Diet and Exercise

I want to be a better person. I don't mean morally, not because I have any fear of confronting who I am and making real change for the benefit of myself and those around me, it's just that I feel like I've pretty much got that part on lock. I carry all the required insurances, I'm careful to be exactly as disinterested and aloof to women who are strangers as I am to men who are strangers, I feel an adequate amount of bad for all the single-use plastic I continue to use... I think you'll agree, there just isn't any obvious room for improvement there.

I've always been suspicious of the New Years Resolution as it always struck me as a kind of unsustainable temporary mania, like the inevitable polar rebound after a sufficient amount of seasonal affective disorder in the week after the shortest, darkest day of the year. It's a cliche, but I've been around long enough to actually witness all the wild-eyed noobs hooning around the gym, stanking up the exercise equipment with a sadly mild amount of sweat and new lycra smell. They last until about mid-February, when one assumes the pull of Not Doing Anything is ascendant again in the neverending human internal tug-of-war between motivation and sloth that often just hovers right in the middle at crippling self-loathing.

Those of us who are blessed with a special kind of routine-related compulsivity don't have to worry about January 1st of any year because we're already locked in, until the places you like go out of business OR your own death, to a rigid system of check-ins with scheduled activities where the consequence of missing one is... well. the anxiety attack bubbling in my throat won't let me finish contemplating it in the rest of this sentence. Let the amateurs have their resolutions and their panic-flavored themed months. I'm sticking with the healthier type of self-delusion, that any of this is under any kind of control. Mostly because the idea of changing to another delusion? Way too fucking scary. This one has to pay off eventually, I just have to stick with it. Forever.

In order to actually better myself, what I have to do is trick myself into making the new thing I want to learn to do part of my regular schedule, where instead of doing a thing I avoid because it's a) hard and b) unusual, I will have to keep doing it for the sake of the structure of the entire universe. How do you think this blog business got started? Every goddamned Thursday for 15 years? That's not dedication, people, that is an act of heroism. You are welcome.

So far my choices for making myself into a more complete person are a) learn to play an instrument or b) learn a language. I've thought of a couple of choices here already, and both are problematic for the same reason: guitar, and French. If I could learn French guitar, that would solve any choice issues, but I'm not sure what that means beyond playing regular guitar while smoking. The problem with both is the crushing lack of ambition both choices represent as I kind of already know how to do both.

There's a theme to my learned skills where I pick them up, sort of plonk away at them erratically (not successfully integrated into my brain disease!) then become satisfied with a middling level of competence that isn't particularly useful in any direction. I've owned and played guitars for decades, but I still only know basic chords. I'm a pretty good strummer and a decent self-accompanist if I'm gonna sing something, but I don't have the ability to talk about guitars in any way, either in terms of music theory or gear.

I took three years of French in high school, two years of it as an undergrad and had to pass a reading proficiency test to get my master's degree. I can read it OK and I fucking crush at the phone app game Duolingo, but in France in 1998 or in Switzerland in 2022, did I speak a word of French or even really follow spoken French when immersed? Reader, I did not.

This isn't really about bettering myself then, it's more about following through on at least one of the things I picked up around 1990. My big solution so far? I've started watching a bunch of YouTube videos about guitars. And that's the magic of the internet, where sitting around procrastinating by watching YouTube feels exactly the same as working on something. I tell myself the lie that it's learning by passive reception, but no one is ever really fooled by the lies they tell themselves. Who knows better than you that you can't be trusted alone with yourself?

As I said, I got Duolingo for French, but that's just like all other apps, a dopamine stimulator designed to keep you docile and patient for when the ads run. Nothing like YouTube at all.

Where am I at, 12 days into the new year? Well, I've owned an electric guitar since about 2005 and now I can finally say I know what pickups are. So that's something. This should tell you how much I knew about the electric I bought at the time I bought it.

The main obstacle isn't really fear of failure, it's lingering, insidious contentment. If you know major and minor chords, some barre shapes, a few seventh chords and some sus2s and sus4s, you can play along (statically, without a lot of voice or variation) with just about anything. If you can manage a bare threshold of conjugated verbs and object vocabulary, you can stumble through the context of just about any French sentence. So what is my goal, what is going to push me forward? The stakes for motivation kind of have to be literally everything, meaning the potential unraveling of my emotional self or the entire universe, which for a real dyed-in-the-wool solipsist, is exactly the same thing. All I have to do is integrate practice into an unscratchable compulsion. I will keep you posted. My therapist is going to be so proud.