Reading and cats and circus

[flexagon]

Now I am going to do a whole post that isn't about work.

I didn't work out a lot this week, partly because of That Other Area Of Life but also because my back was hurting from overdoing the stretching. Oops oops. That's better now, and I did a standing reverse hand-to-hand workshop yesterday that was really fun. (Never stuck it, but did go over too far once, which is a first!) I don't feel good about those total-rest days, and kind of want to pick up a 15-minute "maintain your body" routine (a la Kelly Starrett) just for posture and some foam rolling for days I can't do anything substantive, but haven't yet.

I did finish Riddley Walker. Then I immediately went and read a bunch of pages about Riddley Walker to try to figure out what I just read, because it was that kind of book. I'm annoyed with myself for never figuring out that "Salt 4" was sulfur, even knowing that the ingredients of gunpowder were important and being discussed. I also would never have gotten "gallack seas" without the glossary even though that one's just phonetic. Anyway, A+ on using language to slow down the reader to the protagonist's level of post-apocalyptic confusion, but that's enough of that.

We're putting our asshole orange cat on Prozac, or trying to, because his behavior problems are Just Too Much after five years in a stable household. But his 10mg capsules are bigger than my 20mg tablets so what gives? He is impossible to pill by force; it'd be dangerous to try; so we're trying things with pill pockets. I predict this will fail and we'll have to fall back to the transdermal stuff, which I guess doesn't work as well but should work better than nothing. For the moment he's spooked by crunching into a capsule and spraying powder all over, so we're back to feeding empty pill pockets until he trusts them again.

Checking out some easy nonfiction, I'm scanning Your Oxygen Mask First, which is basically about being a leader w/o being unhappy. I'm not quite the target audience. It panders a bit to the reader (who it assumes to be extremely ambitious and driven to do huge things) and spends time advocating a Work/Self/Life balance as if to someone who's never thought of self-care. Ah well. One interesting notion from it that I am pondering is, what are those things that feed my spirit? The author describes this in a particular way: "things that make you feel that all your hard work was worth it, that your life has meaning". Hmmmm. I do have a couple of those but I feel shy about them, oddly.

So tired from handstands. Luckily I'm about to see Norwood, and he'll feed me. ^_^

Comments

[jadia]

I've been thinking about the Spirit question over the last few years, except I think of it as the pursuit of meaning / things that make me feel fulfilled, vs the pursuit of happiness.

[flexagon]

I think meaning is what the author meant -- it's not a happiness book. Actually more of a long-term productivity book.

[cordjostler]

You've got a good point re: cat pills. I remember reading that most of tablets is "bulking agent" anyway, so I don't know why a cat pill would be larger than a human pill, unless it's just to help identify if the pill was actually swallowed or not. I guess a very tiny pill could hang out in their gums long enough for them to trick you and then spit it out?

We have this problem too, but most of our cats are pill-able though difficult.