Work and Reading, Gym, Injuries

11:49 PM

What a plain day today was. I did my calisthenic dailies again, doing 7 pull ups, 7 chin ups, and 36 push ups. I only did the 36 push ups in a row because I felt some pain in my fingers when I tried to do 7 pull ups and 7 chin ups in a row.

I did 5 pull ups in a row, then the final two after a break. Then I did 3 or 4 chin ups in a row, and then I had to do another 4 or 3 after a break. I tried to do them all in a row, but my fingers really hurt a lot, like they were being crushed trying to pull my weight up, like it just hurt, so I wasn't able to do 7 pull ups and 7 chin ups in a row like I did yesterday. I have to listen to my body. If I am unable to do something, if I feel this kind of tension when attempting it, then I won't go through with it. This is to prevent injuries.

I was able to do 36 push ups in a row though. I did them on my fists too, I do fist push ups instead of palm ones. It's been a while since I did the regular palm push ups, I think I would be able to do a lot more than 36 if I just did the palm ones, which are a lot easier. I motivated myself a little to be able to do the push ups by doing a superstitious thing or maybe a mental technique. I told myself if I was able to do the 31 push ups in a row, which is exhausting to do, then I could date Wahl or Mary, or that Wahl or Mary would somehow like me if I did 31 push ups in a row, like I said it's superstitious or it's a mental technique, but I exceeded it, doing 36 instead of 31, which is awesome.

The superstitious mental techniques can be useful. Another one I used to have was when I was sprinting on a treadmill, I used it years ago. I might tell myself that if I don't sprint for 1 minute straight, then I will die, so then my body will keep pushing as hard as possible, past the 1 minute mark so that I may live. Also, am I using "past" correctly? Should it be "past the 1 minute mark," or should it be "pass the 1 minute mark"?

I wonder if I use these mental techniques on doing pull ups and chin ups, and other exercises, I can exceed my current limits? Like what if I am able to do 10 pull ups in a row, or 10 chin ups in a row somehow, using these techniques? That would be amazing.

Anyway, I made a vegan tweet in the morning as well, as this is another one of my dailies. It got around 5k views throughout the day, not that many, but still a sizeable reach. I made some other tweets as well that got some thousands of views here and there too.

Actually I'm just happy if my tweets get even 100 views, since I do remember the times when they would only get like 3 views or something. Even today, that can still happen. In fact, some of my tweets do get less than 10 views, like if I reply to the end of conversation already deep in replies, then barely one would see that. So yeah, I am very happy with 100 views, but the fact that a decent amount of my tweets get thousands of views, sometimes tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of views, well that makes me feel ecstatic.

I actually don't feel much when I see a tweet of mine get 100k views. I've seen it happen tens of times, I think there are over 30 of my tweets that have over 100k views, so I've seen it happen a lot of times already. The first few times it happened, sure, I'd be like, "whoaaa a tweet of mine got so many views!!" Now it's just a normal event, it doesn't make me feel that different. Especially if some of my tweets already get tens of thousands of views, having them reach over 100k views isn't such a huge leap.

There's actually no fame I think, from getting tweets with 100k+ views, at least I haven't experienced it. I still only have around 1.6k followers, even if I have many many tweets that get over 100k views. People don't really care much either. There's so many other tweets every second, so many other random people tweeting, so a tweet from me getting a lot of views, it's honestly just a flash in the pan experience. It's not like people view my account after viewing the tweet, it rarely happens. No one knows who I am, despite getting millions of total views of my tweets.

Yeah I also worked today, for most of the day. Not the whole day. There was a big code deployment I had to do today, so that was a big deal. I made a checklist of everything I had to do in the morning for this deployment. It was like a checklist of around 20 things. I went through one by one and did them. That was nice.

I read some of the books I ordered, like this book called "Algorithmic Thinking," I read a few pages and it was nice, but then it said I had to know C first basically, to continue. I mean I didn't have to know C, but the rest of the book was going to be in C, and so I better learn it first before continuing. So I ordered a C book from online, "C: A Modern Approach," on Amazon the price for the book is around $100, but I was able to find a copy on eBay for $25. I don't know if I will be able to complete this book, because I have so many other books, and so many things to do, but I will try. I want to learn C, and C++ eventually. I already know C#, I use that in my daily work, but I hate it, I love Python and Javascript, and Elixir, even if I have largely forgotten Elixir by now since I don't use it at all.

I started reading some other books, but yeah I fell sleepy, so I fell asleep. Wait, I also did my cleaning dailies such as sweeping, cleaning the kitchen, washing the dishes. I don't have a daily for cleaning my room or the bathroom, just the kitchen. But yeah I fell asleep since I got bored from reading.

When I woke up, I browsed the Internet. I made some more tweets. Then I went to the gym with Guy and Eric.

So this is where I felt some possible injuries occurring. I started doing squats, this is the first exercise we always do. The current weight I'm squatting is 150 pounds. It's not that heavy, but I squat all the way down, basically my butt touching my ankles, all the way down, the very lowest I can possibly go without my butt touching the floor. Even Eric doesn't go all the way down like me, he goes a little bit higher, like 90% of the way down. Anyway, after doing one set of 5 of 150 pounds, I started feeling some lower back stress. Not pain, it wasn't hurting, but I felt some discomfort there. So I decided to lower the weight to 135 pounds, and then did the rest of my sets in that weight.

So I have some pain on my fingers whenever I do pull ups and chin ups. Now I'm at a heavier weight in squats, and started to feel some discomfort there. I can tell my body can get injured now. Most of the time prior to today, I basically felt invincible. I now realize I am not invincible, I can be hurt and even injured if I push myself too much. So we did some other exercises, and those were fine. When we went to doing curls with the Olympic dumbbell, and even without any weight added yet since I would warm up with just the bar, I felt some discomfort on my left forearm, so, nope, not going to continue doing these right now.

I would experience an actual pain event later. So after I decided not to do these dumbbell curls, I went to the ab machine and did abs there. I apparently put too much weight, and I did like 20 reps of this, just going all out. At some point, I think I was on my second set of 20 reps, that I felt some pain on my right lower chest area, around my lungs. I was like, oh no, did I crush my lungs? I felt some pretty serious pain there. I couldn't even swallow. I couldn't stand. I was basically frozen. I think it was just my upper abs or something cramping, or maybe an organ cramping, but yeah, something hurt. Somehow I was able to stand up, and as I walked, the pain went away, until it disappeared completely. I was thankful to be whole again.

So this demonstrates further how mortal I am.

Not much else happened today, but yeah. I played around with ChatGPT again and I made it combine ideas from Epictetus, Jeff Olson, Steven Covey, and Veganism, and it came up with the philosophical concept of the Ethical Path to Effective Virtue:

"Creating a coherent philosophy and way of life that combines the ideas of Epictetus, Stephen Covey, Jeff Olson, and Veganism involves integrating stoicism, effective personal habits, incremental improvement, and ethical living with respect to all beings. This unified philosophy can be termed "The Ethical Path to Effective Virtue" (EPEV), emphasizing personal growth, ethical integrity, and the impact of daily actions on ourselves, others, and the planet."

Anyway I am sleepy.