Day 106 / End of Week One

Wow, I can’t believe it has already been a week!  I’m excited and pleased that I’m still going so strong.

So, I suppose an end-of-week review is in order:

• Goal One: Complete a sixteen-week fitness programme – This has been ridiculously easy. Apparently I’m even less unfit than I thought! I’m looking forward to ramping it up next week.
• Goal Two: Repair my relationship with food – I could be paying better attention to this. I didn’t have a bad week at all, and aside from one glitch with fast food (I think it was on the second day), I’ve done pretty well. But I’d still like to have that moment where I start feeling like I’m really connecting with the process of eating, instead of just shoving food in my mouth.
• Goal Three: Meditate every day – I have perfect attendance so far with this, and I’ve actually been into it. I’m already noticing a difference.
• Goal Four: Go out and have fun once a week – I did more than my share of this! I went out twice, in fact.
• Goal Five: Read eight works of fiction – I need to speed it up next week. I’ve been reading every day, but not nearly at the pace I need to be at.
• Goal Six: Put a thousand euros in savings – Wow, what a great result with this one! €250 already put away, I’m really pleased with that.
• Goal Seven: Drink summer wine – This is top of the list for things to get started on in Week Two. In fact, I went and bought two bottles of wine this evening, so I’m going to break into those over the weekend.
• Goal Eight: Rock a sundress – Honestly, I haven’t even thought about this one yet, but I certainly will soon, since the weather is warming up.
• Goal Nine: Improve my sleeping habits – Well, I was doing pretty well with this, and then I messed it up by staying up until 5.00 this morning. I need to have a more regular schedule.
• Goal Ten: Leave the house at least once a day – This has been easy since four of those days are taken up with my fitness programme.
• Goal Eleven: Take care of my skin – I need to make this a priority in the week starting tomorrow. My face in particular looks terrible right now and I need to do something about that.
• Goal Twelve: Organise my hard drives – Haven’t even looked at them yet. I might put this off another week.
• Goal Thirteen: Care for my hands and feet – I certainly gave myself a beautiful pedicure, but I need to concentrate more on exfoliation.
• Goal Fourteen: Switch to a standing desk – DONE. I couldn’t believe how easy this was. I thought my legs and feet were going to beg for mercy, but it’s actually been fine.
• Goal Fifteen: Visit a spa – I definitely want to start thinking about this soon.
• Goal Sixteen: Plan an end-of-summer celebration – I think I’ll put this off a few more weeks.

And that’s it!  Week One has definitely been a great success, and I’m looking forward to carrying this momentum into Week Two.

 

Goal Sixteen: Plan an end-of-summer celebration

Believe me, at the end of this project, I am going to want to party like it’s 1969.

In fact, I think a retro party would be fun. Or a snow party in the mountains. Or maybe just dinner at a nice restaurant with some friends.

I’m not sure yet what form this is going to take, but rest assured I am going to plan a really excellent end-of-summer celebration to mark the beginning of the nicest time of the year (i.e. the three months that aren’t summer), and to reflect on this project and whatever I end up learning from it.

So that’s it – that’s the last of the sixteen goals.  As it turns out, it’s now three minutes until midnight on the eve of the start of this project, and tomorrow morning when I wake up we’ll see what’s in store.  I’m looking forward to improved health, increased happiness, and best of all, spending the summer doing something other than complaining about it.

 

Goal Fifteen: Visit a spa

Ah yes, what a terrible thing to have to aim for.

I can hear the complaints now: if she wants to go to the spa, why doesn’t she just go?  Why does this need to be a goal?

I’m sure that wherever you live, you have some remarkable tourist attraction that your city is known for, or some landmark that has made your town famous, or something like that.  But the question is, even though people come from thousands of miles away to visit your city for that specific reason, how often do you do the things your city is famous for?

I know people living in Paris who have never visited the Eiffel Tower.  A friend of mine living in London has never laid eyes on Big Ben.  When you move somewhere, you think, meh, now I can do those things anytime, it doesn’t have to be right now.

I live in Italy and I’ve never been to a spa.  At least, not an Italian spa.

It’s not from lack of promises.  I have told myself a million times that I would go before such-and-such date, and it still hasn’t happened.  I’ve even made appointments and then cancelled them when my schedule got busy.  But I’ve never made an appointment and then shown up and received a spa treatment.

And let me tell you, if there’s anyone who could use a professional massage, it’s me.

So I’m going.  At some point in the next sixteen weeks, I will have a real massage at a real spa.

 

Goal Fourteen: Switch to a standing desk

I know these standing desks are a big deal in America at the moment, but I’m determined to find one here.  Or make one.  Or construct a makeshift one.  Or something.

For those who haven’t run across this term yet (as I hadn’t until about a week ago), a standing desk is exactly what it says on the tin – it’s a desk where instead of sitting in a chair like a lazy arse all day, you stand up while you work, thus keeping yourself at least marginally more active, and solving a lot of the back problems that sitting in a chair creates.

As a maths teacher, I do spend a lot of time sitting.  It’s not what you’d call an athletic job. I exercise regularly, but scientists are discovering that statistically speaking, exercising for an hour a day doesn’t really help extend your life if you spend the other twenty-three hours parked in a chair.

I’m not that sedentary, but I would definitely like to try a standing desk out.  I’m going to get on the task as soon as possible, and be a permanently standing worker by the end of the summer.

 

Goal Thirteen: Care for my hands and feet

In the summer, manicures and pedicures are essential.  Not necessarily in the “pretty nail varnish” sense, but more in the “no more lizard feet” sense.

That’s not to say that I don’t think nail varnish is important.  I’m not so into painting my fingernails, but I love to paint my toenails when it’s flip-flops weather.  So I do want there to be an aesthetic aspect to this goal, but mostly I just don’t want to be walking around with flaky heels and ruffled cuticles and the like.  This is going to involve regular use of both my foot file and my pumice stone, both of which are gathering dust on the edge of the bathtub.  It wall also involve getting out my cuticle nippers and my emery board.  I’m going to have twenty great-looking nails this summer.

 

Goal Twelve: Organise my hard drives

Every goal list should have at least one boring goal, and this is mine.

No, my desktop does not look like the wreck in the above image.  I keep a very clean desktop, actually, and I have a very elaborate system for keeping files in order.  The problem is, eventually when I get busy I always resort to creating a folder called “miscellaneous,” and that folder becomes a black hole of files that may never see the light of day again if I don’t do something.

Every once in a while, I’ll move my miscellaneous folder to an external drive in the hopes that clearing up my internal drive will help me stay on track, but then I just do the same thing again.  I now have several folders called “miscellaneous A,” “miscellaneous B,” and so forth.  Each one may have thousands of files in it.

Let’s not even talk about my archive of old e-mails.  I could open an e-mail museum.

So this summer, I’m finally going to reorganise and clear out everything in my catch-all folders.  I’m going to throw away what’s no longer needed, and file the rest in my otherwise efficient system.  This is a nice, easy goal to do in the summer, as I can do it while sitting in front of the air-conditioner.

 

Goal Eleven: Take care of my skin

All in all, I have pretty good skin, but I don’t do much to take care of it, and it shows.  Sometimes I even do things that damage my skin, and that shows, too.

I’ve often thought about how great my skin would look if I would just do a little daily maintenance with it and stop doing the things that harm it.  Since I don’t like going out in the summer, sun damage has never been an issue, so that’s one thing I’ve already got going for me.  But that doesn’t mean that I can get away with things like not moisturising or not exfoliating.  It’s embarrassing to wear skimpy clothes in the summer when your skin looks scaly, especially if you’re as light-skinned as I am.

I also have some issues with dermatillomania, which is an anxiety disorder that causes a person to harm their own skin.  For most people who suffer from this disorder, dermatillomania manifests in face picking, but in my case I tend to destroy the cuticles around my fingernails, often pulling them back to the point of bleeding if I’m particularly worried or nervous about something.  I’m aware that this is not a skin condition in itself, but rather a psychological one, and that in order for things to get better on that front, I need to treat the source and not the symptoms.  Luckily, I have some other goals on this list that will help me do exactly that, but I’m also aware it’s going to be a more long-term road than just sixteen weeks.  Nonetheless, this is how I’m going to begin.

 

Goal Ten: Leave the house at least once a day

I often hear people talk about getting “cabin fever” or going “stir crazy” if they stay in the house too long, sometimes even just for a few hours.  I have never experienced this feeling in my entire life.  I love my home, I love being at home, and I have been known to stay in for days or even weeks at a time and not even really notice that I haven’t gone out.  It just doesn’t bother me to stay indoors, and in fact I seem to thrive on it.  As online shopping has become more widespread, it has become easier and easier for me to adopt a hermit lifestyle, and so far I haven’t really done anything to stop it.

In the summer, you can pretty much guarantee that I won’t leave the house unless someone has a proverbial gun to my head.

Now, I realise that not everyone has to be the kind of person who likes going out all the time, but I do think that some daily fresh air would do me good… even if that means simply going up to the roof of my building in the evening to drink some iced coffee.  It’s nice to have a break and see something different for a while, so every day for sixteen weeks, I will leave the house at least once, even if it’s only to walk to the corner market to buy some strawberries.

 

Goal Nine: Improve my sleeping habits

I don’t want to give off the impression that I have any problems sleeping, because I don’t, really.  It’s just that I’m aware my sleeping habits are erratic at best, and I want to do something to improve that.  On the sporadic occasions when I’ve kept a regular sleeping schedule, I’ve felt happier, healthier, and more in control of my moods.

I find I do really well with audio sleep programmes like Pzizz, mostly because I like listening to them, and so I look forward to going to sleep, and I’m more likely to keep a regular schedule that way.

I’d also like to set up specific times for waking up and going to bed every day.  I’m a morning person by nature, so I don’t really have any problems waking up, but some days it’s at 6.00 and other days it’s at 9.00 and so forth. I understand that things like going out at night will push the schedule around somewhat, but I’m prepared to work that into the plan.

I also want to stop doing all sorts of busywork before I go to sleep.  I want to spend the last hour before bed winding down, not working straight through until bed time and then collapsing in a heap on the bed.  I’d like my days to taper off gently so that sleeping is more about refreshing myself than fending off exhaustion.

 

Goal Eight: Rock a sundress

This sounds so silly, but I don’t think I’ve ever even owned a sundress, except maybe when I was a toddler.

The total number of dresses (of any style) that I’ve possessed in my entire life is definitely less than ten, and probably even less than five.  I have what some might call an athletic physique, not particularly feminine or soft, and when I wear dresses I have always thought that I look like a transvestite.  Of course my friends all say, “noooooo, that’s not true,” but they’re my friends and they will lie to protect my feelings.

Nonetheless, even rectangular-shaped women deserve to get their sundress on if they want to.  Recently I’ve let go of the antiquated, twentieth-century notion that only certain women with certain body types are “allowed” to wear certain types of clothing.  I have banished the phrase “I wonder if I can get away with that” from my vocabulary.  It’s a dress, not a bank robbery.  There’s nothing to get away with.  If I like it and I want to wear it and I want to feel pretty wearing it, then I will, damn it. No desperately limiting narrow-minded social convention is going to stop me.

Ah, but it’s easier said than done.  Like most women, I’ve been culturally brainwashed into thinking that you have to look “good enough” in something before you can wear it in public, and of course when you look at women in magazines, you realise that you will never look like that, so you put on your baggy jeans and your t-shirt and you tell yourself that this is what someone with your body deserves to wear.  Sexy clothes are for those other girls, the ones who look “good enough,” even if logic tells you that the definition of “good” is completely arbitrary and subjective.

So, the goal:  Find a sundress I truly love, and rock that bitch all summer long.  I want to avoid thinking in terms of a sundress that will “flatter” me – after all, who gets to decide what’s “flattering,” anyway?  Men? Vogue magazine?  Fashion designers?  I’m hereby rejecting the notion that I’m only allowed to wear things that minimize my ample shoulders and give a round appearance to my square hips.  This summer, I’m going to pick a dress I think is super cute, and I’m going to be super cute in it, no matter what.  If people want to judge my body, let them.  Their judgement says everything about them and nothing whatsoever about me.