Two Months Down, Bring On The Third!

February, how did you fare overall? That's right, time for another status report! Though it may be a bit dull to read, actually I don't know that for sure, writing and reading a post are two very different things. But as I'm sure I've mentioned at some point in the past, the key to maintaining good morale and in particular self-esteem is to constantly remind yourself of every achievement no matter how trivial.

February has had its fair share of ups and downs, a few moments where I reversed some of the progress I've made. Even a few moments where the CBT processes didn't work. I made a few predictions at the end of January that didn't come even close to fruition.

I will soon put together a list of companies I'd like to work for and make the cover letter fit their vision for an employee.

This...didn't happen whatsoever, I'm not entirely sure where I stand here. I may have regressed a little in my desires to gain employment. Probably because I started working for my Dad redesigning his website, getting a little bit of cash each week in the process. Despite this fiscal boost I'm growing ever more weary of being so poor all the time. Don't get me wrong though, of course I make enough to survive, but it's been so long since I've been able to have a healthy cash flow where I can worry less about budgeting and just have some fun. Not since I left China at the beginning of 2007...

Well that may change in the next few weeks. On Tuesday I have to return to Sarina Russo to meet with someone. It's been six months since I went to therapy, which means my part-time job searching is over. I hope it means I go back to intensive job searching and not doing work for the dole. Early this month I decided to just let the process work itself, they suggest I get six months for recovery, then I'll take the full six months. If back on intensive job searching, I'll have to go in every day, do some modules as well as several hours of actual job hunting. I'm genuinely ready to get back to work, just don't know what kind. I still imagine I'll lose the least amount of sanity in Admin, but I'll leave it until next week and decide later.

I predict that by the end of the month I'll be able to jog the whole route, about 1.5km.

That was a bit bold...and italic? I now realize I was jumping ahead of myself with that claim, truth is that by the end of February I can manage to jog about 300-400m of the route. So it'll be a while I imagine before I can make it the whole way, but I was wrong to think in those terms anyway. If you set out with enormous short term goals you'll become acquainted with disappointment quite readily unless of course you're some sort of superhuman. If you really want to accomplish it you've got to split it up as much as you can. When I started I just wanted to be able to walk the route, then I got up to jogging 100m and so on. My legs muscles are hurting quite a bit too, not used to that sort of activity. Gotta keep running through the pain, it'll subside eventually.

The one change I'm going to make to my daily tasks is that I want to start jogging twice daily, once in the early morning and then again in the evening. I think by spreading out the exercise it'll be better, right now it feels like I sit around for most of the day, then some intense exercise, then sit around again. I'll give it a go anyways. My other lifestyle achievements for the months include making a complete readjustment to eating three meals a day, I actually get hunger pangs in the A.M. which has never really happened before. The other achievement was fucking finally getting back to a regular sleep pattern, bout 9:30pm to 5:30am, so much bliss!

But not everything was good news, some more regressions. For a few weeks there I started social smoking i.e. every time I had drink. But there were ashamedly a few moments where I just bought a pack of smokes and smoked at home. I felt so ashamed by it that I reverted back to a teenager lifestyle trying to conceal it from my parents and other people. Good news is that I've stopped that now and I've made a new (new for me that is) stratagem for fighting addiction. Which brings me back to alcohol. I am an alcoholic. That is so difficult to admit, I just feel a desperation to delete that remark. But I need to get it out there, have to fight the denial. I only stumbled onto this thought in my last entry when I realized that it may be possible.

Since then I've been internally debating what an alcoholic actually is. I've always thought it's someone who can't live without drinking and will do so at any spare moment. Now I know that the first part of that statement is the actual definition, the second part not so much. An alcoholic is someone who can't live without drinking. That is me. I associate drinking with the highest form of pleasure, more than anything else. Same goes for smoking actually. It is these mental associations that I have to fight. It's easy for me to stop drinking and smoking, but I never stop thinking about how much I'd love to be doing them, because they are awesomeness.

How many times have I said over the last few months that if it wasn't for my health I'd be smoking right now. These are the thoughts I have to get rid of. Smoking and drinking alcohol is shit, always wanting to smoke and drink alcohol is a waste of time and life. I don't like to think of it as mental trickery, I want to genuinely believe those statements. If I don't then I'll never be able to abandon the two habits entirely, every time someone offers me a beer I'll have to comply. Then as I quickly get drunk I'll start bumming smokes off people. That's exactly what happened this month and I do not blame anyone else for that nor should I even consider for a moment laying the blame on anyone else but myself and my poor self control. I keep getting flashback of Jack Black in Tropic Thunder roped to that tree, it really is like that...sad.

I've messed up my life because of alcohol, not the other way round. Alcohol isn't the glue that keeps everything together, it's the acid that dissolved it in the first place. I'll be keeping thoughts like that in mind for a while. This may not mean much, but I truly apologise to anyone who has had a shit night or been made uncomfortable because of my drunkenness and general arseholery. I really mean that, I now feel ashamed of all those piss ups where I acted like a dick. I suppose that's a good sign, I've always thought of them as hilarious.

So I guess those are fairly suitable goals for March:

- Get back into intensive job training.
- Start jogging twice daily.
- Kill the demon alcohol and its deformed brother the cigarette.

Now onto the less serious, non-lifestyle changing events. Here are some numbers. Once this post has been published I'll have made 14 entries for the month, exactly the same as January. I was hoping to be a bit higher than that, just have to keep on truckin' along I guess. That is the equivalent of updating one of my blogs every two days which is actually pretty good. As of this moment I have seen 39 films this month, less than January actually. I've got one last film for February though and that's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm finally going to give it a proper viewing, see if I actually like it this time. But here are a few films I saw this month that I highly recommend you go check out.

• Wall-E
• In Bruges
• Death Proof
• Raising Arizona
• Punch-Drunk Love
• Bad Education
• Happy-Go-Lucky
• Dark Star (I was really surprised by this one!)

Ohh and don't see 88 Minutes of The Chumscrubber unless like me you want to take the bad with the good, I'm not even going to link to them. I saw the first season of The Wire which looks like it's going to be good fun to work through. Managed to get round to the second season of The Sopranos which just keeps getting better and better.

But it was in the world of music this month that I had my greatest joys. This new method of listening I've been using is simple but brilliant. Pick albums that I don't really know and listen to them, the trick is to not put any albums on my mp3 that I know. So I'm left with about 15-20 albums that I've never really listened to and get to know them over a few weeks. I've discovered that I really like Blue Öyster Cult...A LOT, Thin Lizzy are also fantastic, Deep Purple have albums other than Machine Head, I should have gotten into Dio years ago and The Mars Volta on top of being genius are the most 'progressive' progressive rock band I've ever heard. That's all just for starters. But my MP3 player decided to break down this week, how I am growing tired of that CONSTANTLY HAPPENING. That's three MP3s in the last year.

But since they only cost about $40 at uMart it's not a bad investment if they break down every six months. But when I say this player is broken, I don't mean completely broken. It still plugs into my PC and I can listen to the music that way, just can't listen to it through the headphones. It's a glorified USB drive now. I'll just have to purchase some new albums on Monday. You should check those reviews out sometime Monday, got some great albums lined up.

So February was sometimes a very difficult month, I don't like the idea of regressing. I guess it's sort of like two steps forward, one step back and repeat. I can't focus only on those setbacks when I made some great improvements as well. Also now that those problems are locked firmly in my line of sight I'll be able to crush them. Then when I meet some newer problems in March I'll be able to stop them in April. We persevere. Once again I wish everyone a healthy, happy, productive new month and that you're not dragging too many issues with you. I love you guys.

Andy Scott