Should I Stay or Should I Go?

I’m back at the gym and I have no idea what I’m doing.

There’s a general point to each workout, but other than trying to avoid an expanding waistline, and my need to see other living humans in my peripheral vision, there’s no long-term goal or event I’m lifting for. My split jerk is finally looking halfway decent; yet, I’m not sure if I want to keep chasing the possibility of weightlifting competition.

A pandemic, plus a surge in cases of Covid-19 infections during the summer, temporarily kept me away from the gym. With life returning to an adjusted normal and gyms reasonably safe, the opportunity for safer competition is there. But somehow, the gloss has worn off.

Like The Clash song, I’ve never been very good at leaving. Boyfriends, sports, gyms; I always tend to stay a little too long. It once took my getting dumped three times by the same person before I realized that the relationship may have run its course. You’d think I’d have figured it out by the second time, but my unflagging optimism stubbornly claimed that our happier memories far outweighed the numerous red flags. Compounded by the urge to avoid the loss of time, money, emotions, love spent, I’ve clung to anchors while drowning.

Insecurity has had a lot to do with it, but cycling also set me up for failure in that regard, where feeling like you’re having a heart attack is a package deal with having fun. Although the sport taught me the importance of mental fortitude, there was a constant suggestion that my inability to be better at the sport was due to some lack of dedication. If I’d been committed enough, I thought, I’d be able to lose more weight, climb faster, pedal longer. In an effort to prove my love, I spent too many years chasing an arbitrary number on the scale while my relationship with food went from disordered to out of control. I still struggle with it and the digestive issues it has since created.

The fear also lingers. Lacking absurd strength for my size and weight, serious competition in weightlifting would necessitate a hard weight cut. I can’t definitively say that it would be worth it. It’s not just the risk of spiraling or ending up in a place where I am waiting – desperately and endlessly –  to be happy until I reach some goal weight or lose X number of kgs. With Covid having shrunk our social interactions to the exchange digital emojis, could I pass on a chance to touch, hug, and laugh with friends I haven’t physically seen in too long, because I’m training for a competition? The answer for me, right now, is no.

That said, my workouts continue to center around the snatch and the clean and jerk. Kettlebell movements, pull-ups, push-ups, and even the occasional jog have been added; which is to say that I’m doing CrossFit in slow motion. While I expected my step back from weightlifting to bring about some existential turmoil, it’s opened up the opportunities to fail spectacularly at some calisthenics movements. At times I struggle with how generally aimless my workouts currently are, but there’s a relief and a freedom in choosing not to do the things I’m supposed to do, to not feel the need to prove my love to anyone else.

Last week, I hobbled to the stretching area of the gym after I hit a front squat PR. I joined a few other people, outstretched or contorted on the foam mats, all of us trying to work out our individual kinks.

Operation Mallard

I recently applied for a job that required a timed cognitive test that was supposed to discern how quickly I could reason and solve problems. “Reason,” in this case was defined as the ability to calculate percentages and add large numbers without a calculator. It was probably not a great idea to aspire to intellectual heights on a random Wednesday, but a delusional sense of optimism won out.

It went relatively badly. Seconds evaporated as I attempted to remember how to add, divide, and multiply. The test told me I wasn’t nearly as smart as I’d hoped.

The uncomfortable amount of stress sweat dampening my armpits affirmed that I probably wouldn’t enjoy a position where I was required to calculate 34% of 620 within five seconds. At the very least, I was now free to work from home and avoid stressful situations.  

Less than twenty-four hours later, I was standing on the second flight of internal stairs leading to our rooftop, surrounded by leaping ducklings running towards a distressed mother honking angrily one flight down. The Internet had informed us that mallards will depart from their nest around sunrise; an earlier morning check had confirmed no ducklings were present. My father went to take a casual look around noon and found six ducklings and their mother stuck in on our enclosed rooftop. Chaos then ensued.

“Get them!” my own mother said, shoving a cardboard box at me.

As I scooped the adorable, fluffy, helpless things into the box, they leapt out of confinement, scattering along the staircase. They ran towards each other, huddled, then tumbled down the remainder of the stairs where their mother was frantically pressing herself against a window looking out to a balcony. Outdoor access was still one more flight down.

The problem with ducks is that they apparently cannot descend stairs. The mother mallard would hop down one step and look back to have her children follow. She would hop down another step, lose her balance, then half fall, half fly down the stairs. The ducklings would rush to follow and launch themselves head over tail.

Once outside, another issue presented itself. The duck went the wrong way. Spooked by a passing truck and admiring pedestrians, she walked in the opposite direction of the nearest body of water. She only agreed to leave after a couple of crows made their appearance in the lower branches of nearby trees. My mother pointed her umbrella at the nearest crow as my aunt and I used our bodies to direct the duck towards water.

Finally on the right path towards the river, we relaxed. Until we noticed that the storm drains situated on the side of the street were just slightly bigger than a duckling. Scrambling together and over each other to keep up with their mother, the ducklings seemed unconcerned with this obvious danger. Three minutes later, two fell in.

Stressful situations are useful in that they show you the character of a person. First, we all gasped. Next, my mother immediately said we had no choice but to leave them. My aunt agreed. The duck stopped in her tracks, realizing that she was two ducklings short. I looked down the storm drain and saw two ducklings staring upwards, chirping for help.

The storm drain wasn’t deep, the bottom was within arm’s reach. I had to try. I inserted my hands into the two slots and pulled. The lid shifted, then rose off the street. Then, to my mother’s horror, I laid down and dived head first into a cloud of mosquitos to scoop up two squirming distressed baby ducks.

I am convinced that ducklings are heart-meltingly adorable to ensure that humans will be less likely to drive over them. We stopped cars whose drivers’ faces lit up at the subjects of our exhausted escort. By now on the main street in my town, couples holding hands, older ladies on bicycles, kids coming home from baseball practice, all stopped to take pictures. It was only several days later that I realized I’d never seen a mother duck strutting along the street with her young, in Tokyo. For about fifteen minutes, we navigated around a parking lot where, at one point, the mother duck hid in some bushes, panting and stressed. It was a convenient hiding place from pedestrians but it didn’t lead to water. My aunt managed to inadvertently get it out of its hiding place by trying to “cool it off” by pouring water on it.

Another 100 meters of public sidewalk populated by too many people, and we were able to push the duck gang into a side street that led straight to the river. With less people on the street, the mother duck seemed to perk up and waddled forwards more confidently. A car slowed behind us and when it finally passed, almost motivated the duck to turn into another, unrelated side street. I blocked it by standing in the middle of its path; it eyed me with frustration before proceeding to the bridge just up ahead.

The Kanda River is the kind of river you’d expect to see in central Tokyo. Greenish-brown, shallow water flows between tall concrete banks. There are shrubs and cherry trees planted on the tops of the concrete banks, but the river itself appears more like a man-made canal contained for the sake of real estate development. You’d never want to swim in it, but it looks like it has enough creepy crawly things inside to keep water fowl well fed.

The duck stopped at the middle of the bridge and looked at the river, almost pleased at the view. Honking again, she launched herself into the air and down to the water. The ducklings looked on, huddling on the edge of the bridge. It was a good ten meters down. As I stood up to get a picture of the ducklings before they forever left us, one leaped over the edge and dropped into the water, immediately bobbing up to the surface like a cork. The others prepared to take the plunge when I saw my mother’s hand shove them off the edge. She would later claim that it was to keep them from returning towards the street. In reality, I think she was just tired of dealing with them.

They swam away, all six ducklings with their mother, down the river. We cheered, our faces red from the heat and sun. Since then, my mother has said she doesn’t want it to come back, that she doesn’t want to worry about another duckling parade again.

 Deep down, though, she totally does. A couple days ago, she asked me where we should keep the trellis guard in the meantime, while we wait for next year. She’s been sharing videos of the ducks with friends and neighbors. As for me, I’d happily welcome this kind of yearly aptitude test. 

[For a video I put together of the adventure, see below!]

What the Duck?!

“I think it’s a duck,” my mother said.

It was brown, she went on, and there wasn’t a beak, but a bill. It was a duck.

This belief was instantly shot down for its general absurdity. Why would there be a duck nesting in a bush on our rooftop? It had to be a mistake, we said, you just saw it wrong. Don’t ducks hang out near water, anyway? It was probably a pigeon, or one of the turtle doves that are all over our neighborhood. Or some other drab looking bird. Certainly not a duck.

The most recent event to come crashing through my life was precipitated by my dog, who had suddenly insisted on staring at the end of one of the planters situated on the roof. Our rooftop is an area where our dogs, past and present, have been able to run around, and where we hang laundry to dry. Our first dog would slide under the fencing enclosing the rooftop and jump up on the roof’s ledge for the full aerial view of his domain. He eventually launched himself off the edge chasing a crow. Fortunately, he landed in a flower bed about a story and a half down and was fine; we set up cinder blocks underneath the fencing to prevent him from ever gaining access to free fall again.

Those cinder blocks have since become homes to the occasional gecko. Despite my present dog’s general fear of most moving things, she enjoys pressing her nose up to the crevices between the cinder blocks where geckos have taken shelter from the elements. Once she finds a resident gecko, she’ll check up on it at every opportunity.

So when she expressed intense interest at a particular area of our rooftop, whining and sniffing, my mother assumed it was another gecko. She lifted up the dog to show her there was nothing of interest in the planter. Instead, my dog attempted to lunge at something in the bushes that turned to peer towards my mother.

It wasn’t a gecko. It was, we later confirmed, a duck.

This has complicated the general uneventful nature of my life. While the rooftop choice was a wise one in terms of avoiding stray cats and palm-faced civets, the unfortunate timing of having our hedges cut back meant that the duck became more exposed than it should have been. We worried about crows finding it. There’s also the ticking timebomb of ducklings who are somehow supposed to jump down three stories, not die, then walk towards the nearest river without getting run over or picked off by crows. That then presents a moral question: do we stop traffic and ensure the ducklings’ safe return to the river, or do we let nature take its course and allow everything between our house and the nearest body of water decimate the entire brood?

These are all questions and issues I wasn’t ready to voluntarily spend my time thinking about. Nor was the rest of my family. My father told me that he hoped everything worked out for the duck. My mother told me she was too busy to deal with it. Besides, didn’t the duck think things through before making a nest on a rooftop? It must have a plan, right?

Ironically, it was my mother who discovered crows lurking around the nest, quietly plotting death. She texted me with surprising speed.  

When I say “crows,” you might imagine the typical black birds, larger than a pigeon but smaller than a hawk, that might be found near the occasional trashcan or in a Hitchcock film. In Japan, that word refers to a bird the size of a raven that looks like it’s been supersized with steroids. If normal crows were your average human, Japanese crows are Ronnie Coleman. There are stories of Japanese crows dropping kittens on train tracks to kill them, plucking small animals out of zoo enclosures, and snatching food from pedestrians. They’re smart, aggressive, and from what they’ve buried in our planters, particularly enjoy fatty Chinese food.

With the crows fleeing the scene but calling in reinforcements from a neighboring rooftop, we decided to put together a protective guard around the nest. If only to avoid discovering a murdered mallard on her rooftop, my mother came up with the idea of tying two small wire trellises together, then attaching plastic spiked mats made to prevent stray cats from using our yard as a giant toilet, as a further crow deterrent.

Predictably, the duck fled once we placed the contraption over her nest, bursting out of the hedge and quacking in angry distress. It paced around the rooftop as we tried to secure the trellis in place on both sides, my mother telling it that we’d be done soon and asking it not to be upset. It ejected a stream of putrid poop and flew off.

If you’ve never smelled wild mallard poop before, I advise you never to seek the opportunity. What came out of that duck smelled like a mixture of rotten sewage, fish that went bad about a year ago, and wild animal sweat. Even after we hosed down the area, went inside, and vigorously washed our hands, the smell seemed to cling to the insides of our nostrils and our clothes. No wonder my dog found that duck.

I suspect that, at that point, my mother was hoping that it wouldn’t come back. About forty minutes later, I found the duck standing in front of our newly built structure, eyeing it with suspicion and resentment. When I peeked at the planter about twenty minutes later, the duck was securely situated on top of her eggs. She turned and gave me the stink eye.

“You ingrate,” I said as I scanned the sky, rooftops, and telephone lines for any avicidal shadows.

For the present, she seemed safe. If she doesn’t get eaten, Google tells me her eggs will hatch in 30 days. That buys me a month to build a couple crash pads, a ramp, and possibly a sign so I don’t get run over along with the ducks.

Wish us luck, guys.

Sliding into Self-Sabotage

It’s been quiet around here lately.

With the pandemic still raging – despite the Japanese government’s assurances that everything is really ok, at least until the Olympics are over – I just haven’t been doing much. This means that the most exciting part of my day occurs every morning when my willpower to live gets sucked out from my buttchecks via a stone-cold toilet seat. I do have a warming toilet seat, but like coffee shops in Japan, it doesn’t appear to open for business until the late morning hours. 

That’s not to say that I’ve been doing nothing. As the days have blended into one long slog towards whenever we can physically interact without guilt, work had initially been a great distraction. Working was one activity that I could generally control and use to fill the time that I would otherwise spend over coffee with a friend. “If I can’t hang out with friends, I’ll just work,” I reasoned. I was making – and saving – money; I was being productive. It felt good.

Until it didn’t. The continued, year-long discouragement of social interaction translated into a self-imposed obligation to work all the time. On weekends, presented with more free time than I would have liked and hobbies that required thought, I chose to either work or stare blankly at my computer. I burnt myself out about four months ago but dealt with it by stuffing down feelings of guilt and stress with cookies and carbs. I clung to work because it seemed like the one thing that didn’t feel so fruitless. The general sense of loss of control was extrapolated in my mind to a complete loss of control over my circumstances. “Jesus, take the wheel,” my self-control said, and self-sabotage jumped into the driver’s seat.

Rather than enjoying my workouts, eating food that my GI system wouldn’t hate, or doing things that would keep me relatively sane, I either did nothing, ate junk food, or both. While I reasoned that the predictable weight gain had saved me the purchase of a weighted vest or a dip belt for pull ups, there was also the somber reality that my bottom half has become markedly heavier. And bigger. Cellulite, my personal red flag of weight gain I’m going to regret if I keep eating, has seemingly taken up permanent residence on my thighs. With one more thing to worry about, I ate more in response.

“But, the pandemic,” I’d say around a mouthful of donuts, when presented with the mental reminder that this wasn’t actually helping me in the long run. Besides, hadn’t my therapist advised me to “turn off” once in a while?

I understand that my behavior and logic – or lack thereof – requires a special blindness to accountability. The constant self-sabotage has essentially been a muted temper tantrum where I displaced the blame for my own actions because self-care is the harder thing to do. Instead of “turning off” from work, I checked myself out of all responsibility.

But like that one person who uses a second cousin’s in-law’s distant relative’s tragedy to garner sympathy, it’s a stretch to continue to use the pandemic as an excuse to be shitty to myself. Self-care and disconnecting can be exhausting and expensive (I’ve spent more money than I’d like to admit on books in the last two months) but at the very least, my eyebrows look better for it.

As usual, progress hasn’t been perfect. A key takeaway from this most recent period of self-sabotage has been that they really shouldn’t trust me to portion out chocolate bars. (When the entire thing is wrapped in one foil packet, do they really expect me to take some and put the rest back? And have you noticed how the foil is always very thin and rips, thus forcing you to take another portion…? And then another…and another…?) More important ones have been that I haven’t lost control of my entire life, that devouring books instead of chocolate is more effective when I need to get out of my own head, and that the urge to mindlessly snack indicates a need to de-stress.

 Which is to say, I’ll probably be busier going forward, but hopefully, I’ll be a less stressed person for it.

The Let-Down Effect

“I feel like a shark,” I said to a good friend, “like if I stop working, I’m either going to spontaneously die or get super sick.”

I would later learn that the implosion of your immune system after a stressful period or a mad dash to a deadline isn’t unusual and is called the “let-down effect.” The general advice to counter this physical collapse due to professional obligations appears to be to “pace yourself.” Unfortunately, this is as effective as telling a drowning person that maybe he should have learned how to swim. In a perfect world, people would have manageable workloads and ample time to destress. In actuality, we’re left with emotional eating, “revenge bedtime procrastination,” and the let-down effect.

All of which meant that by the last day of 2020, I was overweight, exhausted, and had a killer Tetris score.

To mitigate the damage I was anticipating from the let-down effect, I spent most of the first 48 hours of January, unconscious. That appeared to only delay the onset of a general malaise that triggered another game I’d played all year in 2020: Is it a cold, allergies, the flu, or Covid? Is that muscle soreness from the mere 10 air squats I did or is it corona virus? Am I just unfit or am I actually experiencing a viral infection causing shortness of breath?

Or was it all in my head? While I definitely ate something that my intestines hated in the early days of the 2021, I was almost disappointed in how functional and healthy I was. Like most of 2020, the new year has already thrown a wrench in my plans to be both comatose and unwell for at least four days. I suddenly had a stretch of 48 hours to address basic human needs that had been pushed off to the back burner. It was enough time to do four loads of laundry, write, make postcards, and send long-overdue emails. For that short period of time, I even managed to cut back on the stress snacks, take too many naps, and add to my Tetris score.

It wasn’t what most would think of as an ideal holiday, but it was a couple days away from deadlines and that quietly urgent, completely triggering, tok-tok of Slack alerts. It was a brief yet blissful reprieve from my Japanese willingness to die for a client before I was plunged back into the depths of legal research and case law.

 It’s a new year but I’m still propelling myself forwards to stay afloat, a little less glassy-eyed than 2020, but still slightly gape-mouthed, looking cautiously hopeful to the coming year.  

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween even in these Covid times!

My dog still loves me, I promise.

#ganggang

She is sick of my shit ahaha.