Weeknote 51: Romance in the Real World
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Weeknotes
In which I uninstall all the dating apps, find a gentler exercise routine, and ban the cats from sleeping in my bedroom.
- Tuesday afternoon weeknote? Why not? My website, my rules.
- Blame the lack of weeknotes in the last few weeks on my ill-fated efforts to start exercising. This is what’s been happening, on loop, every single week: I attempt to kick off an exercise routine on Monday morning, feel great for a few hours, start feeling progressively worse as the day wears on, end the day with a bad cold, and have to spend the rest of the week recovering. I don’t know about other people, but sickness and exhaustion don’t quite put me in a writerly mood.
- I’ve finally figured out an exercise routine that is ridiculously, laughably, stupidly slow and gentle. It doesn’t make me fall ill every time I work out, so I’m going to stick to it for a while. If bodies are temples, then mine is an abandoned ritual site for some kind of dimension-spanning Lovecraftian terror.
- I’m now focusing all my energy on fixing my health. I’ve put a lot of things on hold just so I can get to a baseline level of fitness that is reasonable for somebody my age. I still can’t tell if this is an after-effect of getting COVID, a result of getting older, or just the natural consequence of months of sedentary living. One of these days I’ll take myself to a doctor, I promise.
- Summer is slowly making its presence felt in Bangalore, which means my cats are full of boundless, murderous energy. They’ve started to wake up at 4AM so they can rip each other’s guts out. They choose to have their fights inside my room, often on my bed, sometimes right on top of my body, and so they’ve been banned from the bedroom until the weather turns cold again.
- My doctor cut the dosage of my anxiety medication in half yet again, and she says I should be off the drugs in another two months or so! I’ve been having periods of increased anxiety since I switched to the lower dose, but I’ve had enough therapy by now to be able to manage it on my own.
- I’ve been using dating apps for nearly a decade, but they’re not working for me anymore. While I’ve had a moderate amount of success using them for casual flings, I haven’t been able to find a fulfilling relationship through them. It’s clear that I need to look elsewhere if I want a long-term partner, so I’ve removed all the dating apps from my phone. Instead, I’m going to (gasp) look for romance in the real world.
- All I want to do lately is read, which is in sharp contrast to how I was feeling just a few weeks ago. I’m currently making my way through Stephen King’s Christine, which is pretty standard King fare. I love pretty standard King fare. My patience for literary writing has been wearing thin, and Stephen King checks all my boxes for what I’m looking for in my fiction these days: stories that are simply fun, with no pretense of literary merit, no attempts to discuss the “human condition”, and no compulsion to enumerate the myriad failings of our societies. I’m looking for stories told well, and that’s all. When I finish reading Christine, I have a few romance novels lined up in my TBR. And some crime fiction after that. Eat my shorts, Dostoevsky.
Links of the Week
- Meanwhile, Over in Androidtown by John Gruber
- Why VR/AR Gets Farther Away as It Comes Into Focus by Matthew Ball
- Unbundling Tools for Thought by Fernando Borretti
- Evidence grows that mental illness is more than dysfunction by Justin Garson
- Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs by Folding Ideas
Media Diet
- Reading: Christine by Stephen King
- Playing (kinda): Rogue Legacy 2