I Need Better Motivation

I opened a new calendar today. I used to get “August-to-August” calendars all the time, but stopped a few years back. Recently I decided to start using them again. They recall to me the school year, and its implied sense of a time period in which to get things done. I make plans for what to do during the colder months (although I don’t often follow through with them), and I try to end up better in the spring and summer.

Last fall I started losing weight, and I did very well for a while there. I lost a lot of weight. But the weight has been creeping back up, largely due to the fact I haven’t been sticking to the diet. There were several factors for this, but the main one simply is this: I lost my motivation. I had several motives for losing weight, but the strongest (albeit largely unacknowledged) motivation was that losing weight would help me look good so I could attract a mate.

When that didn’t pan out the way I had wanted, I lost the motivation to keep on track. I had not realized how much of my drive to lose weight had been motivated by the desire to find a partner. Not knowing my real motivation—and more importantly, not knowing the inherent insubstantiality of the real motivation—led me to go off track, and to start putting weight back on.

So I need to have real motivation to lose weight. Something that comes from within me, is not dependent on others for the expression of results, and carries an emotional component (in order to involve my whole self in it, and not just my intellect).

Fortunately, I’ve caught myself before I put all the weight back on, and I’m still significantly smaller than I was a year ago.

Five Years In

Next month will mark the fifth anniversary of my move to my current home. I cannot overstate the significance of this move for my life. I was finally escaping a bad homelife, and moving away from a place of degradation and impoverishment. I am extremely grateful, to this day, to the friends who helped me make the move, and helped me set up my new home.

I don't really recall what my plans were for myself once I moved in. I think I had planned to eventually get a cat (which I did), and to start dating again (which I've done, but in a limited fashion—more below). I'd planned to do more in-home entertaining, which I did for about a year-and-a-half, but that's gone by the wayside, and now my apartment is organized almost completely around the needs of myself and Manuel.

I've thoroughly settled in, and despite a massive clean-out last winter, I'm still overburdened with stuff that would be a challenge for me to move. In fact, it would take a miracle or a disaster to get me out of that place now. Even though my rent has increased a little each year, it's still much more reasonable than the alternatives.

As for going out on dates and such, I haven't done nearly as much in the last five years as I had thought I would do. Last year I did see one man very casually, and frankly I enjoy that friendship very much because it is so casual. With him, it seems, my affection for him is tempered by my love for him, in that the affection would have me cling tightly, whereas my love has me cheering, from the sidelines, for his freedom, development and independence. And that's all I'm going to say about this at this time. He's a sweetheart, and deserves everything he can grasp from the world, and then some.

As for the future, well, I'm not getting any younger. But I'm happy in my home with my cat. We'll have to see what miracles/disasters wait around the corner.

Pierce The Veil - Chemical Kids and Mechanical Brides

I have a deeper interpretation of this song: "And if there's a God I letting him go/All for You": this is the 'romance' of the God-chaser for the Divine, which transcends religiosity. Like the Sufis. I drop your idea of who God is and instead pursue the one true, indescribable ONE...

Notes on Books

Quick reading notes:

I'm nearly ¾ the way through Middlemarch. It's very interesting, although I'm wondering about Woolf's assessment that it is on the the few "adult" novels in the English language. I see the same level of miscommunication, romantic intrigue, personal crises, etc. in Pretty Little Liars, minus the creepiness. Still, a worthwhile read.

I'm tired of classical philosophy, for now, and so I'm shelving Plotinus for the time being. He's kind of tedious anyway. Every time he asserts something about the structure of the cosmos or the nature of God, I want him to prove it, and without using a Ouija Board.

Instead, I need to get into the pile of fiction that has built up on my shelves lately, especially stuff by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Conrad and Dinesen. On the other hand, I've also been feeling a renewed pull by Existentialist philosophers, and there's plenty of Kierkegaard on my shelf to start with. So we'll see.

But first, to finish Eliot.

Escaping the Trap of Resentment and Hedonism

I'd never read Augusten Burroughs; his books burst onto the scene in the 90s, when I was working at a book-and-music behemoth chain. I tended to be wary of wildly popular books, and his appeared to be such. Even to this day when I see the cover of Running With Scissors I hear snatches of tunes by Vertical Horizon and Savage Garden in my head.

I'm getting to where I try to determine whether to read a book or not based on its content, rather than its popularity. When I heard good things about Burroughs's latest book, This Is How, and read an excerpt online, I decided to give it a try. I loved it, and wolfed it down in a day. In fact, I intend to return to it time and again to recall its insights. He doesn't pull punches, or try to sugarcoat reality. I don't agree with everything he says, but I suspect if more of us took to heart and manifested some of his ideas, we'd get along a lot better in the world.

 He points out that life is inherently unfair, and that almost all of us are shortchanged in some area or another: looks, opportunities, intelligence, family situation, etc. It's very easy to let this sense of the unfairness fester into resentment. After all, if life is unfair, we feel like those who brought on the unfairness–parents, schoolmates, clergy, politicians, society at large, or even the Universe itself–owes us some payback, or at least an apology.

But no one is going to pay us back for the unfairness we've suffered, and even if we could get that preacher whose fire-and-brimstone sermon sent us into years of torment, or that boss who screwed us over, or whomever—even if we could get that person to apologize for what they did, how would that make our lives better?

The only way to make my life better is to do the work myself. No one can do it for me. I must take responsibility for my life, regardless of who fucked it up and how much, and make it better, if I want it to be better. Analysis into the whys of the fucked-up-ness will only get me so far. The better path is to try to find out how to make it better. And dwelling in resentment is the worst possible thing I can do.

Resentment is a sweet trap. It fuels righteous indignation. I get to feel holy because others have done me wrong. I get to feel righteous because I'm the victim. But it's a place of stagnation, even of deterioration. I cannot let myself get trapped in the cycle of resentment. The world may be unfair, and others, even the universe, may indeed 'owe' me. But they're not going to pay up, and the trap of victimhood and resentment is a terrible place to dwell.

I think resentment is the reason why gay culture turned to hedonism in the 1970s, and despite the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, never really got out of that mindset. If you feel like the universe has been especially harsh to you (by having you be born gay in a very homophobic culture, for example) you might feel that if you can't get payback you can at least get as much pleasure out of life as possible. So gay people turned to extremely casual sex and high levels of chemical abuse in an attempt to pursue pleasure as its own end.

I've been reading a series of columns by Nicholas Benton in which he highlights the hedonism of gay culture and contrasts it with gay life in other ages. I don't agree with a lot of what he says (for instance, I cannot find any proof that gays are inherently, congenitally different in their 'spirit' than straight people), but he brings home the cost that four decades of hedonism have exacted on gay culture.

The fact is that many of us simply refuse to grow up. And in not growing up we stagnate and become more of a burden than a benefit to ourselves, our friends and our community. If we've reached midlife and yet we're stuck in an adolescent mindset, it becomes more and more difficult to find and/or maintain long-term relationships. A lot of us cannot even imagine partnering with someone of our age cohort, finding our own and our peers' bodies too repellent to take pleasure in.

It is very difficult to seize the reins and force oneself to grow up, especially when there is very little in one's culture that would encourage one to do so. I have to do it, to escape the trap of resentment, to become a benefit again, and to make meaning for my life—but again I feel like a trailblazer, making and faking my way through a wilderness no one has bothered to explore.

Three Books

Sometimes I read one book at a time, and sometimes I read several at once. These days I'm actively in the middle of three books.

I'm reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. Ever since Ta-Nehisi Coates mentioned he was reading this novel as part of his own personal studies of the literary canon, I've been intrigued. Then when I found out that Virginia Woolf considered it one of the few adult novels in the English language, I was even more intrigued. The fact is, until now I've never enjoyed Eliot that much, and I think that I've never really been mature enough to read her for her art.

I'm also reading Thomas Vennum's American Indian Lacrosse: Little Brother of War. This is the second book by Vennum I've read. In addition to being a thoroughgoing researcher, he writes very well. My interest in lacrosse springs not only from the grace and brutality that the game mixes together, but also the history and culture. Lacrosse is the oldest team sport in North America. It's the Creator's game.

Finally, I decided to start reading Plotinus. This is the culmination of my readings in Classical European philosophy. Once I finish Plotinus, there are so many different directions I can go in: Medieval European philosophy; Islamic philosophy; Islamic mysticism; Christian mysticism; Kabbalah; even Indian philosophy. I haven't decided yet which comes after Plotinus. Rest assured I have a ton of books in all those categories.

Γνῶθι Σεαυτόν

I was sick all weekend. A very bad chest cold. It felt as if my lungs had been onstage throughout the Kids Choice Awards. I wasn't running a fever, however. I treat colds by the dictum, "Feed a cold." Especially food that has chicken in it. Since I wasn't very picky, I at a lot of crap, and now I feel all bloated. It's time to get back to the paleo-diet.

The major cause of my cold was the extreme jumps in temperature. My body has no way to adjust to 30-40°(F) changes in temperature, and lately the temps in DC have been pogoing like a kid doped up on Pop Rocks and Coca-Cola and listening to House of Pain. Mother Nature has been dicking me around.

Being cooped up at home led to a lot of self-examination. I won't go into all the boring and/or excessively revealing details here. Let's just say I intend some reformation in my life. My mental and physical health, which are really one big ball of wax called "Health", has suffered in recent weeks, and daddy is back in charge.

Another useful dictum for me is, "Moderation in all things." So I'll be altering the way I use food and alcohol, not to mention television and the internet. I'll be feeding my mind with better wisdom, and I'll work harder to balance my alone time and my social time.

Life's not over, and I have much to do.