Week 1490

12.15.25

Today, I realized the American dream. No, not buying a house. No, not the ability to choose my destiny. No. I got a garage fridge. Home Depot delivered it on time and all it took was them plugging it in for it to start cooling. 

We now have a fridge specifically for beverages and pet food. 

Sure, I have to prop up one side with cardboard so that it doesn’t wobble (as much). But, I have a fridge… in my garage. 

The true American dream. 

I even had to leave work early to beat the delivery people there. 

My American dream. 

On top of that, I spent my evening in a slight discomfort due to my stomach and getting to wear barefoot shoes at work all day for the first time (thanks, Syd) - ultimately choosing to skip the gym and prioritizing a better tomorrow. 

Less of my American dream and I’m hoping it isn’t lasting. 

Despite that, I worked on Japanese. Typed this literary masterpiece. Spent time working on the place command (it’s “bed” right now as that is what Truman was taught by Art of the Dog). Watched another video on cars because why buy something you can’t afford when you can waste time watching videos about it? I mean… educating yourself… educating… it was on the X7 M60i. Anyway… I typed this as my wife watched Stranger Things. I contemplated recording this as a video and ultimately let my fingers get to clickity clacketing. I did a foot release. Shoulder and neck release. Shaved. Applied squalane oil to my face and body (I have been pleasantly surprised by the lack of acne with this new routine). 

I spent time thinking about this. What I want to do with it. What I think will come from it. 

How I don’t have many ways for people to contact me nor do I know how or when I want to post the videos online. I crave the notoriety and financial reward that can accompany it but don’t want to face the ridicule as it bothers me more than I would care to admit. 

I want success but don’t always know if I am willing to do what it takes to get it. I’m not even sure what it looks like. 

I want for more but don’t always know what. I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied but I’m okay with that. I love my life. My wife. My dogs. My cats. 

In the moment, I want more. I’m not sure that the future will be so different. More takes time and more will change with time. But more gives me something to do. Something to chase. 

Right now, more is a house that we own. A better way to communicate with our dogs so I can take them to more places. A greater understanding of what I am doing in the gym. Greater fluency in Japanese. That is more right now. 

That’ll change and so will I. Sometimes for the better, others for the worse. But I am looking forward to continuing to share with you. 

I want to share my journey. For better or worse. Give you a peek behind the curtains of life that I have always dreamed that others would give me. That doesn’t mean I will share everything - afterall, I don’t need the entirety of my life scrutinized, No. But I will try to share some details that I think will be interesting for me to look back on, which, in-turn, I believe will be interesting to you. 

What I think is most interesting now is looking forward without knowing where I am going. Without knowing which decision will lead me to where while you get to read this having more insight into where I have ended up. Afterall, if you are reading this, something has ultimately come of this experiment. 

12.21

Crushed daily note taking. Absolutely smashed it…

I haven’t been feeling 100% (persistent tickle in my throat) that is making me nervous this week—or maybe I am just using it as an excuse to not go to the gym and not a selfless act to not get others sick—but I took a nap today because of it. Now, it is just past midnight and I am writing this. 

I was about to handwrite my goals and think through my logic on paper but I am much slower at hand-writing and would end up putting my thoughts here anyway so welcome to my string of consciousness. 

First, it is important for me to establish that my wellbeing, the strength of my relationship, and the wellbeing of my animals are baseline expectations so when I talk about goals, it will be rare that I talk about or create goals surrounding these expectations. 

I love myself and have a good relationship with me. Sure, I am my biggest critic and constantly want to do better but that feels okay to me. I want myself to want more and I am okay with that pattern of behavior at this time. I also am okay with being hard on myself as I would rather this than I constantly create excuses for why I’m not where I want to be, thus creating the life I don’t want to live. I also am not unkind to myself (usually) when I am being hard on myself. 

I may have called myself fat consistently for like two years. I may constantly wonder why I don’t do more, why I can’t push myself at all hours of the day, why I allow myself to take breaks from the gyms that last two days in a row but I rarely let this devolve into anything where I am questioning my integrity or bullying myself by thinking I’m a shit person for this. 

I recognize that I am imperfect and that’s okay—even if it slows my progress. 

I love my wife and our relationship. I adore her. I admire her. We are individuals that have chosen to live our lives together and have an overwhelmingly harmonious relationship. We rarely argue and if it happens, it usually results in us realizing that we were arguing about nothing so within minutes a flurry of emotion becomes a game of who can get the other person to crack a smile first. I like that. 

We are great about making time for one another and if we feel like we need more time with one another, we communicate. Best of all—we don’t rely on our ability to read minds to dictate our feelings towards one another. Who would have thought this was an effective way of co-habitating? 

Our pets are our little world. We love them to pieces. As I write this, I have two doggos snoozing on a couch behind me and a cat trying to get my attention by stretching her paws onto my chair. Now meowing at me. Yes, it sounds cute but this is an elaborate trap to get me to follow her downstairs to feed her second dinner. Filthy little hobitses. 

We have our best dynamic of animals currently where everybody gets along, no lives are at risk if we forget to close the bedroom door and cuddles go around in abundance. 

This fills our hearts and if any of them weren’t healthy, this would be a focus area. 

With that disclosure out of the way—moving on. 

I have historically had a desire to be successful. Success means different things to different people but I think at this point for me it’s a mixture of living a life I am proud of and find interesting along with being free to do what I want. Yes yes, I recognize there are potentially some loose interpretations at play here and yOu cAnT dO WhaTeVer yUO WanT BeCauSe FrEe WiLL iS An IlluSioN. But one, nobody asked you, this is my life, and two, I recognize that there are parameters to this game.

Also, I don’t count work goals into my personal. I live two lives and try to minimize the cross-pollination unless it serves my personal life. 

With more context out of the way, I am balancing a few goals. I want to be fluent in Japanese before I am 30. I want to have really well trained dogs. I want to get jacked. 

When I write it out, that honestly doesn’t sound like much. I just know that each of these goals are multi-year undertakings and maybe that is why I feel overwhelmed thinking about them. But maybe it is because I am also trying to document my life as I live it. Or maybe it is because I am writing this without looking at the computer or my keyboard so I could be writing onsense because I’m not actually on the right keys because who uses the little raisd bumps that I just paused to majes sure that my mac has. Leaving the errors so you can see how I did. 

Read it - not bad. 

Anyway… I have already spent multiple years exposing myself to Japanese and I have struggled with consistency. I talked myself out of it early this year because “it wasn’t going to get me rich” but began to miss it and started re-incorporating it. To be clear, I can barely read it and formulate sentences, but I really have made progress and believe that I can do this. 

Why Japanese? I went there for my 21st birthday and loved the culture. I love connecting with people and would really love to be able to honor them by speaking their language in their country instead of English. Plus, outside of America (and maybe Paris?) people’s eyes light up when a foreigner makes any semblance of an effort to speak their language and I live for those moments. Also, I never reached fluency in Spanish and it annoys me that native English speakers rarely speak a second language so I want to be part of the world that I would like to see more of. I am currently doing Wanikani and writing out the example sentences (typing, to be clear), but I am weighing the idea of hiring a tutor so I can get some language speaking practice in or aiming to take a high-level JLPT exam in December ‘26. 

Well-trained dogs is a bit more nuanced than my simple sentence would lead you to believe. Truman has been formally trained and clearly knows his commands, even when he tries to ignore me. Ellie, not so much. But I want to fundamentally understand what I am doing so I can train them and all of our future dogs so we can all have an effective line of communication. They are Great Danes and we intend on pretty much only having giant breed dogs (unless I can convince Syd to let me get an Italian Greyhound) so it’s important that they are well-trained as they usually will outweigh Syd. Also, well-trained dogs are more fun to take places and I want them to have a full life inside and outside of our home. 

Getting jacked goes beyond my click-bait goal. Yes, of course superficially I want bulging biceps, washboard abs, and pecs that I can raise and drop at will, but I am committed to my long term health and refuse to be another 30 year old that can’t sprint or jump. Fuck that. I want to understand how to take care of my body so I can live a quality life for as long as possible. I don’t want to be another person waiting away in assisted living for the last 15 years of my life. That’s a bit more blunt than Peter Attia would put it, but hey, do you want to be in that position if you can help it?

Just for documentation purposes, I am 232 as of this morning (12/22/25) and would like to be able to be 250 at 10% body fat within the next 3 years and potentially push to 275 naturally over the next 5-10. These are loose goals as I will check my progress along the way and see how I feel; though I expect to enjoy getting increasingly muscular.

The inherent problem I am feeling is that I feel a pull to each of these areas and sometimes it feels hard to balance. At times, I focus too much on fitness… okay, right now… mainly I am spending a lot of time on that but that is a slow race anyway so why not layer in other things along the way? I have no desire to be a field expert but maybe high intermediate to low advanced level knowledge in each of these areas is enough for me to be dangerous. 

There’s no way for me to know how it will come together but maybe I’ll have a bodybuilding, dog-training gym in Japan some day. Or be a ripped guy with well trained dogs sitting on my couch watching anime without having to read the subtitles? Who knows. The world is my oyster. 

The other reason I wanted to write this out is because I see myself getting distracted. Not only do I want our pets to thrive, but our plants. I am feeling a pull back there. Today, I was watching videos on drones thinking of the cool footage I could get with them but I don’t want to master the art of flying drones nor deal with more attention from people that are interested in the buzzing of the propellors… But then I see the footage. 

Then I remember that I stopped at the myofascial release portion of the functional patterns course and that I maybe should do the rest…. But… That’s the only portion I bought the course for as I don’t really trust dogmatic thinkers.

The fact that we inherently have to make sacrifices due to our unknown amount of limited time is really annoying. Why can’t I just pick to fully explore all of my interests and not sacrifice anything along the way?

PS - my wife drives and X3 and we got her brake pads replaced today. Walnut blasting is a unique term that I never would have expected to hear in reference to a car. 

Now that I have thoroughly bounced around in this stream of consciousness, I bid you adieu. 

This week didn’t amount to exactly what I wanted it to be from a gym perspective as I only went ⅗ days. I didn’t feel 100% but also sometimes feel like that is a cop-out as I have been a bit bored with my routine. 

I’m not super obsessive with the gym (though my Spotify wrapped with me being in the top 0.05% of Mark Bell’s Power Project listeners may disagree with that sentiment), but I genuinely want to achieve my ambiguous goal of getting jacked and sometimes it feels like I shouldn’t take a day off even if I find that I am having an unusual bout of low desire to go or am feeling physically fatigued.  

But if I take a day, I feel like I am selling myself short and like I am prolonging my goals. 

In the grand scheme of things, the relative impact of taking a day is practically nothing but it still is hard to ignore in the moment. 

Saturday, Syd hired movers for the first time for her second listing over $1 million (I believe the first one sold for $2.9 and we got to meet the owners who were really sweet while we de-staged) and I don’t think we will ever be able to go back. It’s like how you aren’t supposed to inflate your lifestyle if you can prevent yourself from doing so because once you are on the other side, you don’t want to go back. 

While I only had to lift a few items, I managed to crush my finger three times that day. 

The new stage had a beautiful kitchen and Syd spent the entire time telling me that we should buy the house that will likely sell for close to $3 million in a gated community in Cherry Creek while we can’t even afford a starter home. This made me giggle. 

I giggled more when the architect redoing the house told us the same thing when I was commenting on how I loved what she did with the kitchen and that she got Bosch appliances (that I just so happened to watch a video on earlier in the week). 

We finished “moving” things in 3 hours but will have to go back next week to actually stage. We couldn’t as they are still finishing everything but they kindly let us store everything there instead of having to store it in our Uhaul. 

Sunday, I dropped Syd to the airport and did… Stuff around the house? It’s been a day and somehow I can’t remember. 

I have been transitioning the dogs to a raw diet (just started this week) and was able to get ~60 lbs of meat from Sam’s Meats for the next two weeks. So far, Ellie has been having progressively less diarrhea and Truman is bordering on constipation. I am adjusting the levels of bone to see if I can harden and soften them respectively. 

The first day was pretty funny as Truman had no idea what to do with the meat in his bowl while Ellie finished all of her food and was licking her bowl clean. 

I am slowly increasing my knowledge and giving myself the permission to experiment with this, getting the dogs blood tested and monitoring their coat and skin health for overall improvements. If this helps them, I’m happy to eat the cost to try and have them live a more comfortable life. 

I meant to record this but that is a struggle of mine… I forget to do it in the moment and then the moment has passed. I want to document my life but forget to. The irony of removing myself from the moment to be able to reflect on it by capturing it isn’t lost on me either. 

Also, ya boy did more of his Japanese this way. #baller #日本語上手

P.S. I almost forgot. They finally replaced our window and took our screen?