A slightly better Friday. / random crap I was thinking about

So on Thursday night, I told myself that I wasn't allowed to do more than 1 hour of homework today, since I work for 8 hours on Fridays and spending the rest of the night doing homework after that absolutely burns me out. Then I can't focus well on Saturday or Sunday, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle. 

This turned out to be a great idea, as it made me insanely more productive at work. After all, I had relaxation to look forward to afterwards. I snuck in a quick quiz during work, admittedly, and then after work I got some Panda (so healthy with so little sodium! oh yeah), then worked on my port scanner for about 40 minutes. 

Then I restarted, once more, the arduous process of getting caught up on my favorite webcomics. Arduous, but also relaxing, because it's not like I'm going to get graded on it, and it's nice to lose yourself in a story for a while. In an ideal world, I would be fully caught up on my webcomics and fanfiction readings each week, but that doesn't happen very often. In the summer, with a (hopefully) 40-hour-max work week and no homework, this should be significantly easier. 

Anyway, I was reading True Beauty and it sort of randomly motivated me to work on my fitness and appearance goals again. I've always put a reasonable degree of effort into my appearance, but I was more attractive in high school and to a lesser extent as a missionary -- full stop, no denying that. I've gained weight and all the fat goes immediately to my face, plus my hairline has started to recede because of my 50% whiteness (the whole maternal grandfather hair loss myth can be immediately disproven by my own life, and since when do full Filipinos have male-pattern baldness? yeah, not a thing), and my acne has resurged ever since the covid mass hysteria has led to forced mask mandates. 

I haven't stopped running, but my running has been terribly inconsistent because ever since finishing high school I have been consistently injured. Like take-6-months-off-and-still-have-the-exact-same-amount-of-pain levels of consistency. Like run-for-3-months-and-then-get-injured-for-another-6-months levels of consistency. But the injuries change -- it was patellar tracking disorder for a while, then I switched to toe striking and got plantar fasciitis instead, and now somehow I have pain in 2 different spots on my calf and my Achilles at the same time when I toe strike and a resurgence of patellar tracking disorder when I heel strike. And I've gotten slow. Oh yeah, and I have a half-marathon next Saturday that I already paid for and I'm not sure if I'm even going to be able to walk it. I ran 12 miles once in January and was fine, but I have been injured for the past 2 weeks and it still hurts. Let's hope I don't get lost in the desert! :D I kind of need to make the Grand Canyon in May so I think I'm just going to have to start ramping the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of my stretching. 

Lifting is great too, but I stagnated for a long time because CSANM was and is so time-consuming -- even so, I need to find a way. Also, I was on a great streak that got broken last March because my gym was initially closed, then operated on horrible hours due to the coronavirus panic. Now that it's back to normal (knock on wood), I am slowly easing back into weights, but it is not enough. Also, my diet is crap, in part I developed a stress-eating habit when trying to get into my program, and self-control in that domain isn't my strong point. Plus, sometimes I get pessimistic and don't do much other than preventive care -- i.e. taking excellent care of my hygiene and cleanliness and such, but also showing up to places in sweats and gaudy graphic tees. This is trashy and altogether a bad idea. Unless you're going to Walmart, where everyone looks like that. 

Ergo, I gained weight. In high school, XC and track always kept the weight off. Some people still say I'm skinny, and they are wrong. I just have skinny arms and legs. What I am now is "skinny-fat", and this is a major problem. 

I've found a few good YouTube channels that have tips for improving your appearance. Mario Adrion's is getting kind of weird (ok, let's be real, it's getting REALLY weird and I'm sticking to his old videos only), so I think I'm going to switch to Fresh Pepper who has some much tamer content, but we'll see. Through watching some of their videos, I realized just how terrible my posture has become. Even right now, I've been hunched over at my keyboard writing this. Bad choice. 

Also, with it being a Friday night, I keep thinking about all the TV shows I'm behind on. People always say "Have you seen X show?" and my answer is consistently "umm, no, but I think I've heard of it before!" (This is definitely a lie.) I'm so far behind on the stuff I started watching in 2012 that I'm basically not going to get to 2021 shows until maybe a decade from now, or possibly never at all? I think I'd rather rewatch the entire Pokemon series from scratch rather than whatever crappy stuff is on Netflix or YouTube, etc. these days. Unless it's Vivziepop's series, but I'm quickly getting behind on those too. 

Since I can't run more than a mile max tomorrow and I'll probably be stuck on the stationary bike again -- ugh, so boring -- I might watch another episode of something before I pass out. We'll see. I've been enjoying BNA. Or -- Helluva Boss might be easier to catch up on, plus it's shorter. I think I'll do that. 

And I forgot to game today, whooooops. I did a free preview of NoLimits last weekend and I might buy that but ah, time management. 

This was a very scattered post. Oh well, it's going up anyway. :v