Evening Pages: October 26th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

I wonder if cats ever get tired of a move-y toy like this head scratcher.

I wouldn't, if I was a cat.

Oh my God I exercised today and found out I can't get through seven minutes of exercise without running out of breath. I think I've been out of shape before, but nothing as bad as this. I do feel good after working out, though; better than I've felt in quite a while.

I've been a little afraid to get exercise this year, to be honest. If I fell and sprained my arm, or broke a bone, or something stupid like that, I'd have to go to the hospital...and yeah I don't want to do that right now, no matter what my health insurance status looks like. Yet the counterbalance to that is is if I don't exercise, then I suffer the slow death of being too fat and lazy. I think I swung a little too hard in the latter direction.

I also need to do my laundry more often, and showering more often + making dirtier laundry because I've been working out more often would be a good thing IMHO. It's been my forcing function.

I've also been thinking about the weekly updates I wanted to make to my technical blog. I stopped issuing them regularly after I started my contract-to-hire role, and I've gotten so comfortable I let them fall by the wayside. I think there's plenty of opportunity for me to learn + grow with this company, but I think I need to be mindful that my career and learning progression is my responsibility, and I should exercise my agency over that fact.

So today I pinned the 7-minute workout by New York Times to my Firefox pinned tabs. It's a webapp, and a damn good one too, which is super nice for a Linux laptop, so hopefully that will help me keep up the workout. And the feeling nice part, that was weird, but it felt good. Maybe that will help me build a better habit.