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Making a Plan

So I finally started P90X this weekend.  It’s hard, but I will try and stick with it.  (Plyo is hard!  Forget waterboarding, make terrorists do Plyometrics!) It is something different, so I like the change.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I do certain things.  Why I continue certain actions even though it might not make any sense, or even be good for me.  A good example is something that happened when I was cooking.

A few weeks ago, I went and bought a tub of that new cooking cream by Philadelphia.  There was a coupon in the paper for $1.50 off and I decided to try it out. The dish tasted well, but the following morning I had a serious case of acid reflux.  It was bad.  So bad, I had to choke down a cup of the very nasty tasting throat coat by Yogi teas.  It tastes horrible, but it is very effective.

I started thinking – Why did I add the cream?  I remembered thinking that the dish was good before I added the cream.  Yet I went ahead and used it.  But why?  Yes, I wanted to try it out, but I KNEW before I used it that it might be a bad idea.  So why did I go along?  Because that was what the recipe said to do.

I started to think this might be a habit with me.  I do certain things, because I’m just following the directions.  My instincts may say that it is a bad idea, but I just follow like a lemming.  Where does my brain go?  I just have to get better about seeing the big picture.  Not just with food, but everyday things.  What is my life going to look like in 5 years? 10?  I don’t need to have  fully detailed plan, but I do need to be long term.  These last few years, I’ve been kind of drifting and I need to stop.  In less than a month, I will be 34.  Time to have a plan to take me to 40.

Big life questions aside, I still want to enjoy the random funny things that happen.  Sometimes the unexpected is the best life moment.  Like when I went on that money hunt and I found a DVD set of Sex in the City Season 3.  That one left me scratching my head.  I have no idea where it came from, but now it is in my collection of DVDs.

Or last weekend when I went to visit my aunt.  I hadn’t seen her in a month or so and we started talking about movies.  I mentioned that I finally saw The Social Network, which lead her to exclaim, “And did you see the Academy Awards!  I couldn’t believe that was Trent Reznor.  That’s the same guy that was screaming and running around on stage a few years ago at that concert.”  I laughed for a good five minutes.  My aunt is in her late 50’s.  How awesome is it that she knows who Trent Reznor is?

I need a plan, but I want it to be adaptable.  In some ways, I just want things to be on autopilot.  But I guess things like life planning shouldn’t be that way.  I don’t want to add a bad ingredient that ruins the whole dish, just because the plans said so.  If you do that, you just end up making yourself sick.