The Boardroom

Yesterday, I attended a meet-n-greet function for the UNSW Faculty Board. It wasn’t quite what I expected– I left feeling a lot more positively than I thought I would. I thought it would be a lot more politics and bureaucracy, but so far, it’s off to a good start. We’ll see how it pans out during the rest of the year.

One thing did amuse me though. I always tell [CM] that, although I don’t understand women’s fascination with shoes, I do know one thing– no matter how good girls think other girls’ shoes are, there’s few things as unattractive as them wearing heels and walking like crippled ducks. I guess what I’m getting at is that seeing people statically and seeing people in motion are two different things. A real commanding presence doesn’t come from just posing in a mirror or for a camera– it has to do with how one carries themselves, both physically and mentally. And if you can’t physically be comfortable? It often crosses over into the mental realm, and it gets projected quite noticeably.

I’m not actually mentioning this because of women though. It comes to my attention because there were a buncha undergrad student reps at the board meeting. Sure, it’s a meeting for the Law Faculty– but some of these dudes were wearing full suits with ties and cufflinks. And they looked, to me, kinda silly, considering that it was like 35 degrees Celsisus outside, and the boardroom airconditionning wasn’t working. Heat aside though, they clearly weren’t comfortable wearing what they were wearing. And for all the formality of dressing up like that, it’s supposed to add respectability or charisma or something. Unfortunately, because of the awkwardness with which they moved, or the age they wanted to project versus the quality of what they were saying, the impression it gave off was more of an “awww, isn’t that cute” in a “he’s pretending to be a grown up!” kinda way.

I guess one doesn’t learn to be comfortable in new clothing unless they wear it. Personally, I was wearing a button-down short sleeve north face shirt and cargo shorts. You didn’t see me mopping my sweat with a handkerchief. Some of us realize that it’s the middle of summer in Australia.

I’d like to think I’m not superficial and that I can look beyond peoples’ superficiality at their deeper ability or potential. But I’ve also found that a lot of people who do superficiality badly do it because there’s not much on the inside. Mind you, this is different of course from people who have a lot of substance to them who also know how to clean themselves up.

But please, stop making such a big deal of taking your jacket on or off, or rolling your sleeves up and down repeatedly. Stopping acting like such a tourist!

I have another board meeting toady. I’m wearing another north face shirt, this time with jeans and running shoes, and a military hat. I don’t expect everyone to dress as casually as I do, and actually, some people might think to themselves that I’m underdressing for such an important event– but hey, this isn’t a fashion show, and I don’t need your votes. In fact, quite the opposite– I’m at these meetings because in large part you want me to vote for your issues.

And this is what a voter looks like.

The Den

A few days ago, I visited a Sydney baduk club. I was told that since I was going to be running a club this year, that I should pay my respects to the local authority.

The owner of the club/school is a 8 dan player. In the world of baduk, that’s pretty damn high. Dans are rankings beyond kyu– so while I’m a 9kyu player, working my way towards 1kyu, once I get there, there rankings start counting up from 1 dan and higher. It’s the same terminology for black belts in the martial arts world– the first black belt you get is a “1 dan.” It takes years usually to gain another grade.

So yeah, 8 dan? Pretty respectable.

It was quite the experience to go there… the players there are definately different from what I’m used to. But that doesn’t say very much about me– because, the truth of the matter is, I’ve played maybe only a dozen people in person, including [SiB] and [CM]. In contrast, I’ve played hundreds of game online against anonymous people, who I never converse with.

It’s very different to play in the club.

It’s very different being in person for something that you could otherwise spend your whole life doing online.

It’s not quite the difference between playing a sports video game versus a real life sport, but it is significantly different. For one thing, I barely know how to hold a stone properly– at some point, a stone flew out of my hand and whiped a few more off the board.

I played two games while I was there, but I find that I don’t really know what to do when I play in person. I mean… it’s a social club. But it’s a game of concentration. Do I make small talk? Do I talk about the game? Do I have to get to know these people or something?

I guess I didn’t go there purposely to make friends, but the truth is, there are some pretty interesting characters out there. There was one guy who I played a game with– in actual play, he was about the same level as I am (I beat him by 1.5 points in a no handicap game). But, he knew way more theory than I did– he was discussing the differences beteween Korean and Chinese opening styles and trends with the instructor. He was even able to replay his previous game from memory so that the instructor could analyze the game. FROM MEMORY. There are 19 x 19 squares on the board.

After playing against someone, I tried to see if I could do the same– I could barely replay my first 10 moves, nevermind the 300 or so it takes to play an entire game.

Aside from the 8 dan instructor, his second in command is a 6dan player. There are also about 4-5 Korean seniors, who I’m told are at around the 4dan level– when I watched them play, it seemed like they were betting 20 Australian dollars per game. Or maybe it was a dollar per point difference… I’m not sure. But it was hardcore.

It’s too bad that Strathefield (Korea Town?) is so far from where I live, otherwise it’d be kinda cool to go there more often. I wasn’t a big fan of Hikaru No Go, but it’d be nice to go to a club where there were strong players left, right and centre.

Well, in any case, I had a long chat with the instructor of the school, and got a good number of ideas about how to run my own club this year. We’ll see how it goes.

The Day all the Cows were Grey

“Life is a game, you just don’t get unlimited continues.”
-Dante, Marvel versus Capcom 3: The Fate of Two Worlds

I had a bit of an epiphany the other day. I had it while I was solving some baduk problems on my mobile. The problems are rated for difficulty. So there are problems which are designed for 30k to 25k (“really easy”), some that go up to 10k (pretty ), and then there’s the problems around 9, 8, and 7k which are just easy. It kinda makes me laugh when the level of play I’m currently ranked at, which is about 9k, is still considered “easy,” but whatever.

The thing is, I’ve been stuck at 9k for a long little while now– I’ve been at this rank since about October. I have made some progress and am closer to 8k, but I just can’t seem to break this plateau.

But I noticed something strange– when it came to problem solving, I’m able to solve problems at the 7k or 6k level.

Now, that might not mean too much to you, but the thing is, in the baduk world, the rankings are pretty accurate. There are usually huge differences at the single digit kyu and dan levels that amount to decisive comparisions of overal skill and style. Basically, I shouldn’t be able to solve problems that are a couple of levels higher than my actual playing ability.

But I can.

Which lead me to a theory– perhaps it’s because of the format of the problems. Maybe something about the ‘problem’ environment, they way it’s set out in a microcosimc way, the way you see a chess or sudoku puzzle in a newspaper, that inherently makes it easier to do than a real game.

So I started thinking about the way that my problem solving ability was better than my actual game playing ability. In essence, this translates to a distinction between “theory,” which is composed of the problems; and “practice,” which has to do with the nitty gritty unpredictableness, the street fighting of an actual game of baduk.

Translated to life, it’s the difference between the theory of how we deal with life’s problems on a theoretical level versus how we are capable of applying all that theory to the world.

I managed to isolate one big difference, to begin with. The thing about a problem is that you know there is a solution. That makes it inherently solvable by sheer persistence. It’s the difference between being able to open a door with a combination lock on it, versus a door that’s blocked by a huge boulder that you’re simply not strong enough to move. One of these situations is solvable by method and discipline: you can try every combination, and eventually you’ll find one that works, because the nature of the problem is in the utility of solution.

However, the boulder is a different story– without some addition to you, you’re just not meant to be able to do anything about it.

So, that lead me to another strain of thought– that the higher ranking of the problem assumes that these are problems of boulders that I could lift. Smaller stones, in a way. Meaning: i’m not meant to beat these problems by persistence. I’m meant to beat these problems by simply being able to lift them out of my way, with little or no effort. Only my current “natural ability” is supposed to come into play.

The significance of that is clearly visible in the idea that we have “20-20 hindsight.” When we look at a problem knowing that there is a possible outcome, everything seems so easy. But at a particular time? In particular circumstances? We only have our current level of natural ability.

By natural ability I don’t mean what you’re born with– I mean what feels natural to you through internalization and practice.

So the thing about how this applies to real life is that in real life, compared to problems, we don’t know if there are solutions. Think of it like a door that’s got a lock on it, and though there’s no boulder, maybe the combination lock doesn’t work. Maybe some gears on the inside are worn out. My point is this: the difference between a theoretical problem, either before you attempt it, or in hindsight; versus a real life application, is that in many cases you don’t know if there is a solution.

And that changes everything.

In a game of baduk, instead of solving a problem by trial and error on the board (that is to say, in “reality”), I should internally be playing out all the moves in my head… and the only actions that actually come out should be the solution. That, I think, is the way that demonstrates an internalization of the requisite skill level to be of a certain rank.

When you’re playing a real game, you don’t get to try and put down a stone here or there and if it doesn’t work out, ask your opponent for an undo. No– you get one chance, and that’s it.

That brings me to real life– and it’s a fundamental difference between that which we think about and dream about and what we actually push out into the real world.

It has to do with the knowledge of solubility.

If we know something can be solved, then it becomes only a question of hard work and persistence. But if we have no guarantees? Then we’re more hesitant– that unknown makes us fearful about reprecussions, and stunts our adventurousness.

It’s like how when we’re still in school, it’s so easy to focus– because we know that school can be passed. We just have to pay our dues, get through it all one day at a time.

On the other hand, life after the schoolbell is completely different– you don’t know if you can get a job. You don’t know if you have what it takes. You don’t know how this plays out.

I was thinking though. If you look at people who are ‘successful’ or who have done ‘incredible things,’ what do they have in common? Is it just luck? Did they open doors for themselves because they were lucky enough to get the right combination in a brute-force password break, or, did they go through a door simply because the boulder in front of it was really light to them?

Meanwhile, some people are still trying to dial in the right password. Others are still trying to lift that boulder.

The conclusion I arrive at is that people who are successful have more of a connection between problem solving and reality than people who are unsuccessful.

People who are good at doing things tend to learn more from problem solving– they tend to internalize it better, so that it becomes part of their natural ability to simply remove obstacles when they run into them. I would say that these people have a syncrhonization between their internal and external– some sort of resonance between theory and practice that allows the two aspects of their psyche to feedback. I don’t really know what to call this, so lets call it indvidual dialectical resonance (IDR).

Now, I won’t go as far as to say that people are naturally like this (although some people are obviously more talented than others). Some people obviously have high IDR levels, and that makes it seem like they’re just good at life or something. No matter what bad things happen to them, they just seem to roll with the punches and hit back really, really hard, with a grin on their faces. It’s because somehow, they combine a genuine sharingan ability to assimilate loss and success, and synthesize it into an understanding of their place in new environments, despite unknown variables. Basically– wheras most of us separate the world of games from reality, these people almost seem to be gaming reality.

So how do we get there?

How do we cross over what we know from problem solving into the real world? How do we turn theory into practice?

I guess it goes in small steps– we need to, as it were, play harder, to the point where our real self begins to internalize the madness of our gaming practice.

So what’s holding us back? It’s this separation– the separation into black and white of what we think we’re allowed to dream, and what we think we’re allowed to do. It’s a disconnection between what we dream and what we can do.

But if, just what if, we could take our dreams seriously? How to do that… it seems that what is requisite is either courage, or an autism by which we lose our sensibility of the distinction between the two worlds.

So then… where do we find the courage to try what we think, if practicing that is the only way to get better at doing things? Who gets those chickens and eggs in motion?

Happy Australia Day!

I’ll be heading downtown later to see if anything special is going on.

Zero Sum Conversations

So it’s been about a week and a half of living on my own, and it’s revealing a lot of things about me. I haven’t lived completely alone since South Korea. One of my roomies is back as of a few days ago, but it doesn’t change much because our paths don’t necessarily need to cross.

A few things I’ve noticed.

Firstly, I’m a loner. Definitely. While it’s true that I work pretty well in groups, I’m not sure how that came about—I guess maybe the way to look at it is that I’m constantly in pursuit of selfish goals, many of which happen to be more efficiently accomplished in groups. For example, I’m not sure I necessarily want to work with other people on the Go club—I think I just want to be a better player, and to have a club working the way I want it.

Maybe that makes me a control freak.

I get invited every now and then to go out and do things, but the fact of the matter is, I’m not interested in a lot of it. I think I’m bored of hanging out with most people I know in Australia, with some exceptions—which is totally unfair of me, because I don’t give people the chance to become more interesting.

I think I just develop so much of a distaste for people that it’s hard to imagine forcing myself into social situations. I was having lunch with coworkers at the Legal Centre for example, and it happened to be a Chinese restaurant. One of the Australians was just talking out of her ass, and it just kinda put me off. I dunno. Do you ever get the feeling that putting up with people is simply so tiresome?

Some of the things that came out of her mouth, not even directed at me:
“So what brand is that phone? Oh, HTC? So is that like, a Samsung knockoff? Cause it looks like my smartphone. Oh, well if it’s it’s own brand, I’ve never heard of it. I guess maybe it’s famous somewhere.”
[Congratulations on sounding like a tool; not only do you know nothing about phones, but you’ve managed to show everyone that you think you know everything.]

“I’m totally against violence. The idea that anyone would ever want to be a soldier is a sad, sad thing. They could do so much better with their lives and everything would be so much more peaceful if nobody would ever pick up a gun. Fighting is just so idiotic.”
[Okay there lady. I don’t promote violence, but show some respect for the people who bought you all the freedom to say things like that.]

“These dumplings are delicious! I don’t you (directed at me) could make these at home.”
[Actually, we can and do make these better at home. That deliciousness is called MSG.]

I guess they’re not huge examples, nothing too decisive. But in general, it’s just that the person as a whole is such a huge tool.

Mind you, not everyone at work is like that. But it seems as if if people aren’t tools, they’re just boring. That, or they don’t have the confidence to talk about something they’re passionate about.

Which is a problem I think. People need to talk about the things they’re interested in. People shouldn’t just talk to keep up with the Joneses. Why are people so afraid to geek out about things that are important to them? I don’t care if you’re into rocket science or you like knitting—your importance to me and everyone else has nothing to do with how well you can keep this balance of meaningless conversation going. It’s about how you can open it up,k and how we can learn from eachother.

People should express what they feel, and push forth what makes them unique. All other social conversation? Useless to me. Useless, tiresome, and boring.

Maybe it’s because I finally bought that punching bag. It seems to have lessened my need for friends of the superficial sort, in that it takes all of my expression and reflects it, makes me stronger, without any complaint. It puts in all the hours that I do, and holds me responsible for my actions. It doesn’t say stupid things. It’s as honest as they come.

The other day, I went on a bit of a solo field trip. I decided to head to the beach to read. Yeah, its definately one of the privileges that I have as a temporary Australian– some pretty beautiful coasts. Getting there is a bit of a challenge though. Not having a bus pass, I don’t have easy access to getting there. But it’s a coast–

–how hard could it be to find on a bike?

20km of getting lost later…

Rewind. The plan: get on the bike and head east until I hit water. Simple enough. If you look at a map, the beach is directly east of my apartment. I estimated that it would take about an hour to get there. At some point, I arrived at water– but there was land on the other side. I had ended up at a bay… which meant that I was on the northern shore. The signs said Dubbo Bay. That meant I’d somehow managed to get disoriented, heading north-east instead of east– I was about 10 km north of where I wanted to be.

But it was a good experience.

I’m not a utilitarian. The reason why I think this is that there are such varying levels of complexity to the idea of happiness that any theory of utility necessarily derives from a variable perception. I’m not just talking about how my sense of happiness is different from yours– I’m talking also about the scale of my own happiness. For example, as someone knowing what I know, there’s a level of happiness that I derive out of getting a new piece of hardware, say, a new cellphone or something. But there’s a certain level of unhappiness I get from knowing, for example, how it contributes negatively to environment, social conditions, etc. Yet despite these negative impacts, one could argue about the positive impact that I’d enjoy from having such a device at my disposition. So, which one of these happinesses do I base the utility of my decisions?

There are days when I feel that the world, simply, is too complicated for notions of happiness. On any given day, we school, we work, we volunteer, we do things, and the world goes around. Our actions correspond to somebody’s theory of happiness, maybe our own. But the truth of the matter is, we’re not always happy– which suggests that for all the thinking we do about happiness, perhaps the process of dreaming in itself is insufficient to obtaining that which makes us happy.

So is the solution to pursue more heartily, or to strive for less? When does the equilibrium come?

So I’m sitting there, at the beach, at a far corner. It’s not to lie on the sand and feel all connected to all the people roasting nearby, or the children frolicking about. It’s just to be alone, and hear the ocean, and see how in the distance, there’s no difference between the sky and the water. It is a sublime instance, one where I don’t understand where I am– but the point is, I don’t really need to. It’s a moment of emptiness that feels nice.

When I get up, I let all of my learned world flood back in and cover it all up. It’s like covering Atlantis up until the next time I want to return.

And return I will. It might not be in the same time and space, but it will be to the same state of simply being. A foundation of awe upon which to stack my happiness.

Body Shop

Nowadays, I’ve got class 3 times per week, but nothing else going on. That leaves me with 4 days off per week (at least until I start volunteering part time next week). For someone who is accustomed to having only 1 or 2 days off per week at most, I’ve effecively doubled or quadrupled the amount of free time I have during non-vacation time. I guess I don’t really consider this vacation because the summer class that I’m doing is thrice per week, with each of those schooldays lasting about 7 hours (rather brutal, to be honest).

With [CM] out of town, and without any roomies, and without the full swing of clubs and extra cirriculars at school yet to start, I’m pretty much a one man band. The question is, what should I do with my free time?

Well, I had a pretty productive day, to be honest. It’s 20:45 at the time of this sentence, and I’m pretty exhausted. I woke up at around 7am, and decided to head down to the bay. I purchased a punching bag the day before as part of the “get back in shape” program. It’s only about 50lbs (a small one), but anything bigger than that would be rather inconvenient. I intend to carry this bag down to the bay, and rope it around some of the steel I-beams in the area. Then, I can do like in a Rocky movie, and do some training by the waterfront to the sound of seaguls and laughing children.

It’s actually not that obvious how to hang up a 50 pound bag… our apartment lease says that we can’t drill any holes in the walls, so a wall mount was out of the question. I considered (and honestly, am still considering) building an indoor frame myself, but considering that the whole apartment has permanent carpets, I’m a bit worried about there being too much of a stink after a really good workout… which pretty much ruled out the freestanding punching bags (which I’m not a huge fan of anyway).

Anyways, I went down to the bay this morning, not to hook the bag up, but to throw some rope over the I-beams and measure just how much I’d need to hang the bag up. I’m trying to do this all on a budget, I might add. I’m going to end up using about 10$ worth of nylon chords which I found in the camping section of a local store. I’ve braided it so that it’s three times as thick as it used to be, and ought to be a few factors stronger. I’ve got a couple of biners from back home, so those will make the hooking a bit more quick release. I think I’m pretty much set! The total cost: 50 for the bag, 10 for the rope. I was cheap about the whole project that I didn’t even take a taxi with the bag, I lugged it a couple of blocks on my shoulders like a lumberjack and took public transportation instead.

The bag doubles as a weight lifting aid. I’m basically doing something like deadlifts of the bag itself. Technically, I could probably lift a lot heavier, but a lot of the benefit of the bag is that it’s odd shape forces me to use a lot more muscles and work very ‘inefficiently.’ Inefficient lifting, so long as it’s safe for your back, is a great way to develop a more rounded and practical physique I find.

After figuring out the rope stuff, I went back to the apartment, had a quick nap. Woke up, watched some Prince of Tennis. Yes, I know I’m behind– I just notice that Prince of Tennis II came out, and I figured that since I hadn’t seen the original, all the free time was as good a time as any to catch up on the classics.

While I was lying in bed, I decided to hit the beach. I’m not much of a suntanning person, and I don’t really do beach games (what would you play if you were alone anyhow?) but I like the look of the ocean, and the sound of it. It’s sublime, the way you look out there, and there’s just nothingness. More on the beach later.

Did you know

…That Australia has a huge hole in its ozone layer that give it one of the highest demographics of melanoma in the world ?

Freedom Matters

What, really, is freedom?

If you grab someone off the street and ask them what freedom is, you’ll probably get an answer like “freedom is being able to do what I want.” That’s certainly the way that most of society looks at it nowadays– it’s all about you. Or it’s all about me. But, most certainly, it can’t be about us, can it?

If you ask that person to think about it a bit, they might ammend that idea to “freedom is being able to do what I want, so as long as I don’t hurt anyone else.” That seems pretty reasonable. I mean, whether your freedom actually has something to do with hurting others or not is kinda a tricky subject– but it certainly fits the idea of the freedom that we actually have: most Western law allows us basically to do whatever we want, until we actually hurt someone.

A lot of people might tell you something different– that “Freedom is choice.” It’s a bit more broad than the other guy’s answer, but this too reflects what’s going on in North American society– we have the freedom of religion, we have freedom of expression, we have freedom to vote for whoever we want. That certainly sounds like freedom.

We can pretty much agree that in some countries, people have a lot less freedom than we do. They don’t get to chose a lot of things. We equate that with them not having a lot of freedom, and a lack of freedom in turn means a lack of a good time.

So why is it that so many people are unhappy, when we have so much “freedom”? Who in the world has more freedom than you do?

Is freedom something that is measured on a sliding scale?

How much freedom do you have?

Your response might be that there are different kinds of freedoms. That’s true. Very important, actually. But if we know that there are so many freedoms, why do we make such a big deal about the ones that don’t matter, and ignore the most important ones?

So, then, what would you define as the most important freedom, if you could?

I mean, we know that when we’re unhappy, it’s usually because we’re doing something we don’t want to do, or because we don’t know what to do. The usefulness of freedom is to give us the possibility of feeling good, and of being connected with things– but then, where do we find that kind of freedom?

We can certainly chose lots of things– everything comes in a billion designer colors, different flavours, different sizes and styles. But the only freedom that matters, the one that eludes us the most, is the one that allows us to pursue personal totality. Some sort of … state of being, where we’re “complete.”

And I think that one part of the puzzle that’s been missing to me is that I’ve always figured that freedom, liberty, and completeness had something to do with making myself perfect. What I’ve come to understand in bits and pieces over the years is that a real sense of freedom is one that’s tied to the fates of others. It’s a freedom through universality.

It’s a bit hard for me to explain it, but let me throw some ideas out here. The main point is that I’m not alone– though I may at times feel lonely, the fact of the matter is that the world is full of people, and my life is inexoribly intertwined with these lives. I’m not just talking about family and friends– or even enemies for that matter– I’m talking about how the laptop that I’m writing this on was put together by a dozen people I don’t even know. That the air I breathe is made up of gasses that are a mix of the breaths of other humans. That the carpet that my feet are on was conceptualized by someone, made by someone else, and installed by yet another. There are people everywhere– and if I existed in a world without humans, without their knowledge or influence– I would not last long.

It should probably follow that any sense of freedom that I have shouldn’t be one where everything is about me. But that’s the tendency. Take the example of me having the freedom to swing my fists around– I’m free to do this as much as I want, until I actually hit someone. I have to stop short of that. My freedom, my right, is to swing up until just before that point that I hit someone.

Why is it that freedoms and rights are things that separate us? Why do I have this freedom, and you have this freedom? Why can’t we share in a freedom somehow?

What I’m getting at is that the freedoms that we put so much emphasis on are missing the point. The choices we have in life are missing the point. We’re so concerned with what is yours or mine and coming up with ways of granting freedom that we don’t realize that the very nature of our definitions of freedom is something that divides– there is an ingrained adversarial system in every freedom granted that says that all of the choice in the world must be divided.

Why does that happen?

Because we think we’re entitled to privacy. Because we want privacy. Because we want to be private, individual people. Because we’re egocentric.

What if we were social?

I don’t mean using social networks. I don’t mean making friends.

I mean, truly, social– in the sense that we treated our very existence as one that was connected to others? Where we accepted as much responsibility as we could, not just for ourselves, but for our fellow humans?

If we could be like that, I mean, connected to others, then maybe we could work on acheiving a freedom that matters. But until we can stop using a definition of freedom that defines the “haves” from the “havenots,” we’ll be at odds with the social nature of our very existences.

Somewhere is a disconnect that we have to remedy– we want to be good people, but we’re content to allow ourselves work in systems that do bad things. Smart as we are, we subconsciously feel guilty, or afraid, or resentful of the fact that bad things are because of us or because of others. So maybe we’d just feel better if we could work on a new sort of freedom– one that unites rather than divides?

Core

[CM] is off to Hong Kong and Malaysia for the next 3 weeks or so, so for a while, I’m going to be staying at the apartment all alone, without any of my three roomies. I haven’t lived alone, like, truly alone, since I was in South Korea. It’s going to be rather strange to sleep in a bed alone, and basically cook for just one person again.

I’ll take advantage of the situation though to get back in shape. I did what I thought was a long run today, but it was only actually 3km or so. It felt a lot worse than that though. I’ve mostly been spending the holidays eating like a king, so maybe the New Year is a good time to get back in some sorta routine. Unfortunately, I really, really hate jogging for some reason… so I was thinking of maybe getting a punching bag and using that for cardio?

We’ll see.