Sent from my iPhone
Beautiful Canal
Hot day at the Canal
Negotiation
Me: I’m going for a bike ride. Be back in a couple of hours.
Sean: A couple of hours? That’s a long time! What am I supposed to do without you?
Me: Well, it takes that long…I have to get there, and then I have to ride, and then I have to come back.
Sean: I suppose I’m not allowed to watch Smallville while you’re gone.
Me: No!
Sean: And I know I can’t watch Monk either.
Me: No, you can’t.
Sean: So what am I supposed to do?
Me: Isn’t there some sort of quest you can go on?
Sean: I can’t save the world all the time. Sometimes, other people have to do it.
Me: Would you rather I not go?
Sean: No, I want you to go. I just want to watch Smallville while you’re gone.
Me: Well, if you do that you’ll have to watch the same episodes again when I get back.
Sean: Okay, fine. I give in to your demands. The plane will be waiting at the airport.
Me: Don’t forget the $30 million.
Sean: Whatever, terrorist.
7 Random or Weird Facts
I have been tagged by Chuck…and you all know how much I love being tagged :D It’s taken me a month to get around to it. I may be slow, but I do get things done eventually!
Here are the rules:
1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog; some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
It gets harder and harder over the years to come up with unique things. But I’ll do my best!
FACT 1: I used to have a lot of trouble forming social relationships. I rarely looked people in the eye. I was so afraid of looking stupid that I never reached out to anyone. If a person latched on to me, I latched back, regardless of whether or not the relationship was healthy. It took a long time for me to break the cycle. I still have trouble with either being too aloof or too involved. But now I’m outgoing and even snarky. The internet really helped–being able to have real conversations with people without all the face-to-face distractions made me crave that kind of connection in all my relationships. My current job has also been a blessing. I meet so many new people each year that I just about have to be sociable. All in all, I’m really happy with where I am now.
FACT 2: I suffer from a completely illogical guilt complex. When I got cancer, I felt guilty that my parents had to pay for my treatment and make my car payment while I couldn’t work. When our apartment burned down, I felt guilty that I had ever married Sean in the first place, because after all, if he’d never met me, he wouldn’t have been living there, so he would still have all his stuff. And I felt guilty that family members had given me hand-me-downs and they’d all been destroyed. When I discovered Magazine Man’s identity, I felt guilty for the way I’d done it, even though dozens of people figured it out that way…and that guilt has made it hard for me to relate to him, to this day.
You may not believe this, but I’m better–at least a little bit–than I used to be. When I have to give up on something, when I don’t have time or circumstances change, I don’t beat myself up about it nearly as much as I used to. But it’s still a problem for me.
FACT 3: I only have one mole. It’s on my stomach. And it doesn’t stick out or anything, so it may as well be a huge freckle. I have lots of freckles.
FACT 4: The big toe on my right foot sticks out more than the one on my left. It’s hard for me to move it inwards. The other one moves back and forth just fine.
FACT 5: I am always having ideas, often for websites, for things that I think would be cool to design–not just graphically, but organizationally. But the thought of maintaining those things usually deters me. I think my strength lies in setting things up, and then letting other people use them.
FACT 6: I can, and do, pop almost every joint on my body.
FACT 7: I love rotenburos. A rotenburo is an outdoor Japanese bath. Yes, you go into it naked, with other people around. I’ve never gone to a co-ed onsen, but I honestly think I would try it. I think this is due to a random fact we’ll call 7A: when I’m not wearing my glasses, I’m less self-conscious about how I look.
There you go, Chuck! Sorry it took so long!
Update: I realized after posting that I totally forgot to tag others. I tag: Brooke, Mari, Charles, and Kayo. I realize that’s not seven, but I don’t read a lot of blogs, and of the ones I do read most have already done this questionnaire recently. So if there’s someone out there I didn’t name who wants to do this, let me know in the comments :)
Language Poll #2: Good Morning
Does this exchange make sense to you? What are your thoughts?
Language Poll #1: Good Night
Does this exchange make sense to you? What are your thoughts?
I’m back, baby
I went to Riverwalk for a walk during my break today, as I’ve been trying to get in the habit of doing. I’ve been going there intermittently just to look around, but since I got serious with my exercise habits I’ve been trying to do more. Today, for the first time, I tried jogging. Also for the first time, I went around twice.
My first lap, I jogged as much as I could, striding briskly in between. I used my iPhone’s stopwatch to see how I did: 19:26.9.
For the second lap, I was quite winded, so I resolved to walk it and see how long that took. While striding along, I held my arms straight out, then straight up; then I did curls up and out to the side; then I did some punches. I was trying to simultaneously stay focused and give my arms a workout. It worked! The stopwatch says my walking time was 22:16.8.
Obviously I have a long way to go to improve my jogging. I’ve never been much of a runner. I always got a stitch in my side, even when I was at my best physical condition–back during the kung fu years. Today that didn’t happen, but I did get pretty winded after what I consider brief periods of jogging.
But the point is I tried, and now I have a time I can work on beating.
I headed back to work feeling almost giddy. Working out hard like that is such a good feeling. I need to always hold on to that fact so I will keep doing it.
As I hung my sweat-soaked clothes on the back of the door to dry, I remembered: I used to do this. I used to get all sweaty at lunch and hang up my clothes afterwards. Back when I first started working here, I was in total explore-mode and would walk all around the area. After awhile I got out of the habit, and then I always felt that it would be so inconvenient to bring workout clothes every day, and get sweaty and then have to keep working with no time for a shower.
I don’t feel that way anymore. I’ve been bringing workout clothes every day for weeks now, whether I actually use them or not. It’s become a habit. And today’s rush of good feeling proved to me that being sweaty is hardly worth worrying about.
I think I’ve finally purged some pretty self-destructive habits, and built some constructive ones. :)