jaeleslie

I am getting entirely preoccupied here with reading other people's journals and replying to my friends' stuff and wandering off to find fascinating book artists and pirates amongst the thousands. This morning in brisingamen's journal I found a bit of poetry by Walt Whitman, quite a lovely description of what we are about here. Building a city.

But I have been laboring on my neighborhood association's online discussion list this morning, which is argumentative and petty and always at the edge of flames, and I despair, turn my back and walk away. I'll be back. But here you are. Where else would you be? I speak not only of you, personally, but of the network of friends (whether or not Live Journal-designate Friends) that makes its magical appearance in one guise or another on the screen of this box. But I quote another New York poet, Paul Goodman:

My world my only one, whom I must love
if I so hard persist and pursue
to become a happy man with you
just you, with only you, my obsession,
and I cannot imagine
another possibility than to make
such idle passes at my only world...
I am beforehand disappointed
and late at night I end up sobbing
on the shoulder of my only one my world
for here you are -- where else would you be?

I was thinking about what City is, when I was driving Tobes around, wondering what on earth he thought of our little burg, our provincial capital. We went through one of those vestpocket tax-shelter suburbs near the lake and he mistook that for the country, which indeed it resembled, the English countryside at least, so then I took him out to the real country and pointed out a couple of cornfields and cows. That's what it's like from here for many hundreds of miles in nearly any direction. We came to a T intersection and turned back, and quick enough were back in the sprawl that looks just like Naperville or Aurora or the suburbs anywhere in the hundred-mile sprawl zone around Chicago's Loop. We talk about Madison as a city, but it's just got a big university and a small assortment of world-class this and that, to keep the New Yorkers quiet when they have to spend entire semesters living here. When you're downtown near the power plant, if you drove around the block fifteen times you might get something of the feel of a real conurbation. And if you live in Madison your whole life, you actually run into people you know. If you've just moved here in the last thirty years, say, it's unlikely you'll see people you know at random. It is at least big enough for that, and all the new people make it bigger.

But people live in village-size groups, even if they're surrounded by concrete for miles. The village is not the physical place but the daily interactions. Tobes is part of my village, even though he came so far and will probably never see this place again. The internet has made interactions like those in the fanzine community much more daily than they ever were through the mail. A city includes lots of people you don't know, might never know, perhaps don't want to know, and is big enough to get lost in if you want to find a whole new village for yourself.

Physical therapy is how I am trying to think of my regimen lately. It is surprising to me lately how very little food I seem to actually need. When I started the non-dairy diet I lost a bit, but now I seem to have worked out how to feed myself again, not entirely a good thing. But feeling better is sure nice. Now that we are going to the gym Jon tells me encouragingly that of course muscle mass weighs more than fat, so you can be shrinking while you're actually getting heavier, which seems to be how it works for me. But one would think there were a limit to how densely packed a person could be, which limit I should have passed long ago. How clothes fit now seems a more reliable indicator of my size than the number on the scale.

I always took to weight training well. But I have to think, Physical therapy, physical therapy, to defend against being sucked into Bodybuilding! That mindset is contagious at the gym. It is a subtle effect of how the machines and the workout program encourage one to increase, progress, onwards and upwards, and not only the social environment. It's just like when you're driving a car, and the gas pedal naturally encourages you to go faster and follow the flow of traffic with drivers who are all exceeding the speed limit. The young fellow at the front counter was probably a toddler when I was last lifting weights, and that was several generations of exercise machines ago. Old people can't work out with quite the abandon that young healthy people can. So it is good to have some older people at the gym who are really trying to get over their bad heart or surgery or whatever.

I told Jon about replyhazy working out at home, and he agreed it is pretty impressive to go to the trouble to do that with free weights, but, whatever works. I like the machines now that they are a bit more familiar to me, and I just try not to get in the way of the big serious guys with the big free weights. I can see the social thing at the gym is only beginning to unfold, which is interesting to me. The gym we go to is a little one, with all different ages of people at it. Several weight rooms, a lap pool and a whirlpool and a dance/stretching room, and lots of treadmills and bicycles and step machines. Most everyone listens to their own walkmans instead of the muzak. Eye contact issues are complicated. It turns out that I am more intensely competitive than most other parts of my life would suggest. Yes, I am one of those people who looks at the weights on the other people's machines. I want information. But then I just work my program. I have it all written down on a chart that I carry around still because I can't remember it all.

And it is good to have a pretty direct chain of reward in an exercise program. Mine is Do It = Feels Good. I like using my body (e. e. cummings wrote somewhat on this subject). Of course later at home after the endorphin high wears off it may be another story. I ride the recumbent bicycle for fifteen minutes, then spend a little more than an hour doing eighteen different exercises, three sets of ten for the most part. About half-way through I get to a state when all the blood seems to be occupied elsewhere than my brain, where I can still count to ten if I pay attention, but I forget if I've done the second set or am on the third. The reason I do this much all at once is because I don't want to go every day! which is what Jon does, three different workouts in rotation, but he goes every day -- and sometimes twice a day.

You know I think weight training is a natural for people who have been to many years of school, because the motivation is mostly internalized, and the schedule of reinforcement graduated in tiny increments, with absolute numbers in pounds, repetitions, sets, and timing. Jon knows quite a lot about practical body mechanics, but I have read all about it, so we have quite the jock-like intellectual discussions. He comes from the old boy school of pain, and I come from the new age school of many many many repetitions.
"That's two!"
"Just one more"
"But I'm tired!"
"Maybe you should try shrugs instead"
"I don't want to!"
It is fun to have my own trainer to argue with, just like a rich star.