This western feeling

Love. Man, love is a fucker. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, after a new friend asked me if I'd ever been in love. Innocuous question, but one that's so loaded with significance. At the time, I hummed and hawed a little, because quite honestly, I'm not so sure I have. I do like that she's the kind of person who asks those sorts of questions, because I like people that make me think.

It's like this - I've been obsessed with girls, plenty. There's seldom been a stage in my life where I've not been permanently thinking about someone. I've obsessed over them, fretted over them, penned horrible poems about them. Done all the lame things people who are infatuated with (the idea of) someone do. Stalked them relentlessly on Facebook. Poured over every SMS, searching for hidden meanings. Analyzed, overanalyzed, everything they say. But that's not love, is it? No, love is reciprocal. You can't really say you're in love if the person is unaware of your affections, or (is it?) worse, is aware of them, but doesn't feel the same way.

Around the end of last year I went through the last of these infatuations, and swore thereafter I was done. Unrequited love, obsessive, fawning love, putting someone on a pedestal and building up every insignificant thing they do into this perfect construct, this avatar of your affection, I'm straight up calling bullshit on that. It's not healthy. It's not good. It's not cool. There is nothing admirable about the hopeless romantic - it's just sad and depressing.

What I'm pleased about is that I've been true to my word. There's been plenty of girls I've been interested in since then, and the ones that it seemed worth it (there's a long list of criteria - maybe I still overthink things?) to go for, I have, and while the results have been mixed, they've been results. And when it ended, for whatever reason, I moved the fuck on, got on with my life, more often than not with them and I still friends, which is great. It's healthy. It's part of growing up. Being stuck in that self-destructive cycle of "Oh my god if only she knew how perfect we would be together" is a terrifying downward spiral into self-esteem genocide. Even just typing that above made me cringe, because I've been there. Was there often.

So this year has been good. There's been no unrequited love (not from my side, but I have now been on the opposite side of the fence and while it's not much better being the object of said affection, at least it was a change of scenery) but there's been plenty of good fun.

But I still haven't been in love. I haven't shared something special with someone - there's been a handful of girls who I could see that happening with, but it never progressed to that stage. And that's a good thing. It's a natural pruning of compatibility as you learn more about people and find out just how fucking crazy they are (most are very, very crazy). Building someone up into this ideal, putting them on a pedestal and venerating their every move, their every Facebook post, every utterance is personally disastrous and enormously, emotionally unhealthy.

I'm glad that's in the past. It has been a long and hard lesson to learn.

So no, I haven't been in love. Not really. Not by my definition of the thing. And I'm okay with that. The same someone who sparked this line of questioning sent me this, and it made everything seem okay:

I couldn't find the perfect song

Keto, as it turns out, is harder than you think. After two weeks, with only one (fairly substantial) slip-up, I've abandoned it. It's just too difficult, and the cravings for a snack other than biltong just get to you. I thought it'd be the desire for something like pasta, or pizza, but it turns out it's the little things, like honey in your tea, or late-night tuna mayo on rye bread, or cheese and crackers with wine. WINE! Man. Anyway, in the continuing saga of my body, the anecdotal laboratory of dietary experimentation, I'm now doing intermittent fasting (IF).

The response from my usual dietary detractors to this latest dietary change has been more vociferously negative than their response to keto, but I'm finding it interesting. In short, IF entails having a 16 hour fasted period, and an 8 hour feeding period. My feeding time is from around 5 PM to midnight, and my fasting period is from midnight to 5 PM. Basically, you skip breakfast and lunch, have a small pre-training meal, gorge after your training, and then have a smallish meal before bed. Also, I get to have a 'feeding time', like a shark. That's awesome.

Today's only the second day, but I'm finding it pretty easy. Skipping breakfast is easy as hell to do (let's face it - it feels like a chore most of the time), and while I get hunger pangs around lunchtime, it's nothing a cup of green tea and getting immersed in work doesn't fix. In fact, if anything, I feel more focused at work, because I'm not structuring my day around food, and by the time I get home, I'm in truth, not even that hungry. Yesterday's pre-training meal made me feel incredibly full during my training, which was something of a blessing and a curse.

Something I've noticed about gym during winter - everyone who's there looks like they train. Contrast this with summertime training, where the treadmills are jam-packed with fatties, only the serious fitness enthusiasts are committed enough to make the effort to head out into the cold to train. I realise this sounds incredibly elitist, and I don't mean it like that - it's merely an observation (from an ex-fatty to boot). In summer, it's impossible to get a power cage or squat rack because of the bros queueing up to do brocurls or rack lifts or whatever ridiculous new exercise is flavour-of-the-month, and while there's still a ton of bros working on their biceps now in winter, everyone looks serious about training. There's way fewer of those obviously confused, slightly disorientated people that flock to the gym in summer in a belated attempt to get some sort of beach-appropriate body.

There is however, always an exception, and Flat-in-Front-Fredrick in his bicycle shorts is the main culprit. About a week ago I noticed this guy, immediately, because he was wearing bicycle shorts with a padded front, and looked completely out of his depth.

They look just like this. Just with more padding. A lot more front padding.

Anyway, this guy. I see him because he trains at about the same time as me, but generally in a different section, but I'm always amazed by how androgynous the shorts make him look. There's a lot of padding there, and it just sort of creates this non-descript mound that protrudes out of his loin area that both disturbs me, and inspires a sort of morbid curiosity that means I just. can't. look. away. It doesn't help that he's really rather fat, with these tiny, spindly appendages, and that last night he was sitting on the bench next to mine while I was doing my chest program, and every time I looked left I saw him labouring like some sort of beached whale under the crushing weight of a 20kg bench press, with this perfectly smooth black mound glaring at me like the shiny bald head of a mole emerging from its lair. Again, I realise this sounds absolutely horrible, and more power to him for trying to get into shape, but the bicycling shorts must go man.

I promised you open ocean glow

I had a good weekend and a particularly special Sunday. We went hiking in the Suikerbosrand, and it was beautiful, in an unconventional way. There had very recently been a series of controlled burns, so half the reserve was charred to ash, the other half dry as a bone. It was a strange sensation, to be either walking through so much nature so close to death, everything dry like an enormous natural tinderbox, or the other half already ravaged by fire, nothing but ash. It was like we were walking on that edge of death, where the only thing separating the last vestiges of winter life and their tenuous hold on life from absolute nothingness was a single flame.

And yet, in all the death, a sensation, an idea, just a hint that life struggles on. Not even the first signs of regrowth (it's still too cold for that), but the (almost seditious) idea that life continues, subdued but unabated. The odd gazelle. Sounds of small animals in the sparse undergrowth. The intensely beautiful colour palettes of the shrubs, if you look closely enough. A lizard here or there. An entire herd of skittish zebra.

I positively reveled in the entire experience, if only because hiking is so much damned fun. I suspect I was the only one who really enjoyed it, but I was positively bounding from rock to rock, and pretty much running down the hills through the charred remains of plants, kicking up an enormous cloud of ash behind me and grinning like a madman as I did so. I was sorely tempted on numerous occasions to just break out into a run down a path to see what was on the other side of a group of boulders. I wanted to climb everything, see over the top of every rocky outcrop, explore everywhere. While the people I went with were fun and good company, the expectation was for something less intense, so we did very little running, very little climbing, very little exploring. I'd love to go back, by myself if need be, find the highest hill and climb it. I wanted to take it all in and run until I felt fire in my lungs and sweat in my eyes and feel the pounding of my heart in my hands. I may just.

This is why we get fit. This is why we get strong. It's so we can enjoy these experiences.

On the way back, we saw a controlled burn on a nearby expanse of veld. The plume of smoke it created, tinted pink by the afternoon sun was really quite something to behold. It left me smiling, although the bath I had afterwards, washing the accumulated, caked filth of a day spent in the dirt was probably the highlight of the day.

I spend the next couple of weeks at home, alone. I somehow feel like the timing is fortuitous. I need time to myself. It's been a very sociable couple of months for me, and I need to just disconnect and recharge.