Adjusted Reality

I wanted to post something positive. I haven’t tackled the in-depth topics I’ve wanted because my brain is fried at it’s core.  Let me give a bit of background on the last week or so.  It’s like everyone that I have to spend significant time with in my day has been in the pissiest, most foulest, terrible, horrible, no good very bad mood and damned if it didn’t rub off on me even though I fought it hard.  So by mid-week last week I was super grumpy and joining in the mucking about in the mad mad mud of negativity with them.  My dad monopolizing the TV ALL DAY with his sports was sending me into a snarkfest.  My mom, well, saying anything in that *tone* of hers made my blood pressure jump.  I was probably snippy at Zliten for being snippy at the same things I was feeling snippy about, but I didn’t want to deal with the snippiness twice, so I was snippy about him being snippy.  Let’s not even go into the funk-y-town of negativity which is work, but let it be known there was no escape from it.

So my home life is not my own, hasn’t been for 9 days and I’m not sure when it will end.  I’m scheduled to be out and about WAY more in the next few weeks than normal due to ADGC and what seems like half my friends’ parents having procreated in January (thus having September birthdays) and then a wicked cool three day concert of awesomeness.  My dance card, as they say, is full.  Mix in a whole bunch of abnormal eating (chinese buffet food that wouldn’t stay in my belly one minute longer than deemed necessary by my intestines, bar/party snack food, and much, much, more) and the start of a vigorous exercise plan that I rocked last week into exhaustion, and am already failing at this week because I simply don’t have the time between work and events for hour and a half sweat fests, and it adds up to frustration.

And, of course, the scale isn’t budging.  It has said one hundred and goddamn sixty eight or nine for the last month when it wasn’t saying something worse.  Not that I am unhappy at this weight right now, but I do not want to stay here forever.  On top of everything else getting my knickers in knots, it’s frustrating to count calories and do *reasonably* well eating for most of the month, and beat myself into a pulpy, quivering mess at the gym and continue to see the SAME thing, when all reasonable and mathmatical calculations should show the weight declining in some way, shape or form.

So now that you know how my week was going, I needed a good night out on the town with people my own age who don’t think that that funny internet thing I do is a waste of time.

Yay for ADGC afterparties.  Last night was a lot of freaking fun.  I cruised downtown after work and met Zliten  and T at the jackalope for a few pre-open bar drinkies, then headed to the video game art exhibit at the Arthouse hosted by one of the companies that jetsers is trying to get a job with – and met up with a bunch of Zliten’s ex-coworkers that had been axed as well.  The exhibit ended up being novel but kinda lame, and of all things they ran out of ICE, so my second drink was all vodka, and it took all 5 of the people with us to finish it before we left!  Actually, my first one wasnt great either – was a cute idea in theory (it was called a pac man, which had vodka/blue stuff drink, a lemon wedge cut like pac man, and marshmallows for dots), but not in sippage, so to the peanut (drinking) gallery named Zliten it went.  We also couldn’t hear the guy speaking – the sound system was really fuzzy.  Our gaggle wanted to eat so we led them back to the jackalope for burgers and more cheap drinks.  I got a gardenburger (which was super yummy) and a few (read: half) of jetsers fries.

Then around 9 we headed to the Heatwave party at Sky Lounge which was FABULOUS.  Full open bar, I mean, I was drinking Makers Mark all night for free.  Can’t beat that. ::grin::  A good, energetic crowd.  Funny to watch the suits walk around scoffing and calling the industry people monkeys.  I heard some guy who was like a junior suit tell what was obviously his boss “I’ll be your clown”.  There were wheelings and dealings and little private side meetings all over.  There was also quite a few people I haven’t seen in a while from SOE so it was cool to catch up.  The guys hosting the party were actually pretty cool to talk to, they had a decent idea for a business model (incubating game ideas and then handing them off).  I also got handed two purple boas which I rocked all night.  At one point we had Lum the Mad and Scott Hartsman sitting at one table with us (and the drunk girl that apparently adopted him for the night – poor Lum), and I instantly felt the appearance of thousands of MMO geek boners go “sprooooiiiinnnngggg” simulatenously throughout the world without them even knowing why.  Hardy har.  Requisite bad camera phone picture of me rocking the boa included free of charge.

I may not die by Sunday from exhaustion, stress, and being pissy like I had feared this weekend.  I’m totally awake and happy today!  But it might have been also that I spent last night drinking all caffeinated diet coke and I have a residual buzz, we shall see by the end of today.  Tonight is squeezing in a short workout, dinner with the ‘rents at Stubbs downtown, and then the SOE/PlayStation party.  The place looks pretty sweet, and I have a ride home instead of having to drive, so yay for that.

So here is where I take a stand on that whiny, poor me, wah mood I’ve been in lately.  I refuse to weigh until Thursday because it could potentially piss me off, and I don’t need that.  If it’s lower, great, if not, I’ll wait until I have a quiet day to be grumpy about it (or not even be grumpy, that would be even better).  I refuse to be frustrated with myself for the lack of progress lately.  I’m stressed and got a lot of shit going on, and the stress itself is enough to keep weight on when everything else is going right, so I don’t need to stress more about being stressed, right?  So I’m gonna do the best I can without driving myself crazy until things smooth out (hopefully next week), and not be angry with myself for having an off-month.  If I don’t get to 165 by October 1st, it’s not the end of the world.

My parents will soon be at their own dwelling where we will not be in each others faces every moment, and I’ll have my house and a not-so-pissy jetsers back.  Caring about the politics at my job right now and thinking about what’s going on here in any capacity but what’s required to actually DO my job is going to have to wait until the rest of this shit resolves itself.  Things are looking good for jetsers and the co-op, and we aren’t even remotely close to out of money yet (or even out of severance and PTO reimbursal), so that’s barely even on my radar to stress about.

I am going to spend today happy and in a good mood, and there ain’t no one that’s going to stop me except me.  Tomorrow, well, she’s another day and I’ll see if I can keep this good vibe thing going.  My mood is a choice, and why choose to be in anything but a good one, right?

Something I hear on MMORPG message boards fairly often is “OMG, the devs must have hired a psychologist to figure out how to make us play more” or something to that effect.  While I haven’t ever witnessed this first or second hand, having an understanding of how human behavior and interactions with human controlled characters or humanized AI generally works can definitely be beneficial.  In plainer words, just stopping and thinking how you would react to the scenario you have thought out and planned to impose on your player base.  Now ask a few other people, hopefully of varying backgrounds.  Having the ability to pull the proverbial puppet strings of a whole world for a few years really taught me more than I could have ever learned by theories – and thus the exploration of psychology of games.  A quick intro into WHY this interests me is probably warranted – so the first installment is an introduction of sorts.

Oddly enough, when I dug into my about me section, I realized that I had omitted to say that I graduated cum laude with a honors BA in Psychology (with a minor in Theatre) from the University of Nevada, Reno.  When I was in school, I loved it – just the act of learning new things and gaming the system to get the best grades I could with the least amount of effort got me all riled up.  I always thought I would be one of those “career students” that was always taking a class of some sort.  I had been all my life, it was all I knew, and I was terribly uncomfortable with the idea of the real world.

Then, I decided on a psychology major.  My motivation was two-pronged.  First, I wanted to know what made people tick.  Second, it was the least-boring-while-being-somewhat-useful degree I could think of, considering my other ideas were education, art, theatre, and creative writing/english.  After one class in education, I realized I was making more money waiting tables part time than I would when I graduated, and I had no real passion for it.  The rest were simply things I liked doing – but I didn’t figure I could really make much of a living with ’em.  Psychology held my interest, and at least the idea of real world value.

I also decided to go for the honors degree.  I mean, I had no idea what I really wanted to do, so being on top of the heap for grad school entry was definitely something I wanted to consider.  I mean, the longer you can stay in school the longer you can put off real life, right?  Also, honors kids got first crack at registration, so as long as I kept my status, I had my choice of classes.  Anyone that went to a crowded ass state school knows how important this is.  Since it took me 2 years to really decide that was the way I wanted to go, I spent the majority of my junior and senior years taking psych classes, except when I was taking theatre.

The first year, I found some things I really liked (biological or neural pyschology, and humanistic/existential psychology) and some things I didn’t (child development, abnormal psychology).  Really, when it comes down to it, take a look at this list.  I pretty much loved everything about foundation and principles (learning theories and how things work), but I didn’t want to apply it to real life in a capacity where something was wrong with someone else (applied methods and populations).  Mostly because they start telling you how to push drugs at an early age in your potential psych career.  I got into a lot of trouble asking in class “ok, so you give this medication, but what about dealing with the actual root of the problem”.  So I knew I was never going to make it through grad school to be a shrink, but the research papers and experimentation and theories?  I loved them.

That is, I loved them until the end of my senior year.  Since I spent so little time schmoozing around the department, I was without a mentor for my senior thesis (the major part of the honors degree requirement).  I finally begged one of my professors from a summer school class to bring me on as an assistant to his research assistant to study color vision and aging.  I got to hook people of all ages to electrodes to see how their brains reacted to different color patterns on monitors and read thousands of pages of literature on the subject.  I’m published out there somewhere, which would have been a big deal at 22 if I would have decided to keep on going.

My professor just ended up being a jackass about everything.  I went from being ready to graduate six months early (a year if I would have loaded up summer school) to graduating in August 2001 instead of May.  I actually did not technically graduate until I was moved to San Diego and had my foot in the door at SCEA.  Every week I would submit my paper, and every week he would have changes.  I’d fix those changes and submit again, and there would be more.  This literally happened for MONTHS.  He also wanted to try to keep me there another semester in the fall to run more subjects for his paper to get the grade and credit, and I convinced him to let me out at graduation, just continuing to revise the paper and submit it over email – over and over, until it was finally accepted.

That day in August when I finally got credit complete notification (with an A to boot, woohoo), I knew that the world of academia was maybe not as happy and fun as I had dreamed it would be.  There would always be someone like that professor that would ruin research work for knowledge and advancement, at best being indescisive or at worst power hungry and lusting for more credits and publications, not caring who they stepped on.  I don’t care how big your academic-peenie is when my degree and/or career is on the line.  After school, I pretty much became one with my couch out of frustration and exhaustion and I took a year off and started to look for a real world job.  I was too beat up mentally and emotially to go back just yet.

What happened then, in the fateful summer of 2001?  Part 2 soon!

In light of the lack of updates this week, it’s time for the contiguously challenged post topic of 5 Random Things!

1.  My parental units (hehe) are in town and staying with me, waiting to close on their house.  Friday’s the day, and then their stuff gets here 0-10 days after.  Our friend T mentioned to Zliten that my parents were staying with us for 3+2d6 (for non table-toppers, not that I’m really one but I understand dice rolls, that’s 3 + the total of 2 six sided dice).  I liked the sentiment!

2.  I have a lot of serious, in depth posts rattling around in my head, but I haven’t been able to unearth them completely from my brain.  So, while I’d like to discuss the psychology of games and why I really want to lose the vanity weight, my brain just isn’t ready to let go of them.  So maybe this will be a light week of posting.  And maybe by acknowledging that I am feeling blocked, my muse (not these guys, though I do like their epic, histrionic music style ) might come to light and I’ll write in SPITE of that.  Who knows?

3.  My dad cornered me last night and said that I looked really, really skinny.  In a good way.  From the guy who berated me in public in front of the family a few years ago, it was good… I dunno, not vengeance, not validation… I guess just nice to prove it to everyone I was not a lost cause physically.  I didn’t have to be the fat daughter or the fat girlfriend or the fat boss or the fat friend.  A lot to read into a literally 2 minute conversation, I guess.

4.  I finally read through all the xkcd archives.  Existentialism and math geekery at it’s finest.  I just want more!

5.  I did my first “official” timed 5k on the treadmill yesterday.  Official, meaning I was running for the distance as fast as I could.  I did 3.1 miles in 32:20.  It’s not great, but it’s a start.  My goal is under 30 mins.  Since I never run on the pavement, I think I’d be happy with 35 mins in a for real race.  I’d say I’d train on it so I could get better, but it just HURTS me bad the next day.  Since I already have legacy gymnastic ankle injuries, I sort of consider myself lucky to be able to run and don’t want to press my luck.  Maybe when I have a bit less to lug around?  Until then, I love me the treadmill!

Every month I try to update and tweak around my exercise plan a bit, because we all know that doing the same thing over and over makes your weight loss and fitness level stagnate.  I also get into trouble one way or another if I don’t walk into the gym with a plan.  I’m not quite as adventurous as Charlotte, but I do like trying new things, or old things in new combinations.  In June, I pretty much concentrated on the hundred pushup challenge while maintaining my cardio, and working fake HIIT on the treadmill.  July, I worked on increasing my top running mileage from 3 to 4.  August, I cut my 1 mile time down from 9:30 to 8:55 and worked the abs hard.  On off days, I did DDR, yoga, skating, and/or climbing.

So, what am I going to do this month?  It’s been hard to come up with a plan, because all I want to do is ADD to my program, but I only have a limited time to do everything.  I want to add Cybil the Cybex into my life, and become one with the assisted pullup/dip machine but I also want to add back my yoga and not give up DDR and still run distance and HIIT and improve my mile and…ARGH!!!  It’s too hard, peoples!  I need the ability and the capacity to spend 3-4 hours at the gym per day.  In other words, have someone pay me the same salary I make herding cats and posting on my blog (otherwise known as producing video games) to workout.

Well, it’s not going to happen any time soon, so I have to pick and choose.  And since, it’s the first month at the gym and I’m going to make use of it most days.  After skipping yoga for about a month, I realized that I just CANNOT do that if I want to keep pushing my running further and faster, so that’s gotta be there too.  It’s also promising to get colder soon, which means I will be undertaking a 5k soon, though I’m not even signing up until it gets out of the 90s (and I’m hoping to not have to run in the morning).  So here is the first version of my September workout plan, complete with time estimates…

Day 1: 20 mins on Cybil, 20 mins arms/squats, 20 mins running

Day 2: 5k run for time, 20 mins core/bootie, 15-20 mins yoga at home

Day 3: 40 minutes of DDR, 15-20 mins yoga at home

Day 4: 1 mile run for time, 20 mins full body strength, 20 mins on Cybil

Day 5: 4 mile run, 15-20 mins yoga at home

It looks sane at first glance, but let’s dig a bit deeper to find the problems.

Day 1 is actually seems sane, until you realize that I’m probably not going to stop at 20 minutes doing an arm rotation.  I love me some arm workouts.  And now I have more machines to play with.  I do pullups and tricep dips and lat raises and bicep curls and tricep kickbacks and modified bench presses and shoulder presses and now 40 minutes have gone by.  Since I’m in denial and say that I only have 60 minutes, 5 days a week to work out, I have to pretend that I intend to do 20 minutes and then… oops, I spent 40 mins doing it.  Every time.  So realistically, I’m at 1 hour 20 mins here.

Day 2 is already screwed from the get-go.  While I would LOVE to run a 30 minute 5k, I’m closer to 33 right now, and with warmup and cooldown that’s at least 40 mins.  My core/bootie regiment is a little more sane than my arms, so 25-30 mins is much more accurate – though I haven’t tried any of the machines at the gym so I could be just as screwed.  Then, I have to fit in some yoga SOMEWHERE, so add another 15-20 mins.  So, for day 2, I’m somewhere between 1 hour 20 and 30 minutes.

Day 3, again, looks sane.  But 40 minutes of DDR time is really closer to an hour because it only counts time during the songs, not during loading screens.  Which is GOOD, but definitely takes longer.  Then yoga again, for a grand total of 1 hour 20 minutes.  This is also the day I might blow off if I’m heading out to skate or climb over the weekend, and planning ahead.

Day 4 is a day of denial as well.  If I can’t do an arm workout in 20 mins, I surely can’t do a full body strength training session in 20, even if I cut some exercises.  Add in the rest of the cardio and we’re looking at 1 hour 30, easy.

Day 5 is slightly sane.  Right now, 4 miles and warmup/cool down is about 50 minutes.  With yoga, I’m only looking at 1 hour 10 minutes at the most.  This is also probably the day I would blow off the run to either rock climb or skate if I needed something fun to do and had already done my DDR workout.

Even without the rose colored time traveling glasses to make these workouts actually fit in my schedule, I’m going to give it a try.  I took it a little easier for the last 6 weeks or so because of crazy work hours, and recovering from crazy work hours, so I can definitely use a month of ass kicking.  Plus, my parents will be staying with us for a while starting next week, so I can definitely use some extended *me* time away from the house.

This is my plan, and I’m sticking to it.  I’ll be back with a workout report at the end of next week and let you know how it went!

I like description in threes (she’s a lean, mean, fighting machine who needs a tall, cool, and frothy pint of beer…doesn’t that just flow?), and lists in fives (the last five fruits I’ve eaten have been grapefruits, oranges, grapes, peaches, and strawberries…just gives enough variety to get to know a person and their tastes), so five random things it is!  Just to have some sort of outlet from my randomness, I’ll save them up to be a decent chunk of post instead of just an offhand “Hmmm, I went to the store today and saw the cutest little mini-peaches called donut peaches“.

1.  Tuesday’s run was a new personal (adult) best mile run time of 8:55.  I’m only 1:05 away from my best time ever, 7:50, which was in junior high school.  I’m improving between 5-10 seconds most weeks, so I’m not too far away until I hit a wall.

2.  I just watched The Big Lebowski for the first time.  Yeah, I know, I’m terribly late to the party.  What an awesome movie.  Some days, I just wish I could be the Dude… totally oblivious and in a white-russian-and-illicit-substance fog.  Someone at least needs to bring the wearing of bathrobes as a overcoat into style.

3.  Tuesday also was my first day at the new gym.  There are soooo many machines, it’s unfathomable that they could ever all be full, but I’m used to the office gym which has one treadmill, a bike, a rickety elipse which I won’t touch, and a perpetually broken stairmaster.  I did go around 6:30, so I’ll see if I change my tune today when I head there closer to 5.  The funniest thing is – they have alarms on the weights, so if you drop them, it makes this obnoxious air horn sound (trying to embarrass the lunkheads who grunt and drop weights, the gym is all about not being pretentious).  This guy would totally do it on purpose.  I’m totally frightened that I’ll do it on accident.

4.  Had a great conversation with an ex-coworker of Zliten’s Wednesday night.  I love talking psychology with people that can talk it back – it totally wakes my brain up. It’s also incredibly inspiring to hear about someone who beat the odds just by getting into his own head and solving the problem. Totally reinforces my ideals that people can do amazing things just by giving their mind a chance.  This has totally started the wheels spinning for a post or series of posts, but worthy of note immediately.

5.  Why is frozen fruit just so good?  I had a snack of frozen strawberries and frozen grapes last night while I was waiting for Zliten to decide he was hungry enough to grill us some dinnah.  Amazing.  And they don’t go bad!  I’ve had these grapes for 3 weeks now and they are as delicious as when I first got them.  Seriously, if you’re having issues with sweet cravings or just want something quick that doesn’t go bad and is healthy for you – frozen fruit, baby.