Dipping into Oblivion

“Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, canceled, made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not, you will never really change.”
— D.H. Lawrence

Many things have changed or are in the process of changing since I last posted on DW. It's been a bit of a transitional point in my life.

Two nights ago I went out with some old friends from Ruby Tuesday's, many of whom I hadn't seen in at least 4 months, if not much more. For the first time since one of these aforementioned changes began, one of my old friends asked me about my losing weight. Truth be told, I haven't lost weight; but I have been changing my ratio of percentages of what makes up that weight. Since A-S was finally able to drag me to the rec center late this year, I've been averaging about 6 days a week working out, alternating with weights and adding a bit of cardio each day. A lot of the facts and advice I got from working out with ASH has atrophied through lack of use, but as I'm getting back into it things are starting to click again. Overall, though, I've been feeling much better. As a side note, it's now been well over 4 and a half months since I quite smoking cold turkey with not a single side-puff or cheat in the mix.

Graduation also took place a little over a week ago. I even got to wear the Masters hood, which made for a good picture with the rents. Graduations always make me fairly melancholy, which is ironic considering how many of the damn things I'll have gone to by the time I actually start my career. The cause of that sober thoughtfulness I'll leave to the reader's speculations, but it does mean I'll be transitioning to life up at Madison for the next few months. I found a great place right next to St. Mary's, stuck in between the beautiful jogging paths of both Shore Dr. of Monona Bay and the Arboretum. It's just a quick mile and a half to Campus and State St., and just 2 miles to the capital. That's easily walking distance, but even better is the plethora of bike lanes crossing all of the Central and West regions of Madison. In lieu of this potential, I took my old Trek 6000 into the shop to get tuned up to riding capacity again. There's a great cyclery shop in town who did quite a bit of maintenance for quite an affordable price. I also added on one of those back-tire racks, though I don't have any satchel bags to go with, yet. Since I got it back, I've pretty much been riding it as opposed to driving most of the time. This adds to the working out change, and at $3.50 a gallon up here, the investment I made in fixing the bike up should be pretty quick to return itself.



And, with a lack of school, I've been reading a lot of books left dormant on shelves this past year. I tend to accumulate quite a bit of amazon.com orders over the course of the year, without ever seeming to realize there's no way I'd get to read them until summer rolled around. The thing is, a lot of important aspects about life went amiss this past year: specifically, the important aspect of life, itself. I was dead wrong in my assessment of how difficult and busy an academic year this would be -- mostly self-inflicted, but damaging none-the-less. Between applications, GREs, taking on supererogatory coursework, making admissions decisions, and having a TAship from hell, I lost track of some of the old traits and practices I used to keep up with. Now, I'm looking to get back the Felix Felicis I had when I first moved up to DeKalb. Not that I'm trying to recreate the past, but the combination of practices and habits that likely resulted in the successful navigation of life two years ago are all in place again; working out regularly, eating well, reading good books voraciously, and taking time to center life again.

If you can't dance with you own devils....

I know this was a bit of a long post; just a way of updating the personal side of this blog in one (hopefully not too boring) fell swoop. I'll get back to posting more regularly now that keel is bit more even.

Namaste'.