April 2014 Review

The big deal about April was my gym-six-days-a-week-for-six-weeks experiment. Did I keep it? I missed two days because of colds with accompanying fever, and skipped Easter Monday because I don’t like crowds. That’s 33 out of 36 days, which isn’t half bad. I did a personal best of 2x2x187lbs on the bench with a spot, and can now knock out sets of 4x176lbs with far more comfort than when I started. (Before you start giggling, you have to do that at my age, not yours.) I gave myself a half-way treat with supper at Picture, and then an it’s-done reward with supper at Picture again. Have I mentioned I really like Picture?

I saw the amazing tap-dancing of Savion Glover at Sadlers Wells, and had supper at Moro in Exmouth Market, with Sis; Divergent, The Quiet Ones and Spiderman 2 at Cineworld; and the first season of the Italian series Inspector Montalbano on DVD. I read Robert Trivers’ Deceit and Self-Deception, James Davies’ Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good, Lawrence Principe’s The Secret of Alchemy, and a collection of essays on the Philosopy of Pseudoscience, and Colonel Thomas Hammes’ The Sling and The Stone.

I made some more decent progress with the interminable Riemann-Roch essay, and watched an fascinating lecture by J-P Serre on How To Write Mathematics Badly.

I had a cold for at least two weeks of the month. So I wasn’t functioning at a very high level, and was kinda inclined to “go home” as a default setting, rather than “hang out for another hour and catch a movie”. I have learned this about having colds: unless I have an actual fever, when exercising can be actually dangerous, the point is to show up and work. In the gym I might only do 80% of what I would ordinarily do, and at work or the keyboard, a lot of it might be deleted and re-written, but when the cold is over, I don’t have to start again after a week off. I’m still about where I was just before the cold.

Oh. And I made my first cold approach for about sixteen years: ten or so in an LTR and five or so just plain not in the mood. If you had blinked, you would have missed it, but she knew I wanted to talk to her, and she had given me a definite IOI a couple of minutes before, and a couple of times before that. When the moment came, I suspect we both chickened out. In the Bad Old Days, I would have beaten myself up for being such a wuss, and be obsessing about what a failure it was even now. But I’m all spiritual and in recovery now, so I decided to treat it as what it was: my first cold approach for sixteen years. It had to be done, and now that’s over with.