It was Thanksgiving week, but it’s time to review the week!
1) Your late 20s is the real coming of age
The one thing I realized this week is that your late 20s are much more significant than your adolescence. While you shape habits and lifestyle in your teenage years, you’re making a lot of big decisions that can’t easily be reversed in your 20s and a setback or wrong decision could cost you years. If you make the wrong career decision or love the wrong person or buy the wrong things, you could lose a lot of opportunities. I suppose the problem is that people become very different, so there aren’t as many good generalizations to be made as there are for teenagers, where themes like perception, acceptance, and first love are more universal. I outlined some of the skills that I think are fairly common though – ability to sort out differences, the collar of money, and avoiding big mistakes. Happiness is very hard to define, but it involves a well-rounded sort of contentment. You don’t want to neglect friendship, money, love, career, or passions, because sometimes you can’t get them back.
2) As a man, you want wife and mother in law to get along
It was only recently that I realized how important this was. If you’re a girl and you’re reading this, it seems obvious – ugly relations with the in-laws will mean rocky times at family reunions and in Asian cultures, can really make the wife miserable. But as a man, it’s pretty important that you not get stuck between a war between your mother and your wife, because both will expect you to take their side and will be ENRAGED if you even sympathize with the other. I don’t think it’s as important for the husband to get along with his in-laws, but it’s nice to have two families bonded well together. In short, marriage isn’t just between two people, it affects two families. If they differ fundamentally on issues, it can cause a lot of trouble. It’s something to sort out before you put the rings on.
If you haven’t guessed where the bad blood starts, it’s usually over how to discipline a child and how hard to push expectations. Most disagreements up to that point can be suppressed to a degree, but people will go to war over their kids.
3) Calorie counting will depress you
The more ways I find to keep myself accountable, the more I realize that I’m not nearly as good as I thought I was. Keeping a count of calories is revealing a fatal love of juice and really an addiction to rice. Aki usually eats 1/4 cup of rice and feels full, while I pound the other 1.75 cups of rice. Except for the part that 1/4 cup of rice is considered a full serving at 150 calories, so I can eat like 1050 calories before I even get to the meat. One interesting side effect is that it has caused me to fall in love with kimchi, which is filling, tastes pretty good, and a jar of the stuff is like 80 calories. I now shudder to think about what I was doing when I could eat 2 cups of rice, a bowl of ramen, and a can of Spam – and think about a package of mochi ice cream for dessert.
An interesting side mystery is that my metabolism has slowed down severely and I’m not convinced that my age has everything to do with it. I think my multivitamins may be having an effect. My feet are always ice-cold these days and I don’t think I have as much energy as I used to, even though my multivitamin claims to have extra B vitamins for an energy boost. I might stop for a couple weeks and see if it picks up.
Avg sleep: 7.71 hrs
Avg calories: 1772
Goals from the week (brace yourself, it’s not good):
1) Run 12 miles – did not run at all
2) Write TKD papers – success!
3) 300 finance questions, 200 other questions – fell a bit short but not by far
4) 750 pullups, 1500 pushups, 8000 situps – not even close, maybe half
5) tuck planche, handstand for 15 seconds – I’m at maybe 5 sec, it’s harder than I thought
6) learn to juggle 4 balls – maybe for 2-3 seconds, it’s not good
7) job searching – eh
Verdict: Too much falling short, scale back or push harder