Please play this video as many times as it takes while reading this blog entry.

God DAMN they had awesome music in the Seventies.

Yup. We are moving on up! We have secured a new place to live, and it’s the high rise that I may have mentioned before.

And I am stoked. It’s going to be almost torture to wait till the 15th to start moving in. I will be counting the days, starting now.

9. It’s nine days till the 15th.

This is the place I wanted the most because it is a building with a gym and a sauna, and I want that so very much.

Once we are moved in, I am going to work very hard to make working out part of my daily routine. I will steadfastly ignore the alarm calls of my social anxiety and hang in there till I get used to the place and I can calm down about it.

After all, if you don’t endure, you don’t adapt.

It’s good to know going into a situation that there will be anxiety issues. I am working on not letting my anxieties run my life, and so knowing going in that adjusting to the gym and random people coming in and out and whatnot will be difficult gives me an edge on mentally preparing for it so I can enter the situation ready to stand up to my anxieties and stare them down.

Sadly, my bum knee complicates things. When it comes to the lifting part of working out, there are plenty of stations that don’t require the use of the legs.

But when it comes to cardio…. I can’t think of a cardio machine that doesn’t involve using the legs in some way. Cardio machines are strongly biased towards giving you a full body workout.

So I am not sure how I am going to get the cardio necessary to get my engines up to speed for the actual lifting weights part of things.

But whatever. Maybe I will just lift free weights for cardio. I will think of something. And this knee is not going to be busted forever.

At least, I sure hope it isn’t.

Granted, a high rise apartment is sort of the exact opposite of the fully detached house idea that I went into this process with. We will still be surrounded on all sides by apartments full of people and their noises and whatnot.

I am pondering making some sort of effort to at least get to know the other people on my floor. Do a little “Hi, I’m your new neighbor!” door-knocking and maybe get people to join a Facebook group called FloorSixAtCooneyAndCook, or the like.

Watching all this stuff about modern cities and their problems has really made me aware of how alienated we are from the people around us. It’s strange to live amongst strangers. We need to start breaking down some of the walls between us (not literally) and get to know the people actually physically present in our lives.

Because no matter how awesome the Internet gets, there is still no substitute for face-time. I am not sure, but I think getting to know the people who live in the apartment next door, while quite awkward at first, could ultimately lead to a reduction of urban stress overall.

Because make no mistake, urban life stresses the human organism. We don’t notice it because it’s always there in the background and we rapidly lose touch with any other kind of living, but it is there and it takes its toll.

Like I said before, it’s strange to live among strangers. Human beings can adapt to this world where you are always surrounded by people you know nothing about, but it takes its toll on us.

It drains our social battery. It is by no means a perfect adaptation. And it completely destroys any sense of community. The human need for community doesn’t know anything about virtual friends and Internet communities. The socialization we get via those things makes a poor substitute for the rich environment of a real world sense of community.

It is hard to feel like a citizen when the first link, connection with those around you, is broken. We have taken the atomization of individualism about as far as it can go without us all getting our own planet like the Little Prince, and the price has been the deep sense of alienation that pervade the zeitgeist.

I think it is entirely possible that the sharp rise in depression over the last thirty years is almost entirely due to this individualist alienation. I am glad that the current generation of millennials seems determined to rediscover community and reverse this trend at last.

Because it sure as hell won’t be my generation of sullen and resentful Gen X types who fix it. Even the hippies would have been better suited to the task than us.

And I have to admit, on a purely personal level, the things I think are good for people are not necessarily things I would choose for myself.

With my social issues, having lots of barriers between myself and others sounds just fine to me. You can’t exactly get into the whole community thing when your psychological issues have you hiding from the world.

But who knows… maybe a dose of communal feeling would be exactly the medicine I need to heal my soul and make me feel less trapped and less afraid of the world.

The view of humanity that I keep deep inside me, the feeling that all strangers are dangers and could turn on me at any time and are silently judging me incredibly harshly and think I am a complete disgusting horror of a human being… that could really use some new, positive inputs to replace the old tapes.

And of course, I need to work on that atrocious and unfounded self-image and the issues that make me feel that way.

I have a full plate ahead of me.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!