I have some sort of muscular-skeletal weirdness that
causes all of my socks to get holes in the same spot with annoying frequency.
Last week when I was putting my socks on in the pool locker room, I swear some
woman noticed and actually looked at me askance. I’m convinced she was grossed
out by my sock hole. I don’t know why she felt my socks were any of her
business, but Little-Miss-Perfect-Sock’s furtive glance at my footies and her subsequent
mouth-curl of disgust did not escape my attention. I’m glad she has all the time
in world to go around replacing her socks at the first sign of wear, but I have
a job, and hobbies and stuff.
Speaking of time sucks like jobs and hobbies, the
latest in the hobby category for me has been “Stranded Deep”, one of the many survival
video games floating around on Steam. I’m not generally a fan of the survival
genre, but I downloaded it about a week ago and have been weirdly obsessed with
it ever since. After several unfortunate perma-deaths and lots of deep dives
into Youtube instruction videos, I’ve finally hit my stride! I got the food and
water thing down to a science, so I’m not constantly getting dysentery, and I was
ridiculously proud when I built my first structure: A humble supply shack. It’s
a cheaply produced game and a bit glitchy, but the graphics are colorful and
beautiful, and it’s giving me a real charge. My brain is bathed in feel-good
chemicals from learning something new, and I think it’s actually improving my
terrible sense of direction, because I’m forced to use a compass frequently. I
have a nice little encampment set up now, and my next goal is to build a
motorboat so I can get around faster and plunder the earth’s natural resources
more efficiently.
As predicted, my grand goal of the 6:00 a.m.
swim has not worked out…yet. But I was listening to the Joe Rogan podcast the other
day, and he may have successfully shamed me into forcing myself to try it. I’m
a big fan of Joe Rogan, but sometimes he does go on a bit too much about the mechanics
of maintaining his meat castle. On this particular podcast, he gave a little spiel
about his intense physical discipline and how he’s good at forcing himself to
do physically hard things and then upping the ante on the level of challenge. I
rolled my eyes terminally hard at this, but he was right when he said that the
first step is the hardest. I’m no Joe Rogan when it comes to physical skill or discipline--I'm uncoordinated, and I
must distract myself at all costs during exercise, then bribe myself with rewards. We can’t all have the self-mastery and iron will of an ex-MMA
fighter. But I could push it a little bit more, and as I age, I need to be
constantly vigilant against the threat of total middle-aged blobbery and muscle
degeneration. So, I’m off for a swim, even though I don’t really feel like it.
I’ll try for the 6:00 a.m. jaunt again this week. Stayed tuned!
Not the official game trailer, but I love the
song. (Our Last Night - "Sunrise")
--Kristen
McHenry
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