One Month After Fasting Progress

11:38 PM

It's been about a month since I completed my previous fasting. It lasted 4 days and I ended up losing 5-6 pounds. During this past month, I ended up gaining 5 pounds back, but I also worked out during that time period, so some of that weight gained back was muscle. Although I do complain and write about my face a lot lately and how minoxidil aged me, I think I'm making good progress back, hopefully I can surpass my previous looks.

There is this cosmetic procedure I'm going to do soon called microneedling. I ordered this Dr. Pen M8S microneedle stamper for around $60 on Temu, normal price is $300, and it should arrive in a month or so. After buying it, I saw that there were other electric microneedle stampers for $20, and they're basically the same thing, so looking at those, I do feel sort of ripped off paying over $60 for this. However, they're not the same brand and the builds are slightly different, the one I ordered is one of the highest quality microneedle stampers apparently with widespread use and support, so I think it's fine. When it arrives, I'm going to just do a small section of my face first, like my forehead, waiting a week and testing any results on that, before trying it out on the rest of my face.

The reason I'm doing microneedling is because of my nasolabial folds (laugh lines), I hate these things. They weren't there before, they literally just came out of nowhere in my 30s. Maybe it was due to fasting. I lost a lot of weight, nearly 20 pounds in my fast in January, and have kept most of the weight off, just gaining 6-7 pounds back. The nasolabial folds just look so bad and unattractive. I really just dislike them. I actually don't even like smiling in my photos all that much anymore, because I think my face gets so wrinkly looking and looks so bad, a large amount due to minoxidil killing off collagen in some areas.

Anyway, I completed some work today. I also did a lot of shopping today on Temu again. I bought a bunch of random cosmetic stuff, and some books. There's these books that are only available on Temu, self-improvement books targeted at kids, and the titles for them really intrigued me enough to buy them. One of the books was called "It's not about how smart you are, it's about how hard you work," and I couldn't find this book and any other books anywhere else. Doing a search online yields no results. Even though the books were expensive, around $50 for 6 books, I still ordered them hoping to learn valuable lessons.

Like every other day, I exercised again today. My exercises are now very simple. I couldn't maintain my 100 push ups per day, 100 squats per day, etc. habit for very long. I've been trying to maintain large numbers like that for over a year, but it just wore me out and I would stop eventually. So now I basically reduced all of my workouts to just doing a really small amount, like 20 push ups, 5 pull-ups, 10 squats, etc. Easy enough amounts to do in one set. So hopefully I'm not demotivated to exercise in the future and will continue doing them.

So, on RedNote, there are actually a lot of people, women especially, posting selfies in their late 20s or early 30s and saying "I look so old now and I am disappointed in my looks" and yeah they don't look great in their photos. I'm not trying to disparage them or anything, they are posting these photos on their own and making those comments on their own. In the photos they have even deeper nasolabial folds than I do, even heavier dark circles than I do. In comparison, even though I have been damaged by minoxidil, in my opinion I still look younger than most of them I think, so I'm thankful for that.

Chinese is such a difficult language I think. I'm not sure how anyone can understand it. The Chinese on average know over 5000-6000 different characters, and can discern them easily. There's more than 135,000 characters in total, some people know over 20,000 characters. There is a different character for every word and concept, and each character has a different sound. The Chinese have all of this memorized, and they are fluent and masters at their language. Isn't that insane?

I have a book on learning Chinese, and it's difficult enough to just learn a few words. I mean, again, every single character is a word with its own sound, and every word has a different definition, and they can be combined differently. In English you might have random and very specific words like thorax to refer to the body of an insect (or the chest of a human), but in Chinese, there's some random character for thorax, it's this character: 胸. Who the heck can read that? The character is so small, and so detailed and intricate, yet any random Chinese will just see that character and easily know what it means instantly. Isn't that insane?

Look at this sentence:

这是一句随机的英文句子，翻译成了中文。注意，每个字都独一无二，各不相同。除了一些字，因为现在我也用了同一个词，所以没有两个字是相同的。

"Here is a random sentence in English translated into Chinese. Notice that every character is distinct and different. There are no two characters that are the same, except some right now because I'm also using the same word"

Of course some characters repeat, but imagine reading some newspaper or some book, and pretty much every character is different. That would be insane. I actually can't read any Spanish books, because even though I took 6 years of it in school, in Spanish books I encounter so many words I have never seen before, that I would have to pause every word basically, to look up what it meant. Even though I'm fluent in Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines, I speak it every day with my parents, I probably also couldn't read a book in Tagalog, just because there also would be so many words I have never used nor heard before.

There's just so many words we really only encounter in writing. Even though the definitions and words are simple, it's not common lexicon to use words like lexicon or obtain or transpire or transgress or burdensome or scholarly in real life conversations. They're used sometimes, but rarely, we encounter these words in text a lot more. Even the word encounter isn't used that often in real life, and it's such a simple word. Maybe even the word conversation isn't used that often in real life. There might also be phrases that are basically only written, such as "No file selected" or "press any key to continue," it is rare anyone will ever speak those words out loud.

Anyway, I'm very sleepy now. Languages are pretty hard. Chinese is pretty hard. Arabic is also pretty hard, and so is Hebrew, and Thai. Japanese is up there as well. Man, every language is difficult. Even Tagalog is difficult, if you are not already fluent. There are just rules and patters in every language that are so different from other languages, it's hard to understand if you're not fluent. I'm surprised people were able to create a structure for English. Even "Ye Olde English" is pretty hard to read and understand, but scholars have formalized rules for it that we now follow, so now it is easy to understand.

Anyway, that was my day today. I'd go on but I'm so sleepy.