Haven't had all that much to say lately.

Don't feel bad though, or don't worry, or anything. Whenever people seem sullen online I worry, often irrationally, that I've done something to upset or offend them. Also I am notoriously bad at reading people online, and constantly think that people are upset when they aren't. I am not sullen, anyway, just slightly out of it. I felt rotten last week but it was a vague, hard to pin down rottenness.

I worked it out to several things:
1. I wasn't getting enough sleep.
2. I wasn't getting enough exercise.

The first was easy to fix (I feel like I spent the whole weekend asleep), the second took a bit more doing. I feel like I shouldn't be working during the winter, I feel like I should be free as a bird and should spend my days hiking, and my nights sleeping, eating, and reading. Summer I don't mind working 9 to 5, because there are several good hours of daylight when I finish. I mind during winter-time.

I went up to the pastureland near my house, a little postage-stamp of open space, and walked the loop there. It was stunning in the snow. On one of the fields, I thought "This is like the ocean." Melissa wonders how people can live without the ocean, and now I know how. The wind had swept the snow into shallow waves, ice gleamed as it caught the sun like flat white-caps. Like the ocean, it was exhilarating and dangerous. Sun blazed in my face, and I felt nothing but the wind as I glided across the rolling field.

Into the trees, the place I think of as the foyer, I thought "I know this place well. I have seen it in all seasons." There is something austere about the place in wintertime, and I was just glad to be there.

I wish you could be here, because here is good to me right now.

I'm proud of myself, and glad that I chose to leave the house and get fresh air. I stared at my bed in the middle of the day and wanted to strip and crawl into it and never wake up, but I walked instead. I am very cautiously optimistic about my frequency of exercising. It's been, oh, six months since I started and while I have not always been consistent in frequency I have always come back to it. I'm fairly proud of myself, and my body. I do things that just wouldn't have occurred to me before, like play with my cousins or shovel out the driveway when it snows. I have fun.

Best thing I ever did. I love it when I do stuff. I love it when I follow through. I should do this more often.

2003-01-12, hiking, snow

before / after

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