blueswede

The Nine Faces of Dave
2003-06-21 08:39:18 (UTC)

ramblings on music, shoes, and exercise

Winamp kicks off the entry with Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka's "Lie
Upon Lie." Lowtax is the founder of SomethingAwful.com, and
he created the song from some poetry/lyrics/nonsense written
by the owner of an Awful Link of the Day site. Despite it's
short length (47 seconds) and lack of production quality, it
has become one of my favorite songs. No matter what my mood
happens to be, it always makes me laugh.

Now that I've alienated everybody by talking about a humor
website, I'll move on to the real stuff.

I'm giving the music of Genesis a test drive tonight while I
write this entry. I became a fan of Peter Gabriel thanks to
poor file management by KaZaA users, and when I found out he
used to be with Genesis, I figured I'd give them a shot. So
far it's pretty good stuff, though I'm only on the third of
several songs. Not as good as Peter Gabriel, but then, few
artists are.

It's funny; I never would have started listening to Gabriel
had it not been for a mistake. I was downloading some Steve
Winwood songs one night, and picked up "In Your Eyes," which
was listed with Steve Winwood as the artist. In retrospect,
it's understandable; Peter Gabriel does sound a little like
Winwood on that song, especially 1970s Steve Winwood. But
getting back to the story, I went looking for the lyrics one
day, and discovered who the actual artist was, so I went and
downloaded a whole bunch of Peter Gabriel songs, including,
of course, Sledgehammer. And I'm really glad I did.

Amazing how a seemingly innocuous error on the part of some
other KaZaA user led me to one of my new favorite artist, as
well as the band he used to perform with. It would be nice
if all such minor errors led to such wonderful results. But
as we all know, they don't. For instance, a minor error in
judgement on my part while buying running shoes led to some
blisters on my feet. I'll be seeing tomorrow afternoon if I
can exchange them for some shoes that fit properly, or maybe
just get a refund. The salesman told my father (also buying
shoes) that we could return them if any problems arose. Now
we just have to hope he was being fully honest with us; I've
had too many bad experiences with retail establishments.

My exercise plan fell back a step this morning when I found
I had gained a pound and a half since yesterday morning. I
don't quite know how this happened, but I suspect that it's
mostly water. I was kind of dried out yesterday when I woke
up, and I did drink a lot of water that day.

Still, water or no, it doesn't really make my gain in weight
any less discouraging. I've tried to adjust my plan to have
more focus on non-numeric results, but for some reason that
seems like cheating or backing down from my original goal of
losing 40 pounds. After all, even if I do gain significant
muscle mass, there's no reason I shouldn't weigh 40 pounds
less when I return to college than when I came home.

Maybe I'm attaching too much importance to my physical state
and not enough to other facets of myself. After all, two of
the chief parts of the Dave Improvement Plan were social and
psychological improvement. And while my mental state and my
sense of self are greatly improved by all the exercise, my
social life has arguably gotten worse.

The worst part is that I have no idea how to go about a plan
of social improvement. Most of the problems I have involve
my interactions with women, and my experience is extremely
limited. On top of that, most of my friends aren't a whole
lot better off than I am, and I probably wouldn't feel very
comfortable discussing my problems with the rest.

So right now I see three possible approaches:

1) I fly solo, and if I crash, I crash;

2) I hit the scene (not sure quite where that is, but it's
probably downtown somewhere) with a comrade who's having the
same troubles, and see if two heads work better than one;

3) I quit worrying about it and go running.

The first option has massive positive potential, and not too
much negative possibility. As Bob Dylan sang, "when you've
got nothing, you've got nothing to lose." Unfortunately, I
may end up just wasting time.

The second option also has massive possibility, and not much
more negative possibility. I've got a couple of friends who
probably could use to get out and about just as much as me,
though I'm not sure how things would go. My one friend and
I have had a bit of a spat as of late, but that should blow
over pretty soon. And the other guy would probably make me
look worse by comparison.

Now the third choice is what I'd pick if I were a strong and
rational human being, the sort of stoic I'd like to be. But
right now I'm still feeling pretty bad about my life, and I
don't think stoicism is going to help.

Man, this is a really bad entry. Ah well, at least I found
out that Genesis is a really good band.

As always, feedback is welcome.

This is Dave, signing off.




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