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[TheBiggerFish]

Hey, you're doing stuff, though, which is good!

[NRDL]

That's fantastic, cardio based around martial arts is the best. 

[JoshuaFH]

There was no actual kickboxing, just some exercises that kicked my ass. I said I was only a little embarrassed, but that was a lie I'm actually very very embarrassed, I looked really clueless and awkward, and three quarters of the way through it was all I could do to not die on the floor from the overexertion.

[NRDL]

It gets better, the longer you keep at it.  Definitely worth it as long as it isn't all that expensive.

[JoshuaFH]

I tried to go to a Yoga class today, but it turns out nobody showed up for the class so the instructor cancelled it. I thought that was a bummer, so I just went out for a bike ride instead.

One thing I want to do is try to ride with my hands off the handlebars. I've been extremely cautious, feeling like I need to keep a steely grip on the handlebars at all times, but little by little I've been trying to figure out how to remain balanced and going when I let go. Today's been the most successful attempt so far, being able to keep my hands off, remain pedaling, and relax with my hands at my side while staying a straight course, for several seconds at least. I'm still not 100% confident, but I'm getting there.

[Starver]

I wouldn't actually suggest you do that too much (safety, in case something surprising happens; you also lose a bit of leg leverage without any contact with bars, but that mostly applies only when you're on a difficult stretch) and can't imagine too many circumstances that it'd be a beneficial thing to do, rather than showboating, but...

At any reasonable speed, the bike keeps itself up, and torso movement alone is enough to correct a slight lean.  Or, when you're tired of going straight, applying a slight lean, which gives the front wheel a slight turn and you can curve round slaloms (sweeping ones, at least) without any handlebar use at all.

Steelily gripping the handlebar is pretty much never necessary (perhaps whilst traversing uneven ground, with large rocks and small boulders jinking the front wheel off course unpredictably) and may be uncomfortable and cramping.  Is this why you want your hands off?

Try progeessively resting your hands, atop the bars.  Uncurl the hands, keep the palm of the hand atop, relax the fingers and thumb¹. You should have full control, or (more importantly) instant control should you feel the bars twist beneath your hands, yet with as light a touch as you wish, and I've ridden deliberately hovering above the bars at times (does wonders, for the solar plexus, as you maintain a forward lean without support, and then there's whatever bit of the thighs one uses to grip the saddle whilst peddling) and pulling up straight thus frees both arms to clean one's glasses, peel the banana, unfold enough of the map to read without so much that it catches the wind, conduct a sign-language conversation with someone or perhaps just pump your arms contratime to their respective legs as if jogging...

You've managed the no-hands thing, so you know its possible, but it sounds like you're doing it as if a mere journeyman unicyclist relying on he arms to balance rather than balancing whilst the arms are doing something else, rather than the proficient performer who can even juggle (assuming you can first do that whilst merely standing, that is) and has learnt the nack of full-body control whilst at it.


I repeat, however, that the moment you spot a particularly vicious pothole, a squirrel dashes across your path too close for comfort, a car passes you closer than you'dvlike or you get a blowout you will appreciate having your hands on the bars (although good luck, still, in all cases, especially the blowout) and even though I could ride all day (if non-stop) hands-free, I wouldn't consider it a useful skill to so employ on a continuous basis. The few moments to extract the waterproof jacket from the saddlebag and then don it is probably the most I'd risk, whilst road/traffic/wind conditions aren't likely to threaten my stability for the duration.


¹ I find that when riding on cobbles, rough but regular and thus not likely to be surprising, touching finger(s) and thumb into a loop larger than the diameter of the bar. I then unconsciously brace myself so that I am surrounding the bars, not pulling or pushing them, and the rattling and oscillating front of the bike jolts the bars up and down but all within the confines of my 'finger rings', saving me much of the pummeling. If I don't need to peddle, I'll even stand up on the pedals a bit (at 3 o'clock/9 o'clock, more or less), slightly off the saddle but not too much, and gripping it between the thighs, letting my bent legs take the rest of the vertical jolting (generally less than the front alone, as it's an average betwen the two wheels).  And yet, I have the bars captured, such that they can't slip from my loose and open-handed grip and either they twist upon hitting a badly-located cobble-edge or my hands jump off the bars to front or back and I first risk face-planting down onto the headset and then body-planting down onto the ground, the bike off to one side.  Also useful for cattle-grids and unsurfaced but not totally rubbly roads.

But you've got your lockable/unlockable suspension, which does much the same job.

[JoshuaFH]

I'll say that I misspoke, as I didn't actually mean I was gripping the handlebars very hand, just that I never let them go. I actually usually have a fairly light grip.

But I'll agree that that it's pointlessly dangerous. It just feels like it's something that's so simple anyone should be able to do it, but I struggle to keep my balance the instant the bars are let go. Plus I'm always chiding myself that I have such a cautious and wimpy personality, I guess this was just my way of taking small risks to break out of it, just like going over that hill I was talking about.

[JoshuaFH]

I'd been reading a lot of books recently, and they all had a common theme throughout them: There was the first one I mentioned, 'Models'. Then there was 'No More Mr. Nice Guy'. Then 'Healing the Shame That Binds You'. Then 'Man, Interrupted'. That theme is that they all specifically address and are aimed at helping men that had an abusive, unavailable, or otherwise completely absent father.

I've been doing a mental inventory of all the traumas and pains in my life, and attempting to assign weight to them in order to gauge their significance in which ones need healing the most. The list is somewhat long, and while I'm (currently) unwilling to go over the entire list both for reasons of shame and brevity, the gist of it is that the one issue with my childhood that dwarfed all the others by orders of magnitude is the complete absence of my father. My father cheated on his wife with my Mom, who then gave birth to me and raised me by herself several states away, completely nowhere near my biological Dad. Part of me, a large part, is convinced that if I had a father in my life growing up, I'd wouldn't be the ineffectual and frustrated man I am today.

Growing up, I never knew my Dad at all. If not for the existence of pictures of him my Mom owned, I wouldn't even know what he looked like. Still, I have to say I think I was a very optimistic child, for I remember vividly, throughout elementary school, holding onto the firm belief that my Dad was only temporarily separated from me, and that he'd one day reenter my life and guide me as his son. I suppose it wasn't a completely outlandish belief at the time, for I was also often frequently away from my Mom, who worked days and so I'd often be spending the entire day by myself, and if Mom was away for long stretches of time, what was to say Dad wasn't just away for an even longer stretch of time? It goes without saying that my fantasy never became reality.

There were men in my life, my Mom's boyfriends, though 3 existed, one existed in my pre-memory childhood, but the two I do remember are the definition of worthless men. The first was an drug addict, very violent and angry for reasons I wasn't able to comprehend at the time, and fought viciously with my Mom. He got sent to jail eventually for possession of cocaine I believe, but I'm not willing to fact check that with my Mom at this moment. This man was no father figure, obviously.

The second boyfriend, the lazy and desperate moocher that stayed in my life for 15+ years now. He was the ornament in the house, I'd frequently forget his existence. He was known for being an idiot with a high tolerance for pain, a fact he was glad to demonstrate over and over and over again as my Mom's emotional instability would cause her to pick fights with him and then beat his ass, then call the police, who'd then come over and drag the bloodied and beaten boyfriend away who hadn't put up a fight, who would then be released without charges, and then come crawling back to my mom, to repeat this pattern, nearly every week, for more than a decade. The sounds of fighting became a very reliable background noise, ready to keep me awake nearly every night, and nothing I said or did could stop it once started. It'd be like jumping onto a primed grenade.

This man eventually fathered my half-blood sister. And while I love my sister dearly, I have to say she's gotten the shit end of two awful gene pools.

I have to say that even though I'd personally known this boyfriend for 15+ years now, I never once cared for him, at all, not as a replacement father figure, step family member, friend, or acquaintance. He eventually did leave my mom, to hook up with a woman who was impossibly even more idiotic than he was, but how their life together is progressing right now, I couldn't care less.

The only man I considered a replacement father figure was my "Uncle" who had married into my family through my Aunt. He was a proud and strong handyman. Good with machines, hardworking, an honest person with a complex that made him want to be of use to others and help them. He innately sympathized with my plight of having to live with my bitch of a mother, willing to call her out on her shit when she acted up in his presence.  He frequently promised to take me out fishing, or bowling, or any other kinds of trips, but to my memory he only ever followed through on these promises once or twice, much to my enormous disappointment. When we did have the chance to hang out, I would meekly follow him around, for no particular reason, perhaps trying to absorb his manly experience through proximity. I always felt like a hanger-on and a wannabe son, but I guess I couldn't help myself, I wanted to master what it was that made me respect him so much, and by extension become respectable myself. All in all, he wasn't in my life enough to alter the course of my imminently failurebound maturance, but the little bit of time he did spend with me, I cherished it.

He died this year, on March 28, seven days after my 27th birthday, of lung cancer. I had the immense displeasure of, over the course of several months, watching the strong and proud man I knew waste away to a confused and frail skeleton, a shadow of himself, and then die in pain and indignity. Even at his bed, watching him being unable to do even the simplest of tasks as he lost his grip on life, I was unable to cry. When he died, I got the first phone call notifying me of what had happened, I was still unable to cry. Even now, I can't find it in me to cry, and I don't think I will again for anything else, for I feel if I wasn't able to cry for this one man I so genuinely cared about, it'd be disrespectful towards him. Unforgivably disrespectful.

This is just another thing I'd like to place down into words here. I have a great deal of emotional baggage, but it was only recently that I grasped the literalness of the phrase. "Baggage", you're carrying it, it's heavy and it's eating my mental and emotional energies just to hold it, so much so that it paralyzes my ability to think or feel or do things. Obviously just holding onto it isn't going to make it less heavy, I have to place it down and leave it behind me, and only then will my energies be freed up again to be used how I want them to be used. So this post is me putting it down, just one bag out of many, to hopefully be free of all of it, someday.

[TheBiggerFish]

Good.  Keep doing that.  It helps.

*hugs*

[JoshuaFH]

There's actually been something on my mind for a long time now, though I've hesitated to voice it for fear of exposing even more of my naivety, but I guess it's gotta come out eventually, as it's catch-22 twisted logic that I can't help but believe is true. It's obviously fallacious, but it causes me intense anxiety.

Basically, it's based on a truism I heard a long time ago, though I can't remember from where, that 'Everyone's first relationship fails' or something to that effect. While I've obviously dated some women, I don't think any of my experiences with them counted as being in a relationship. They were all too short-lived, too insubstantial, too superficial to have counted. The stakes weren't high enough, which is anxiety provoking enough when my few, shallow failures have already instigated so much anxiety only to realize that each step in a relationship ostensibly raises the emotional stakes by a magnitude of order. I haven't had a 'real' relationship yet, and therefore from the premise's logic, the first one I DO have is guaranteed to fail. The first one is a 'sacrificial' relationship, it needs to be born, cared for, and then killed in reverence to a god of emotional maturity, so that the next one has a chance to live.

What would define a 'real' relationship I then ask myself. I can only imagine it, but it's not just a factor of time, it would need to be emotionally intense but also emotionally quieting, unpredictable but stable enough to be able to rely on the other person, hot-blooded but relaxing, (As I imagine, I never had a role model that depicted relationships as anything other than shouting matches followed by fistfights) but most of all sincere. I suppose this is where the Catch-22 comes in, wherein if I believe that the first real one is certain to fail, and I do believe that with my level of maturity plus utterly poor interpersonal skills and natural pessimistic defensiveness that that it is a safe assumption to assume that the odds of imminent failure are extremely high, why should I emotionally invest in it, why should I be sincere? But if I don't do that, if I don't allow the emotional stakes to rise to what would (to me) be a disastrous emotional fallout, then that relationship won't meet the criteria for being 'real' and so the next one will become the sacrificial relationship. It'll be a nonstop loop of fallout after fallout.

It's obviously absurd logic, but it feels really real, it makes trying to advance my situation seem pointless. Moreover, philosophizing on how to 'game' life is so pointless for someone as inexperienced as I am, when the obvious solution just seems to be to barge into and through problems without a care as to the consequences, go ahead and advance, get messed up and bloodied, and stop, just please stop, living in my head and live out in the world already...

But that's whats been on my mind recently. And by 'recently' I mean probably for the last two or so years now.

[NRDL]

Sounds like you already know the answer to whatever questions are plaguing you, you're just venting, which is good if it actually makes you feel better.  As for that particular point of view on relationships, whether or not you actually place stock in it as an idea or are just bothered by its possibility, the standards we impose on ourselves and our relationships based on our observation of others is ridiculous. 

[JoshuaFH]

Yeah, just venting. I'd like to get the thoughts out of my head. To use another metaphor, that way they're not resting in the background of my mind, eating up processing power, I've gotten them verbalized and materialized in a way that is outside my mind. I believe I hold onto a lot of twisted, painful, and/or conflicting beliefs that I just keep running indefinitely, and so when I need that processing power they're using, I'm suddenly frozen and can't decide.

[NRDL]

You definitely ain't the only one, man.  Some days when there's not much going on for me, ideas just start popping up and seeming far more important than they actually are in the grand scheme of meaningless existence.  As fun as thinking is, it does tend to get out of hand when one stops being physically active and external for even a day or so. 

[JoshuaFH]

I want to talk about one very specific memory that's clung to me for a long time now, more than 10 years, and the incident that the memory is about was actually very innocuous and innocent, you wouldn't think that this would bother me as much as it does, but every single time I make any mistake, large or small, meaningful or inconsequential, it comes up to haunt me, and it completely fucks me up. It happened in Highschool, as seemingly all my bad memories originate, I was in counseling, because of course I was, and I was telling the counselor about how I had accidentally knocked over a thing in my house that had created a domino effect and knocked over two or three other things, and then she said the line I can't forget: "I thought you were smarter than that, Josh."

Even 10 years after the fact, that's a deeply cutting insult I can't quite shake off. For someone who at that point had based almost their entire identity on being the naturally intelligent boy that got straight A's easily and never needed to study or take notes, but otherwise had no social life, nothing else to base their identity on, that line was a personal attack aimed at my existence. It's not just after the fact I was upset, I was upset then too, I went fucking ballistic, locking myself into her office by myself, had the police called on me, I went to a mental hospital, and further cemented my identity among all my peers as the crazy fucker. Obviously things were going downhill for me before that point, but that event highlights how fast my mental and emotional state was spiraling downward inexorably.

I believe I've spoken of how hard I crashed in HS, in the Sad Thread though that was a long time ago now. I don't remember my senior year at all, it was one giant fog of depression I was crawling through blindly. My grades plummeted. My mental and emotional state had completely collapsed. By that point I had alienated myself to my peers, teachers, authority figures, just everyone, and was just drifting through every day by myself trying to not upset anyone any further, just not even interact with anyone for fear of fucking myself socially even further. I don't think I need to mention that obviously my Mom, her boyfriend, and whatever other family had no interest in my wellbeing at all either. It was the darkest time of my life without comparison. How I graduated is literally beyond me.

All these memories, brought up cause I made a stupid mistake in MTG that cost me a game, and that line got dredged up again "I thought you were smarter than that, Josh".

[NRDL]

*hugpats*

It really does suck how prevalent it is for everyone to place all their self-worth on one thing that could fluctuate and go down the crapper on any bad day.  So much needless suffering.  A person's self worth should never be dependent on external circumstance.