Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

This was imported from my old Tumblr blog posts.

Not much, but I started with a few things.

Let’s start with – exercise.

It’s not a secret that I don’t do much exercising – my body will tell anyone that in big bold letters. I already have a “dad bod”. At least I managed to move out of a 249-pound situation into a manageable 200 pounds. For years, I thought my heaviest body weight was 239 pounds, until I found a cellphone picture I took that showed me 249 on the scale that I go “Jesus, holy shit, it was THAT bad”. 200 isn’t bad considering I once was 249, but it certainly isn’t anywhere near my ideal body weight. For reference, I’m 5′ 7.25″, so my ideal body weight should be around, I guess, 160-170 pound range. So I’m 30+ pound overweight.

Once I moved to SG, I did consider subscribing to a gym.

For reference, I once subscribed to a gym many years ago – it was Slimmer’s World at Makati – but I fell out of routine as I had misguided views on health, and my web developer work schedule in my former employment there never gave me a consistent timeframe to do gym, basically deadlines and crunch timeframes did me in. Things happened, so I managed to pare down on my excesses and indulgences, and I shaved off nearly 20% off my body weight. There’s that, but I’m still way off my ideal weight.

I tried other non-gym means of exercise – like walking from the tricycle station to my house at night (2014-2015), walking round-trip from Mandaluyong Executive Mansions to Makati RCB as my daily commute (2015-2017), walking from Emerald Tower to the jeep station in Boni at night, sometimes until Mandaluyong City Hall (2018) – and while they are considerable distances, they were more of necessities at the time.

But gyms here are expensive – both the actual and collateral costs. Consider Fitness First. I used to ask my colleague if I could hitch a ride on his weekend gym routines to FF – his subscription allows him to have one “guest” to take to the gym on weekends. And FF in Singapore is nice, really nice. It has all the amenities, have nice steam and sauna rooms, you don’t have to bring extra clothes and towels (they give it), they have hairspray and blowdryers and nice lockers – the place is a very convenient gym experience, just literally “come and go” with all the hassles taken care of. But that convenience came a cost that I was uncomfortable to part with at the time – I only have a few thousand in my bank account, and I was not financially stable to plunk a chunk of cash for it. And not just the actual subscription fee – the collateral costs kicked in. I have to allot some cost for bus/train fare, and breakfast/dinner costs, every time I go to the gym on weekdays. So that will amount to at least 60-100+ SGD every month (depending on which gym location and what I can eat) on top of the monthly gym membership cost, and that’s a lot.

Then I started to look around, if I can at least see options that I can manage. There’s Anytime Fitness. It’s 24/7, and the monthly cost is indeed lower than FF, but the ones nearest to my house are not manageable (distance-wise) for morning sessions, and I have to plunk down more cash for gym attires – which means I have to spend more for laundry. There’s the ActiveSG gyms, which are way lower in cost, but the amenities – let’s just say you will get what you pay for. I relented once and used an ActiveSG gym in Enabling Village six times to prep for SCSM 2019, and while it was baseline good for a basic workout and get some run in, it’s not the most attractive option.

And so I resolved to save as much as I could to afford a good gym. If I’m going to spend a thousand-plus SGD on a gym, I’d rather go for the top one. ActiveSG can be my stopgap for run preps, but that’s about it.

Until I found that Nintendo has a game application for boxing – “Fitness Boxing”. It was cheap on eShop, so I downloaded the demo and gave it a few tries. After a few exercises, I’m f*cking sweaty as hell – so I immediately bought the full game. It’s around 60-70 SGD. It’s a nice and cheap option for exercise, and after a full hour of boxing, I was sweating lots even on a lightly airconditioned room. It also ticked off a box on my liking – it’s a game. And I’m gaming quite a lot these days, so I’m in for that and goals I can see easily. Also, it’s largely because of one other thing which I will discuss later.

February and March, I was able to log in a considerably good amount of sessions in the game – 45-60 minutes a night, around 3-4 sessions a week. And as the game keeps track of my records and stuff, I can easily see where I’m at and where I need to do more. Although I will never see this game as a gym replacement, it’s a convenient option for me at this time. I don’t have to spend time and money to go to a gym at night, and I can sleep more in the morning. But lately my sessions have been dipping, so I have to pump brakes and do control. Currently I’m restructuring my nightly schedule so I can squeeze in a good hour or so for boxing, as I will detail later below.

Next stop – Japanese language lessons.

I definitely have a longtime fondness for Japanese. Anything. Blame PTV4 and IBC13 reruns of Japan tourism videos in the 90′s. As a child, I watched it with curiosity – as of now, I can still recall quite a lot of episodes, my personal favorite is the video about housemoving and packing the house stuff. And later on as a teen, “anime” was a big thing at the time (lots of TV stations hoarded them like shit and packed morning/afternoon timeslots), so I watched a lot of it. College had me buying my first Japanese manga and light novel. And during my adult life, I always kept an eye out for anything Japanese – food, retail (like Uniqlo – most of my outside-home attire is Uniqlo), conventions. And when I first planned to travel to Japan, I obsessively studied where to go and what to eat.

Although when I got there, it reinforced two things in me when I left KIX:

1) I have to come back here in a better state of mind someday. I came to Japan as an escape from work. I “chased enjoyment out of despair that my workplace has drained me of happiness”, as one person I met there told me during a chance breakfast in a hostel in Kyoto. And I was genuinely happy to have seen Japan personally (it’s a life memory for me), but I have mixed feelings when people ask me if I enjoyed my trip in Japan, because for some reason, I couldn’t fully say yes.

2) I have to take Japanese language lessons. I felt that it would benefit me to learn a third language.

And so, when I moved to SG for work, I reconsidered that second thing. But I knew that will cost me as well. Considering I balked with the costly gym membership thingie, I have to also take this under consideration. For much of December and January, I was teetering back and forth on choosing either a gym membership or Japanese language lessons. By January, I accrued enough spare cash to afford either one, but not both. I had to make a decision soon. I was leaning towards a gym membership by the end of January.

And so, when I found the “Fitness Boxing” game from Nintendo, it made my decision a whole lot easier. Like, a whole damn lot. I can maintain a semblance of an exercise routine with the game, and I can also spend the cash on a Japanese language lesson instead. Perfect – two birds one stone. So by March, I looked for a good language school to enroll in. Took me a couple of weeks to decide on one, even though most of them were in the same price range.

By the way, another incentive of me looking for a language school in Singapore is just to tick off a box off my bucket list – at least I can say I studied in a school in Singapore. Looks good on a resume too. Also, it gives me a something tangible to do on a weekend. Less time doing weekend staycations in bed and more getting out and having some sun.

And so I settled for Ikoma Language School at Shaw House in Orchard. It’s a very comfortable trip back and forth for me on weekends, it’s in Orchard so I can easily walk to Books Kinokuniya after class to browse new manga and light novels, and they have a more attractive part-time schedule compared to the other options. 2.5 hours per class, 12 classes per term is manageable. And Ikoma’s part-time schedule fit my timeline almost perfectly – it gives me a motivation to try to be good and stay a bit longer.

I plan to cover their entire Basic 1-2 and Intermediate 1-2 terms, and apply for JLPT N5 (or N4 if I get good).

Two sessions in, and I can say it’s off to a good start. The sensei’s nice to us, and the lessons, while fast-paced, was manageable. The term’s tailored to complete beginners, and that’s fine with me – I have to start somewhere. I do settled on a daily routine like this:

EARLY MORNING: 20 minutes of practice writing hiragana – the ones already covered on lessons, plus advance 2 rows on the gojūon chart, and 15 minutes practice alternate between reciting the basic Japanese greetings or listening to Ikoma-provided recordings of pronunciation (the other option leftover I do at night).

COMMUTE TO CLARKE QUAY & HOME: (All in Duolingo/Tinycards) Two lessons in hiragana and two sections in the hiragana flashcards, plus one section of flashcards for common Japanese words.

BEFORE BED:  20 minutes of reading the practice material provided by Ikoma, and 15 minutes practice alternate between reciting the basic Japanese greetings or listening to Ikoma-provided recordings of pronunciation (leftover option from morning).

So I spend at least an hour daily total to keep up with the lessons on weekends. I’m no spring chicken anymore when it comes to school and lessons (a thing I learned the hard way when my former employer sent me to PMP certification lessons and I failed the test), so if I want a JLPT N5, I have to pour in a good chunk of effort on my part. That means, I have to recover the old university mindset I had when it comes to difficult subjects.

The routine helped greatly in the weekend sessions – I needed to memorize less (because I already memorized the hiragana for the lesson in advance), and I can concentrate more on the other stuff like pronunciation lessons and conversational Japanese. It helps, really.

But my new Japanese-study routine is messing up something – my boxing routine.

Before I enrolled in Ikoma, I had my night schedule all planned out – I have to go lights out by 11-1130 PM, and I arrive home around 8-830 PM after dinner, so I have more or less 3 hours to do stuff. I usually start boxing at around 9 (at least 45 minutes after my last meal), finish by 10, take a long warm bath, and wait until my hair is dry to sleep.

Now, I squeezed in 35-40 minutes of Japanese language study, so I’m f*cked. Add in another – I started playing Square Enix’s “Octopath Traveller”, and I’m a huge sucker for JRPGs – so now my night schedule is wacked.

I’m currently trying to balance my three activities, but sometimes work time gets in the way and I have to discard playing game for the boxing session (or both), as I put the Japanese language study my #1 priority can’t-miss activity. But it is a good problem to have, for me. Really, I’d rather have these kind of problems than the problems I had in 2017. Those problems I had drained me of any will to have side projects. Now, I have side projects. And small hobbies too.

Probably I’d test out offloading one of the two (playing Octopath or boxing) in the morning and see what happens. I initially chose to just have Japanese lessons in the morning because I’m not exactly a morning person – years of plying EDSA/MakatiAve on the mornings will do that to a person. My current morning routine is to wake up, stretch a bit, walk out of my room to grab my overnight oats in the fridge, scoop a few spoonfuls of muesli and dried fruits in it, and eat it for breakfast. I only start my Japanese study routine after I’m fully dressed for work.

I’m still thinking where can I squeeze in things, or I can extend my sleep deadline to 12AM.

But for now, two things. Two things I like to do. And it keeps me from being bored, and gives me goals to accomplish.