Defiantone.com

Irregardless of which way you add up the numbers, I’m going to spend a long time away from work. I have a bunch of leave available and I decided, hey, why not take a bunch of it all in one giant go? I won’t be traveling far from home during the duration of my leave but I’ll have plenty of time away from work to goof around. I only have a few goals while I’m on leave

1. enjoy my time away from work
2. avoid thinking of work
3. goof off whenever possible
4. read a book or two
5. study
6. hang out with Jessica
7. hang out with my parents (who will be here from the 6th-12th)
8. wear all of the dogs out
9. Train for snowboarding season (its right around the corner - hooray!!!!)
10. Go to the Mariners game on the 9th (my birthday coincidentally)

None of the goals are monumental and all are achievable. The only ones that will take a little bit of willpower to achieve are numbers five and nine.

I’m going to study for a few CLEP tests while I’m on leave so that when I return to work I can enroll in school. Due to the manning situation at work (we don’t have enough manning at work) I’ll still be on mid-shift for the next few months. The current schedule looks like I will be working nights until Thanksgiving. It could be drawn out longer but we’ll see what happens when we have people return from this current rotation to the desert. As a military member we sacrifice, this is my current sacrifice; I work a shift that nobody else wants because I’m the only guy that can do it. It messes with my personal life and its going to mess with it further when I enroll in classes in late September. I should have plenty of time to do my homework at night but some of my classes are going to be during the evening. There is no way that I can avoid that - oh well, gotta get my education finished sooner or later.

Training for snowboarding season means a tweak in my workout regimen. I’ll target all of the flexors and core muscles in my body while doubling my lower body workout. I lift legs once every 5 days and do cardio every other day. I’m planning on doing a two day leg lifting split that will have me doing one day of ridiculously heavy lifting followed by another day of endurance lifting. I’m not worried about the heavy lifting - I’m worried about the endurance lifting. Simply put, its going to hurt - alot.

I should have a busy, and hopefully relaxing, month ahead of me.There are times when it’s great to be a government employee - thank god for paid leave.

Boredom will force you cause you to make foolish decisions. My latest foolish decision was to go to the gym for the past 12 days without a break. If I was a normal, healthy individual this wouldn’t be that big of a deal but I’ve got problems that don’t respond well to repeated abuse.

My latest problem started when I decided to squat too much weight for far to long. I took some serious time off my leg workout to give my lower back time to recuperate. I redesigned my workouts to reduce the stress on my back and continued exercising daily. My lower back has taken a slow and painful beating. Muscle pain, in my view, arrives in two different formats. The first is muscle pain - this pain is intense and comes regardless of what position you place your body. It feels as if your bones are attempting to separate from your muscles and that your entire body is trying to tear itself apart. This is excruciating - I deal with it 4-6 days a week. I do not take ibuprofen - I “tough” it out. The second type of pain we’ve all experienced - muscle soreness. If you stress a muscle and later stretch or move that particular area you will experience some discomfort - I rarely feel this as pain in the prevalent experience.

So - my back has been feeling fine lately. I have been stretching and doing some “yoga-esque” things to make the pain go away. My hamstrings and hip flexors cause the majority of problems. These muscles will NOT relax. I have tried for days to stretch them but they will not release one iota of pressure from my back. Today, my common sense defeated my strong desire to go to the gym and push through it. I’m taking the day off - I’m not really sure what to do with the time other than to write a series of random blog posts. I guess boredom will do that.

The did it in Abu Ghraib prison to people that didn’t deserve the treatment. I do it to myself on a daily basis. Why in the world would somebody beat the ever living crap out of their body? Why would someone push themselves until they were in so much pain that they thought they were going to puke?

Boredom

I decided to see how hard I could push myself today. My shoulder is almost completely rehabbed - almost to the point where I don’t have to worry about it. I’m still working on strengthening the anterior deltoid muscle (the weak one in the bunch) so that it keeps all of the other muscles where there are supposed to be located. It was leg day - the most brutal day of the week. Leg day is an all out assault on the largest muscle group in the body. It is the muscle group that is constantly in use and the one that takes the most punishment (save for the heart of course). I went through my normal routine but I cranked it up to three sets of 20 reps. I normally work in the 3×12 range but I essentially doubled my reps while maintaining the same weights. By the time I was done with each set my legs were on fire - veins were starting to pop out from my skin that I didn’t even know existed. I could barely walk by the time that I was done - not being able to walk isn’t a bad thing in this case - it merely shows that I properly worked out the muscle group. If you’ve watched any bad horror movies and have seen zombies stumbling about - its probably close to how I’ve been walking around. We probably smell the same too - its been a few days since we’ve had running water. Unless the world goes to hell, I’ll get my first shower in days tomorrow morning.

I’ve been resisting the urge to expunge the material in my stomach - its been 30 minutes since I’ve walked out of there but the pain is so intense that I can barely hold my guts in check. Its a hobby - albeit a painful one.

Things have felt a bit off since I have returned to this country. For the first few weeks, as I eased back into the life I live here, things were fine and I had very few problems. As I’ve spent more time here I’ve begun to loose interest in almost everything around me. I’ve been unable to find ways to occupy my time and keep my mind stimulated. I normally sit around and wait for the next day to come so I can repeat it all over again. I can only hope that this type of existence will be fleeting and that something better will come around the corner and do so soon.

My house has decended into absolute chaos. I really don’t care how it looks and I cannot be bothered to do anything about it, if it went a little further it might be considered squalor. I make sure that the trash goes out and the dishes get rinsed off but I can scarcely find the time to actually cook something real. I find myself taking shortcuts so I can get some quick food that I can eat, I used to care about eating something that tasted good but I’m all about what I get out of the food. I wish that I could find some food that I could eat for the joy of it rather than just for what nutrients it might provide.

Some might think that this missive is written while deep in the throes of depression but I don’t believe that that could be the exact case. More likely, I’m writing this note while in the deep throes of boredom. I was told that this could be expected and I’m looking for something else out there that I didn’t have before. I’ve been looking for a long time but I haven’t been able to find anything. I wonder if I am looking with enough vigour or if I am just putting on a show as a giant act.

I have been unable to figure myself out as of late, when I do something I question why the heck it happened as if I am sitting in the back seat while another person is driving the car. I can try to be a backseat driver but there is only so much I can do. I wonder how many more metaphores I can use as I write this?

I am Lokor, the gatekeeper of despair and destruction… that what I thought of as I was heading to the gym today. It’s a throwback to a SNL bit that they used to (probably still do) called Goth talk. It involved people that wished they were dead and…. well… goth. I laughed about it all but its odd how I thought it might somehow involve me. Life should be vibrant and worth living but I’m struggling to see out the dirty window into the clouded gloom of each day.

In the past, all of this would have made me feel a little depressed but more than anything else I’m confused. I’m really not sure to go with my energy and what to do with it all. I’m not sure if I am heading down the right path but I can only forge ahead and see what might occur.

On a completely different note, I am still going to the gym and lifting 5 days a week and I’m still improving. Much of what I do there is all about intensity and the will to push myself to the next echelon. I reached a new max in squat (insert rude joke here) of 275. I pushed 225 on bench today which was heavy but felt good. I’ve just got to keep plugging away at it so in the future I won’t be the small one in the family. Its odd knowing that I have been the smallest one in the King family for the longest time. I guess I’ll just have to do something about it.

Well, my workweek is dead and done with. Next week, a new one will rise and torment me for 5 days until I can stand it no longer and run in absolute terror. There is no stopping it, there is no killing it, the only thing you can do is wait for it to die. There was something about this entire week that had me on edge. I am still trying to figure out why I am so tense when there was so little going on with it. Sure, I had a lot of little things here and there but almost everything else about it was fine.

I’m getting ready to get out of this country… this half-assed country. So many things here have the appearance of a group of people that started with really good intentions who got drunk halfway through. Either that, or they found that producing a good product for a reasonable price was hard so they make crap and sell it for tons of money.

I’ve found that I’m the type of person that really needs three beatings before I’ve got it completely figured out. This time, I’m talking about maintaining my car. Sure, I’m only halfway to the point where my warranty runs out but I’ve paid almost 5x as much on servicing as I really should just so the warranty stays in check. I did the math on it, for almost any major repair if I would have done the oil changes and other such by myself I could have paid for it in cash because I would have saved that much money along the way. Then again, the second I stop letting them do the service work the engine will fall out on the ground.

Oh, here’s something I came up with today in a bit of sarcastic rage called

It could be worse

if… you were told to do pushups after they stapled your ears to the carpet
if… you had to do squat thrusts with full leg casts
if… after you lost any argument you got a kick in the nuts
if… each time the conversation with the woman went nowhere you lost a nut
if… you were a right handed pitcher that lost his right arm in a car accident
if… you never got out of England

I could go on… but I think you now might have a better understanding of how my day has been going…

While I try to hide the fact that I know jack squat I’ve started to add squats to my normal workout. With most exercises, the muscles you work out will fill tired but by the next morning will feel like new. With squats, when you get out of bed the next morning you “fall” out of bed because you muscles hate you and want revenge on the rest of the body. By day three you still feel a little sore but things are looking up.

The good news is that by the third workout, on day 5, when you go home you don’t feel like taking a wheelchair the rest of the way. There are some small stabilizer muscles that I don’t work out even when running that the all mighty squat takes care of. The strangest thing is that while performing the exercise my right foot cramps. Odd isnt it?