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Weekend Update

Well, I managed to work out on Saturday morning, before meeting up with my friend Mike from Jeonju. We hung out for the weekend: good food, lots of good conversation, a little beer. It was a pretty good weekend, and I’m feeling more settled for the week to come, though it will be hectic.

I think the break I took today from exercise (beyond walking down to the station and walking home again later) was good for me, as my body seems to have recovered from the past two weeks of hard exercise, except for the pain in my abdominal muscles that tells me I did the right thing in starting working on what seems to be called “core workouts.” By the way, I am not sure whether I managed to lose 1.5 kilograms by Friday morning — I forgot to weigh myself — but I did manage to lose 1.4 kilograms by Thursday morning, which was enough to make me feel mighty pleased with my progress, especially since I know I’m putting on muscle at the moment: I can see it in my arms and chest. The best effect of the exercise (and, I’m thinking, the hypertension medication) is on my mind, however: I’m clear-headed in ways I can remember having been for years now, and people have commented on it almost as much as they have on my weight loss and apparently increasingly youthful appearance. (Would that exercise could return my hairline to its pre-2008 configuration, but some things cannot be reversed so easily.)

I did manage to get a long overdue piece of writing done and sent off, though it’s probably ridiculously too long; and I also have some really good news on both the creative-writing and the academic fronts, though the former I cannot announce for the moment, and the latter I would like to write about at somewhat greater length. But for now, I need sleep — not as much as you might think, since I napped away most of the evening, but still, it is 3:00 am now, and I want to get a hike and cycle in tomorrow morning before hitting the office, so that I can get some student reference letters done before I go for a swim at noon with my friend/co-worker Gwen. I’ll have to squeeze in the weight training sometime in the evening. Two hours or more a day is pretty hard work when you’re also prepping for classes and trying to get research done.

Lastly, Lime and I had a difficult (but important) talk. Things are, well, they just are complicated. I very conspicuously didn’t mention here that she moved out in January — ah, some of you may be thinking, no wonder there was a patch of silence on this blog around then — and emotionally things have kind of been up in the air ever since, though after I went onto hypertension medication in late February and started exercising intensely, everything else went onto the back-burner. It’s a familiar enough story, though, two wonderful-but-scarred people struggling through individual and shared pains, trying to do right by one another and learning to do right by themselves too, but finding they keep hurting themselves and one another in trying to get the airplane to go off the ground again, like it’s supposed to do, except they find themselves just watching it crash and crash and crash.

I just hope she heard me, really heard me, when I was telling her all the things I wish she could see about herself. I don’t know what tomorrow holds, but all those things I’ve said about her, here on this blog? I still mean them, and I’m still thankful every day for the fact we met on that bus that first day we were back in Korea, as if by some strange prearrangement of fate. She’s fighting heroically considering some of the crap she’s dealing with. But there is some definite, and serious, owch for me at this moment, too, though I try not to dwell on it as I swim through this strange, in-between state we find ourselves in now.

Still, when things are hard, sometimes music is a comfort. I’ve been finding “Cotton” by the Mountain Goats to be a very comforting song in this regard, and though it may sound bleak on first listening, it’s really a song quite full of hope, once you get what he’s actually saying in those lyrics. The video is not embeddable, so click the link to see a great fan-video on Youtube.

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