Evaluation of last week

Goal Blog

1. Overall goal is to get published.
2. This involved writing two hours everyday and drawing or other kinds of art two times a day.
3. Getting up at 5 am and writing for two hours from 5:30 to 7:30
4. Also exercise everyday
5. Save money
6. Get bills squared away
7. Cultivate more social contacts

Basically, I am feeling depressed and isolated and in a rut. I need to do something about this. I will go to church tomorrow. It’s a liberal church my sister goes to. Good place to find the kinds of people I would get along with. I have been thinking Christianity, is really no worse than any other world religion. I grew up with it, the Liberal protestant kind. I only became a fanatic later in life. Episcopalians aren’t fanatical. They aren’t narrow minded. I mean how narrow minded could they be if Phillip K. Dick was an Episcopalian? This is a liberal low key congregational church.
I tried out going to some pagan things but Its not for me, The rituals have no tradition for me, no sense of meaning. I find myself yearning for some sense of continuity in my spiritual life , not just jumping around constantly.
I will probably check out the Big UU church, too. That’s good for having a religious community while being experimental at the same time. I do have a lot of animist tendencies, but the fact is I don’t live in a tribal village. So to have a religious community, in America, church fits the bill.

I have been doing well with the exercise. Diet is getting better. I need to cut back on dairy and sugar and eat more veggies. No fried food. I also need to really get serious with the pilates. I am up to doing over 100 push ups a day. I can do 50 pretty easy for the first set. The dumbbell curls aggravated my sprained elbow, so I cut them out. I think it was shortening my biceps muscle. So that made my range of motion restricted again.

I got up at 5 am either 3 or 4 of the five days, but only wrote one day for an hour, one day and a half an hour another day. So out of a total of 10 hours of writing I had scheduled, I reached only 15% of my goal.

So pretty piss poor. But I did pretty well on the getting up early. I thought by the middle of the week, I would automatically start to adjust my sleeping patterns and begin retiring to bed earlier, but I ended up going to bed as late as usual (around midnight) and only getting 5 hours of sleep. But the goal is to get published. There is no reward for reaching this daily goals. No in is there to pat me on my back and say “good job.” Even finishing the novel is not the goal.

One thing I notice though is that by setting and achieving goals, my demeanor changes. I look and feel and act different. I look and feel more masculine, more mature, less boyish, like I have more character, I have better posture, more vigorous walk, better muscle tone.

Drifting through life is bad news. It really is being a slacker. My body and face becomes slack. As I get older if I continue to just drift along I will develop wrinkles associated with being a slacker. Certain muscles in my face will atrophy, the wrinkles will form around a permanent bored listless expression. I will exude this energy imprint of laziness. People will pick up on it subconsciously.
People that have a lot of “presence” when they are old, are people that lived their whole life on their own terms. They went out and did what they wanted to do in life, met the challenges. Their face shows a record of this. They have a strong energy imprint. Their character is carved into their face.

Having a strong grip has a lot to do with this too. Strong willed people with a lot of character have a strong grip. I mean, auto-mechanics, manual laborers etc. Have a strong grip, too, but not for the same reason. Its not totally related. You can be a CEO of a corporation and have hands as smooth and un-calloused as a baby’s, but if you are a strong willed aggressive person, you will have a strong grip.

Its like my Dad, he always had good posture, hard muscle tone, firm jaw line. He never exercised. His exercise was building his business.

Initiative is a rare thing. Not everyone has it. It’s creating something ex-nihilo from sheer force of will. Its creating something in your mind and bringing it into existence. Its power. It’s a physical exercise. It takes your whole body to do it.

So that’s why I think the push ups and pilates and the power walking is really helping me reach the goal. It gives a message to my body of what I am doing.