This made me want to avoid cleaning my house for a while.
Did it have the same affect on any of my readers?
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How I Learned to Love Exercise
Growing up, I was one of those kids who deeply disliked gym class. I was small for my age and not naturally athletic in the least. While it was good for me to have the chance to discover that organized team sports weren’t my thing, it took years for me to figure out what kinds of exercise I actually did enjoy.
One of my biggest reasons for disliking gym class back then was that I find many vigorous forms of exercise to be downright painful. Jogging hurts my joints. Running up and down a field over and over again while trying to catch or kick a ball makes my lungs feel like they’re on fire. Smacking a hard volleyball against my arms is pretty uncomfortable as well. I’m not a masochist, so the idea of doing any of this stuff routinely for the sake of my health – much less for fun – was and is completely unappealing.
(This isn’t to say that you should avoid any or all of these activities! They may work beautifully for you regardless of what my heart, lungs, and joints think of them).
Moderate exercise is a different story for me. I’ll get a little winded on a brisk walk, when weightlifting, or while dancing, but their brief discomforts never tip the scale into actual pain. Not having to dread all of that pain has gone a long way to helping me actually enjoy being active.
One of the first workouts I started a few years ago was incredibly simple. I’d walk in place on top of a yoga mat while watching TV shows. It was something I chose because I really enjoy outdoor walks but couldn’t do one of those that day due to some terrible weather we were having in Toronto.
The only rule I set for myself was that I couldn’t stop moving until the show had ended. This is still something I fall back on when I’m feeling totally unmotivated to do anything physical at all. It’s easy to get so involved in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I forget I’m moving at all. Sometimes I even decide to keep walking in place for just one more episode so that I can find out what happens to the characters next.
Trying a lot of different types of workouts has helped me to figure out what I actually like. A few years ago I never would have guessed that I’d love weightlifting, but it’s turned out to be a wonderful fit for me. There’s something immensely satisfying about being able to lift bags, furniture, and other objects that were once too heavy for you. It’s also fascinating to see your body slowly change its shape as a result of these kinds of workouts.
I’m planning to give yoga a try in the next week or two. I have no idea if I’ll love it or hate it, but I can’t wait to find out either way!
There are times when I enjoy the same routine so much that I keep doing it for weeks on end without making any adjustments at all. Would I be more physically fit if I challenged myself as soon as my current workouts are no longer quite so challenging? Yes, but that isn’t the only reason why I exercise. I’m not in this to become a body builder or a bikini model. I simply want to take good care of my body, and sometimes that means sticking to the same old stuff for a while until I’m emotionally and physically ready to try something new.
Completely cutting out any form of competition has helped me to learn to love exercise as well. Dividing people into winners and losers instantly kills my desire to play whatever game it is that’s been thrown together. The only people I exercise with are the ones who agree that whatever we’re doing is all strictly for fun. There’s no trash talking or keeping score when I’m involved, although I don’t have a problem watching other people be playfully competitive with each other if they enjoy that sort of thing!
What kinds of exercise do you like? What new kinds of exercise are you hoping to try in the near future? If you weren’t always a fan of it, how did you change your mind?
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Suggestion Saturday: June 11, 2016
Here is this week’s list of articles, comic strips, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.
Is There a Right Way to Ask Someone Where They Came From? via Krista_Quintana. I love talking about this kind of stuff because of how many surprises are often hidden in the past. If only it was a socially acceptable thing to bring up with people you don’t know that well.
The Cat Psychic. The title tells you all you need to know about this one. I can’t quite tell if the cat psychic genuinely believes she’s communicating telepathically with animals or if she’s running a scam.
How (and Why) Athletes Go Broke. My husband and I had a conversation about how we’d handle an unexpected windfall after I read this article. It’s heartbreaking to see how quickly people can lose even extremely large fortunes if they act like their money will never run out.
Explaining Why I Refuse to Be Like Them via VHughesAuthor. My extended family isn’t racist, but I’ve made a conscious decision to step away from their worldview in other ways. There’s a lot of freedom that comes with choosing what you will and won’t carry on into your adult life.
Retiring Retirement. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this plays out over the next few decades.
Biased Opinions. This is as funny as it is true. Who else will admit to doing this sometimes?
The Mystery of Mystery Hill via Kathleen01930. Anyone who has spent a vacation with me has grown accustomed to being invited to stuff like this. It’s absolutely fascinating to think about what life was like 100, 1,000, 0r 10,000 years ago. The further back in history we move, the less we know for sure about the people who used a particular area. Sometimes I wonder what future generations will think of us and whether they will completely misunderstand certain parts of our architecture or art.
What have you been reading?
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Questions from the Search Engines
Every once in a while I like to share some of the questions and phrases that lead people to this blog. The queries are in bold. My answers are below them.
Spiderman is a myth that re-emerged in the the 21st century.
This isn’t true as far as I can tell. Wouldn’t it be cool to know the original stories that our current myths, fairy tales, and legends are based on, though? I’ve often wondered if some of them are loosely based on things that really happened.
For example, I have a very distant relative who, according to family legend, “lost” her illegitimate child in the woods one day. That child was never seen or heard from again. Did Hansel and Gretel become so well known partially because it soothed the guilt of parents whose children died under mysterious circumstances?
I could talk about this topic all day. It’s utterly fascinating.
I don’t wear makeup but I want to cosplay. What do I do?
I wouldn’t have a problem cosplaying without makeup. A great costume matters a whole lot more. You could also look for a character that wears a mask of some kind. No one can tell you’re not wearing makeup if they can’t see your face!
Why don’t people respect elders?
Age has nothing to do with whether or not someone should be respected. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect.
How to think positive about religions.
Stop watching the news. It’s full of half-truths and sometimes actual lies.
Don’t judge people before you know them.
Make friends with people from other religions. There are kind and wonderful folks in every belief system.
Difference between telling truth and badmouthing.
People who badmouth others tend to go out of their way to talk about the negative side of that person. This is especially true if what they’re saying is made up or greatly exaggerated.
People who are telling the truth generally need to be coaxed into talking about the terrible things that happened to them. They don’t share it indiscriminately in most cases.
How to forgive a friend for pretending to be something he is not.
That depends. If he was pretending to be straight to avoid being harmed by his parents or community, he wouldn’t need any forgiveness. Someday these ruses will hopefully no longer be necessary, but I understand the need for some people to remain in the closet to stay safe.
If he lied for selfish reasons, I’d take a giant step back from the friendship and see if he changed his tune.
Happy smiling unicorn llamas
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100 Years of Beauty in 1 Minute: Kenya
I’ve been following the 100 years of beauty series for a while now. It’s fascinating to see how hair, makeup, and clothing trends have changed over the years.
If you click on the Youtube link to this video, you can see what the trends were like in other countries as well.
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What Do You Miss?
My family lived in a house on a lake for a few years during my childhood.
Our next-door neighbours were so kind. They occasionally let me borrow a canoe or paddleboat so that I could explore the lake.
I wasn’t an athletic kid in the least, but I loved taking those boats around the lake even when it made my arms (or legs) ache from all of the rowing (or paddling). It was fascinating to see other people’s backyards and catch the occasional glimpse of the fish that lived in that lake.
There was a small island that I sometimes visited on nice days as well. It had all kinds of bushes and small trees growing on it. Once I spotted a dog running around on the island and I quickly ran back to my boat before the dog could get anywhere near me. I wasn’t sure if it was friendly, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way that it wasn’t.
I haven’t paddled or rowed in a boat since those summers. It’s something I keep intending to do without actually going through and doing it.
I miss those experiences, though. They were a lot of fun.
What do you miss doing?
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Suggestion Saturday: June 4, 2016
Here is this week’s list of poems, comic strips, essays, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.
Siren Song. The imagery in this is fantastic.
Why Are Highly Educated Americans Getting More Liberal? Who else has noticed this trend? I sure have.
Substitutions 3. Reading the news would be so much more fun if everyone used this chart. The scientists section was my favourite one. Too funny!
These Ancient Trees Have Stories to Tell. I have a vague memory of my parents taking me to see a very old tree when I was a child. The word massive doesn’t even begin to describe how large the trunk was. Who else here has taken a road trip specifically to see something like that?
Blackflix: How the Netflix Algorithm Weighs Race. Every once in a while I dive deeply into Netflix to see if there are any movies they have on there that the algorithm hasn’t recommended to me yet for some reason. Even so, I wonder how many great shows I’ve missed over the years.
It’s the Billionaires vs. the Millionaires. These are the kinds of elementary school shenanigans that I’d expect to see from children. The fact that adults – most of whom don’t understand how ridiculous the whole thing is – are responsible for it is both humorous and depressing.
What have you been reading?
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Feeling Anxious? It Might Be the Caffeine in Your Diet
An interesting thing happened to me a while ago. The weekend started out great, but by Sunday afternoon I was feeling anxious.
The first thing I do when this sort of thing happens is start going through a mental checklist of possible causes. Sometimes your mood can be affected by things that are easy to fix and don’t actually have anything to do with your mental state at all.
Was I hungry? No.
Thirsty? No.
Tired? No.
Lonely? No.
Had anything concerning happened recently? Not in the least. Life was good.
Had I been eating or drinking caffeinated products? YES! I’d had a couple of chocolate baked goods as well as caffeinated soda over the weekend.
Larger doses of caffeine make my heart race and my body feel jittery. I have several relatives who have mentioned having similar reactions, so I’m guessing that at least some of it is due to genetics. Even fairly small amounts of caffeine have been known to make me anxious because my tolerance for that drug is so low.
When I avoid every source of caffeine, I am a much calmer person.
This won’t work for everyone, of course. There are many causes of anxiety, and your ancestors may not have given you a lovely oversensitive-to-caffeine gene like mine did. Haha.
It is a simple thing to try if you’ve been struggling with anxious thoughts, though. Avoiding caffeine is pretty easy once you figure out where it likes to hide. The only sneaky place I’ve found it would be in some over-the-counter pain medicine. Certain brands include caffeine to make their medicine more effective.
Other than that, caffeine generally isn’t hidden in food or drinks. If it’s chocolate, coffee, or non-herbal tea, it probably has caffeine. If it isn’t, it probably doesn’t. I’d recommend cutting it out of your diet for a week or two to see if it helps.
The worst thing you can discover is that it isn’t a trigger for you!
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The Pier
I’ve always liked piers.
It’s beautifully bizarre to stand on a solid surface but also hear water lapping the shore below your feet.
I like how piers connect the land and the water. Normally I wouldn’t step into the muddy or sandy edge of a body of water. This hesitation disappears when I have a dry and mostly clean place to walk.
This photograph reminds me of the piers I’ve known.
My grandfather used to have a nice, little one in the home where he spent some of his retirement. I liked standing on it and watching my brothers fish.
Toronto has several decent sized piers. Every time I visit them, I feel like I’ve stepped into an entirely new world. You don’t generally expect to smell fresh, sea air and hear seagulls scream in the middle of a city, but it happens here.
These were the things I thought about when I first saw this photograph. What did you think about?
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I Reserve the Right to Write About You
The funny thing about being a fiction writer is how easy it is for your everyday life to seep into your work.
There have been multiple times when I started working on a story with a specific personality in mind for a character. Once the plot starts flowing, though, the character starts shifting into someone new.
Sometimes they’ll say or do something that is eerily similar to stuff that I’ve seen in real life. These scenes don’t always make it to the final cut, but in some cases they turn out to be exactly what the storyline needed to flourish.
Friends, family members, acquaintances, and even perfect strangers can be endless sources of inspiration. Listening to the way they talk has helped me to figure out how to word the dialogue in my stories. Seeing how people of different ages and from various backgrounds react to the same bad (or good!) news has also been enlightening. You can learn so much about how the average person thinks by listening quietly to what they say and how they say it.
No, I don’t usually borrow full anecdotes from the people I care about when I’m writing. Normally it’s something small like a phrase or a funny, unexpected reaction. Even then, these moments are trimmed down or exaggerated to fit my purposes. Most of them are nearly unrecognizable by the time they’ve gone through the writing and editing processes unless you are unusually observant and happened to be in the room at the exact moment when inspiration hit.
It’s difficult to turn off this part of my mind. This is something I do without thinking about it, just like my mom instantly switches on her medical mode and starts asking specific questions about our health if anyone gets sick.
Occasionally I’ve stopped working on a story because I couldn’t quite make the transition from an interesting observation to the realm of fiction. There is a fuzzy line between being inspired by people and lifting too much from their lives for your own purposes. I don’t always know exactly where that line begins, but I’m careful not to cross it.
I still reserve the right to write about you, though. The people in my life are incredible, and I want to share a small piece of them with the rest of the world.
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