My week of aches continues. It’s all because of a cold, or so I hope. I took a day off from the gym because my lower back hurt, my shoulders hurt, and my forearms hurt. It all got better but now my knees hurt. I’m hoping that this is all due to my cold, but it’s probably because I’m old and creaky.

Cognitive dissonance is an easy answer for lots of things. I don’t believe in astrology in any sense, but I read my horoscope hoping that anything hopeful in the predictions might actually occur. Today it was that, “You might be surprised by someone’s affection for you, HISASHI.” There are seventeen more minutes for this to happen. I’m not holding my breath.

Eventually, there ought to be some vague and happy prediction that comes true for me.

In any case, this is probably the reason I buy lottery tickets even though I know the math and how unlikely it is that I’ll win. I only do it once in a while and it gives me a chance to imagine what I’d do if I actually won.

I’m a very liberal guy, but in my own life I’m pretty darn boring. Just ask my ex-girlfriends. Boooring. So when I had weird cuts on my legs for the past two nights, I had no idea what they were. They’re rope burns from climbing the big ropes at the gym. The new gym has a ceiling that’s probably twenty-something feet high, and new manila ropes that go all the way up. As a novice rope climber, I try all sorts of weird things to try to climb on up and I have the rope burns to prove it.

The hard part of climbing up ropes or the poles they have in the gyms in Japan isn’t so much getting up to the top, but figuring out what to do once you get there. You have to find your way down, and that’s when you get the rope burn.

Like I said, boooring.