keep going

So I keep going. About half way through chapter 3 with the final edit. I am writing this while I wait for my dinner to cook.

I went back to the gym about 3 wees ago, and this week I upped the intensity level a little. I love the gym, it was stupid of me to stop going. I mainly stopped because I had to let my tennis elbow repair itself and it has, but I also got complacent. I now weigh about 98 kgs and various people have commented on how thin I am looking. The good thing is that my lifestyle did not change much when I stopped going to the gym so my metabolism was still quite high. I have certainly lost a lot of muscle mass as I am weaker when trying to lift weights. One of the changes I made to my previous program was to spread the weight exercises across the week so as not to wear out parts of my body.

But what hasn’t changed is the absolute fury with which I approach the cardio exercises. Now I’m burning of calories and the negative affects stemming from my failed romantic life. If you want to go hard at the gym, then break up with someone you love. As I have previously noted, fantasies (in the psychoanalytic sense) are a useful resource for invoking affective responses and the correlative release of chemicals in the brain when working or working out. When I write ‘fury’, I mean it. My workouts are so durably violent that I have already had few ‘chunky burps’ (where I taste my breakfast again, lol).

Working out is one thing, writing the dissertation is another. The same patterns of thought are not useful when I am trying to concentrate on the dissertation; this is when negative affects meet and amplify each other. People with 9 to 5 jobs or whatever crtainly have stresses, or the loneliness of working on a mine site working 13 day fortnights in six week stints is also pretty fucked, but there is a unique anxiety to this dissertation writing business. This has been further compounded. The problem is that I find I need to have my wits about me when writing, which is hard to do when I am thinking about how much I miss someone or what I did wrong in the relationship. As I regurgitate my failures, they leave a sick feeling that is a much worse taste than the chunky burps.

Yet, I am doing it, and it shall be done. This feels me with a weird joy, that I know that I can do it. The feeling of joy has echoes of sadness, but it helps me.

So I keep going.