Chapter 151: Feels So Good

Today was a pretty decent day. I woke up right on time when my alarm went off at 7:30am, got up out of bed, brushed my teeth, washed my face and sat down in front of the computer for coffee and a cigarette. The first thing I did in front of the computer was visit Cherry Culture to track my order from them. The estimated delivery date has always been Thursday, April 8 but I have had a number of items say that they were due for delivery one day and actually show up a few days earlier. I have also seen the estimated delivery dates move up on things quite a few times. The last time I had checked the tracking link on the site it said that the item had arrived in City Of Industry, CA at around 5:56am on Saturday, April 3. I checked it once yesterday and found it saying the same thing, which made perfect sense to me considering it was Easter. Because of this, I was pretty anxious to see if I would find it updated this morning. Turns out, it was not updated. It still said City Of Industry, CA. The last piece of tracking information was it arriving in City Of Industry. I could understand if there were a departure scan and then it went traveling for a couple of days without any updates but it still just said Arrived. That was pretty annoying but I am still pretty confident that it will arrive by Thursday. After all, it is what is going to be my fun times this coming weekend, so it has to show up! Still, I am pretty damn anxious to receive this stuff and am keeping my fingers crossed that it comes slightly earlier than expected. We’ll see.

So, as I discussed last night, this morning was a do or die exercise morning. Like I said, my Mom and I are both really dedicated to our workout regime and are dead set on getting back on the wagon in a much bigger way than ever before. We both agreed to go ahead and do our usual “Walk-A-Dobics” this morning, just to do something we are familiar with to get us back into the swing of things. I put together a little playlist of all the up-tempo tracks on Christina Aguilera’s Greatest Hits album, “Keeps Getting Better,” and we used that as our workout soundtrack this morning, which I think worked really well. It was a pretty intense workout and I think we both got a lot out of it, which is great. It felt really good to be back to our workout routine. The whole point, though, is to NOT have it be so much of a routine. As I also mentioned last night, we have made the decision to try mixing up different types of workouts in order to speed up results, as well as to make it a little more fun, interesting and exciting for us. The issue with working out for so many people, and I think I am one of them, is that doing the same routine every day gets really boring and you get burned out on it. I am a person who needs for things to be interesting and exciting in order for me to care enough to do them. I am really good at making things fun and interesting in most situations but working out has been a little more difficult for me to figure out ways to spice up. Still, I am determined to sort it out. This evening when we got home, my Mom and I gathered up the various workout DVDs and such that we have collected to sit down and watch and see what we think could work and what wouldn’t. I brought a couple things to the table, like choreographer Jamie King’s “Rock Your Body,” and Geri Halliwell’s “Geri Yoga,” both of which my Mom kind of shot down, and she brought “Tae Bo,” which we were both like, “FUCK NO,” to. Not yet, anyway. She also brought the one we decided to give a try tomorrow morning, called “Zumba.” “Zumba” is a workout based on various types of Spanish dance styles, including Salsa, Samba, Reggaeton, Cumbia, Merengue, etc. This video was a lot of fun to watch and seemed like enough to get a good workout and try something new but not so much that we will be completely lost, which I can admit is a bit of an issue with the Jamie King one. I am already thinking about ordering up another workout DVD once I get paid again; a very special one, indeed – Mel B’s “Totally Fit.” Much like “Geri Yoga,” the immediate draw of this is the fact that it is led by one of the Spice Girls. Not only is it run by one of the Spice Girls but one who has undergone a pretty incredible physical transformation. This is a large part of why Geri and Mel B are ones who I would trust workout advice from. If Melanie C did something like this I’d be all over it, as well. I would be less prone to do a workout led by Victoria or Emma because they’ve both always kind of managed to stay in the same shape they’ve always been in. I mean, not entirely the shape they’ve always been in but Emma has pretty well stayed the same over the years and Victoria’s changed in ways that don’t appear entirely healthy. I just watched some of the clips and stuff on Mel B’s website from the DVD and it looks pretty awesome. It also looks pretty intense but I’m sure we could handle it if we keep up these other workouts regularly between now and then.

Work was boring today. It was a little busier than we are used to these days. A couple of things of note, though, are the fact that I put in a schedule request for a vacation day on April 16, which is our next payday Friday. I’ve been kind of desperate for a 3-day weekend where I’m not sick or anything, so I finally decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and request a day. What can it hurt? Nothing – it can help a lot, though. Plus, that’s the day that I get my “free” paycheck, so I may spend that day scouring the internet for new and interesting items to purchase. We’ll see. I also spent a chunk of the day drawing a picture of a woman underwater with an iPod, a Blackberry and a laptop. Inspired by the picture, I then wrote a new song that opens with the line, “I’m drowning in a sea of technology.” It’s basically a song about how we, as a society, use all these technologies that we have nowadays to escape from the things we dislike about ourselves and to avoid connecting with others. Fun stuff. Like I said, overall work was pretty boring. I spent most of the day being nervous about my piano lesson tonight. Like I mentioned in last night’s blog, I was feeling a lot more comfortable with the piece that I had to play tonight but I still wasn’t completely confident about it. I was having a lot of trouble trying to put the left and right hands together still. I spent a good deal of time at work playing pretend piano on my desk to try and sort it out but it wasn’t really working out for me.

I arrived at the Allegro Academy this evening around 6:50pm and my lesson was scheduled for 7pm. I paid for my lessons for the next month and sat down in the lobby to wait for Viktor to finish with the lesson before me. This little boy, who was probably 11 or 12 years old, came creeping out of one of the rooms off the lobby and tried to play a trick on the girl who works at the front desk but it didn’t really work out for him. He was a funny kid, though, and seemed really mature for his age but kind of immature for his age at the same time. I could understand that. He was very friendly, though, and I carried on a conversation for a while with him and Maria, who works at the front desk, while I waited for Viktor. At around 7:10pm, Viktor came out in a pair of jeans that fit him beautifully and accentuated all the right places. It put me a little out of my head for a minute. He asked if I would mind waiting just 10 minutes or so more because his current lesson was “kind of an emergency.” I said that was fine. I was actually pretty pleased with this because wait time beforehand just meant that much less wait time afterward. It was around 7:25pm when I finally got to go in. I pulled out the book and he asked me how I did with the piece I was supposed to learn. I told him that it was okay and I knew how to play it all on the piano but that I couldn’t seem to play both sides at once. When I actually tried to play it, though, Viktor decided that I had much more of a problem than only being able to play one side at a time – apparently, I have a ridiculously bad sense of timing. I kept trying to play everything too fast and couldn’t seem to keep a beat to save my life. That was interesting because I had no idea that this was any type of problem for me. Once he pointed it out, though, it became really obvious. He recommended that I get myself a metronome, which is one of those things that swings back and forth and ticks each time to keep the beat for you. That is something else I intend to pick up with my next paycheck. I did find a site online, though, that can help me in the meantime. The site is Metronome Online, which is exactly what it says. It is basically just a website that will tick for you. I played around with that a little when I got home and I think it helped a lot. He gave me a different piece to try for my next appointment, a slower one. He also really stressed the importance of picking up a metronome in order to work on my terrible timing. One thing that was really nice about this lesson, though, was the fact that Viktor took things to a really personal level today. He told me that if I am practicing at home and having any sort of trouble or getting frustrated in any way I could feel free to call him. He also offered me a ride home, which was pretty cool of him. Of course, by the time we got out of my lesson it was 7:56pm and I declined because I didn’t have much of a wait left at all. My Mom got there at around 8:20pm and we came home to check out those DVDs.

I am pretty tired at this point and should have been in bed about an hour ago. It is 12:44am now and I need to get myself rested up for trying the “Zumba” workout in the morning. I am pretty excited for it, honestly. It seems like a lot more fun than what we’ve been doing and I love the idea that it is so dance oriented. I think it will be a lot of fun and will really spice things up a lot for us. Get it? Spanish dancing spicing things up? It wasn’t really that funny. It wasn’t really even a joke. These are signs that I am too tired. It is time for bed. Goodnight.