I said, there’s bad news, too…

The Bad

The not-so-good news is that I’m not going to be able to do punching bag work for a while. No, I didn’t break a hand (though I have twisted my wrists a few times - ow). Last night while I was doing my workout, I thought I saw some small, white particles falling around the bag. A few more punches, and I was sure I saw them. I gave the bag a really hard punch and looked up at where it’s mounted - white dust was in the air. Uh oh.

Upon further inspection, I found lots of those little white particles on the floor. These turned out to be pieces of, um, plaster. Apparently, all of the stress from the bag bouncing and swinging around has been silently taking its toll on the woodwork where the bag is mounted. In other words, if I keep using the bag where it’s at, I’m probably going to destroy the woodwork, and perhaps even some of our ceiling. That doesn’t sound particularly healthy, does it? That, and the Missus probably wouldn’t appreciate the destruction of our ceiling very much…

There are stands available for punching bags, but those run around $150 (or up); doable, but they look rather large, and I’m not really sure where I’d put such a device. There are also wall mounts, but again - I’m not really sure about a location for one, and honestly, I’d be afraid of the whole thing ripping down one of our walls. As I’ve mentioned before, a carpenter I am not.

So, for the time being, no more punching bag at home. I’m a bit bummed about it, truth be told, because I’ve really been enjoying it, but I’ve run out of ideas as to where to put it, and destroying the house in the name of fitness just isn’t going to cut it.

The Ugly What Now?

What’s the game plan now? Well, I’m going to keep exercising, that’s the plan! While I can’t use my punching bag currently, I’m going to keep doing the things I mentioned above, as well as start adding some other stuff into my routine. I’m aiming to alternate between upper body and lower body workouts, so I need to figure out what exercises will allow me to “cover all of the bases”, so to speak - I don’t want to neglect any muscle groups, as that can lead to injury (or so I’ve read over and over).

I’m not, however, going to stop exercising while I plan it all out with half a dozen books and three different color coded notebooks. I could do that, and I have such things in the past, but not this time. I’ll work on the details while I keep the routine going. I refuse to get bogged down in nitpicking over every little thing right now. The primary thing is to keep myself exercising regularly.

I just wanted to toss up a quick post to let you all know that I have, indeed, not fallen off the face of the earth. I’ve still been twittering, but I’ve been struggling with a bit of blogger’s block - that is, I’ve not really had much to say, or at least haven’t found the way in which I want to say it. Maybe I’m just not digging deep enough, though.

In either case, a regular, more substantive post shall be forthcoming relatively soon. I promise. If nothing else, I’m going on a day long Viking boat voyage on the Ohio river this Saturday, which should give me something interesting to write about. Hopefully it amounts to more than “damn, do I have a bad sunburn!”

In the meantime, I hope all of you stay well!

I mentioned before that I’ve become interested in using kickboxing for exercise, and that I bought a punching bag to make it more effective. When I bought it, I had planned on hanging it in our attic from a beam, which was in place for some sort of room construction (which was never completed). I followed through with this plan. Problems quickly popped up with this, though; problems which, admittedly, could have been avoided, if I’d done a little more research and put my grey matter to use.

But I didn’t. I got it home, lugged it up two flights of stairs to the attic, and hung it up as quickly as possible. Just like the overgrown kid I am - “A new toy!” Then I tried to use it and noticed the problems.

The first problem that appeared after mounting the bag in the attic and hitting it around a bit is connected to this simple fact: I’m not a carpenter. Not only am I not a carpenter, I never even took shop class in school; my knowledge of woodworking is woefully inadequate, more or less nonexistent, actually. Which, of course, would explain why I mounted an 80 pound punching bag to a beam that isn’t nearly sturdy enough to hold it, at least not for a long period of time with me knocking it around.

To make it clear, I did test the beam, or rather my wife did. She weighs a good deal more than 80 pounds, and she hung from the beam, and it didn’t give at all. We figured, okay, if it’ll hold her, it’ll hold the bag - simple math, right? Well, yes. But see, I didn’t proceed to push my wife around while she was hanging from the beam, throwing hooks at her and front kicks and all of that other stuff. She just hung there. Apparently, when you hang an 80 pound object from a chain, and then punch and kick it around, when the bag jerks down on the chain, there’s a little bit more stress than 80 pounds being applied. Who woulda’ thought it, right?

More specifically, when I hit the punching bag or, gods forbid, kicked it, bad things started to happen. The beam warped an awful lot, to the point where it went beyond “normal warping” to “hey, that might just snap in two!” It warped in both directions, both side to side and up and down. Furthermore, if I just shoved the bag and let it swing back and forth, I could hear the beam creaking at one point where it was attached to the ceiling. I could imagine the nails slowly but surely squeaking out of their holes.

I also discovered something else that could be seen as “not good.” Shortly after mounting the bag, I noticed a thick, white wire running along the top of the beam. It crossed over to another beam, and went to a light bulb. Oops. Okay, so I mounted an 80 pound bag on a weak-as-jelly beam that has a live electrical wire on it. Not the smartest thing I’ve ever done…

The final blow (pun woefully intended) to the plan of having the punching bag in the attic was heat. Summer hasn’t even officially arrived yet, and our attic is already hot. Once summer arrives, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if temperatures up there hit 120 Fahrenheit. While I know that you’re supposed to get warmed up during exercise, I’m not sure a heat stroke is on the agenda for health and weight loss.

Of course, all of this led to me not using the bag much. I was afraid of it falling on me, I was afraid of getting electrocuted when it fell on me, and I was afraid that if I spent more than half an hour up there, I’d either collapse or melt, perhaps both. None of that sounded appealing. I also didn’t use it simply because it was out of the way; it being in the attic proves that the saying “out of sight, out of mind” holds at least some truth.

So, having had enough of not using it, I went on a scouting mission in our house to find a better spot. All of the ceilings were more or less out of the question: we have an old house, in which the ceilings are 1) about 9 and a half feet high and 2) covered with plaster. I didn’t really want to buy another chain setup, and I really didn’t want the bag slowly making the hole in the ceiling bigger and bigger. Success in my search came quickly, however. I’m not really sure what it’s called, but there’s a sort of portal between the large part of our bedroom, and a smaller area; that portal has some quite thick woodwork, and being part of the wall, I figured it’d be sturdy enough to hold the bag. The bag was remounted there, and my guess proved correct: solid as a rock. I’ve used it three or four times now, and haven’t seen any problems.

Hopefully, having the bag in my our bedroom will help me stick with it, as it’s obviously far more accessible now. Certainly, I’ve already used it more in the last couple of days than I had in the past few weeks, when it was in the attic. Let’s hope the expert at Duke University knows what he’s talking about when he says that our environment plays a large role in what habits we have. (I’m still unconvinced that willpower plays no role, though. Having the bag in my bedroom will probably help, but I can still walk by it without using it, unless I throw some willpower into the mix.)

According to my mom, I have her father to thank for a trait of mine: I worry. A lot. Except, truth be told, while I would’ve loved to have met him and spent time with him (he was dead long before I was “even a twinkle in my mom’s eye”, as the saying goes), I wouldn’t have thanked him for it. In fact, I might have thrown something at him. Nothing hard or overly dangerous, mind you, just enough to convey the message of “but gramps, that trait sucks, I don’t want that!”

I’ve been going through a recent bout with hardcore worrying over my health. I’ve had a few problems pop up recently, some stomach pain and an ugly mole^[1], and so, logically, I’ve been worrying that I have some sort of cancer and that I’m going to die within a week. Which is clearly illogical, even total nonsense, and I know it. There’s an awful lot of things that can cause stomach pain, and an ugly mole can just be an ugly mole, rather than melanoma. Yeah, I tend to imagine I have the worst possible thing whenever I have health problems…

Knowing these things hasn’t helped in silencing my mind, though. My brain just keeps going through the same thought patterns over and over, and I’ve not had much luck in shutting the lump of grey matter up. The list just keeps looping - what if I’ve got a terrible illness, what if I’m going to die soon, what will my family do when I do, etc. When it reaches the end of the list, it just starts over.

It’s become rather tiresome, actually.

And of course, the real kicker is, even if what’s up with my mortal coil is serious - well, what’s worrying going to help? No one ever got better by worrying. In fact, if I don’t have some form of cancer or other terrible disease, sitting around worrying constantly will certainly push me towards having one. It’s goofy, really. And like I said, I know it’s goofy. I just don’t know how to stop it. When I’ve caught myself running the “Let’s Worry About What Might Be Wrong With You!” reruns in my head, I’ve tried to stop it by focusing on other things, but it hasn’t worked very well. It just leads to a tension in my head, a tug-of-war between the part of my mind that says “forget about it” and the part of my mind that screams “no, we must worry about it, now!”

I’ve also tried my standby, being mindful of the worry: looking at it in a detached matter, seeing how it manifests itself in my body (tense chest, slightly creased forehead, prominent frown), and seeing where it goes. It either gets better, gets worse, or stays the same^[2]. It gets better more often than it gets worse, but being mindful all the time is harder than it sounds, so I’ve still spent a lot of time in the past few weeks in worry mode.

I’ve been this way, a worry-wart, for as long as I can remember, but it’s reached new heights now that I’ve had to visit a doctor multiple times. Up until now, I’ve never had any health problems at all. No hospitalizations, no broken bones, nothing. Alas, health problems happen, and after seeing my internal responses to this crop of them, I’ve gotta’ say: I don’t want to keep doing this worrying nonsense. It’s no fun for me, and more importantly, it’s no fun for the people around me, because when I’m in Worry Mode (TM), I’m grumpy.

I’m not really sure what I’m going to do about the problem at this point. My family tells me “Just relax, stop worrying, you’re going to worry your life away” - okay, but how? Brute mental force directed at the worrying thoughts doesn’t work, at least not very well, nor does thinking about the issues logically. Where’s the little switch in my head labeled Worry, and how do I turn it off?

Maybe I’ve got a bit of OCD going on; maybe it should be brought up at the next doctor’s appointment. What say you lot?

1. Removed today, actually, and so now I just have to wait to see what the lab’s verdict is; the dermatologist seemed pretty confident it wasn’t anything to worry about. [↩]
2. This is something that Gil Fronsdal has pointed out in many of his talks, which I listen to via Zencast. It’s comical the way it sounds, but it’s true. Pain and emotions will always do one of these three things when you observe them mindfully. [↩]