Every morning I wake up with the infinite possibilities of a whole day and then get paralyzed immediately by indecision. So many choices and things to do! This is worse now given that I do not go every day to a building labeled work and a bunch of people don’t demand me to do things with disapproving smirks.
You’d think unbridled excitement to start the day is good but it’s not.
Here’s something I read:
“The common causes of over-excitement in dogs are boredom…..They may need more exercise and mental stimulation to be content and happy.”
Yes, I am not completely oblivious to the fact that the above statement seems to be a reference to dogs while I am a fully-grown human…arguably. But like Mark Twain said, “The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's,” and so, I’ve decided to take cues from dog blogs and canine grapevine.
I decided I’d physically exhaust myself first thing in the morning by running.
I hated running.
No predator was chasing me (although the occasional street dog can make up for it). Delicious food wasn’t scampering away from me to hunt down. What was the point of braving ice ages and crossing continents on foot to build whole-ass civilizations if, eventually, we are all going to be running helter-skelter on the ground?
When I did run I’d feel like my chest was exploding. Wheezing like a defunct steam engine from the 1890s, I said once to N as we ran together, “I might be having a heart attack”
“No, you are just lazy,” she had responded, with worrying speed.
Then something happened, starting a few years back.
Finding Bubba
I am a little fuzzy on when I started finding joy in running (it was around 2020) and also fuzzy on the why. All I can offer you is a laundry list of potential reasons why I started enjoying this frenetic ambulation:
The Middle Ages descended on me with shocking surprise. One morning I woke up to find a monster standing in the hallway. “Who are you?” I said. “Your mortality,” it responded and immediately began chasing me. I ran.
I moved to Bangkok and started seeing fitter people all around. You are what you surround yourself with.
I’d gotten moderately fitter. Who knew that when you don’t eat garlic naan and masala dosa every other day you shed weight and feel less lethargic? This made running easier.
I found The Secret - no, not that book that tries to recruit you to a cult but the actual secret to running. I wish someone had told this to me earlier: Running, unlike life, gets progressively easier. The first 500 meters is harder than the next kilometer which in turn is harder than the one after.
To be honest none of those explanations satisfy me. Here’s a more reasonable one: In the year 2020, as a pandemic swept through the world, we all shifted into an alternative reality. The lazy version of me is still in the original universe huffing and puffing around Bangkok.
In any case, I had finally found joy in running.
When my legs, body, and mind are all oscillating to the rhythm of my breath, and salty sweat drips down my face, I feel the tuning fork of my body and brain sync up.
But then the great irony of life came calling. Whenever you think you’re cresting a summit, a new peak always reveals itself. I was soon being told by svelte humanoids on social media that running was useless and that I needed to start bending my body and lifting heavy things repeatedly to be truly fit.
Working out
My face is contorted in a mixture of anger and pain. I am cursing. Spittle leaks from my mouth and my body shivers grotesquely. And what is that salty emanation from my eyes? Am I, a thirty-nine-year-old man, crying like a baby?
This was me trying to work-out to Youtube videos even as recently as a couple of years back. Apparently, lying on the floor and lifting my legs a few dozen times was the equivalent of me trying to climb the Himalayas.
It was/is an enormous ordeal for me.
Squatting. Bending. Lifting. Twisting. Crunching. Seems like a short ride away from maiming, pillaging, and slashing. That’s exactly how these workouts feel to me - medieval and tortuous.
Over the last two years, things have gotten moderately better.
I no longer feel like a waterboarded captive in Guantanamo. These days, I bring out my inner Greek (no that’s not what I call my thing). On days when I feel moderate angst, I imagine myself as a Stoic and remind myself that I volunteered for this pain. On other days I partake in an Epicurean delusion of fully giving in to the pain so I can feel the pleasure of it stopping when it eventually does.
This is all fine except if I have to lift weights I am forced to occasionally go to a place I have avoided mostly in the first three decades of my existence - The Gym.
Someone invented noise-cancelling earbuds; I started going to the Gym
Gyms rank among the most boring places to visit. What’s with all those steampunk-ian medieval torture devices? Why are they all in black? Why is everyone so serious?
A mild smell of sweat permeates the atmosphere. It’s always either too hot or too cold. Venal and tortured-looking men and women with dead, lifeless eyes stare balefully back at you.
Sidenote: Ancient Greece had Gymnasia too. It’s the equivalent of a sports arena perhaps where wealthy young men came to train. Most importantly the athletes there “wore no clothes and it was common practice for them to oil or dust their bodies before and after taking part in sports activities”. Current day gyms are looking so much better now.
I stick to visiting the gyms in the apartments I live in. Condo gyms are perfect examples of urban desolation. There is something mildly sad and lifeless about them. Typically they are empty or have a handful of clueless residents moving about listlessly.
My standard operating procedure for visiting gyms is to put on my earbuds that can abstract away the world. I also immediately go and attach myself to one of those medieval devices.
Thus cocooned, I begin an epic battle between the Good Me and the Evil Me. The Good Me is egging me on to do more while the Evil Me is telling me things like, ‘What’s the point of any of this?’ or ‘Do you know that guy who worked out seven times a week and died of a heart attack at 40?’
Epic battles like these need complete focus. I have zero bandwidth to give to a human conversation at this point. It would be the equivalent of engaging in small talk with a soldier right as he is in the thick of a showdown with enemy troops.
Thankfully, everyone else in the condo gym is of the same frequency.
I was going on a journey again. But a stranger came to town.
How do you avoid a chatty gym uncle?
About a month or so back, I spotted a new face at the gym. The moment I saw the glint of eagerness in his eyes, I immediately knew that my halcyon bubble was going to burst. He looked Indian and middle-aged (my guess was older than me).
Even as I started lifting some weights, I could see his eyes trying to catch mine and then his face broke into a vague smile of recognition and he swooped in, his mouth hole beginning to move already. The Evil Me started laughing hysterically. Before I knew it I was the recipient of a conversation.
I sighed louder than I needed to, placed the weights down, and made a rather elaborate show of tapping my earbuds to show him how much he was disrupting my flow.
It did not even register.
“Are you from India?” he wanted to know.
All I did was nod and then he started. Here’s a small snippet of what I learned about him:
He’s Nepali but his wife is from India and his family is mixed all around. He lives in Nepal but visits Bangkok for work a couple of months every year. He stays at my condo (“They don’t typically do short-term rentals but this owner is nice”). He hates Bangkok traffic but likes the condo because it is close to everything “But it is very noisy” because he keeps windows open and doesn’t like air conditioning.
It had been less than a minute since I placed my weights down.
As I am reeling from all this information, I make polite noises like “mmhmm”, “cool”, “good”, etc. I do not attempt to ask follow-up questions hoping this would be a short interruption.
I turn to restart my workout when he starts with the questions.
Where am I from?
What do I do?
Am I married?
Evil Me is very pleased with this turn of events.
I give him short responses and go back to the weights. Surely, this is a universal signal that I am done with the conversation. Right? Right?
I am groaning more than usual. Everything is elaborate. And yet he persists.
How long have I lived in Bangkok? Where is my place of work?
I am gasping and snapping really short answers now but questions keep on coming. I grunt and whimper like an animal. Yet he persists.
Ok, look. I know what you’re thinking. Why don’t you just tell him that you cannot talk while you’re doing this?
Dear reader, allow me to present a small glance into one of the three dark controlling forces of my life. I avoid confrontations like Asians avoid the sun. I have willingly let go of money, pride, and preferences in the past if it means avoiding an unpleasant confrontation. Mild passive-aggressive drama is the best I can do. Rolling eyes. Sighting. Frowning. Showing annoyance. That’s my best response when presented with a situation I do not agree with. What are the other two dark forces you ask? Sorry, but this is not a therapy session however much it may feel like one.
In any case, anyone with some basic social cue-reading should get it but he is like a puppy, gloriously unaware of my signals.
So I resorted to the ultimate weapon in my toolkit - my brahmāstra. I’ve refined this tool over many years and practiced it on a range of people. I began to ignore him. I put on my podcast and continued working out. I could see that his mouth was still moving but after about five minutes he shrugged and walked away.
I am sure he thought I am some kind of asshole. The whole thing left me both annoyed and guilty.
In the true spirit of a nonconfrontationalist and unable to face him one more time in the Gym, I decided that I would stick to running outside henceforth.
Could be Worse,
Tyag