Just Around the River Bend

My favorite Disney princess is, and likely will always be, Pocahontas. As a little girl, she was the princess with whom I most identified. I remember watching Pocahontas repeatedly and having a bootleg mystery book where I helped Pocahontas to find her father’s headdress. My name was printed in the book and everything. I was also a big fan of Cinderella, but I didn’t identify with her. I didn’t admire her or idolize her in the way I did Pocahontas. With the introduction of an African-American princess into the Disney canon, I guess I could be expected to identify more with her but I don’t.

Maybe we look more alike but we certainly don’t have similar ideas about life. My life philosophy is more “Just Around the River Bend” than “Almost There.” Life’s about enjoying the journey and finding the next amazing journey, not building someone else’s dream and hating life along the way. I couldn’t have Tiana’s single-minded pursuit of a dream instilled in her by her father. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to figure out what is “just around the river bend” and figuring out how to live a life full of excitement and enjoyment.

Starting Over

I guess I should make it clear that I'm getting my 21 day revamp guide from The Personal Excellence Blog and that one of the requirements is to repeat the habit every single day for 21 days and if I miss a day, I start over. Well, I missed yesterday. So everything's starting over...

But, everything's starting over next week... the day after I get home (5/18) because  it'll be simpler to actually maintain a habit when I have a stable environment. I will keep trying to do these things as practice for the 21 day trial.

So, I'll have four 21 day trials with a week in between each it seems.

Round 1... FIGHT!

My first 21 day wave (which starts tomorrow, May 10, and ends on May 30) is going to be fitness-centric. Getting healthier is the most important issue in my life but my eating and exercise habits are quite terrible. I definitely need to lose weight. I have a goal of losing 68 pounds by the end of the year with a current weight of 212.5. So Round 1 Habits are:

• pescetarianism (been toying around with the idea)
• exercising for an hour daily (not including the below)
• 5-5-5 (five minutes each of pushups/planks, abwork, and legwork)/ 30 minutes of yoga
• 100 oz of water daily
• log my nutrition
• blogging daily

There are 33 weeks left in the year so to get to my goal of 145, I need to lose slightly more than 2 pounds every week. I have to burn roughly 7200 calories every week, more than half of that will be from exercise (aiming for 600 calories daily) and a little under 450 from diet daily.

Of course, I won't be blogging much about it. Exercise is just not that interesting. But I will check in every Sunday to hold myself responsible for adhering (or not adhering *cringe*) to my goals. I will eventually put up a sidebar listing all of the resources I will have used this summer, but for these habits, here are the ones I plan on using:

• Rootein.com
• dailyburn.com

A Secret... A Cheat... An Explanation

I generally hate writing the first entry of a personal notebook or journal, simply because I always feel like that has to be perfect; it will set the tone for the rest of the journal and if that's not perfect then *gasp* nothing else will be. It just feels like so much pressure that I have this instinctive reaction against it.

So, a secret... I usually skip the first page in a new notebook. That way it remains pristine and perfect for the perfect prologue written in a very distant future. For blogging, it's different. There will always be a first entry and it can't be hidden behind loads of new, specific, interesting, tangential posts. It will always be the first.

So, a cheat... I have just written my first post about why I hate writing first posts. It gives insight into me and is not so meaningful that I feel like I've just restricted the blog's focus to any particular subject. Which is good to me because I have no idea what I would want the subject to be. I've never been successful in keeping tabs on a particular subject really or having a journal that was just about my life indefinitely. The only successful journaling I've ever done was during a six-week summer program at the University of Indiana in which I managed to write a page-long entry everyday. I restricted the entries to a page everyday and it worked. I wrote about a lot of random things- people, activities, thoughts, etc- but there was always the structure of one page everyday for six weeks. That is why I have created this blog with a double time-frame: twenty-one days of the summer season.

So, an explanation... I think the summer time-frame explains itself easily enough in light of the last paragraph. I do have to add that my definition of summer is somewhat different from the standard June 21 to September 21 period because of the practicalities of my life. My summer is 105 days long starting from May 10 to August 22. Now onto why I have apparently chosen 21 days of this 105-day long summer. Some say that it takes twenty-one days to form or to break a habit. There are plenty of habits I would like to make and plenty I would like to break. There is hardly ever a better time for a full-time student like me to focus on personal development than during the summer which conveniently works out to five cycles of 21 days, which means 5 waves of focusing on creating good habits and eliminating bad ones. I'm not entirely certain how everything will break down yet, although I do have an idea of what my first cycle will look like. I also have quite a few summer goals to post about later, but for now...

This entry is perfect.