This week started with a weight scare. I went shopping for some shorts and realized I don’t even fit into most of them. I knew I’d gained weight over the last few years but it was mostly muscle. Recently though, I realized I gained a lot of belly fat. I know I’ve neglected my workouts since we moved into our new apartment and throughout July I was mostly sedentary at home. I’m at an age where, if I let my weight go out of control, it might require a herculean effort to roll back. So I hit the gym 4 times this week, replaced my (usually big) lunches with protein shakes and walked ~5km every day to burn additional calories.
I went to the studio only once and worked on my sculpture for ~6 hours, sandpapering it. I’m proud to see how much better this is than my first. I decided to name this something much more modest, so I’m calling it simply Étude.
I finally finished The Claw of the Conciliator, the 2nd book of The Book of the New Sun series. I enjoyed this less than the first one but nevertheless I’m hooked on Severian’s story and will start the 3rd book without a pause.
Coincidentally, we watched two movies from the year 2000. The first was The Gift, starring Cate Blanchett and Keanu Reeves. I enjoyed the film greatly, it almost felt like watching Twin Peaks. It was also very disorienting (in a good way) to watch Keanu Reeves as an antagonist.
The second movie was Iñárritu’s Amores Perros. This immediately went into my favorite movies list. The stories, the characters, the rawness of it all were spectacular. But the movie was not for the faint-hearted, especially for people sensitive to animal welfare. On the famous website Does the Dog Die?, the top comment is:
don’t watch nothing but dogs dying left right and centre — Steffylew