Friday, May 1, 2015

Cutting Weight, Healing Leg: Part 3


I weighed 163 pounds this morning. I ate approximately 2,560 calories today, and burned approximately 210 calories doing exercise (yoga).

Leg: y'know. Right direction. Glad it came out of yesterday fine, there was one sec I was worried, but fine.


"What part of your past are you trying to atone for?"

I don't remember if those were S the novelist's exact words, but that was her sentiment. Everyone around the table, in a sun-dapped backyard in Venice (Los Angeles, not the other one) went ooooohhh; like "burn", I guess.

She'd asked this, S -- who was (still is! I am sure!) winsome and red-headed and gracefully accepting/deflecting another member of our party's probing personal questions about her, which was partially why the big ooooohhh: role reversal, the questioned now asking tough questions.

I had been sitting there, kind of spaced out, and everyone knew it was cuz I was hungry because I was cutting for the fight. Etc.

I'm actually not going to rattle on with this anecdote; that's the nub. The nub really being a return to the question that is animating this series, at least here at its start. "Why do this?" I don't think, as S cheekily posited, that I'm exorcising (exercising. har.) some angry / scared / compensatory inner thing. WELL. Maybe the last one; it could be that there is something in some people that when your life is so good, so rich, you feel that you have to test something. But even writing that frankly it feels like obvious bullshit, and even sort of wasteful (if things are so good, shouldn't you build on them to make more? And that's more what this feels like). So, that's not it, either.

I do think there's a sometimes hard-to-bridge gap between people who derive deep pleasure/satisfaction from challenging, pushing, and yes-sometimes-hurting their bodies and those who do not. I'm not saying S is a "does not". I don't know her. I'm saying that part of it is just really simple: net-net, I like it. It's hard sometimes, but I like it.

But I also take her point, and I'm asking myself the same question in less pointed terms. What are the particularities of this: the little rushes of fear, and excitement, that overtake you every day; the fact that I am at this point always mentally and emotionally (nevermind physically. obviously physically) affected by hunger, mild to not-so-mild; the fact that you could get hurt (probably not. but you could.); the fact that you could hurt someone else (ditto)? What are the things in me that makes me want to do this?

It's actually a rich and complete feeling, facing these questions in myself.

I have no idea how to answer htem.

It's also a good lesson, and maybe that's what I'll close this on, so I can offer something a little thought-ish instead of just questions. I have, for a long time, had an itch to fight. Not in my life, never that, but as sport. I've done 2 so far; this will be the 3rd. I know that there is an end to my road with this sport, somewhere not impossible to imagine; I'm 35, I want to be active for years, and if you're as bad as I am at fighting you should not be fighting much past my age if you want to stay healthy for other activities at a good level. I know all that. Et cetera et cetera.

But right now what it is is that I'm doing the thing that I was itching to do but was hard. And scratching that itch.

It would be a terrible bummer if my leg got re-screwed-up and I had to drop this fight; that's looking okay touch wood. It would be a terrible bummer to get hammered and injured again in the ring, as I did in my fight last October. It would be a disappointment, but a noble one, to have a good fight but lose. It would be a glory to have a good fight and win. But whatever happens I am doing it. I'm doing it.

The things that we want and always wonder if about, do not have to stay if. We can do them and, in so doing, relax the threads that pull some of us (it can't just be me) many ways. Satisfy desires; answer some of the questions. They lead to others, unavoidably--thanks, S--but still: we can forward ourselves through more than just time.

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