After a great back workout at the gym yesterday which has left my back nicely sore and growing stronger, I laid on the couch all afternoon with my husband as we watched movies.  First up was Sweeney Todd (the new version with Johnny Depp – fantastic!), then Enchanted (silly but cute), then Memory (kinda dumb, but ok).  It was great fun. 

Today we’ll tend to more chores around the house, but mostly it will be puttering and relaxing.  No gym today.  I’ll get some writing done this afternoon. 

Oh, and I collected Baby from the vet yesterday morning.  She’s fine.  Excited to be home.  Her usual energetic, happy, dumb, tail-wagging self.  My big beautiful stinky girl.

“You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.”
     — Carly Simon

I may be wrong,  but I don’t think I expect that much from people who are my friends or loved ones and I don’t think my expectations are unreasonable.

I expect to be listened to and responded to.  This shouldn’t be a great burden on any of my friends or loved ones because I’m not a huge talker to begin with.  But when I am speaking, I want to be heard.  I don’t want the person to walk away, answer the phone or a text message, or start talking to someone else in the middle of my sentence. 

When I send an email, I hope to get a reply, even a short acknowledgement.  Especially when that email reports good or bad news updates on a topic of mutual interest or importance.  I don’t expect to have to remind the person the next day only to get a three word comment followed by 2 paragraphs about his boring work assignment.

I hope those who say they love me can be overjoyed by my successes and give me appropriate ego strokes for those successes, to the same copious degree I have given to them in the past and to the same degree that we’ve commiserated over setbacks and failures. 

Ah – on the other hand, although my expectations aren’t unreasonable, I can’t expect the scorpion to change his spots in the middle of the stream.  The scorpion will always act within his nature.  He will always sting the frog, killing them both halfway across. 

In the same way as the scorpion, some people will always simply be self-absorbed and it is in fact unreasonable to expect them to be otherwise.  They aren’t capable of seeing past their own dramas and obsessions.  They aren’t capable of being happy for others because somehow that threatens their own sense of security. 

The real problem is that they have no sense of security in the first place.  They are so insecure that they must focus all their concentration (hence, self-absorption) on keeping their own boat afloat.  They can’t be happy that my ship is sailing if they’re in constant fear of taking on water themselves.

Ok.  Enough mixed-up metaphors. 

I don’t email people who don’t email me back.  I don’t talk to people who don’t listen.  I don’t spend time with people who have no time for me.  I can’t be constantly giving to people who have nothing to give back.  It’s not complicated.

I called the vet clinic yesterday afternoon and they said Baby came through her surgery just fine.  She was awake, happy, and healthy.  No problems.  I’ll pick her up in the morning.

Today is boxing day at the gym.  I’ve got to set aside more time for boxing.  Once a week, on an off day from weightlifting, isn’t enough.  I’ll have to add a little to the other days, too.

Also, now that I’ve got this new book, I’m going to be refining my techniques rather than just trying to kill the rubber dummy.

If the new Powerhouse gym ever opens up… they’ve stalled their grand opening for 2 months now… but they’re supposed to have a whole specialized room of boxing equipment rather than just the make-shift converted raquetball court where I go now.  I’ll have access to a speed bag and a former boxer to help with training.  It’ll be very cool.

But for now, it’s the converted raquetball court with no mirrors, the wooden floor blocks coming up, the rubber dummy with the stuffing coming out his nose, and the crooked, duct taped, heavy bag.  It’s not even “old school.”  It’s just sad.

I just got back from taking Baby to the vet for her spaying.  She’s a year old Lab mix that I got from a rescue shelter last fall.  She didn’t want to go with the vet assistant.  I’m not worried about her – I’ve been with this vet clinic for 8 years and my daughter once worked there, so I trust them to be good – but I know she’s scared and I wish I could do more to reassure her.  She’s been to the vet several times, but she’s never stayed there overnight alone (without Lucky, that is).  Oh well.  She’ll be fine.  I’ll pick her up Saturday morning.

In the meantime, today is shoulder day at the gym.  They’ve always been my weakest link, but they’ve been getting stronger this last month.  I’m going to push them hard today, make ‘em grow.

Un-happying news:  It’s supposed to rain beginning late this afternoon and going on for the next 3 days.  Blech.

I want to leave you today with this excerpt from the book I’m reading:

    “Like most women my age…I was trained to be a nice girl growing up.  I spent most of my life following the litany of things nice girls do – and the things nice girls don’t do.  When you are raised to be a nice girl, the list of things you cannot do is long.  But it’s best if you memorize it.  You wouldn’t want to be mistaken for someone who’s not nice.
    “You must always defer to other people, especially men. … You must always be polite and you  must never say what you think.  When you are a nice girl, you put your desires last.  This is because you’re nice and you want other people to know it (otherwise, what’s the point?)  You must always worry about the other person.  You must ask yourself, what does that other person think?  You  must make sure you ask this question every time you encounter another person, which means you ask this question a lot.”

And people wonder why I have an easily tapped molten river of rage flowing through my core.  Or why punching the rubber dummy is cathartic.

I love exercising.  Specifically, I love lifting weights.  I also enjoy cardio – the elliptical or the treadmill or even the bike – but that’s not what draws me to the gym over and over, or pulls me back into the gym after long layoffs like I had in 2007 with the tendinitis and all the traveling.

I love the strength and muscle mass gains I’m able to make from week to week.  I love the feeling of compact power my body has when it is strong.  I love the feel of sweat pouring off me and the burn of lactic acid because I know that leads to the strength and more muscle.

Yesterday, I did the leg press with 280 lbs.  That’s an all time high for me.
(This is the movement; this is not me.  Photo borrowed from Wikipedia.)

 
280 lbs is more than my bodyweight.  It’s four 45 lb plates plus four 25 lb plates.

I admire the look of female bodybuilders and powerlifters, but I don’t want to compete.  I have no desire to go through the painful pre-contest regime, the drugs, or to be judged on my appearance.  My goal is to get as strong as I can get, to become leaner than I am now, and to be fit and healthy.  And to have fun doing it.

To me, seeing if I can lift more iron than I could last week…. that’s fun.

Happy April!

Yesterday’s workout at the gym did go much better than Sunday’s. 

I’m up early today and have nothing to blog about yet, so I found this cartoon to share with you.

Sounds good to me.  I love Egg McMuffins.  It’s about the only thing from McDs that I can stand to eat anyway.  The rest of it is pseudo-food.

I’ve just updated my Wild Pines website, including adding new photos to the Digital Feathers Bird Compendium pages. 

There will be more photos added in the next few days, but I wanted to get some posted as quickly as possible.

Friday was my last day to employ a trainer, so today when I go to the gym I’ll be on my own for the first time in a while.  I’ve got my workout all planned.  I hope it goes better than yesterday.  You know how some days you just can’t get coordinated no matter what you do? 

Yesterday was one of those days for me.  The energy wouldn’t kick in, the timing of my punches was slow and off-target and hurt me more that it hurt the rubber dummy, and the whole workout was just poopy.

But then, sometimes you have those days where you feel like you could run 100 miles, no matter how much iron you pile on it seems feather-light, and every punch is a square on knock-out blow.

Here’s hoping for one of those days today.

Yesterday my bird-watching season officially began.  Although it was a bit on the chilly side, the weather was sunny and mild and I took my camera on tripod, binoculars, field guide, and notebook out onto the deck and snapped almost 300 new bird (and flower) photos.

Here’s the list of the birds I saw yesterday.  The ones marked with * had their pictures taken as well.  (Others were too far away to get a clear photo, but I saw them with the binoculars.)

*Titmouse
*House Sparrow
*Song Sparrow
*White-Throated Sparrow
Hairy Woodpecker
Vulture
*House Finch
*Cardinal
*Robin
*Grackle
*Blue Jay
*Junco
*Chickadee
Northern Flicker

And here are 3 new photos.  I’m going to put more new photos on the Digital Feathers section of my Wild Pines website, so check over there in a few days to see them.

Titmouse

Blue Jay
 

Daffodil

This is bizarre.

Morbidly Obese Aunt Charged in 2 Year Old’s Death

What is an emotion?

The dictionary defines it like this:
1) an affective state of consciousness in which joy, sorrow, fear, hate or the like, is experienced, as distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness.
2) any of the feeling of joy, sorrow, fear, hate, love, etc.
3) any strong agitation of the feelings actuated by experiencing love, hate fear, etc, and usually accompanied by certain physiological changes, as increased heartbeat or respiration, and often overt manifestation, as crying or shaking.
4) an instance of this.
5) something that causes such a reaction.
[1570-80, <MF esmotion, to set in motion, move the feelings]

These aren’t wrong, but they aren’t really going deep enough for my purposes.

An emotion is a full-body bio-chemical response to a conscious or unconscious thought.

Not every thought provokes an emotional response.  Many thoughts are neutral, or at least should be.  I mean, we’ve all seen people emotionally overreact to thoughts that seemed neutral.  But they responded emotionally because they had information or experiences (possibly obsolete) that, to them, made the situation more serious than we knew.  Sometimes when we discover those additional reasons, we understand their reaction and may even share it.

The old saying, “Time heals all wounds,” is somewhat true — strong emotional reactions to past events do tend to fade over time — but it isn’t absolute.  Some old hurts never heal completely.  When we think of them years later, they still provoke an emotional response.

Often though, it’s not time alone that is doing the healing, it’s gaining new understanding or perspective on the event, i.e. new information or experiences that change the way we think about the situation.

We each have a certain degree of power over our thoughts.  I’m not sure anyone acheives 100% perfect control over all their conscious and unconscious thoughts, but with practice we can ‘change our minds’ about many of the thoughts that provoke emotional responses.  I learned this while in a cognitive behavior therapy group a couple years ago.  We can become more cognizant of our thoughts and thereby interrupt the process that triggers emotional responses that interfere with our enjoyment of life.

By the same token, however, we can provoke within ourselves whatever emotional response we’d like to experience by dredging up thoughts that trigger those emotions.  There are plenty of things in the world, in my own personal experience or in history or in the news, to get sad or mad or glad about.  If I want to feel angry, all I have to do is dwell on some big nasty injustice that has happened.  Then if I want to feel happy again, I can put it out of my mind and think about things that make me happy.

Why would anyone dwell on thoughts that create unpleasant emotions?  Well, if we never had unpleasant emotions, we’d wouldn’t get nearly the number of wonderful inventions that make our life more pleasant.  Necessity isn’t the mother of invention, unhappiness is, and it’s the human desire to avoid unhappiness and make ourselves more comfortable, happy, and satisified with our existence that has sparked such things as indoor plumbing, central heat and air, civil rights, the woman’s right to vote, etc and so forth.

Also, artists of all ilk, but actors in particular using a technique called Method Acting, draw on their own emotional experiences to perform their art. 

In writing, it’s oft-repeated advice that the main character must want something.  Happy, well-pleased characters don’t want anything (and they’re boring to read about); they aren’t feeling anything unpleasant which is spurring them to change or go on their journey.  And content, well-pleased writers might have a harder time depicting their character’s discontent on the page without dredging up at least a little of the discontent within themselves.

And some of us do better dredging up a little angry energy as motivation to write in the first place.  After all, a happy contented writer may feel no need to create anything.  She’s happy and content sitting back with her feet up.  A little bit of angry energy (or fear, or sadness, take your pick of emotions) gives her something to say, a reason to move, and somewhere to go with it.

Now, I’m off to think about something really un-happying so I finish my collage.