Last night I was so absorbed in this type of activity that I totally forgot to go to a birthday party that I'd been invited to. Crap! I sent a note of apology, but it was disappointing because it was an opportunity to get to know the person better, which I have no idea when there might be another of.
It's interesting that I seemed to need these periods of unbroken downtime so badly, even though my schedule for the last couple of weeks seems to have given me plenty of 3-ish hour slots of time to myself. I wonder what this need derives from? What I do during them is not very goal-directed at all. My first thought was that maybe I need to insulate myself from outside influences for a while, but I read LiveJournal so that's not it. So my current hypothesis is that my task-switching muscle gets tired after a week of work-social-errands-home-repeat, and what I'm doing on the weekends is trying to spend some time resting it.
Running: is still on track. I posted a comprehensive training schedule (this looks much better in Firefox than IE, for some reason; it is generated from gnumeric -- concidence?), so today I had my longest run period yet, 8 minutes x 2. Tuesday's run calls for 20 continuous minutes. That seems like quite a leap! I'll trust the wisdom of the Couch-to-5k plan, though. Then only 4 weeks until I graduate to the Mileage Buildup schedule.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People & The 8th Habit: I'm nearing the end of this audiobook. I think it would have been a *much* better audiobook if the author hadn't read it. Something about the author's diction strikes me as uneducated, somehow (even though he is a highly educated person). He tends to get emotionally worked up, and nearly shout some of the time. He inserts lots of "y'see" and "see what I mean?" phrases, and frequently he will say something that he thinks should arouse indignation and then he will let out a sharp breath like people do when they're mildly outraged, to suggest that you should be outraged too. These feel like high-pressure tactics and as a result they actually make me inclined to look for reasons to reject his message. As for the content, sometimes the explanations/justifications strike me as a little simplistic with their reliance on "principles" and "paradigm shifts," but, despite all these criticisms, there is still a lot of good, concrete advice and many persuasive illustrations of his ideas, and I will probably want to look for a 'cliff notes' version to refer back to in the future.
Social: I've been seeing a lot of
candid recently and we've exchanged a bunch of email. I didn't go to Hike the Geek today, which he runs (and apparently by skipping it I missed my Raw Potluck friends Eric and Silvia, d'oh) but he and I are going to do some hanging out this afternoon, and on Tuesday we're going Speed Dating (though whether that means we'll Speed Date each other, I'm not sure yet.) The Speed Dating site somehow convinced me to create a profile on their companion matchmaking site (probably because they said it was helpful for people who Speed Date you to be able to look you up afterwards), but I've spent much more time than I should on it, mostly because whenever I create anything like an online profile, I get "answering machine jitters" and tend to tweak it obsessively until I finally convince myself that it is sufficiently unobjectionable, after which I can be comfortable and forget about it. Since doing that a few days ago, I unexpectedly had about a dozen people "express interest," none of them interesting to me so far. So I added some caveats to my profile ("you must be this tall to ride" sort of things), but it only seemed to cut down the interest level by half. The way it's going I will probably delete this profile before too long. 