My Favorite High

-

Note: This was written in February, 2021.

As I've alluded to before, I'm a bit of a gym rat. I like being strong, and exercise is one of the best things for calming my brain down. But also, it's my favorite drug.

Being a responsible person who lives with a vulnerable spouse, I haven't been to a gym since the start of the pandemic. Early on, I got myself a set of dumbbells, and I've been making do. It's fine for keeping up on some things. It's fine for working certain sets of muscles. But they just aren't heavy enough for the large muscle groups, and with dumbbells a lot more things are limited by my hands before it really gets to the muscles I want to work.

Recently I got myself a squat rack and bench, and then a bar and weights (yes, separated in time. There are reasons.) It's been a few weeks, and I've been working myself back up slowly, because it had been a long time, and I was trying to be responsible. I'm finally back to the point where I'm actually pushing myself again (not back to what I was lifting before the pandemic. That will still take a while to recover). 

Today I got a true exercise high from weight lifting for the first time since the start of the pandemic. I had almost forgotten how good that feels. I miss the bike ride home, but I can do without that given the snow. This is my favorite drug. Yes, I like being strong. Yes, I'm vain and I like showing off muscles. Yes, exercise is good for my focus. Those are the reasons that I want to lift weights. But really? This feeling is what actually gets me to go do the workout.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Accommodations

-
Image
Recently I had two very different experiences around accommodations and imposter syndrome.  In the first one, I was in a zoom training. I tend to have a really hard time keeping focused in zoom trainings. I have found that having the transcript going helps a lot. When the speaker is going too slow and I get bored and my brain wanders off, I can read back in the transcript and catch myself up. Zoom automatically has this available unless you turn it off, so it doesn't add any work for the people running the training. I went looking to turn the transcript on, and I didn't have access to do so, which means that they had turned this feature off. I asked if they could allow access to it.       This led to 10 minutes of waiting while they tried to figure out whether they could turn it on from inside zoom (it's normally a feature linked to the account) or how to deal with this. Well before this was over, I both felt bad for wasting everyone's time and was also angry wi...
Read more

Yom Kippur and Pedagogy

-
I’m a college professor, and we talk a lot about strategies for teaching and helping our students. In this context, we use two types of assessment: formative assessment and summative assessment. Summative assessment is when you look everything over and give the student a grade. Formative assessment, on the other hand, is when you look at the student’s work, well before the end of the term and say “you didn’t get this answer right”, “your writing here isn’t in the right format”, or “you need more citations to support this assertion.” This type of assessment is how we learn. If you’re self-motivated, you can learn just fine without summative assessment. You don’t need grades to learn. You do need formative assessment. Someone (which could be yourself!) needs to look at your work so far and say “This part looks good. This part needs work. And over here, it seems like you’re not really getting the concept we’re working on.” Without formative assessment, you don’t know what you still need t...
Read more

Echolocation

-
First actual new post on the blog! One of my minor superpowers is very good directional hearing. When I was in college, I took an improv theater class. At one point, there was a game, where one person was blindfolded, and the instructor took a ball of paper and tossed it into the center of the room. The blindfolded person then had to retrieve the paper ball. Until I watched other people, I simply didn't understand why this was a game. For me, it was not much harder than it would have been with my eyes open. Locating the paper ball by the sound it made was about as hard as looking to see where it was, then looking away and picking it up. It was a trivial task. Watching other people do it made me realize that was not true for everyone. Coming off of this, I have also taught myself very basic echolocation. When I am in a dark environment, I will made small ticking sounds. I can use these to identify nearby large obstacles. It's not anything like the detail I would get with sight: ...
Read more