From Stasis to Change

So for the past 2 years I’ve been dishonest with myself on my overall diet and fitness activity. Last Sunday that stagnation of body and mind came to an end.

I’ve been tracking calories for about a week now and it’s actually become something of a fun game/challenge to try to hit a calorie deficit. So far I wasn’t able to do it until last night and I’m mighty proud of that, as minor of an accomplishment as it might be.

So nutrition is now getting back on track after this 2-year hiatus in the hell of greasy garbage I kept funneling into my face. Burgers, Tex-mex, Italian, and deep-fried food daily. Part of the problem is that I was under extreme stress from family while also trying to perform at peak productivity at work. The equation simply didn’t work. I spent a lot of time emotionally stress eating to weather the storm of abuse from family. After I walked out of that situation three months ago, my brain has been working through the PTSD and I am slowly returning to the self-esteem I had before my back failed me and I underwent surgery.

So the next goal to tackle will be fitness. I’ve lost a lot of muscle and gained a lot of fat since the surgery. PT didn’t happen because I couldn’t afford it and didn’t build in time for it when I could afford it, and that had an impact on my recovery. But as I said above, let me not delude myself here. I was already overweight before the back surgery. In fact the last time I was anywhere near “fit” was 2015, when I was regularly weightlifting on a push/pull/legs split routine 3 days a week with a 90-min cardio session every Saturday.

I hope to get back to that place eventually, so in accordance with the dietary tracking I started walking last Tuesday. My goal right now is small; a 30-minute walk 4 days a week. I have so far walked every evening except for this past Saturday and Sunday. I was supposed to walk yesterday but after work I was so tired I fell asleep at 6pm and didn’t wake until 9:30pm so I panicked and ran the calorie numbers and ordered something that would keep me under my daily intake limit. That took quite a bit of research since the restaurant website’s calorie calculator and MyFitnessPal were different by about 60 calories and that freaked me out on which number to pick as the true calorie count for the meal. I ended up going with the restaurant site’s calorie count since it’s the higher number and I’d rather play worst-case-scenario with myself on that rather than try to “cheat” the system even if it was only by 60 calories. The point is that I cannot lie to myself anymore and that’s it.

My weight goals are no longer as lofty or insane as they used to be. I’ve come to terms with the fact that with my current height and activity level I may not be able to hit the target 180-190lbs for my height and age until sometime next year. The last time I was that weight was when I was 19 and my diet was horrible back then as I was sort of yo-yoing between the master cleanse diet and junk food to keep my weight down to near 175lbs. So the question then is, what exactly is my weight goal?

Simply put, it is to lose 20lbs in 9 months. To this end I am also employing intermittent fasting with the 16:8 schedule and increasing my daily water intake too. First meal at 12pm and last one around 6:30pm. The mornings are difficult as I’m hungry upon wake up but after 2-3 cups of black tea and several glasses of water I don’t feel as awful. Plus, there’s something pathologically there where if I stay hungry, my brain stays sharper at work.

Anyways I’m back to work, later.

Getting Used To It

It’s all slowly coming together now. I’ve tied up loose ends from the old place and have slowly started getting the new place together. I’ll probably be spending a lot of time cooking up random stuff in the weeknights and have either Friday or Saturday as my designated cheat day.

I’ll say this: avocado oil works wonders for cooking anything. It’s pricey but I’m at the point now where I can afford to think about what I’m putting into my body. It’s not college anymore, and I gotta look out for my body and treat it better so it gives me back the performance I expect from it.

In other news, I’ve quickly realized that on nights where the wind readings are higher than normal, the window right next to my bed becomes a howling wind tunnel at night. I’m in the process of getting some thick blackout/noiseproofing curtains up in the meantime but for any of you DIYers out there, if you have any ideas on further soundproofing a large living room type window from road noise that’d be greatly appreciated.

Over and out.

The Myth of the Sinking Ship III: A Way Off This Rock

This is prolific posting by my standards but in recent news I’ve struck out once more on my own to be independent and this time it’s permanent. Cutting out awful people and opportunists from my life has been an ongoing battle since 2010. But as of like a week ago I just snapped and said enough is enough. I’m a human being damnit, my life has meaning!

In my previous efforts to cut out shitty people, my inner optimist just kept saying “what if they’ve changed? Maybe this time will be different! Maybe I can convince them to not extort me and keep cool heads! Maybe diplomacy will work this time!”

I now realize those are all lies I’ve concocted internally to rationalize the behavior and actions of the worst people in my life. But a week ago something crashed over me, and it was a wave of needing inner peace so badly that I felt like offing myself to make that happen. I haven’t entertained those kinds of thoughts since I was 17, and a decade later having that swirl around in my mind made me snap and make a decision to get the fuck out of my current place and never look back. But facts are facts. I did the best possible thing for myself mentally and physically.

It takes guts to stand up for yourself, but it takes brains to pick your battles. I’m no longer about this kind of stupid macho self-asserting fakeness because I’m not 21 anymore, and I know the emotional traps and triggers my family tries to bait me with and I’m just too old and done with that game. I’m evolving to be shrewd and a bit more logical and strategic about how I conduct myself, and that includes picking my battles. My family is not worth the energy expenditure or stress.

Viruses Oh My

So it’s been a fascinating 6 weeks. In that time, COVID-19 aka Wuhan flu aka novel coronavirus has swept the world like a game of Plague Inc.

Where I live, some government offices have shut down and as expected, fucking toilet paper has disappeared completely. So far there’s one reported death due to the virus, and 9 new cases since yesterday.

Work has started to ramp up but the offshore teams I work with are all starting to go remote. There was a highly contentious 1000-person meeting today with the execs where people were asking why they were being mandated to come into the office (temporary rotation schedule in place) especially when the already-offshore teams, like in my project, didn’t matter?

I’ll tell you exactly what the fuck this is. It’s corporate shithousing around. I experienced this to a degree in the first company I worked for out of university. They started doing layoffs about 2 years ago so the info we grunts kept getting beaten over the head with was “stay at your desk from 9-5 to appear busy or risk getting canned”. This is a practice known as “seat-warming” and it’s a complete joke. It only leads to inevitable burnout and frustration at the management, two things that can make a programmer walk away to a better place for more money, or (gulp) never look at a keyboard again.

I’m at least jaded enough this time around to see through the fucking nonsense I’m getting hit with constantly about the virus at work. Really the worst part about this thing is that last week when I was still in the office, everyone was walking around coughing and sneezing. It’s ridiculous how the culture at this workplace is like “go to work even if you’re sick”

Me in the other hand choose and prefer isolation. I was doing it before it became known by normies and media as “social distancing”. That’s also a crock of shit. Anyone with half a brain, a decade of memes under their belt, and general understanding of the internet, and play video games occasionally can call bullshit on it. Modern AAA titles have had online mode for a while now, while the campaign-based video games are now evolved enough to cross into VR. So yeah you’re damn right I’m enjoying being alone! It’s my natural state, because people are generally insufferable and extremely narcissistic. I don’t fuck with people, or the world. ‘Nuff Said.

Holidaze II: Electric Boogaloo

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to the interweb folks out there.

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Work’s been going slow and steady so far. Not really much to report at the moment besides some super fun Internet Explorer 11 issues that I’ll definitely explore in a future post. For now all I’m going to say about that is

Why the FUCK are people still using Internet Explorer in 2019? Do you hate yourself? Are you tied down and being forced to use it?

I’ve been slowly upgrading my cubicle with better hardware one month at a time so that at some point I can smoothly connect and work from just about anywhere. The digital nomad dream.

 

 

I’ve hit a few concerts towards the end of Q3 that were pretty good.

Like this fucking guy

 

Bought a Switch and got hardcore back into Smash like my old ranked days in Melee. And speaking of that I may or may not go off into an extended rant about how broken some of the classic character hitboxes are, and how certain combos that were so smooth in Smash are now either unusable or too damn slow to use because of how much longer the knockdown recovery invincibility time is. It feels like an extra 0.3 seconds, maybe more. And even in casual play, if you’ve ever played Melee regularly you’ll definitely feel that as a pain point with the new Smash. But I digress, onto other shit right?

 

I have some plans in motion now to ring in the new year in a far-off place so that should be fun. And having a companion with an equally shitty sense of humor as myself there makes it that much more entertaining.

 

Looking back to the holiday season back in 2015. Things have definitely gotten better since then. I’m lucky enough to have broken out of the wage-slave cycle and bills are more or less automated now. It’s amazing how much stress was lifted off my back once I graduated and started working for a bigger company, despite the petty corporate bs that came with the territory. I’m content now to just exist with a shit-eating grin and live life to the max outside of work. Think weekend warrior but 24/7.

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All right that’s all I got people. See ya next year and keep on fighting the good fight.

The Myth of the Sinking Ship II: A Way Out

Escape fate at all costs.

 

So once again, there’s a certain freedom in taking the power back. To become autonomous is to become whole once again.

I’ve found a passage to the next gig. It’s a massive pay bump as well, and close to home and the nightlife district.

 

Once I’m settled into the new gig after a month or so, I’m gonna tear this town a new one over a weekend or two.

 

Professionally, I’m not allowed to say “fuck you” to past employers because it looks bad and it’s generally frowned upon amongst the pasty whitebread-ass motherfuckers making and setting all the rules at the top of the corporate game. But here, on this blog, it’s a bit more relaxed. I am running this one-man circus show. Therefore, “fuck you” to a certain past employer. Why? Because I can.

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Get Up, Stand Up

I’m roughly 6-7 weeks out from surgery. I returned to work earlier than I was supposed to which has caused me to be in constant pain at least three times a week.

Truth is, I had to go back to work. Some part of me wanted to escape the house for a change of scenery.

The first couple weeks at work I was pretty useless. It was mostly 4-5 hour workdays that involved reading docs, talking to people and generally catching up at a high level to see where I fit into the big picture again.

The beginning of last week was the first time I started churning out code again as part of little fixes/patches to the current system and talked to people about my approach to several tasks from a design/process POV to make sure I was on the right track.

This might be a famous quote but I read somewhere that the hard part of software development isn’t the coding. It’s knowing which problems to solve in the first place. I can’t know for sure what those problems  are because for the first time in my career I’m getting handed very high level objectives and being told to translate them into application features/code.

Previously I was in a rut, being given much less vague but at the same time less impactful tasks since they were really all contained within the development part of the agile lifecycle with barely any real testing work given on my part.

I do however have a feeling that I’m gonna be doing a reverse waterfall process again on the current project since nothing has been done from a PM/BA requirements standpoint and part of an existing solution will be delivered very soon. I imagine that by the time the warranty work is wrapped up, it’s gonna be on me to write requirements based on stuff I’ve already implemented just so PMs can call it complete by their metrics.

On one hand I’m now going to be knee deep pretty much across lifecycle now but on the other, that means I need to find a bunch of shortcuts, hacks and tools to speed up my development work ASAP.

It’s The current development environment is basically free-tier top to bottom and that means I’m already playing with one hand tied behind my back productivity-wise.

I can invest in the speed up tools on my own dime but I figured the company wouldn’t cheap out on IT like that. Guess not.

Here I go again I guess. Hopefully no further surgeries required by the time I’m done with things here.

Back into it…

Tomorrow I return to work.

It’s been a relatively crap holiday. The best holiday years I’ve had in the past were when my family went out of town/country for the rest of the year. Having to glue everyone together in some way was very, very difficult.

Like I said in the last post, being a financial/emotional punching bag for family has been taxing as hell.

I’ve tried explaining to them that after working regular 12/13 hour days for 5 weeks at a time, I don’t have the mental ability to solve their problems. I don’t even care to listen to any of it. All I want is a hot shower and a good night’s rest.

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I’ve been thinking about moving to the U.K. It’s my birthplace, and I have fond memories of it from when I was younger. I think the attitude towards work there is healthier and more reasonable.

I spent today regimenting a time schedule to follow everyday for the new year. Maybe it’ll drive more structure/routine into my life. I don’t know if that’s the solution to my issues with work at the moment, but at least in university sticking to a block schedule helped me keep my sanity for the most part.

This however is much more of a regression back to my middle-school/elementary school days. It’s an 8-5p workday with possibly a 30min lunch squeezed in there.

During this whole planning phase today it dawned on me that time is so, so limited everyday. There used to be days where I could play videogames for days straight without a care in the world. Or hang out with friends, go places, etc. for weeks at a time.

The more I think back to those times in my life, the more I believe that must have been a parallel universe. One where I didn’t give a shit about anything other than enjoying the day, one day at a time, and operate on a principle of living life to the max in terms of personal recreation and fun.

I guess the process of growing up and getting into the damn rat race is that all of these things get sacrificed in the name of money, and fear of job security. Completely deleted in fact.

Earlier in the year before work got so mental I used to meet up with a friend on Friday evenings for a pint or two. I derived very little enjoyment from this activity. Felt fake, as if I was living someone else’s life. In a way what I learned about myself in the first 2 months of 2018 is that my ability to socialize non-work wise was going down the drain, ever so gradually.

Looking back I think it was around that time that I started falling into this sort of hellish autopilot that defined the rest of the year, and was amplified when the job’s demands became ridiculous.

I think the goal, or I guess my goal for 2019 is to get locked into a better automation that produces more positive thinking, positive growth personally, and use that fuel to launch myself out of this job to somewhere else.

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