I quit smoking weed, done one full week as of today, which is the longest I've gone without it in maybe 2 years and the longest I've gone without it voluntarily for about 9 years.

Not that there's anything wrong with smoking in the abstract, but I enjoy it too much to be responsible with it. So I've decided that I'm going to let it go so I can focus on things that matter more to me.

Also I'm continuing to play guitar most days after about a month since I picked it back up. I made a thread to get some advice and was overwhelmed by the nicest, coolest hexbears with just SO much advice and support. Very cool and very inspiring. This place can be really great.

This week I practiced meditation for 4 days in a row and did a bit of reading. It was still too cold to go running or hiking but I went for a walk every day. Hopefully it's gonna be a bit warmer next weekend so I'll be able to go hiking.

I went to the gym today Squats, Bench Press and 1.13 mi. Goals is to slowly add weight each visit. And lower my 1 mile time to 8 minutes.

I need to draw and paint but BG3 has got its tentacles on me.

I hit the gym three times this week. I also downloaded Rocksmith 2014 from Fitgirl (guitar hero with an actual guitar playing actual notes) and played it twice.

Didn't get around to practicing piano. The goal this week is to set a schedule where I'm practicing both daily.

Oh, and I tracked my meals for the second half of this week and met my calorie + protein + creatine goals for muscle gain.

Physical
I started an acrobatics class this week that is super fun! It's helping me develop my kinesthetic sense and do some strenuous exercise that feels euphoric. The teacher said I was a natural. Even if she was just being sweet it felt really reassuring since the other people in the class had been doing it for a while which was a bit daunting.

I also signed up for Planet Fitness but I ain't been yet. Really struggling with 'big dog in a little apartment' syndrome with Winter how it is. Actually addressing it this year instead of getting sedentary and depresso.

Emotional Working my way through Polysecure and writing some journal reflections which have been really clarifying and healing. Had a difficult conversation with my partner that I been putting off as a product of what I discovered through the book.

Attending temple more regularly and making some big breakthroughs in terms of grounding myself with prayer. Even without that, going has been really cathartic for me. In general, I struggle to cry when I need to but always seem to get really weepy during services. It's really nice to have a space to sing and reflect and cry each week.

Other Still struggling some with using the computer too much. I haven't been reading as much as I'd like even though I got a few books I'm excited about.

Week 2 of cleaning and organizing. Today we are gonna focus on tidying up our oldest's room a bit, move the hand-me-down stuff to our youngest's room and do some like reorganizing. I'm also gonna try and get our table cleaned pod since it turned into a dump station.

Ramping up to getting to the bookshelves... Once that's done we wanna figure out how to manage the youngest's play like that ended up in front of the TV...

I signed up for my classes, and I've been having an existential crisis ever since. I really just wanted to do art, but I never so much as picked up a pencil or learned so much as one song because I was worried it would never make money. I'm in my mid-twenties finishing a degree I abandoned in my early 20s and I will be surrounded by only early 20s folks. I missed out on youth big time.

I'm not going to like what I'm doing, but the only alternative is rotting away in my parents basement while I do minimum wage jobs waiting for inspiration to strike me even though it likely never will. It feels like I am settling for a lesser devil rather than finding happiness.

Mokey Practice List. Need another lesson with the teacher I found but he forgot about me and I'm going to get really busy this week. So instead of waiting for him I'm just going to work the logical next step.

Arm Technique:

Full Stroke 70BPM each arm. Goal is 80 BPM.

Rebound Stroke 100BPM in right arm/90 BPM in left arm. Will likely drop right arm and double down on my left.

Next up: Tap Strokes and Doubles with only forearm.

Feet Technique

Left Foot, Heel Down 50-60. Quarter/Eighth/Triplets. Keep the pedal with the foot. Initiate stroke with an upstroke. I think my left foot is locked at 70 because my upstroke isn't engrained enough and nor is my foot staying with the pedal enough. I really want to stop shedding left foot technique, I need more time for more important things.

Ankle Technique 120-130. Do three or five strokes. Don't try to do consistent eighth notes. This way is better for building muscle.

Ankle Technique 175-165. Do three or five strokes. Don't try to do consistent eighth notes.

Next up: Will be working on this for awhile. Once I can play consistent eighth notes between 100-200 BPM I'll stop working on this and probably put the time into traditional grip.

Groove Studies

Jazz Ride Pattern with bass drum permutations. 1, a of 1, + of 1. Really focusing on my ride has been helpful and I feel like getting my bass drum clean is a good use of my time while I flesh out more details of my ride beat. Sometimes I play heavier on 1 and 3 than I like.

Rhythmic Pyramid with Benny Greb App. 60 BPM. This is something I'll be shedding for awhile. I noticed today that sometimes I can sense that my quarter note is wrong in the silence and I think that extrasensory feeling might be what I'm chasing.

Rhythmic Pyramid 40 BPM. Play quarter notes, two bars of subdividing as triplets and two bars of subdividing as eigth notes. I notice how hard it is to subdivide back and forth for these more sparse subdivisions, so I'm just going to shed that. It's very hard to not rush/drag, happy to work it out.

Transcribing

Minority - Bill Evans, Philly Joe Jones Trading Fours

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yevo49R1o4I

Listen

Oscar Peterson's Blues Etude Album, particularly If I Were A Bell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q-HoOgiz3Q

Feeling very called out by the op

Exercised 3x Kept up on eating 6/7 days, was straight up too exhausted after work one day and just passed out (ended up doing 10k steps in like 4 hours at work that day), oh well

A fifth of the way through this textbook now, it's slowed down as it's getting into things I'm not familiar with, and work was busy so less time on the clock to study. should have more time this week to make some good progress there though.

Reading before bed is definitely helping with sleep too, read a chapter and my eyes are barely able to stay open and then I pop on a podcast and fall asleep

Really cutting down on my calorie intake recently and it's starting to show. I've managed to lose 3-13lbs since I started and I'm pretty surprised about how easy this low calorie diet stuff is. For a meal I've just been microwaving a whole pack of cauliflower and tossing some lemon pepper on it. A whole ass pound of food and it's like 150 calories tops, and I feel super energized afterwords

Going to try and start heading to the gym soon. There's nothing really stopping me other than I don't want to run into the new year's crowd. Hopefully by February I'll go there though

Starting a new lift routine after I stopped for awhile after a non lifting related rib injury.

Lessons learned that I'm bringing into it this go around:

While I've professed and lived by the mantra of "start slow, build slow", for any kind of exercise routine, I've never really considered the importance of staying slow. As soon as I start feeling the benefits of my slow, but steady and gainful progression, I'll get excited and jump weights and do whatever else weird stuff. This time I'm just going to stay slow.

In conjunction one of the most challenging moments for me is the time right before/after and then beginning a new routine. The emotional buildup, relief, and then uncertainty that often comes in those moments leaves me vulnerable to getting out of my rhythm. I get so focused on completing my goal, that I don't really know what I want to do next, so I can go from pure motivation/accomplishment to really aimlessness after.

So anyway to address that I'm committing to a longer routine, this one is set for 48 weeks, and I'm going to avoid setting medium goals like get to X weight, or beat my PR on this lift. I've used those in the past to motivate me to lift, but those aren't my goals, my goal is to continue lifting for 48 weeks.

This week I think I'll practice some piano/synth/music theory stuff rather than drums. I've gotten pretty got damn rusty.

Goal: Make 1 song using a bunch different synth layers that I actually play and record with mine own two hands (i.e. not clicking around in the DAW piano roll).

• Make as simple a beat as possible (808, 909?), 4 bar loop is fine, some variations every now and then, some kind of fill every 16th. Really don't spend too much time on this.
• Live record a bunch of synths-that-are-not-the-lead (there might be a word for this) on top of it. I'm thinking a pad, a 303 arp thing, and bass tracks.
• Live record a lead synth/melody straight from the Hydrasynth to the track. Can of course do re-takes if it's completely fucked, but try not to fuck with it too much.
• Quick arrangement, quick and dirty mastering, export, done. It does not have to be good, as long as I just make something.

The point is to get more comfortable with imperfections. I tend to rely too much on the DAW to clean up my MIDI tracks, which has kind of made my creativity stagnate. It's objectively much more fun to just overdub something dope on the fly rather than being a fucking nerd about it and demanding everything to make perfect musical sense at all times. I just want to make something good enough and keep it like that, and then finish up the track before I start analyzing the fun out of it.

I have also come to the unorthodox conclusion that I need to start smoking more weed. I kind of stopped smoking once most of my friends and I got a real, adult jobs, but now I kind of miss it. I can't exactly remember, but I think I stopped because I was afraid it would fuck with my performance at work or something? Like I valued the job more than getting stoned. I don't think it was ever mutually exclusive, but whatever, it was probably not a bad idea to lay off the zaza for a while anyway. Now that I have some manner of job security and seniority I think it's about time to start lighting up every now and then. Looking forward to it.

I'm too scared to step on the scale but I've been keeping up with calorie conscious veggie packed meals during the week and pig out weekends. I don't think I'm getting enough protein though since I'm still feeling hungry during the week.

I'm making the effort to be more prepared and organised this semester, which will hopefully help to combat my depression. I've been making my bed every morning, which I used to not do, planning out my lunches a bit more, and the biggest thing is that I've been trying to cut out binge eating. Last year I gained a lot of weight because I would go to the supermarket and buy 4 big cookies and eat them in one day. It never satisfied me and I always felt bad afterwards but I wasn't able to resist the temptation. So this year I'm cutting that out. Small treats are allowed, in moderation. I'm also trying to attend college much more than last year, often last year I would skip two or three days of lectures a week and end up feeling isolated and unproductive. My biggest break is that I've finally settled in with a good group of friends in college, three years in. I'm I a dnd group, we play weekly and it's really fun. So I'm hoping overall this semester will be a lot better than the last

I ANNIHILATED my back squat pr from last week today by 25 pounds after watching the jts pillars of squatting series

https://youtu.be/oEy5WFr-CDA?si=R3wrcO7zbAImyyKa

I watched the bench one too but it felt really weird to bench with such an exaggerated arch. The leg drive helps for sure but it’ll take some getting used to. I PRd volume there too but not nearly as impressive a margin

doin' a little more cooking lately instead of just making heat-n-eat slop

pan frying makes me so fucking itchy cause of the oil particles blasting everywhere but god damn does it makes stuff taste good

sad to report the snowstorm fucked with all the good habits i was building. I was extremely stressed being trapped inside for a week, awaiting power outages and possibly trees falling on my house, frozen pipes, and being worried about my cat because their canned food shipment being delayed due to the ice. (Cat is doing good, we have dry food here so they weren't going hungry, just forced to eat their not-favorite food for a few days. Me too, buddy.)

I think it's important to talk about this stuff, because habit building/self improvement/recovery is usually more like an upward trend on a chart with lots of little dips and gains and not one continuous line upward. I honestly struggled a lot with my cannabis use that week, i used it a lot as a stress reliever and backslid on reducing. BUT it was an extremely stressful week, and i didn't backslide *that *far, and my plan was never to completely quit anyway, just be less reliant on it. Still, i was able to keep myself from smoking for long periods of the time the last few days when i've been feeling better mentally and can do stuff like go outside and have less general anxiety about my safety/home.

So during that time i was trapped inside, i couldn't garden. BUT i did actually read a gardening book every day or do seed research so i'm counting that. Yesterday was the first day in... 8 days? i could do anything outside. I just moved a bunch of sticks that fell from the windstorms into a border for one of my garden beds since the ground was still a bit snowy. I'm feeling a bit unwell today, but if i feel better i'm hoping to weed around some of the younger plants. Turns out dandelions are actually great for the soil and bringing up a lot deep nutrients up into the topsoil, and are good for pollinators, so i'm going to keep some around, but i need to make sure there is no other plants around the babies so they have room in the soil for their roots. I hope all the plants survived the 17F icestorm weather. I protected the sensitive ones, but i don't know if it'll be enough. Oh and i ordered some seeds for inside, microgreen radish seeds, mung beans, and cinnamon basil. When i feel better i'm going to mix up some veganic potting soil using a recipe a friend gave me and repot a plant that's been in a broken container for the last six months lol.

My "be active" plan also suffered. It dropped below freezing here and between stress and the cold i just felt like hibernating and had very little energy. The heating system in this place is honestly pretty bad lol. My fingers were going numb just sitting at my desk with the heat supposedly turned up to max. I did some half hearted stretching and called it good. But now i'm on day 3 streak of being active now that it's warmed up and i'm not snowed in.

So i didn't do well last week under stressful conditions but now that things are more normal, i'm doing a lot better and are back to making progress in areas i care about :)

I'm rubbing shoulders with the upper middle class and rich people again.

We had dinner with this woman who talked about how futile it is to tell kids in inner city music programs that theyll be in major symphonies. I liked this lady, she seemed to have a pretty grounded head. These kids don't have private teachers everyday, they don't study with the best teachers, they don't go to fancy camps and programs. And it's true, it's responsible to tell these kids this, especially when they become some universities piggy bank and are saddled with debt forever.

It's true, painfully so because I am even worse than these kids. I didn't even have the inner city youth program to lie to me. I am that much of an idiot. I am a dumb hick loser bred to power the capitalist machine.

I don't know why I exist sometimes, it's for music but I am so irrelevant and the adversity is so high that I feel like I'm wasting the life that isn't even mine. I don't even have a speaking role in other peoples movies, how do people go through life not considering how the rest of us feel? I feel like I should quit music and holding onto the idea of getting really good is futile and more pain than its worth.

About 30 days without video games. Biggest personal advancements: I have won a very small rhetorics/debate contest (less than 8 contestants, 30 viewers. I argued for a good talking point) and did guided tours about architecture and history professionally. I finally could afford a new top. Now that the weather is getting better, I hope to get into biking and then working out for general strength. My time schedule is significantly unfucked. I am thinking about setting aside one day/week for enjoyment only.

Emotionally still pretty rough, everybody else around me is doing awful. I feel like I am leeching everybody's luck sometimes. I am not superstitious, but I think this expresses my anxieties about sharing my small successes while other people face a lot of shit.