March 15th, 2012: Up a pound. Back to 295. No big deal. I think I felt it anyway, you know how you can sometimes just feel that you’ve either remained static – or gained – that’s how I felt last night and this morning. And I was correct.
One thing I’ve noticed since I’ve started trying to lose weight and stuff is that I’ve become more sensitive – and I don’t mean that in a good way. I mean, it seems like I used to have thicker skin, literally and figuratively. I could take lots of comments and it’d be water off a duck’s back. Things didn’t bother me as much, and I think it’s because I really didn’t care that much. Now I’m starting to care again and some things that shouldn’t be a big deal are really causing me to become irritated. This morning I said good morning to one of my co-workers and she replied, “Where the hell were you yesterday afternoon. People were looking for you! Next time you tell me when you’re going to be leaving.” This was at 6:45 am. Dammit, it started to ruin my whole morning, but then I was able to put the brakes on it with this thought and advice, to myself, or anyone else who may want it: Don’t let other people’s attitudes determine yours.
I’m going to work on that today and tomorrow and from now on. I’m a positive person by nature, and loud, and happy. I’m going to work on having thicker skin mentally and thinner skin physically at the same time. A bad attitude won’t help me along at all on this journey.
March 15th, 2020: I thought when you get older you should be able to focus on things longer – be more attentive and in the moment. I guess that overall, I’ve followed that pattern, but it seems like in some areas of performance my attentional capabilities have digressed. It’s why I play piano for 30 minutes a day, hit a speed bag in the boxing gym, and use a balance board – to try to either improve my focus in the moment; or at least try to figure out where I lose it, and why.
Some people call these moments of lapsed attention “squirrels” (from the Disney movie “Up”); I also refer to them as times when there’s too much thinking going on. Usually they aren’t a big deal. It’s frustrating, though, when I’m in the middle of playing piano and squirrel into some task I need to complete later, or have some other unrelated thought that could’ve waited until after I finished playing the song, and forget where I’m at in the song and fuck it up. Again, usually no big deal, but there were two days it must have been, judging by the two separate holes in the wall to my right, the size of the coffee cups that got hucked into it on those two separate days.
In an open-water swim, or a gunfight maybe, a squirrel might be deadly.
The confidence was still there, man; I just streamlined myself out and found my pace; choppy water, wind, semi-cold temperature and all. I moved slow and steady across the lake, looking ahead occasionally only to maintain the proper heading for that shore where my mom and son played around and waited for me.
The wind was pushing me a little further north, and off course, than I wanted, which I should have recognized as normal, and anticipated, just like it would do this if I were flying a small airplane through a crosswind. I’m not sure if this brought on the squirrel, but something did. I looked up at my cheering section and there they were, the distance they should have been from me, and then I looked up again a second later, and they appeared further, much further. At this point, I was in the dead-center of this motherfuckin lake, and the last thing I needed was to squirrel into a panic attack, but this is right when that very worst fear came true. I became frightened of fear. Goddamn, how perplexing is that phenomenon? The fight for life started when the distance I had left to swim appeared to be increasing, rather than decreasing, in perfect indirect proportion to what I had in my gas tank and overall ability. This wasn’t good…
To be continued…
