Yearly Archives: 2006

Ah, vacation.

My evenings the past couple of days have been going a bit like this:

  1. Write for about two hours solid.
  2. Browse the NaNoWriMo forums for about 5 minutes.
  3. Glance at the Uru Live forums for 10 seconds.
  4. If I’m stuck on plot, knit a couple of rows, cursing my cheap, old Walmart yarn (that easily fucking unravels into individual strands!) and lack of skill.
  5. Go back to writing for another couple of hours.

This way, I’ll complete NaNoWriMo in 8-9 days, get back into knitting quickly, and not be starved for pseudo-human contact!

Quote of the day.

“Laziness, like money, doesn’t really exist except to represent something else–in this case fear, severe self-judgment, or what Natalie Goldberg calls ‘the cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure.'”
–Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

Not just in writing, in my opinion.

Words, words!

NaNoWriMo is in full swing, and although I’m certainly not writing 2000 words a day, I’m writing in most of the free time I don’t give my thesis. This isn’t aided by the fact that I’m on drixoral for the next few days, and that shit is fucking me up royally. I was afraid of a relapse of the nasty bug that floored WO and me this summer until I read on the Internet that dizziness and drowsiness are normal side effects of drixoral. Ugh. (Nice of the doc to not mention it, I’ll add.)

Add to that a continuation of some personal life stressors, and I’m just begging to get out of the house for at least a nice long walk with uninterrupted music (hoping I don’t get too light-headed along the way). I’m about at the point I reach about this time every term, where I want to throw my laptop into a dumpster. That’s where all the work and all the requests for work are, after all.

Okay, maybe not a dumpster. But I wouldn’t have a problem losing it in the shit pile that is my apartment for the next couple of weeks.

My NaNoWriMo story is shaping up decently nicely, although I think my lack of writing practice shows clearly. The opening is awkward and stilted, and if I take a break for more than about 12 hours, I’m awkward when I start again. That said, I still feel good doing it, even if I don’t think I’ll be tossing it out here for public consumption.

It’s another thing tying me to my computer, though, and I’m lucky I’ve got plenty sufficient willpower/disdain/laziness to say, “I’m going to write and not check my email” without feeling any guilt.

The rigors of keeping a body

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I tend to be one that wants some schedule, some regularity, to my workouts. I like having a “training schedule” for running, even if I’m not planning to race. I like knowing when my twice-weekly weight lifting sessions will be. Same with biking, yoga, and martial arts.

But what happens when I don’t feel like doing one or any of them? I’ve been kind of dragging myself to the gym for weight lifting out of necessity these past couple of weeks. My body needs the strength, my shins especially, but I find it hard to focus and do the reps correctly, and I feel the workout’s wasted if I just throw weights around. I know it’s not a complete waste, but still.

I had a pretty nasty asthma attack last night, and I woke up (for about the fifth time) this morning about an hour before the run I was supposed to do. It took me that whole hour to psych myself into going out and running, knowing that I’d lost my inhaler, and knowing that I was at high risk for an attack, especially since I was still wheezing while lying in bed the next morning.

Maybe it’s just the start of my usual winter doldrums. Getting myself out of bed before class to exert myself seems arduous, especially given how interrupted my sleep’s been. Just two months ago, I was so happy to have classes starting at 10:00 so that I would have time to knock out a full hour of exercise before tackling the day.

The big question is, perhaps, “What’s my motivation?” I’m telling myself to get out and be active because I want to get in shape (which I define as purely stamina, not body weight/shape), help my asthma, mebbe lose some weight, and because it makes me feel good (in that order? maybe.).

I feel in part like I have too many goals to remain focused. I see weight lifting as separate from running and both of those as separate from biking. So while I have a “schedule”, I don’t have a cohesive workout… vision. I don’t flow from one workout to the next, and I think each should be reinforcing the others.

So the question is, how do I fix it?