Live

The past week has been a non-stop rollercoaster of social and work-related events. Front to back, back to front – life has been nothing more than one domino falling on another as I watch in bemusement. Work, family, friends, work, work, work, rinse and repeat. Life should not be spent like this, as a series of reactions instead of actions. This is the opposite of purposeful living, which is what I’m trying to practise.

Amidst this madness I’m glad that I have somehow managed to keep to a relatively stable routine that I now consider as my anchor. At the start of December I resolved to stick to three things: exercising, learning Spanish, and cleaning up my living environment. These were the three main things that I was unhappy with in my life at that point. My day job and non-profit work had started to consume me, and when they didn’t go well I fell into a slump, because those were the only things that defined me. Self-maintenance became secondary, and I ceased to do things that mattered to me outside of work.

The worst thing is that all that stress made me even less productive, which created a downward spiral of anxiety. I’m a firm believer that a happy worker is a productive worker.

So I did some soul searching and created a plan. I thought about habits that would make me happier, and narrowed it down to three: physical activity, learning something, and cleaning up the mess around me. I needed some way to track my habits and downloaded an app called “Way of Life“, which is quite brilliant really, and the free version of it enables you to do rather detailed tracking of three items every day.

Here is what I have so far:

3 weeks worth of routine. Green means I was good, red means I didn’t accomplish my goal on that day. The little dog-ears indicate notes taken down.

As you can see I’ve not been doing well in the cleaning department at all. It’s really not my favourite thing to do, and at the end of a working day it takes the most energy to push myself to do it. The goal was to just clean for 15 minutes a day, but I’ve not even been able to do much of that. I think the best way is still to get a part-time cleaning lady to come in every one or two weeks to keep the surroundings passably clean, so that it doesn’t get so dirty that I’m too intimidated to do anything at all.

The bright side is that I’ve been doing relatively well in the other two aspects. For exercising, I’ve done quite consistent 4-days-out-of-7 weeks (see figure below), the past three weeks. Mostly I swim and stick to my 200 sit-up challenge, with some other stuff thrown in for good measure. Sometimes it’s yoga, sometimes capoeira, one time I went for a Brazilian Jujitsu women self-defense course. For the sit-up challenge, I just did a intermission test today. Turns out that I can already do 100 consecutive sit-ups, which is rather good because I was only aiming to hit 40 in the test. The goal is to do 200 consecutive sit-ups at the end of a six-week programme.

As for Spanish-learning, I’ve also kept up the learning, at least one duolingo exercise a day if I’m really busy or tired. One weekend I spent hours on it. So far the app informs me that I have learnt about 740 words. I hear that there’s around 1,500 words in total that Duolingo covers, so I have still quite some way to go, but I’m already able to speak very haltingly to The Boyfriend, and get myself generally understood (in present and past tenses, and if all else fails, the infinitive). I still have about 3 months to go till I go to Argentina. Much more to learn!

The good thing about this app is that it gives you the perspective that things should go at a steady pace, and habits require time to build up. It doesn’t matter if I miss one day, because I know that it doesn’t mean that I’m a failure in general. I can do it tomorrow. For things such as language-learning, or aiming to do a handstand, the key really is perseverance.

It’s late now and I should go to bed. It’s funny that amidst this crazy life, I still feel that the year is winding down. Things go slower at the year end somehow. I’m glad that I started my new year resolutions a month early, and I’m confident that I’ll be able to continue carrying it out without much problems in the new year.

Oh hello it is Wednesday. The middle child of the week. Always crying out for attention, because let’s be honest, he’s not hated nor loved, he’s like the speed bump that is not high enough to be annoying (Monday I’m looking at you), but high enough to be just “there”. Everyone just wants to get over it and welcome Thursday! And after that is Friday, and then comes Saturday and Sunday.

Thank you Rebecca Black for teaching me the days of the week.

I have been good the past week. I have exercised almost every day that I could, and now I can do a very teetering crow pose. For half a second. Basically what happened was that I put a cushion in front of my face, got into the position, got my feet off the ground, had half a second of “I’M DOING IT I’M DOING IT” and promptly fell face-first into the cushion. Didn’t stop me from claiming victory, as I pranced to the livingroom, hauled The Boyfriend away from his work, and did it again.

The sit-up challenge is going well so far, as I have completed the first week. Five sets every two days, with one minute rest in between the sets. Too complicated to understand? Here’s a visualization:

[set] rest 1 min [set] rest 1 min [set] rest 1 min [set] rest 1 min [set]

rest one day

[set] rest 1 min [set] rest 1 min [set] rest 1 min [set] rest 1 min [set]

rest one day

[set] rest 1 min [set] rest 1 min [set] rest 1 min [set] rest 1 min [set]

you get the idea

The first day I did 70 sit-ups in total, the second day 85, and the third day 90. I am moving into my second week now. The goal is to be able to do two hundred consecutively, though the actual motive is to have a strong core, with which I will be able to rely upon to do other things. It’s also a procrastinating move before I take up a push-up challenge. O me feeble arms!

In other news, I’ve also taken to doing Duolingo exercises every day. My current streak is 4 days in a row, and I’ve invested in 5 lingots (double or nothing) in a seven-day streak. Don’t understand again?

[practise Spanish] [practise Spanish] [practise Spanish] [practise Spanish] [practise Spanish] [practise Spanish] [practise Spanish] = 7 day streak = I earn 10 lingots.

Alternative scenario:

[practise Spanish] [practise Spanish][forgot!] = broke 7 day streak = I lose 5 lingots. 

Lingots are the currency of Duolingo, with which you can “buy” stuff on Duolingo such as extra lives. The meaninglessness of an imaginary currency that does not buy you food does not stop me from being highly competitive. I will get that 10 lingots damnit.

Work is a-mounting and I am trying to maintain a calm composure and to remember to take care of my health. To remember that there is life outside of work. Speaking of which –

I should get back to reading papers now.

So ever since I managed the wheel I have been feeling very encouraged, and also I’ve started the two hundred sit-ups challenge. How it works is that you do five sets every second day for about 6 weeks, in incremental numbers of sit-ups per set. Just the other day I jumpstarted my first week, doing 70 in total, with 4 one-minute break in between.

I’ve also been trying to think of goals to work towards. The wheel was a major milestone and confidence booster because I honestly felt quite inadequate when I was the only person within my peer group (well, granted, I’ve got a rather athletic peer group at the moment – The Boyfriend who’s danced tango and done yoga for years, Rachel who’s a capoeirista, Zara who won awards for karate, and Eva who’s ridiculously flexible and apparently has no bones, bless her marrow) who wasn’t able to do it.

Me doing the wheel

But now that that’s behind me, the possibilities are endless! I am eager to level up to other milestones, which will require me to do a lot more training of my body, but the joy of success is worth it.

I’m looking at routines that will enable me to do hand stands, also something that I’ve never been able to do (indeed, I’ve been too intimidated to try). I have no idea how long it’s going to take me. But if it takes shorter than expected, I would like to do this after:

Of which The Boyfriend was skeptical. Well, his skepticism will be my fuel towards success! First the wheel-to-handstand, and then, take over the world!

I do recognise that there will be a process towards this though. One thing is that I’ll need to improve my upper body strength by a long shot. My arms in particular seem to be one of the weak links of my body. I don’t think I’ve ever really done a push-up in good form, mostly it is some negligible and pathetic twitching. So, as intermediate goals, I have decided to work on these two poses:

Queda de Rins of Capoeira

Queda de rins (source)

Crow Pose (Bakasana) of Yoga

Crow Pose (source)

These seem to be reasonable half-way points in training balance and the ability to hold up my body weight on my arms. The queda de rins is a pose that is often done at the start of capoeira class, but the teacher never really explained how we should do it, and the others usually do it within seconds, so I will need to work much more on the techniques on my own. I’ve found Youtube to be an amazing resource of tutorials!

I think I may also put up a section in Shenanigans to set fitness goals and track progress, as well as put up resources. Still not sure how to or if I’d have the time to do it though.

Let it be known that 27 November 2013 was the day that I finally managed to do The Wheel!

Yoga Wheel Pose (Source)

I did get The Boyfriend to take a picture but the one that he took was so crappy that I had to use the above picture instead. After doing planks and side planks, the sun salutations, a shoulder stand and the cat pose, I half-heartedly decided to try The Wheel as I’d never been able to do it before. But for some reason it worked! I hoisted my entire body up and supported it only with my limbs! Even with the extra weight from all that binging in Penang!

This is a personal milestone indeed. What’s next, handstands? I must say that I am very much encouraged by the development of events. I was able to do it for 4 more times so it was not a freak accident. I think I’m ready to take on the twohundredsitups challenge.

I’m bored and I’m defying The Boyfriend’s instructions of not looking at the screen. Here I am putting another post up. If I were as prolific in my work-related writing!

It just occurred to me how people with perfect eyesight will never understand how it’s like to be half-blind without a pair of glasses. Having worn glasses for 21 years of my life, I am perfectly positioned to explain this to the curious. From the young age of 9, after being diagnosed as short-sighted (my parents found out through testing me with car plate numbers), I was under strict instructions of never taking off my glasses except when I shower, or go to bed. So, you could say that my specs were very much part of me and my appearance.

Therefore, I went through most of my life (until yesterday) without knowing how I look like with no glasses. I wore contact lenses for once in my life, when I was 23 perhaps, when I went snorkelling. When I bungee-jumped at 26, I gave up after 1.5 hours of trying to put the contacts in, and did it half blind. My daily routine of washing my face did not show me how I looked. The reflection in the mirror was always blurry, and when I moved closer to it I saw my features instead of my face. So, this is something that I need to get used to. It’s like removing a permanent feature, for instance your eyebrows, from your face.

Sports. This is quite obvious I guess. My taichi teacher used to say that my posture was horrible because my head was always slightly tilted. I attribute this to the glasses that were constantly sliding down my nose. Out of habit, I’d lift my head. Eventually I had to take them off. I am currently doing capoeira and I cannot do it with glasses because they’d fly away when I do cartwheels. Swimming, well, I lost my good pair of prescription goggles and have not swum with clear sight for a very long time now. It’s not fun to lose one of your senses when you’re engaging in sports.

Glasses fog when you get out of air-conditioned rooms, or eat steaming bowls of noodles. They also retain drops of water when you get rained on. They smash against your face when you take a basketball to your nose. If you get scratches on your lenses, and it happens after years of wiping condensation and water off your glasses and basketball attacks, your vision is marred, until you get a pair of new ones. And, they’re fucking expensive.

My decision to go for LASIK surgery was connected to that. I broke my (relatively new) glasses by dropping my laptop on it (yes don’t ask), and decided that if I’m going to spend hundreds on a pair of new one, I should just fix the source of the problem. And thus two weeks later, here I am, with a pair of sun visors indoors, defying The Boyfriend’s instructions of no computer usage.

What else. There’s always a ring of blurriness in your peripheral vision (outside the coverage of your glasses), that’s why you always have to adjust the glasses, push them up your nose, for instance. Losing your glasses, and I am prone to losing things in general, is the most annoying thing to experience – you curse as you fumble around, groping random objects, knowing fully that your glasses would be so much easier to find if you had them on.

So, in short, I’m glad I’m done with them for practical reasons. But for aesthetic reasons – well, I’m still trying to get used to my face. How would you feel if you did a permanent removal of your eyebrows?

It’s 1st of November and I’m typing this sprawled on my bed with the curtains drawn and a pair of sun visors firmly lodged on my face. My douche-bag indoor glasses I call them.

31st October 2013 is forever to be remembered as the day when I phased out my glasses and exposed my eyes to the world.

The surgery went well although it was terrifying. It was alright up till the point when I lay down on Surgery Bed #1 (there were two) and the doctor pointed a light in my eye, and put a suction thing onto my eyeballs. That was the moment when I realized that I may have made the worst mistake of my seeing life (assuming that the point forth I would lose my sight) and my eyeballs then struggled for their lives. They did not make it. I must have used three patients’ supply of local anaesthetic for each eye, but finally the doctor and 2 nurses were able to put the suction on.

I was really tense and they knew it, and I must say that the bedside manner of both doctors and nurses were very comforting. Someone put a hand on my tightly clasped hands.

I had to look at some lights, at which point some lasers were beamed at my cornea, creating a flap. After both flaps were created (with much reluctance from my eyeballs), I clambered onto Surgery Bed #2. The corneal flap was lifted, I was instructed to look at some lights again, and then I saw some white lights shooting into my eyes in rapid succession – it was almost therapeutic actually – and then the right eye was done. The doctor readjusted the flap and smoothed it down.

Repeat for the left eye.

The doctor said that the surgery went perfectly. I wasn’t very sure if she says that to everyone, but I was relieved in any case. She also informed me that my friend waiting outside was close to crying. At which point I saw The Boyfriend standing on the other side of the glass window of the operating theatre – he had been there for the entire operation though I didn’t know. He later commented that it was also exceedingly scary for him because he watched the operation through the screen with my (valiant) eyeballs magnified.

A shuttle was arranged for us to get back home from The Curve. My eyes smarted a whole lot, and was unable to process any sort of light, so the rest of the evening we spent in almost darkness. The Boyfriend cooked curry for dinner, but since I couldn’t process curry either, he ended up making an extra portion of mashed potatoes and a boiled egg for me. Eye drops for inflammation and antibiotics.

I really do think I’ve got the awesomest boyfriend in the world. He cleaned the entire house before the operation because I said that I needed to be in a dust free environment, and he was there the entire time, and took really good care of me post-op.

The cats have been awesome too.

This morning I went for a check up again and the doctor said that everything is progressing well, I did the eye test and to my surprise, I aced the test. Saw all the letters on the wall except for those that are too small to be seen by normal people anyway. I can’t help but think of all the possibilities and things in life that are now possible without my glasses sliding down my nose. Perhaps I’ll do that bungee jump again, this time with sight.

Thus sets the tone of my blog –  of wine, of poetry, of virtue. Hello, world.

Oh who am I kidding. It will be wine all the way, no doubt.

La Bodega’s Ladies Night yesterday was a happy affair. Eva and I plonked our asses down on high chairs, asked for wine and the kind bartenders on the other side of the bar kept our glasses full the entire night. Oh the beauty of free, bottomless wine. I had not been so pleasantly tipsy for a long time. Rachel joined us in our merriment later in the night, and the imbibing of the luscious red liquid continued until 10pm when Ladies’ Night ended. We then adjourned to Rachel’s to check out her cloth pads.

My memory is a haze of discussions on the merits of using reusable menstruation pads and excited planning of a “padspedition”. The idea is so simple, I wonder why I had never thought about it before. Mountains of landfilled plastic pads no more.

Anyway, this is my first blog post. Hello, world.