Initial Impressions 2.0 Blog #67: Monday Runday, Social Media Stalkers, 5K Fun, etc.

1. It was the return of Monday Runday this week. That is where I get out of work, meet my friend Mike at a local school track, and run or walk. It is so much fun, especially when the weather is good. The return of this fun event was not without its challenges. Mainly, it was do I beat the hell out of a selfish, entitled dog owner. I took a detour off of the track to find a porta-potty. Once done there I took a long lap around the school. It was here that I was met with a dog running free while its idiot owners just watched. I yelled repeatedly to get their dog while it ran around me. I kept running but made sure to toss several F words at the moron dude who stood there leaking brain cells on the ground. It did get my adrenaline pumping but man, stupid people.

2. A new piece of training equipment I got to try this week is resistance training for your lungs. It is a mouth guard with a valve attached to it. You can adjust the valve to restrict your oxygen intake. The gist of it is that if you have to breathe twice(or more) as hard as normal to get a full breath then when you’re exercising in reality, you’ll have far more stamina. I suppose you could use it to strengthen your lungs just for daily life as well. My hope is that using it will leads to more stamina running while my calf wedge will allow me to run longer due to increased ankle and calf mobility. We shall see.

3. I don’t know if it is an example of the Mandela effect or if it’s just me, but how did it take me to my late 40s to realize that Tom the Cat from Tom & Jerry was gray during the first years of the cartoons? I thought he was always blue, but it turns out he was gray for a lot of the time. Maybe my sense of color was different when watching the cartoons as a kid? Maybe I am putting way too much thought into 80-year-old cartoons? But also what else from my childhood am I ‘misremembering’ as Roger Clemens once said?

How did I not notice Tom was gray?

4. There are plenty of times over the last few years when I feel like I am working on so many different projects and making minimal progress on each. Typically, my content itinerary consists of podcasts, videos, blogs, and various social media posts to promote all of those. I have also been working for months on a website for my podcast. This is the project that feels like I am making little progress on. Usually it’s because the rest of the content takes precedence. As we speak, I am working on loading in all of the links I’ve shared in 194(and counting) episodes, along with all of the old shows and artwork. You can see that it’s slow going based on the fact that I chose to stop that work to continue this blog. I’m sure the site will be up before my podcast ends, pretty sure.

5. I always find it weird and a bit off-putting when a random stranger likes a photo or post of mine on social media that dates back several years. Like how much are you stalking my pages to find something that far back when I have hundreds, if not thousands of posts? It’s especially creepy on Instagram, where I have nearly 6,000 posts. If you’re that big of a fan to go years back in my archives, then go support me on Patreon, if you’re just a weirdo stalker, then please make yourself known so I can block you.

6. My 5K race this weekend left me shocked and speechless in the best possible way. I had only semi-trained. I looked at this race as a kind of barometer of where I went with running afterward. My goals were twofold. Don’t get hurt, and finish the 5K(3.1 miles) in less than 35 minutes. I ended up beating my goal by more than 6 minutes, and actually beating my last 5K time by a good 45 seconds. To say I am shocked is an understatement. I was tired for sure but I set a pace from the start and barely wavered. As a runner, sometimes the hardest thing to do is run your race and not change your plan based on others around you. I fell victim to that more times than I can count. For some reason in this race, I felt like it was just me against myself, and it turned out better than I could have imagined.

7. The race was the Dennis Chamber 5K. It started and ended at the beautiful Mayflower Beach, which is on the bay side. This marked the 4^th time I ran a race on this course. It’s relatively easy, there are a couple of hills but nothing that any average runner hasn’t seen before. This year’s race had about 250 people, so we were packed like sardines at the beginning. At my peak I used to line up right on the starting line and would take off in a flash. Now I tend to be in the middle of the pack. The faster people take off out of sight, while I still can pass my fair share of slower people who don’t understand that they need to be in the back of the group. There was music, free food, water, a potential free lunch afterward. It was a fun and festive time made all the better by my surpassing my own expectations.

8. I took pride in my outfit for the race. I had an idea for it in my head and had to hope for the weather to cooperate because a rainy day would put the kibosh on my setup. Luckily, it ended up being sunny and around 60 for the race. This meant that I was able to go all out. I had some styling powder from a company named Level 3. It’s great stuff, you can use it on your dry hair. So I spiked up my hair I’ve been growing for the last few months. This didn’t go off without a hitch, as when I opened the container of the powder, I did manage to spill some on my black shirt and shorts. Smooth. Then I had a killer headband from the Junk company. It was blue and black Hippie skulls. Combined with sunglasses, it was a great look. Things went off without a hitch until a few hours after the race. This is when I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that, thanks to the headband, I had a very specific red area on my face. The headband and sunglasses covered my forehead and eyes, so I ended up with what boiled down to a red line about ¼” wide going across my forehead right above my eyebrows. Nice. It was still a good look though.

You can see where I might have gotten red...

9. The weather has been perfect especially over the weekend. It was time to throw open all of the windows and get that spring air flowing through my space. Of course this is the time then that the next door neighbor has a thorough cleanup done on their yard. This was complete with a backpack blower going nearly nonstop for close to 2 hours. It was the ultimate background music for me trying to edit my podcast. I ended up having to close my windows just like it was January again. Booo.

10. In this day and age I rarely have cash on me. I rely on my debit card for all purchases. Only when an issue arises do I wish we were still in the cash days. I was in a supermarket and only when I was at the self-checkout did I realize that the card reader was having issues. I had cash on me but only $5. I wasn’t going to leave my stuff, go run to an ATM, and then come back to pay the rest. After close to 10 minutes of trying and failing a different employee came over and suggested I try the ‘tap’ option. I had done it several times with no luck but to humor her I did one last time. Lo and behold it worked. I was so relieved and said she was a good luck charm. I then bumped into a few people I knew. I felt so good when leaving that I took that $5 and gave it to a group of little girls collecting money for their dance academy. Good karma for me.

Just a little spring photo to end the blog.

What I've Learned In My 40s(so far): 2. Learning To Let Go of Toxic People, Even Those Close To You

 

I turned 40 on November 2, 2017. There is an old saying that ‘life begins at 40.’ I used to think that was just something middle-aged people said to make them feel younger. Maybe that is a part of it. I do believe that the wisdom behind that saying is that you spend those first 39 years accumulating all kinds of knowledge that you then can start to put into practice when you hit the Big 4-0.

For me, as I stare down 47, I can honestly say that my 40s so far have been the most difficult and also rewarding decade of my life. I never thought I’d find a time where I’d feel more unsure, insecure, lost, and yet filled with optimism. My teens used to be the benchmark until my 40s.

I’ve learned a lot in my life. Some of it has been useful as I’ve aged. A lot has been pointless. No amount of studying prepares you for coming to grips with your own aging, your own mortality, or your own demons. No amount of preparation can soften the blow of loss and grief. My 40s have been a trial by fire. They have seen me dropped in hostile environments mentally with no survival gear and having to learn on the fly.

So what have I learned in my 40s so far? A lot.

2. I’ve learned that it is sometimes necessary to let go of toxic people in one's life, even if those people are immediate family.

I tend to push my feelings to the side for the sake of others. I am an empath through and through which is a good trait to have. Being able to feel what someone else is going through can help you understand and be supportive of them. It can also cause people to look past you and take you for granted.

Too many times in my life I have heard some form of the phrase ‘you have to deal with so-and-so because they’re family.’ That’s a lie. If someone’s presence in your life is actively hurting you then you don’t ‘have’ to allow them in your life.

I gave my father 40 years to show me something. Anything. He was given a long leash, and a thousand ‘second chances’ because he was my father. My parents divorced when I was 4. My father had been out of the house since probably a year before then. When I would see him as a kid he was more of a guy trying to be a cool older friend rather than a male role model to help shape who I would become. Notice I said when I would see him.

I had wanted to have a father like so many of my other friends had. Someone who taught them things. Someone who supported their goals. Someone who was actually in their lives. My father didn’t want any of those things. He wanted as little responsibility as possible.

This manifested itself in devastating ways. It was there when he would no-show picking me up for a visit when he said he would when I was a small child. It was there when he quit multiple jobs rather than pay below the minimum for child support. You know the money that would go to supporting your child? This meant for all intents and purposes he didn’t care if I had food, medical care, clothing, you name it.

I mentioned in the previous section that he would stop at the liquor store on drives home from work. He helped get me that job as a dishwasher/food prep. This meant that he also knew I was making money. This allowed him to ask for money constantly. Not to help with living expenses. No, he’d ask his 15-year-old son for money to buy alcohol and cigarettes. At one point he cleaned out my entire savings, well over $1,200, with the promise of payback in full. He might have paid back 75% and then never brought it up again.

The older I got the more I began to see with my own eyes who my father was. The more I was able to make the choice for myself the more I chose not to associate with him. I wanted a father but what I had was a lazy, selfish drunk who prioritized buying beer over his kids having their basic needs met.

After my Nana died in 2009 I stuck my neck out and got him a job at the same restaurant as me. This was me doing right by my Nana. He repaid me by no-call, no-showing 5 straight days about a month or so after starting the job. Can you imagine the embarrassment of knowing that your father cared so little that he just bailed on a job his son got him? My coworkers promised that didn’t make them see me any differently, but come on, it was humiliating.

From 2010 until I turned 40 in 2017 I saw my father very rarely. As I started having events for my books that I released, or road races, he was never there. I had loads of family at these events, not my father. There was always an excuse. He should have just been honest and said ‘you’re not important enough to me for me to try.’

My final straw came not too long before I turned 40. My father had a medical event that landed him in the ER. Despite being relatively estranged I was there with him like a good son. I was there as the doctors checked him out.

The doctor told my father he would make a full recovery but he needed to cut down and eventually cut out alcohol and cigarettes. By this point, I had switched careers and was a personal trainer. I promised the doctor and my father that I could help him with exercise and some nutrition advice. This was the last-second miracle I had wanted. I would finally have the father I had wanted. Better late than never.

He tapered down booze and cigarettes but only temporarily. Within a few weeks of getting out of the hospital, he was chugging beer and smoking like a chimney as if the medical issue had never happened.

That was it. I told him flat out that since he obviously didn’t care then I didn’t care either. I gave him until I turned 40 but I was done trying to force myself to have a father who only cared about himself. Only one person in the family, an aunt, tried to push the ‘but he’s family’ line on me. Everyone else understood why I was cutting my father out.

Flash forward to the present time and my father resides in a nursing and rehabilitation facility. His brazen ignoring of doctor’s recommendations in 2017 caught up with him. He had both of his legs amputated at the knees due to his incessant smoking and drinking. It would have been gut-wrenching if he had been even a subpar father.

In my eyes, he is living his karma. When I needed a father growing up he couldn’t have cared less. He only saw me when I visited my Nana’s house and that’s because he was living there. In fact, when I was still very young he had told my mother he was willing to waive all parental rights to me and my sister so that he wouldn’t have to pay child support.

It was only when my mother said that my Nana would lose all visitation rights as well that my father relented. Finding out that info as an adult should have been traumatizing. To me, it was par for the course. Why would I give one inch of space inside my mind to a man who prioritized beer and cigarettes over his children? And also why would I give one second of my time to visit such a reprehensible human? As far as I am concerned my father does not exist and as far as I am concerned it can stay that way for the rest of his miserable life.

Do not feel as though you have to keep a toxic, painful relationship going because someone is family. Sometimes the pain of having them in your life is greater than the pain of removing them from it.

Next: Part 3 - Learning there is no textbook for dealing with grief and loss

Previous: Part 1 - Being A Slave to a Demon, and Also Slaying That Demon