guys its barbenheimer weekend
I was talking with my housemate about how to be more physically active if you’re not used to it at all because everywhere you’re told to start a training routine where you push yourself a little every day, and while that may seem easy for some people it can be really fucking daunting if you start from zero.
As someone who comes from a very physically active family that doesn’t exercise just for the sake of exercising but do things like walk to the grocery store and bike to work, here’s my advice that has always worked for me:
Go super duper easy on yourself.
If you want to walk more start by walking for 3 or 5 minutes. The shortest possible walk you feel you’re capable of. A trip around the block or across the yard. You don’t need to sweat or get your blood pumping. Just a short stroll. The hardest part is to convince yourself to set aside 5 minutes every day to go on this short walk but nothing else about it should be hard. Do it every day and one day you’ll realize that you don’t want to go home just yet. It’s very important that you don’t think “I want to pressure myself to walk further” but rather “I haven’t spent all my walking energy yet. I have more walk in me” and only then do you lengthen the walk. I repeat, at no point should it be exhausting or difficult because even when it feels easy your body will be building muscle and stamina and it will eventually feel too easy and you’ll naturally want to crank it back up to easy again.
If you’re not used to being physically active it might not make a ton of sense when I say that you’ll have more walking energy left but trust me, you’ll get it when you get there.
I grew up with going on evening walks with my parents and passed that on to other housemates who didn’t get it at first but are now going on walks long after they moved somewhere else. Because once you get the hang of it you’ll realize how calming it is on the brain to move the body even if the body isn’t exhausted afterwards.
And it of course helps to entertain yourself especially in the beginning. My housemate started out listening to audiobooks and podcasts but eventually realized Pokémon Go was the best motivator. Whatever you feel like you want to do on your 5 minute easy stroll.
Love this. Exercise should be individual. No pain no gain is a big lie most of the time. Just do a little bit if that's what you can do. A little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing.
There’s certain benign activities that you should do even if someone is judging you because the sort of person who would judge you for doing that isn’t a person worth listening to.
Worried about wearing that pikachu shirt when you usually don’t wear t-shirts? Do it. The sort of person who would judge you for wearing a pikachu shirt isn’t worth your time.
Worried someone will judge you for eating in public? What sort of idiot cares about another person eating a salad at the park? Just do it.
Worried you’re not dressed well enough for this mall? It’s a mall. If someone judged you for showing up in basketball shorts they have too much time on their hands.
What sort of person gets mad at someone else just standing to the side and reading a nutrition label? Not the sort of person I’d like to meet.
Someone judging you for not wearing makeup? That person is not worth your time.
This mindset has helped my social anxiety a lot btw. As long as you generally do your best to be a polite person other normal or slightly weird or out of character things you do are your business. The sort of person paying a lot of attention to every little thing a stranger does generally isn’t the sort of person whose opinion you’d respect. So stop letting their opinions matter to you when you haven’t even met them.
I got very loudly deadnamed and misgendered multiple times at the doctors office today. This new receptionist ignored the preferred name on my profile to deadname and misgender me loudly, louder than she talked about anyone else in the waiting room. My birth certificate says "F" nex to sex, my medical documentation reflects this, and I was still deadnamed and misgendered.
And the saving grace was a woman and her child. I wear cat-ears and the child too young to speak loved them, and kept pointing and looking at me. I'm assuming her mother kept saying "yeah, she's wearing cat-ears", "yeah, that woman has cute cat-ears", and the like. Her child was enamoured with them, and that woman didn't misgender me once. And each time my very obviously masculine deadname name came up, she looked upset at the receptionist, but not once did she give me a bad look.
It doesn't have to be much. You don't need to be a knight in shining armour, or in someones face. Simply a quiet refusal to play along with someone elses bullshit is enough. It was enough to turn a trying and tiring moment into something that put a smile on my face and joy back into my life. It wasn't a lot but it mattered to me.
Posting this iconic piece of media that I just NEVER found online isolated except in an archived reddit thread
"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.
Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.
We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.
be pro-aging but wear sun screen. sun protection is not beauty industry propaganda it will save you. wear it. or else.
Oh okay so it's good then
Phenomenon I feel happens a lot
most of the notes were just like "this is why we should communicate better and just say it" but i feel like this person elaborates a bit on the deeper root of this problem
I came into my room and there was a web directly across the inside of my doorway even though it had only been a couple of hours since I last walked in here. Of course I immediately thought of this old Far Side which is never too far from my mind
Have loved this particular Far Side moment for ages.
not a dream
WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR DASH
I don't like it
oh you're the president cool
no, I just got my shoelaces from the president
me, a reddit refugee:
