On My Mind, Volume 1

I have the house to myself, I’m waiting for water to boil behind me in the kitchen, and, perhaps most importantly, I have a few things on my mind. So lets do this.

The first thing is the gym. Is it just me, or is there an element of the personal training profession that requires convincing a person to not believe in themselves? It seems counter-intuitive when you read the statement, but today I totally experienced it. I had been doing pretty good, following a workout strategy from Men’s Health, when one thing led to another and I wound up today in a “free fitness assessment”.

I expected the trainer to push personal training, but I wasn’t expecting him to literally promise me results at the tune of $5000. I expected him to motivate me, but instead I’m left with the impression that, like just about everything in the world, you can’t get what you really want unless you spend a lot of money. The sad part is, before today I truly thought I could do it on my own. I was motivated, and had fit the gym into my schedule with, surprisingly, little effort. So I really thought I could do it. Men’s Health told me I could do it. The trainer said I could try doing it, but I’d end up failing. I had told him I had tried in the past with little result, and he pretty much took that and used it against me.

He put me on a schedule that went from now all the way till December, at which point I would be good to go. The first part was the most important—on correcting problems with my posture, the way I used certain joints… I didn’t really understand the issue, but he stressed it was the most important.

So I decided that, if it was so important, I’ll bank for training on that part, which is oh-so-important, and opt to do the rest myself. Because, in the end, I still do believe in myself.

[I just realized the irony of writing about commitment on a blog I haven't updated in about a year... moving on]

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Today also happened to be the Royal Wedding. I think it would be interesting to study what it is about these types of events, or the monarchy in general, that fascinates people so much. I have to admit, I don’t know enough about the monarchy or how it works to really put a point forward here. Who’s paying for the wedding? How did she end up meeting and then marrying him? Does it matter? I would hate to see them split up after all this publicity that’s been going on for the last week, but didn’t that already happen with Prince Charles and Princess Diana?

I don’t get it. The only reason I can suggest for people adoring this wedding is because it lets them see a fairytale lived out in real life; princes marrying princesses, horse-drawn carriages, flowers, kings and queens. It’s almost like Disney but in London, 2011. Another reason stemming from that might be that people sort of live vicariously through it, or it lets them sort of be a kid again when watching the TV at 5 AM (this is further supported by the dress-up-and-watch events that happened all over the place).

In any case, it would be an expensive method for people to relive their childhood dreams. I could be totally wrong, but, in the end, it has to be because of something, right?

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I should also point out that I started reading my old LiveJournal from the beginning, which may or may not have propelled me to write in this blog (it’s probably a combination of things). It was kind of interesting to see what I remembered and what I didn’t remember. It was also interesting to see what’s changed since then; who I talked to more, what was available, what things cost (I think somewhere I put that I had dinner for $6, which is pretty damn good). These entries were from exactly six years ago, so it’s especially interesting to read them now, just after finishing my undergrad. I have them all downloaded to a PDF book just in case something happens to the website—I discovered that Photobucket deleted all the photos I had uploaded without even warning me, and some of them were ones I don’t think I have anywhere else.

So maybe this is just a temporary phase and I won’t write again for another year. The difference, though, is that last year at this time I would start a year in which most of my courses had at least some form of writing that I had to do on a regular basis. Now I’m done school (for a while at least), and apparently there are things on my mind, so hopefully I can put this blog to good use once again.

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