Entry 570: Beaten Up But Not Beaten Down

I feel pretty beaten up right now, mainly because I am.  I took two Krav Maga classes each of the previous two nights, and I am feeling it today.  One of the classes is just called Fight and it's pretty much as advertised.  It's a lot of sparring, a lot of grappling, some kicking -- dirty boxing, so to speak.  You don't get blasted like you would in a real fight -- everybody knows everybody has to go to work the next day -- but you definitely feel what it's like to get hit, and it doesn't feel good.  This one dude caught me with a pretty good right flush on the chin.  I think it was payback because I booted him in the side and made him wince.  Turnabout is fair play.

I definitely have daydreams about starting sport fighting in my early twenties instead of my early forties.  I think I'm picking it up pretty quickly, but my body just can't do things it could do 20 years ago.  I'm not as agile, not as fast, and not as confident.  That last one is a big one.  So often I find myself holding back a little bit because I don't want to pull a hamstring or strain my back or fuck up my neck.  These aren't things I ever worried about as a younger man.  During my last class of the week the instructor asked me if I met my class goals, and I said, "Yeah, I didn't get injured."  And I was totally serious.

Then again, even if I took up fighting earlier and more seriously, what would I have done with it?  Almost certainly nothing.  It's not like I was going to be a pro or even an amateur fighter.  I just would've gotten hit a lot more and that's probably not a good thing.  Doing what I'm doing now, cosplaying MMA, pretending to be a badass, is likely the better way to go.  I get to beat up on the patzers and get a workout in the process.  That's a pretty sweet deal.

The workouts have been paying dividends too.  I've dropped about 15 pounds over the past month and a half.  I lost like 12 of those in two weeks, just by eating better, and then it's been an ongoing grind to get off the rest.  The thing is, weight is not a good metric for me, because I don't mind if I add muscle weight, but I don't know what else to use.  Basically, I want to look good with my shirt off, but how do you measure that?  Maybe I'll start an Instagram account and just post weekly pics of myself shirtless and then read the responses.*  What could go wrong with that plan?

*Does Instagram have responses?  I honestly have never been on the site.

Actually, that does kinda sound like a fun idea.  But I'm not going to do it, mainly because inertia, but also because being off social media has really been a boon to my mood and mental health.  I miss Facebook sometimes, because it really did keep me connected, if only superficially, to people I really like, but aren't in my "real" life for one reason or another.  For the most part, however, I just don't even think about it, and that's a good thing.  I was listening to the Slate Political Gabfest podcast today, and they had an interesting discussion about social media.  Here's an excerpt from cohost Emily Bazelon.  The impetus of the dialog is a personal essay in The Atlantic by Caitlin Flanagan about quitting Twitter.  (You don't actually have to read the essay to follow along; I haven't read it.)

You know, what I was thinking about is that one of the things this essay gets at is the difference between quitting social media and desperately wanting social media just not to exist anymore at all. There’s taking yourself out of the game, which for her sounds like absolutely a healthy psychological move and better for her work. And then there is just wishing there was no conversation going on that you then had to feel excluded from or that you’d excluded yourself from. I mean, I really do flirt with the idea that we would just be better off if social media platforms didn’t exist whatsoever.  That they do so much more harm than good even with all of the wonderful celebration of free speech and the way that it has democratized participation in debates, and I see huge benefits to it, including to my children. It also just causes tremendous damage, like apart from ethnic violence and ruining elections, which is like very real. I think that it also makes people really anxious and insecure in unhelpful ways. It definitely has that effect on me some of the time. I don’t think I’m addicted to it, but I can’t quite bring myself to get off it because it keeps going. So it it creates this FOMO. And yet I also have just participated in it less because I don’t like the sharp meanness of it. I can’t figure out how to argue on it without feeling some kind of awful sense that I’m supposed to then go back and see what retort someone has written back to me and I really, really don’t like that feeling through the day. So then I don’t argue and then my feed is boring.

I think this is really well said.  I agree with pretty much all of it, especially the last part about having a boring feed, because of the "awful sense" you have throughout the day when you argue online.  This is also why I almost never post anything even the slightest bit controversial on blog comments -- even anonymously I hate that feeling.

There's also the time aspect of it.  Back when I would go on Twitter regularly, I couldn't get any traction.  Nobody engaged with my posts much at all.  Then I looked at the feeds of other people, who had a bunch of followers, who were no wittier or more poignant or famous than me, to see how they did it, and it was like, "Oh, they tweet all the fucking time."  It's like the only way to make social media worth it is to be on social media constantly, and that totally sucks.  Ergo, social media either isn't worth it or totally sucks.

Alright, I'm already 14 minutes past the blogging limit I set for myself this evening, so I'm going to wrap it up.  But before I do, here's the latest in Lil' S2 solving math problems in his head that would literally (and I mean that literally) stump a decent portion of the adult population.  We measured him a few days ago and he's 46 inches.  So I said to him, "There are 12 inches in a foot, so how many feet and how many inches are you?"  And then he thought about it and said, "3 feet and 10 inches."  I tried it with my height 73" to make sure it wasn't a fluke, but he got it as well: 6' 1".  I'm telling you, he's pretty sharp for a five-year-old.

Until next time...