"The heat is on so feel the fire." - The Roots, Boom!
Things fall apart. Like my body. Like my resolve. Like my dedication. Like my habits. It had all been going so well, too. I'd been so incredibly consistent with my workout, with my diet (as in maintaining good eating habits not as in any specific weight loss program), with checking things off the personal to-do list. Then the curve balls showed up. Tiffany went away for work and I hadn't accounted for how much her mere physical proximity kept me on task; I caught the flu and was bed-ridden (well, couch-ridden) for a few days; we shifted gears at work which led to me thinking a lot more about projects and challenges to work through there than I had been.
So, many things came tumbling down. I missed some workouts and then came back too hard and injured my left hip. I went off the eat right train with a mix of fast and fried foods and haven't quite gotten back on track yet (although I'm better). The house was a mess until the night before she returned home. I wasn't mentally prepared for the aggressive increase in health goals I had set for myself on health month. I didn't get any of the things I wanted to get accomplished around the house or with the wedding that I wanted to over the last two weeks. Hell, I didn't even write one of these last week.
I'm not beating myself up about it (that guilt and anxiety was for Tuesday and Wednesday this past week and probably led to my overexerting myself working out those days).This is an acknowledgement of my failures and shortcomings—the most stark examples of them in 2011.
But we fall down to get back up again. Sunday featured a 4 mile walk and ticking a few things off the personal to-do list, the biggest of which were finally buying plane tickets to Austin for SXSW and finally sorting through and re-organizing (alphabetical by title) our large combined collection of books. I'm feeling accomplished again. Not a failure. A work in progress.
Goals For the Coming Week!
- Finish some lingering wedding tasks. Namely invitations and entertainment booking. Also, it's time to start wedding band shopping.
- Like Ali said, we must fight mr. tooth decay! Schedule a dental check-up and cleaning.
- Clear the wall. There's a wall in our place that has things that need to go to storage, to goodwill, and donated to libraries. It's time to clear all of the things.
How'd I do on the goals from two weeks ago? Well, #3 from two weeks ago is now #1. I did spend time with friends before I got sick and this week I did better on curbing the single guy habits but only because I had less time to act like a single guy.
The Week In Review
- The Best Thing I Saw This Week: The season 2 premiere of Brick City. And, if I'm being honest, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion shows. Those chicks are really going through it. Bonus: The best thing I watched on Netflix Instant was Moon.
- The Best Thing I Heard This Week: I'm really enjoying Drake's Thank Me Later. Also, Adele is back in heavy rotation.
- The Best Thing I Read This Week: Kyle Baker's Nat Turner comics. I haven't been able to really get into Nine Lives so I think I'm moving on to Henrietta Lacks and come back to it later.
- The Thing I Read This Week That Most Resonated:
It is too soon to tell if younger people who have just picked up e-readers will stick to them in the long run, or grow bored and move on. But Monica Vila, who runs the popular Web site The Online Mom and lectures frequently to parent groups about Internet safety, said that in recent months she had been bombarded with questions from parents about whether they should buy e-readers for their children.
Why? Because I've become a more avid e-Reader myself. With all this book sorting and organizing I've been trying to figure out how I want to deal with older titles I've read. Do I want to keep the physical copies or just repurchase digital versions the next time I want to re-read them? The closed nature of the medium makes the problem different than when I converted most of my music from CD to mp3. I didn't have to rebuy that music, I just got to archive it digitally. No such luck and no universal/open medium for eBooks. I can't buy an eBook from amazon and then read it via iBooks or Kobo or nook rather than the kindle. But still, I'm really enjoying the digital experience and I, for sure, like having fewer books taking up space in our place.
So for tonight, I made a compromise, old textbooks and paperback books not from my very favorite authors went in the go pile. If I want to go back and read through those books, I'll rebuy digitally if available or check them out from the library, if not. But I don't know why I wouldn't just get all these old Stephen King and Walter Mosley and Zora Neale Hurston books in a digital format now. It would clear a significant portion of my shelves. But it seems wrong to let them go.
At least it does today.
We'll see what happens the next time I get the bright idea to trim the literary fat. I imagine I'll feel a little less possessive of the physical form.
They fall apart, too.
