A big head spinner for me was getting on a streetcar one day, not aware that it was full of the German engineers that designed it. I’m just bopping along with the regular din of voices, then confusion set in. I couldn’t understand what anybody was saying. They were all talking and laughing just like any normal people, but It was all just wrong.
It took a little bit to recognize the words, then I had to ask the guy next to me to make sure. But for a minute I was really afraid something in my brain was actually broken.
The issue of accents and word pronunciation in China is pretty interesting. My spoken Mandarin sucks(relative to the average Chinese national) as I grew up speaking mostly the Fujian dialect so I’ve had to spend a ton of effort over several years improving it when I started dealing with Chinese nationals as clients even though I studied Mandarin up to ‘A’ levels. My accent ended up evolving into something that sounds 90% similar to the Taiwanese accent because otherwise the local Chinese where I live have problems understanding me lol.
Since there’re so many different dialects and accents in China, when people suspect I’m not local, they usually assume I’m either from Taiwan or some obscure rural province in the South, the latter I’m assuming is because I live in a tropical part of the world so I dress like a bum when I’m not at work even when I’m in China lol.
I worked out today, but it was the first time in two weeks. At first I told myself that without vacations of any sort, there was an artificial continuity to things since the beginning of the pandemic, so I would take a week off. Then I took another.
I’m seriously considering stopping. Just…not being someone who sets alarms to go do something no one on earth cares about but me. But do I care? Enough for the alarms and time devoted and sore muscles and rapacious and constant hunger? I just don’t know.
I’ve had times like this. Whether it was emotional toll of other life stuff, time requirements, some combination of other things, they add up to me just giving up. Being tired.
It actually kinda hurts. Just don’t start smoking again.
I had this all last week. I did pick up an injury, so there’s that, but I definitely used it coupled with the general pandemic situation as an excuse to stop giving much of a shit about training.
Fortunately gyms reopen next week just in time to give me a kick up the arse.
Because it might not matter tomorrow. It might not matter next year. But when you’re 60, you’ll be grateful to have decades of activity under your belt. For me, personally, one look at the people in my life who can’t be bothered to look after themselves physically and the effect that has on their lives is enough to keep active.
This is why I would always choose to have a gym membership instead of a home gym - if you can just get yourself into the gym, then the battle’s won because once you’re there, then you work out.
If you figure out the magic motivation cure, please let me know!
Struggling with motivation myself. I will say, I switched to a new bottle of blood pressure meds (new bottle of same prescription from the last few years) and it was right around the time of the switch that I started feeling shitty and demotivated. I noticed the pills even taste different (most batches have tasted different from others, all equally awful, though), so I’m a little worried about contamination or over/under-dosing. Losartan has had several recalls in the last year or so due to contamination, so that doesn’t totally give me a warm, fuzzy feeling.
If I’m looking at a dumbbell trying to summon up enough will to put it up over my head and there’s a fridge full of ice-cream within five metres, the only thing that gets lifted is going to be a spoon to my mouth!
