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Houses and homes

Went to the gym two days ago and cycled, did some core strengthening exercises, used the elliptical, and did some weight lifting. Then the next day I went to yoga. Needless to say, my arms aren’t very happy with me right now (but I did do pretty well for the core strength exercises during yoga!). When I got home I did some more ab exercises (I’m trying a 30-day ab workout), showered, and then crashed on the couch and watched Eddie Murphy’s “Raw”.

I was planning on going to a tiny house exhibition today – a girl I was chatting with on OkCupid clued me in to the organization – but since I was so exhausted last night I slept through half of the exhibition. Oh well, not too upset about it. I ended up going to Mom and Dad’s instead to help set up their new home phones, helped Anne pick out a fitness tracker at the mall, and went out with everyone to dinner at Mission BBQ. The food was ok, but the decor was a bit unnerving – all sorts of police and fire and military insignia all around you. I’m not comfortable with that sort of hero worship.

I’m still working on that Rules of The Game 30-day tutorial. I haven’t really been following it, though, since most of the things it’s told me to do have been things that I didn’t really think I needed to do (start conversations with five strangers and make a note of their eye color), or things that would have been dumb for me to do (calling people at 10 PM when I got home from yoga to get them to recommend a movie!). Next step is asking three women for menswear recommendations. I guess I could try that, but that’ll wait until Monday.

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Day 1 of 30

Today at my therapy session I talked about how I knew what I wanted to do, knew that I was holding myself back from doing so, and that I knew I knew I was doing so. Confusing! I’m trying to get past my mental blocks holding me back.

After writing yesterday’s post I found a blog post by Ramit Sethi that happened to be more about dating than about finances. The gist of the post was that you have to be ready to improve yourself if you want to accomplish dating goals that you might have in mind. Basically, why should this person you have a crush on be interested in you? You should be ready to improve yourself to fit what they’re looking for. That reminded me that I still hadn’t read through these books on pickup artist culture that my therapist had recommended I read (not necessarily for their content, but more for what they had to say about your own self-esteem and self-confidence). I started to read a sample of The Game that I had on my Kindle but when I went to purchase it I discovered a companion book Rules of The Game by the same author. It seems like it’s more of a how-to guide, and one of the sections has a 30-day process for “how to get a date”. I figured I might get more use out of this rather than the book itself, and since it’s the first of the month I figure I’ve got all of April to go through this how-to.

We also talked about how I should maybe try daily to list what things I did that day that exemplify my good traits (perhaps I might add something for this to my quantitative self database? that’s possibly something to consider…). She also pointed out that how by forcing myself to get out and about more that it’s actually pretty brave of me. I’ve never really thought of myself as being “brave” for going out and socializing when I didn’t particularly want to, but it’s nice to get some positive reinforcement in any case.

I also need to write more here in my journal. It’s definitely cathartic to get thoughts out of my head, even if I’m generally the only one reading them.

Maybe I’ll try to get to the gym tomorrow. It’s been a while since I’ve gone and I feel like I have all this nervous energy I need to get out. I’m not sure what exactly I’ll do – running is still out of the question, especially not on a treadmill – and cycling and rowing might also impact my foot too.

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Trepidation

The other day I did this run with November Project, a free just-show-up workout group. We ran through the National Zoo dressed in penguin-themed colors and clothing, and after about 4 or 5 miles we ended up at a bar for socializing.

I’ve known about November Project for several months, but the logistics of getting to/from their workouts made it not very feasible. Their workouts start at 6:30 AM (there’s one that starts at 5:30 AM as well), and they’re either at the Lincoln Memorial (far) or Meridian Hill Park (also far) or if it’s the last Monday of the month then at the Capitol building (far but not as far as the other locations).

Even though I had that metatarsalgia diagnosis I went on the run anyway since just a few weeks ago I ran two miles and my foot didn’t bother me any more afterward. After this run, however, my foot started really bothering me. I’ve scheduled a new sports medicine appointment to get a second opinion – from talking with some of the other run participants at the bar they recommended trying to get an MRI scan if I could – and probably shouldn’t run on it in the meantime. This sucks because right now I want to work out and exercise and I can’t.

At the bar I spoke with a few girls and gave one of them my contact info so I could be added to a November Project messageboard. Seems like quite a few of the people that go to the morning workouts drive there, so that might be an option for me. But because of my foot, I probably shouldn’t.

I’m extra disappointed that my foot was bothering me because I met this one really cute girl at the bar and if I went to these workout sessions I might be able to chat her up again. We’re friends on Facebook now and as much as I want to send her a message to ask her out I can’t bring myself to do so. Maybe because she’s probably about 8 years younger than me, maybe because I can’t imagine why she’d want to go out with me (even though this is something that I’ve been working on at my psychology sessions), maybe because I’m being too hard on myself. I fucking hate feeling this way about myself, that I can’t convince myself to get over my trepidation and do something I want to do.

I have a psychologist session tomorrow so I should probably talk about this then.

Besides my foot appointment I also made an appointment to get the mole on my chin checked out and talk about having it removed. Also the mole on the right side of my head, and possibly one on my chest. Gross.

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Metatarsalgia

Been a while since I wrote here. Been lazy.

My right foot has been bothering me for the past month and a half, so last week I went to a sports medicine specialist (who I partly chose because she ran cross-country in college, and partly because she was attractive :P) to get it checked out. Turns out it’s something called metatarsalgia, and long story short I now have a prescription and an appointment scheduled for an orthopedist to check it out and measure me for metatarsalgia pads. That appointment isn’t until April though.

My friend Monica was visiting the last week or so for work, but we had a few chances to hang out. At one point I told her how I’d been working with my therapist to try to get me to be more social and try to get back into dating again. Monica said something like “women are waiting to find a great guy like you and you’re not letting them!” which made me think I should stop being so wishy-washy and go ahead and start proactively contacting women on online dating sites again. That’s fine and all, but I still need encouragement to be more social in person. There’s a few meetup groups I’ve joined that should hopefully help get me out and meeting people, though.

Takeaway from today’s therapy session is trying to turn social outings into a game of some sort so they’re more fun for me to attend, and thus create more incentive for me to attend. Also, be more open to asking open-ended questions when meeting people.

The foot pain and the bad weather lately has kept me from running, but yesterday was the first warm day that I had a chance to go out for a run, which was nice. My foot didn’t bother me at all during that run, but just those two miles wore me out. Hopefully my stamina will come back once I get back into running regularly. The downside was that I skipped out on a networking social event I had planned to attend (if we’re being real, I talked myself out of going).

Last night Monica and Dave and Tom and I went to see Jukebox the Ghost at the 9:30 Club. Fun times, not particulary my type of music (I enjoyed the opening acts more), but still good. Didn’t get to sleep until almost 1 AM, so I’m feeling extra tired tonight.