tension.

I went to see Gangs of New York tonight. I'm pretty sure it's a good movie, but I can't quite figure out what it was trying to say. And it has, hands-down, the absolute worst credits sequence I've ever seen, and if you go to see it (it's also brutally violent, incidentally) I highly recommend bolting out of the theater the second the last scene fades to black.

My body is doing some more re-adjustments, I think: some cracking and snapping and popping and re-setting into place. I feel this is much of what's happening with my knees, but it's also ankle and wrist. The upside is that I believe it will end eventually. I'm thinking to get some acupuncture done on my knees anyway. Unless I've fucked up something fairly seriously, there's no surgery that can fix them; I can get some kind of braces or something, but I don't want braces, I want them to work better on their own.

I weigh myself periodically when I get the chance, which tends to be every 2-10 months. While at Dan's on Sunday watching the Super Bowl, I took advantage of his rather nice and probably-reliable scale to discover that I weigh 215 pounds with clothes, so probably 210 without. Clearly the 165 listed on my driver's license is just wishful thinking, but that's how I think of myself, since I weighed less than that the last time I was around a scale regularly--when I was on the diving team in 1993. My body composition has been varying wildly, but I'm also entirely unused to my adult body. Ten years ago when I got in shape I became wiry; now, I'm really densely packed, have fairly wide shoulders, and am much more truck-like than wiry. I stopped growing upward many years ago, but my shoulders kept widening until just a couple of years ago, and I'm trying to remind myself that I'm "big". (I'm not making any of this up: I keep getting told this by all the 100-150 pound people I train with.) Ann and I were talking a couple months ago about how our body image somehow hasn't changed from arbitrary points in the past, from when we were 4 or 10 or 15 (rather dramatic in her case, since she's about 6 feet tall and leans down to give me a hug). This process of learning to inhabit my body is great, but it takes a lot to move this much mass around.*grin*

Hey, it's been my birthday (the 29th) for a whole hour, which means it's time to get my ass to bed. I didn't breathe and relax as much today, so starting now I'm going to try and return to not being at all stressed about anything. Easy, no?


Chris