second sparring friday

Getting myself out the door today was extra tough. If I were still doing school and everything too, I'd have taken the day off. Training often felt like too much, after sitting in class for hours, then homework I was falling behind on. Now I can finally focus on this thing I'm not entirely sure I should be focusing on.

Today's been unseasonably cold and grey and I was so tired, I thought it must be covid. I know these vaccines aren't 100% and I've been putting that to quite a test. On Wednesday, we grappled while wearing masks, and a minute later, my partner's mask was somehow stuck in the collar of my gi, behind my head.

Lots of the class keeps wearing them though, despite being vaccinated. It's strange to me, I guess they're used to it, and feel it's the right thing to do. I'm sure they help at the supermarket, but at the gym, it seems largely pointless - that's why I haven't been going. They've been going this whole time, but wearing masks and social distancing. I'm guessing most of them have had covid already and don't know it. It's nice being there for the transition, where we're finally able to spar and grapple again.

Sparring went especially well tonight. We rotated partners and I got to spar all sorts of people. My brain seems to be working a little differently than it used to. I even remember all their names. One of them caught me with a question mark kick to the face. "Nice!" I exclaimed. I don't get hit like that often. 

I walked home afterwards feeling great. No nausea, not even those damn hiccups I often get after class.  I'm reluctant to admit being anything but miserable for fear that life will promptly clobber me for it. I'm afraid I'm not being exactly productive, but I don't know how much that matters. According to the plan, I'll give myself three months before I decide if I'll try doing more; going back to school or whatever else.

I'm not sure how much anything matters anymore. I don't know why I keep blogging. All my thoughts and ideas, it all seems like so much pointless noise. I wanted there to be some record of who I am, but even that seems insignificant now. Every one of us, an epic tale from the day we're born, to the day we take the whole story with us.

I'm tired of it all. I just want to do something I enjoy. Something that I'm good at.

remember the good

I often want to blog when I get back from a good class. I want to remember that it was good. That I felt something like happiness afterwards. I may not remember tomorrow. I may not even remember later tonight. 

When the endorphins et al wind down, I'll be left remembering everything that went wrong, instead. Next time I'm gearing up for class, I'll be fighting with the little kid in me all over again, who never wants to do anything. My memories of enjoyment will be distant and vague, but every mistake and weakness will be vivid and glaring.

I don't know why my brain does this to me, but for the record, class was great tonight. I got to roll for the first time in years. I got triangled and kimura'd, but didn't mind at all. My kickboxing partner was another person who remembered me from before the great pandemic.. that I don't remember at all. She seemed nice, though. I don't know why I don't remember these people. I had a lot going on. I think I'll be better at remembering everyone this time around. 

I have a lot less going on now. Walking to class, I worried about that. This one thing I do, now that covid is winding down, getting back to normal, and it's mostly just this. It hardly seems adequate. My life isn't going to be all that different. Is it? 

I'm not sure that's a good idea, but my perspective was different after class. As I walked home, I wondered if this is the way to go. Maybe I don't need to ruin it by being more ambitious. One thing I've learned this past year is that I should appreciate the hell out of this, while I can. I seem to have trouble appreciating much of anything else.

. . .

They just posted this to Instagram. I'm out of view, but this was a minute of the first class.

hot and exhausted

Had to do laundry and groceries today. It's about five degrees cooler than yesterday, but feels twenty degrees warmer. Must have something to do with the fact that I'm doing laundry and groceries instead of kickboxing.

The second guy I sparred with remembered me from over a year ago. He was out a long time due to tearing both his meniscus and ACL, he told me. He was wearing a knee bracing sleeve and basically asked not to be kicked there. It's funny, because in speculating about that very scenario, I remember telling others I couldn't do exactly that. I can't tell people not to kick me in the leg, I thought. In reality though, it was fine. Maybe a little risky for him, but I mean, no one in the class held it against him. It didn't seem wrong, but perfectly reasonable.

I don't remember him though. I don't know if I'd recognize him now, and I still don't remember his name. I'd like to thank him for trying to offer me something for the nausea, but I had to make haste for the bathroom, and then forgot about it and went home. 

I need to work on my cardio, but I also need to practice interacting with people. I'm awful at that, too. I've literally been reminding myself to make eye contact, instead of just looking in someone's general direction like a blind person. I'm not autistic. I'm just so bad with people, it makes them think I might be. 

In the past three years, I've met more people than I've known in my entire life. Multiple times more. The neural circuitry for facial recognition has been getting far more exercise than it used to. I need to remind myself, to cut myself some slack. I'm working on it. Another student introduced himself for the 5th time yesterday, and I think his name might finally stick.

finally

I'm in a strange mood after hitting the gym tonight for the first time since last summer. It was a good class. We even got to do some sparring, which I wasn't expecting. It was a bit much for my first day back. I had to bail after suddenly becoming very nauseous. I know it's relatively normal, but I've never gotten that sick from exertion before. It wasn't the note I wanted to end on.

I'm torn as to whether or not I can blame the vaccine. Exercise nausea is supposedly normal, but never an issue I had until about a year ago. It was minor then. Tonight was worse. Could just be that I'm getting older, and my cardio needs work. Could also be because it was over 90 today. Odd thing about that was that I didn't really notice. Just seemed like a nice day.

Sparring pushes me beyond my limits, because I try so hard. I'm horrible at pacing myself. I'm sure that I need better cardio, but I'm also know I went back a bit soon. I didn't wait the recommended two weeks and my symptoms were unusually severe. Completely gone, I thought, but my appetite was weak today. I barely ate, so can't even blame it on a full stomach. So yeah. I'm ok, I don't regret going. Just.. bleh. 

Not feeling the greatest about my first day back, but I was doing great until the after class sparring. Made it through class feeling like I could maybe handle another one. That's what I've been going for all year. On June 12th, they're doing this sparring in the park thing. In theory, I should be able to bike there and participate.

framing

Trying to set up a doctor's appointment, I had to leave a voicemail. The front desk apparently remembered I don't like telephones, and replied to me via email. Wow. No one's that nice. Now that I'm at a point in my life where upon being given the option to see a doctor without even leaving my apartment, I decline. No telehealth. I mentioned that I'm all vaccinated. Finally, I said, excuses to leave the house are a good thing again.

I wondered if the person reading the email might be the sort to disagree. Turns out, lots of people like some of these changes. They like not needing to leave their homes or deal with society or bathe. I get it, I really do. That is the problem. Maybe I'm a failure of a sloth, but I've realized that laziness isn't actually healthy. Neither is being antisocial. Even more outlandish, I've also realized that being healthy is actually quite important. 

Maybe it's middle age, changing my perspective, forcing me to face mortality; my own, and those I've loved. It's been a rough few years. Still, I've also been taking omnitrope for a few years now, and hormones can work developmentally. That is, they change the way we develop throughout our lives. e.g. development of bones, muscles, neural circuitry.

Explaining why my doctor hasn't heard from me in so long, I said that I didn't handle the pandemic well. Another way of putting it would be to say I was exceptionally vulnerable to this whole shitshow. One might say that I handled it well, given how vulnerable I was. I protected myself from having my life shattered, I prioritized, I worked out every day. I'll finally be able to put that to the test soon. 

I'm feeling better today. The pressure in my chest is just about gone. The sun's been out. Even that feels like a good thing to me now. For the longest time, I really hated that fucking thing.

probably just myocarditis

Spoke way too soon on being 100% over vaccination. A few hours later some of it came back. What can best be described as burning aching chest pain, unrelated to eating anything, because it's also been screwing my appetite. I often haven't eaten anything. Heartburn seems unlikely but so does heart inflammation.

Upon looking it up, I find that is a rare side effect but what they mean by rare is dubious. They say 5% of people vaccinated by Pfizer experience fatigue. Meanwhile, almost everyone I've spoken too says they experienced 2nd dose fatigue. Almost 20% experience injection site soreness they say, but anecdotally, that's 100%. They also say loss of appetite isn't a known side-effect at all, but a common one is nausea, which makes no sense. I suppose I could try harder to force myself to eat and call it nausea.

Normally, I'm a trust the science sort of person, but in this case, I think the pharmaceutical companies are full of it. Who knows what they're obfuscating. I'm still experiencing symptoms though, four days later.

I'm not too worried, because it has been gradually getting better. I was able to do a full workout for the first time since vaccination, today. That should accelerate recovery. I've read that if it is something like myocarditis, it can last a week or so. I've also read that there's some evidence that it can be a consequence of getting vaccinated, having previously caught and overcome covid.

Aside from the loss of appetite and chest pain, I've also had major trouble sleeping every night, like my immune system is still revved up. I'm still feeling crappy from lack of food, lack of sleep. Maybe not handling the vaccine so well, after all.

pandemic survivor

Got my second dose of the vaccine yesterday afternoon. No symptoms except the sore shoulder and some insomnia, before finally falling asleep. Then woke up at 3am, feeling sicker than I've ever felt in my life. There were almost no symptoms, but what I did feel was extreme. I could barely make it from one room to the next, I was shivering so badly, while all my muscles seemed to be conspiring to force me into a fetal position. It was frighteningly awful.

I managed to drift in and out of sleep for the next few hours. Around 7am, I was feeling a little better, but expected to be sick all day, if not for a few days. Then suddenly woke up feeling completely 100% better. I thought I must have slept for a long time. It had to be after noon, at least.. but it was only 9am. Whatever the hell that was, it only lasted a few hours.

Ok, so I guess that was it. Just like that, it's all over. I'm vaccinated now. 

I'm afraid to have any hope about anything anymore, but it seems to me the pandemic is basically over. At least for this part of the world. It should all be fading into distant memory soon. Far from unscathed, my life a smoldering heap of rubble, a year of it stolen from me, but I should have at least a few more years to spare. It seems I've survived.

It feels profound and surreal. Life is suddenly different again, a whole new chapter about to begin. I'm uneasy though, because it isn't getting back to normal, or put another way, getting back to anything familiar. I can't go back, pick up where I left off, or anything of the sort. All the parameters are different now. My father doesn't exist anymore, but my knees are stronger than ever. All my routines will have to change. I have to figure out what I'm doing all over again.

is covid over yet

 A few more days and I will be fully vaccinated. I will be able to go back to the gym on the 21st. I feel anxious but mostly numb. The problem is that getting back to the gym in itself does not feel like getting back on track. It won't help me find my way to adulthood or whatever the hell I was trying to do. It's a step that might help. It might not. In the meantime, I'm still back to being aimless again.

Why can't I just go back to school, of course. The problem is that it wasn't going well. The equation gets a little complicated, here. That school wasn't going well could be considered the real problem, but it's not that simple either. It might have worked out. The odds just weren't looking good. My academic counselor wasn't much help. I'd really hoped that I'd have some sort of career path figured out, at least vaguely. I'd hoped that would be something community colleges focus on, but there I go being all utopian idealist again. Have to live in the real world, where everything is crap.

It was expensive. It was time and energy consuming. A whole lot of it was crap. It makes less sense if it's not going to get me anywhere. I need something to aim for. So, the pandemic ruined it for me, in the sense that I'd have held on for another year or two. At least long enough to get my associates degree. It was a great experience that I'd have liked to keep going, but I can't do it honestly anymore. I can't hold my head up, thinking I'm finally getting my life together, anymore. Doh, I'm not. I don't think they can help with that. I need to figure something else out, which feels an awful lot like back to square one. Here's to the losers🍺

By not going though, I'll be able to focus on training. I keep thinking it an odd choice of things to focus on at this point in my life, but it will be nice to be able to really focus on it, for a change. I don't know if this counts as giving up or not. I've been working my ass off all year. I even jump rope every day now. I'll be really pissed if class is just as hard as it ever was and I manage to injure myself doing pushups as soon as I get back.

My plan is basically to hope I'm in a better place to come up with a plan after a few months of feeling alive again. Maybe then I'll even reconsider college. I don't know.

what is your original face?

YouTube is always recommending clips of this Alan Watts character to me. He was a Brit known for interpreting and popularizing Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism for a Western audience. Almost a century ago.

On how we push our ways on the rest of the world, he remarks that even in political styles, we enforce democracy. "You'd better be democratic, or we'll shoot," he chides. How clever he is for noting the contradiction, but then rests on that. How silly people are, right? Well, no. It's not a nonsensical contradiction, but a deception. They conflate capitalism with democracy, and then what they enforce is capitalism. They do it for the straightforward reason that it makes them wealthier. They will shoot you if you get in their way. 

It's suddenly not so contradictory. His take was just naïve. Not that there's any shame in that. Seems like there's always more to learn that changes everything. Unsurprising then that he also equates Mao with Hitler.

"If you say that you want to improve, you ought to know what's good for you - but obviously you don't. Because if you did, you would be improved."

This is exactly the sort of fallacy I'm always picking at. This presumption that the ego is somehow separate and above the rest of ourselves, in control. Whatever we know, at our fingertips to use at will. None of this is how the brain actually works. The ego is not some master controller, but more like the brain's stenographer. "If I know I'm going crazy, I must not be insane," as Dave Mustaine put it, but "knowing the path is not the same as walking the path," to quote Morpheus.

Knowing isn't necessarily enough to get you anywhere. It can help though, to understand the mechanics of what we're talking about. What sorts of improvements are we even talking about? He critiques the grim determination of jogging, "shaking the bones and rattling the brain," but doesn't understand jogging. He doesn't understand what exercise does for the bones or the brain. He doesn't understand that healthy brain function has a whole lot more to do with well-being than his ideas do.

He doesn't understand that to live is to grow. What we're not improving, we're letting atrophy. He says that we should do what we enjoy.. but what privilege it must be, to be able to do that, without it being incredibly self destructive. I might drink too much, maybe even die of alcoholism. The way he did.

"Your own nature will begin to take care of itself?" 😬

This is drivel. There is no "our own nature." There are just all sorts of reasons we are the way we are. Some more positive than others, some more addressable than others. Some we should everything do to counteract if at all possible. When you break your leg, you don't go, 'oh well, I guess that's my nature now,' but this is what we do, when we don't know what's actually broken. When we don't know enough about our circumstances to know what can be broken, let alone whether it can be fixed. It becomes magic, boot straps, and willpower. Self improvement becomes some abstract question, antithetical to your "nature," when you'd be far better served taking care of yourself.

What do I know, right? It is quite a privilege to have ideas of what makes us happy and to believe that we're living them, that we're happy because of them. I'd bet that his baseline was always about the same. The ideas were just bells and whistles. I'd prefer listening to someone fighting their way out of hell than someone pretending to have it all figured out while drinking themselves to death.