Can you do it to yourself?

On my way home from work, on the ride on the bus home, with my favorite ‘pink’ iPod Shuffle giving me splendid company, I was thinking about what my colleagues had told me in the afternoon.

“Kris, your paunch is looking bigger.”

I hadn’t noticed it had grown that prominent. I tired to defend myself by saying:

“It’s always been there. Maybe you didn’t notice.”

Suddenly, Thom Yorke started singing “Just” on my Shuffle, the chorus went of like this:

“Can you do it to yourself? Yes, you do, and that’s what really hurts. You do it to yourself…”

It felt like Thom was asking me about why I was letting myself grow overweight and out of shape.

That’s it, I decided. It motivated me to go to the gym back again. With the iPod Shuffle, of course.

I did. I weighed myself. I had put on 6 kilos in the last 4 months or so! I felt bad enough to set up an appointment for a BCA test. That will be tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I won’t let it do it to myself. I promise.

13 months more

The wave of depression seems to have coincided with the Japanese tsunami. But unlike Japan, I was ravaged by it for about 3 days.

The good news is that I think I'm about to bounce back. I felt good almost throughout the day today. I was more talkative at work and was as usual cracking jokes and making a fool out of myself.

It's good that I started feeling better around the time I'm being asked to renew my membership at the gym. I had my doubts as to whether I should invest in something that I was not being able to put at 100% at.

Of course, when I am in my depressive spiral, everything that I should ideally do feels avoidable. But now that I am out of it, I think I'm going to do it.

So it's the same apartment and the same gym for another 13 months!

Financial troubles?

I might be a 31-year-old qualified surgeon in India. But I don’t practice surgery. Neither am I in a lucrative job – I work as an academic editor in Medicine and Biosciences, and the salary is about one fourth of what my cousins earn. And I live all by myself in Mumbai. This doesn’t augur well for my finances. I’m yet to await the final word regarding my appraisal this year and I fear that my hopes of moving into a better apartment are going to be stalled yet again.

My second profession – music – not only doesn’t bring me enough money but ends up making me spend money with regard to jams in rented jam rooms and dinner/drinking sessions after rehearsals. This has been especially true in the last two months or so. I need to probably opt out of these dinner/drinking sessions to save up some money or else I won’t be saving up any money!

Because of the various rehearsals and also because of the relatively hectic schedule at work, I have not been able to go to the gym regularly. My membership is due for renewal in April, which is around the time my apartment lease is going to expire. I guess I will have to stick to the same apartment for at least another year. The big burning question is – should I renew my gym membership? I guess I should as that’s the only investment on health that I’m making. I think I should cut out on partying and eating/drinking out as a compensation.

To take care of myself

Sometimes I forget that I’m supposed to take care of my health. Too many bands, too many commitments, too much of work – all have led to me ignoring the fact of taking care of myself and my body. Bands and commitments lead to more time out and partying and drinking and work leads to more stress, forcing me to try and find some time to relax.

I’m ashamed of myself in a way – to have missed gym on most days in the last three months or so – to indulge in some kind of alcohol in some social occasion or the other quite regularly. I wish I could just push the red button on this and get back to the routine of having time to take care of myself. Even if I find it, would I have the courage to push it?

A bitch at work

I started the work-week being all positive. I woke up feeling all pumped up and ready to bring my life back on the most-desired track. This, in my case, includes a direct bus to and fro to work and back, good 9-hour working day, a couple of hours at the gym, another couple of hours rehearsing songs, and quiet dinner, and some time catching up with friends online.

After my morning cuppa, I felt ready to conquer the world. I took my gym bag with me down the stairs of my apartment building, hoping that work would be kind to me. I log on to Twitter on my mobile phone and as I am browsing through the tweets, my direct bus comes in like a whirlwind, stops briefly for a second, and zips past me. I realize that only when I feel the dust-smoke cloud formed by the bus engulfs me.

What a sad start. I get a rick and hurry to work not wanting to lose the time advantage that I had. I walk into work and check my schedule and I find a bitch of an assignment waiting for me. I take a few minutes to finish away a work-related chore that I have been putting off for long.

Then I start working on the bitch. She was full of ticks and fleas, and was fat and a pig. To make things worse, the freelancer that she was to be pruned by had peed and shat all over her, making her distinctly unpleasant to work with. I would like to bitchslap the freelancer so that her cheeks are more skewed than the W's ideas about WMD.

I work away at the bitch incessantly, clipping her overgrown finger/toe nails, trimming her overgrown fur, and giving her a nice anti-helminthic purge before I washed her down of all the sludge. I take teeny-weeny breaks for breakfast and lunch in between. But the bitch is so unwieldy that I can't even pee the whole evening. Well, until I got done with her at least - by 7.03 pm.

There is no energy left in me. I leave the gym bag at work, hoping that I will wake up nice and early tomorrow, turn up for work early, LEAVE work early, head to the gym, go back home, and head to the party at the Banana Bar. I hope there ain't another bitch waiting for me at work.

Gym at last

For the last year or so, I have had the desire to start going to a gym again - again, because, during a brief stint of 3 months or so two years back, when all of us from Shor Bazaar were deluded enough to believe that we could all quit our livelihoods to chase our musical dream, we had all joined a gym and gone there for a month or so, and I had lingered on for a couple of more months. All through out this “plump” phase of my life, I had longed to re-start something healthy, something that would get rid of my ever-growing love handles and paunch.

One of the three reasons that I was intimidated was – two reasons are based on the lack of adequate dispensable income – is that I thought I could not stick to a diet that you are expected to follow once you start working out in a gym. The other reason, of course, was the expenses associated with joining the gym. The third of course was the doubt as to whether I could find enough time and motivation to go there regularly – as regular are almost daily.

So, last month, a lot of money came in – guess what, through music! Yes, both Shor Bazaar and Cirkles are increasing my dispensable income enough for me to think about gym, a new phone, iPod etc – and I decided that enough was enough. Impulsively, almost instantly, I decided to join a gym. On the first day of deciding, I was supposed to check out a couple of gym in the locality. This, of course, barring the one which is right next to my apartment building, on top of the supermarket, which happens to be the biggest (and apparently the most expensive) gym in Asia.

After work, I went to check out the first gym, which is about 10 minutes from my apartment. My budget was around 10 K for an annual membership. In less than 10 minutes, I signed up for the gym after a guided tour and a fantastic package deal offer. I signed up on fourth of April and I have had a really wonderful time at least until now. If anything, I am sticking to the diet in the most practicable way – that should help me restore some health to my ageing body.

It is ironic that I started this new “health” trip almost as soon as I started to have my own mini-bar, the pleasures of which are less available to me now, by choice. But then, this is all of longevity and health, and being a doctor I think I need to portray an image of health and wellness. Yes, here’s to a year of physical activity and healthy eating, the after effect of which will hopefully be a less flabby, more muscular body!

Time to break the silence

So many things to write about, but so little time. That's the story of my life. In a nutshell, however, I can catalog it here. Here goes...

• I'm back to being up and down. I'm going through a change of medications (antidepressants/antipsychotics/mood stabilizers etc.), perhaps I'll soon reach a stable baseline.
• Twitter is back into my life. I'm tweeting more than ever. If you are a horny gay male bird wanting to mate with me, follow me or my alter-ego Krishna.
• I'm watching plays and hanging out with friends more often.
• I've finally started having my own mini bar at home. I have started out with whisky (Royal Stag), vodka (Sminnoff classic) and beer (Kingfisher Blue). If you are hunky enough, funny enough, or hung enough, please saunter into my apartment after informing me - you might just have the quiet drink of your life.
• I have decided to not move out of my present apartment. That, ufortunately will happen next year. Or so it seems now.
• I'm planning to join a gym! Yeah, I need to get my waist from the present 31 to past 29!
• I've planning to buy an iPod. I want a gigantic storage space for music/videos/movies. iPod Classic?
• I'm making plans to upgrade (in the next 6 months or so) my existing phone (Sony Ericsson P1i) into something even better! I am looking for QWERTY smartphones preferably with huge touch screens preferably on the Android platform. The options that I'm currently considering are as follows:
  
  
  
  • Motorola Milestone (or Droid)
  • BlackBerry Curve 8520/BlackBerry Bold 9000
  • SE Aspen/SE Xperia Mini Pro
  • LG GW 620
  • Others? (Please suggest)