It’s funny… I was looking forward to getting more sleep last night, having been totally zombified the day before, but then I didn’t get to bed until a little after my normal bedtime anyway, and my body woke me up at 4:17 a.m.
🙃
I could have gone back to sleep. I debated for a little bit whether or not I wanted to try and sleep in and catch up on sleep, but I also know that once I make an exception, it’s a lot easier to make an exception again later… So I chose to get up, and I’m glad I did.
I had a much more productive study time than I would have expected, both in personal study and in couple study and in my meditation time.
It was all really good. 🙂
I had a funny thing happened this morning as I was dictating something on my phone. I dictated the word eternity, and for whatever reason, Google decided to spell it like this: eaternity.
😆
I enjoyed that. 🙂 I think I feel that way when I’m trying to get all the food I need in a day. 🙃
One of the things that I’m really grateful for today is that I’ve made some good progress on my studies on prayer. I feel like I’m finally piecing together a semi decent foundation from which to build.
It’s kind of exciting. 🙂 Prayer is going to be so much more meaningful, I think, as well as much more intellectually intensive?
I’ve realized that to have the relationship that I want to have with God and to learn and grow in the ways that I want to learn and grow, specifically in this case with prayer, that there’s a lot more effort that I’m going to need to give going forward.
It’s exciting. 🙂
Since I’m only barely getting a piece together foundation that I’m feeling a little confident in, I’m still at that point where I’m not well versed enough for it to be natural because there’s so many new insights and lessons that I’m trying to apply all the same time into this one whole. So as I move forward, my efforts will certainly be a work in progress, but it’s that work in progress that feels like the pieces are there, and they’re almost fully put together, but I’m not familiar enough with them to put them all in the right places yet. Like puzzle pieces. I have them, I have the gist of where they go, but sometimes I forget about certain pieces.
Probably not the best analogy, but hopefully it makes sense enough to express the sentiment.
What else… Been working hard to try and get the calories I need to maintain my weight. I’m coming up on 2 weeks, maybe three, where I’m definitely not getting even enough to break even. Today I think I came the closest. I think by the end of the day, I had notched somewhere around 2200 calories ish?
Online calculators have me needing about 2500 calories to maintain my weight if I’m not exercising regularly and something like 2750 calories if I am exercising regularly.
As of right now, I wouldn’t consider my exercise strenuous, so I probably need somewhere around 2,600 calories to maintain my weight?
So, I think today is either the closest I’ve come or maybe the second closest I’ve come to meeting the requirements.
I feel like I have to eat all the time and find calorie dense foods just to come close to where I need to be. 🙃
For example, I bought a gallon of extra virgin olive oil (I don’t even like olive oil, but the research seems to show that extra virgin olive oil is healthy for you and is perhaps the healthiest of all the oils), and now I’m adding two tablespoons of olive oil to my daily diet because, hey, that’s over 200 calories! And my diet is so low on fats, that I need the extra help. 😅
And I don’t mind eating stuff that I don’t like the taste of if it’s just quick. I don’t much care for my pea protein, but it’s not awful, and I can drink it down gone.
I wish I could just drink every meal. 🙃
Wouldn’t be good for my teeth, though.
Anyway, it’s kind of funny. I keep losing weight, even though I feel like I’m eating all the blasted time.
I think I’m probably repeating myself from past posts.
Sorry. 🙃
Moving on… I’m grateful for chat GPT. I don’t know what the deal is with Google, but their search engine has just taken a nose dive. It used to be that I could find what I needed with a quick Google search, but now it spits out so many things that are popular or whatever else but not what I was actually looking for. Oftentimes, just jumping over to chat GPT, and that little AI knows exactly what I’m trying to get, not every time, but most of the time. So, thank you, to the people who built chat GPT. 🙂
I had a weird vanity thing hit me pretty sideways today, caught me totally off guard, but taught me something pretty powerful. I think I mentioned before that I don’t spend much time in front of the mirror.
Well, today, for whatever reason, I leaned forward, face close to the mirror, and I got a pretty darn good look at how badly sun damaged my face is, all the wrinkles that are from spending the last 7 years working outside in the sun without a sun hat.
Seeing all the wrinkles in the skin that’s lost its elasticity and everything, suddenly I felt super self-conscious and unattractive–or at least worried about being unattractive.
And it hit hard.
I found myself worrying about it for probably an hour, wondering what I could do to fix all the damage that I’ve done to my body from all the sun exposure. Then I started getting over a little bit, but it’s still in there. I know there’s still a little bit of anxiety in there about a wrinkly sun-damaged face.
Attraction is something that’s super dichotomous for me. Is that the right word? I don’t know. On the one hand, I wish I weren’t concerned at all about physical appearance, myself or others. I wish I didn’t have such a narrow spectrum of what I find attractive. It just… it’s so superficial to the things that actually matter. But at the same time that I have that desire and think that physical attraction is superficial and unimportant, it’s also massively important in my brain, a part of my brain that I haven’t been able to change to be what I wish it could be.
Gosh, I feel for women and how bombarded they are with all the makeup stuff in the creams and masks and all those other things that the world says that they have to have in order to make their bodies attractive.
It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And I know they’re starting to do it to guys now, trying to get guys to focus in on those kinds of things, and they are succeeding.
I wish we lived in a different world. But I’m a product of this culture myself, at least that’s what I’d guess is why I have my preferences the way that I do. I imagine that it’s been molded through natural biological means but probably even more so through societal norms, expectations, and standards of beauty.
It’s funny how quickly dissatisfaction can set in, and worry and 1 minute you had not a care in the world and 10 minutes later, you’re learning about retinoids and laser skin treatments and chemical peels.
😶
Part of me wants to laugh. Part of me just finds it so… sad?
But there I was, all caught up in it, all worried and trying to meet some standard because maybe I wouldn’t be thought of as attractive with the blemishes and imperfections and whatever else in my face.
And that was from just one really close look in the mirror I think because I had a pimple just above my lip. Then I start a noticing all these imperfections that I don’t see because I don’t look in the mirror much.
Maybe I’ll just go back to not looking in the mirror much, maybe I can just forget about it. 🙃
It is a good reminder, though, to better take care of my body. I’ve got on my to-do list for tomorrow to buy a sun hat because, well, From what I understand, son does some pretty hefty damage on the skin, and I know aside from the perspective that comes more from vanity, there’s also the health perspective and the potential for melanoma and whatnot. I’m pretty sure that runs in our family.
It was Sunday, so we did church. Good stuff. Sunday school lesson was on the book of James, and there’s a bunch of good stuff in James.
After that, I came home and chatted with Mom for a bit and ate a bunch of food, before heading up to Jim and Steph’s place to help set up for pie night.
Pie night was great. And I’m grateful to have family that doesn’t mind my weird diet, so it’s not a big deal if I show up and just hang out without eating anyone’s pies. 🙃
Good conversations with people I haven’t talked too much lately because I’ve been so stuck in myself or out of town.
Came home and chatted with Mom for a bit, ate a little bit more, even though it was past my eating time, and now I’m late for bed.
I need to go to bed.
I’m grateful for the rain pitter-pattering on the roof.
I’m grateful for the beautiful sunrise this morning that had all the colors of a beautiful sunset. 🥰
Time for bed. G’night, folks!
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 