I'm fat. And tired of it. Now that my ankle is better, I can get back to walking regularly (happy dog!), and start doing the exercise I need to do to limber up, and get back into yoga. I'm so stiff it is embarrassing to go to yoga right now. I can't even sit cross-legged on the floor... my legs are so tight I fall over backwards. :-( It's funny, but frustrating. I'm going to do the Distinguished Gentleman's Ride at the end of the month, riding my old BMW, waxing up the handlebar mustache, and wearing my wedding tuxedo. Hopefully the weather holds. September in Seattle is a real crapshoot... could be 80 and sunny, or 50 and raining. It also conflicts with a weekend Burner campout I'm going to be attending, so... not sure how to sort all that out, just yet. But I'm sure it will all work out fine! :-o Had a fascinating conversation with two women I knew very well back in the late 1980's. We sort-of lived together in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, since the apartment I was in always had a couple of people circulating in and out on a regular basis... Anyway, I admitted that I was embarrassed by a drunken night of lunacy, when I last visited them about 15 years ago. In my head, this was an epic "issue" between us that I could never overcome because I was such an asshole, and it would always color our relationship for every day from then on into the infinite future. She said she didn't remember that at all... And then admitted she felt bad still for arguing with me on the back stoop of our apartment, back in 1988(?) or so, and that she still felt bad for breaking that glass and yelling at me... ... which I don't recall at all... And so an interesting conversation ensued... We talked about how we hold on to things, and revisit them over and over in our heads, until they become completely blown out of proportion, and we build up this elaborate baseball bat, and then beat ourselves over the head with it for ever and ever and ever... Until one late night in 2016, she is chatting with me over Messenger as she lays down to go to bed in Dusseldorf, while I am just waking up in Seattle, and we both admit our secret shame to each other... and realize that this embarrassment, this weight, this failure we have carried around with us for almost three decades... has absolutely zero significance. That's an important lesson that we need to re-learn, over and over and over again, throughout our lives.
That's a great story. When I'm drifting off to sleep and am jolted into wakefulness by an embarrassing or cringe-worthy memory of mine, a tactic I've developed for placing less significance on the memory is to remind myself that I've never been jolted into wakefulness by something embarrassing someone else has done.