Morning. Still dark. A glimpse of the moon through the hedge, shaking free of the clouds for a moment, but it's gone again. La puesta de la luna. It's late, after 7:00, but there's barely any light in the sky, even now. Winter still holds its dominion.
(Oh! There's the moon again, just above the neighbor's rooftop!)
We use such similar verbs for the setting of the sun, in English and Spanish: the same verb you use for putting things away, or setting them carefully in place. The rising, however, is different. La salida de la luna, they say in Spanish, the going-out of the moon, as if the moon was leaving on a shopping trip. I always have a hard time remembering that, since to me the moonrise signifies the coming of the moon, not its departure. It's joining us, not leaving us. But that's not how Spanish sees it: to Spanish, the moon is off on an expedition, when it rises. Leaving the house.
Finally some light in the sky. La salida del sol, though my breakfast-nook windows don't look east. The skylights are blue with early cloudlight, and the trees and hedge are suddenly an intense, sharp-cut black.
Last couple of days I read G. K. Chesterton's little History of England. Chesterton, Chesterton, what are we to do with you? You're so good when you're good, and you're so bad when you're bad. You wear better than most your contemporaries, though.
Here he is being good:
We have all read at school that Simon de Montfort and Edward I., when they first summoned Commons to council, chiefly as advisers on local taxation, called "two burgesses" from every town. If we had read a little more closely, those simple words would have given away the whole secret of the lost mediƦval civilization. We had only to ask what burgesses were, and whether they grew on trees. We should immediately have discovered that England was full of little parliaments, out of which the great parliament was made. And if it be a matter of wonder that the great council (still called in quaint archaism by its old title of the House of Commons) is the only one of these popular or elective corporations of which we hear much in our books of history, the explanation, I fear, is simple and a little sad. It is that the Parliament was the one among these mediƦval creations which ultimately consented to betray and to destroy the rest.
Saturday, January 11, 2020
Thursday, January 09, 2020
Under the Hunting Skies
A etched cry in the high hills.
A cloud shadow runs from the gully to the rise:
a small uncertain thing shifts and turns
under the hunting skies
Tell me the story as you heard it first
when the rain was rattling pots by the door;
a small uncertain thing gathers itself
and gathers itself once more.
You remember the king who studied the dust
where the rain had written his epitaph?
The clouds went kiting away that day
and swept the floor with a laugh.
A small thing dodges left where the ticking
of white and black caught the eye:
grows sure-footed as the beat quickens,
and dodges again to the right.
Say what you like for the hunter,
say what you like for the prey:
the game goes to the swift and the wary
as the cloud shadow runs away.
A cloud shadow runs from the gully to the rise:
a small uncertain thing shifts and turns
under the hunting skies
Tell me the story as you heard it first
when the rain was rattling pots by the door;
a small uncertain thing gathers itself
and gathers itself once more.
You remember the king who studied the dust
where the rain had written his epitaph?
The clouds went kiting away that day
and swept the floor with a laugh.
A small thing dodges left where the ticking
of white and black caught the eye:
grows sure-footed as the beat quickens,
and dodges again to the right.
Say what you like for the hunter,
say what you like for the prey:
the game goes to the swift and the wary
as the cloud shadow runs away.
Saturday, January 04, 2020
End of Year Check-In, 2019
Here's the charts for 2019:
The project for 2019 was to increase my weight by ten pounds, while losing half an inch off my waist. The weight-increase worked fine. But things went off the rails twice -- there were two periods in which I had a week or two of not eating according to program, and some binges -- not on the scale of binges as I used to know them, but bad enough. Things may or may not be under control again: it's too soon to know. I ended the year with my waist an inch and a half larger: not at all what I was aiming for.
The unevenness itself is telling. My eating is not "fixed," and I doubt it ever will be: I think the safest assumption is that my appetite is permanently broken, and I will always have to monitor and deliberately control my eating. So that's discouraging, although I expected it: most people who have maintained weight loss over years report the same thing. The other thing to note is that going off the rails corresponds exactly with stress: it's not difficult to locate my parents' health troubles in the summer, or the onset of the holidays, on either graph. That's the decisive factor, and it's largely out of my control. This probably runs into the ditch any time my family has serious worries.
But backing off a bit, it's worth pulling up the full charts, back to the beginning of this project in May 2017:
On this scale, the failures of this year look less important. Basically I lost the weight in the course of 15 months, and have kept it off for a subsequent 16 months.
I decided from the start that "success" in this project meant still being on track and in control five years later -- to wit, in May 2022. And in fact, my goal at the start was to get down to 180 lbs and stay there -- my present 160 is way beyond what I had thought possible. I need to remind myself -- since I tend to forget -- that this has still been, according to my original goals, wildly successful.
Other notes. The experiment in quitting red meat, and substituting bean salad for my nightly hamburger, was a resounding failure, and is involved in the end-of-year collapse. I've backtracked on that one. Maybe someday. Maybe not.
The other thing to note here is that now, in maintenance mode, exercise actually matters. I attribute part of my success in losing my weight to totally ignoring exercise as a contributor to weight loss: it's a trivial factor, not worth taking into account, if you're trying to lose a pound a week. Calorie intake totally swamps calorie output ("you can't outrun your fork," as they say.) But when you're talking half a pound a month, or half an inch a year, the exercise is an important factor. I had cold viruses twice in December, and basically stopped lifting for that month, and even stopped walking for a week or two, which had a lot to do with how bad the numbers look there. I'm lifting again now, and have done some thinking and planning about how to get back on track after exercise setbacks: hopefully I won't be so derailed again. Not exercising at all feels really crappy and depressing. I need to get back to it as quickly as possible, even if it's just "ghost workouts": going through the motions with light weights (or none.)
So that's the year: 2019 is a wrap.
 |
| Weight in 2019 |
 |
| Waist in 2019 |
The project for 2019 was to increase my weight by ten pounds, while losing half an inch off my waist. The weight-increase worked fine. But things went off the rails twice -- there were two periods in which I had a week or two of not eating according to program, and some binges -- not on the scale of binges as I used to know them, but bad enough. Things may or may not be under control again: it's too soon to know. I ended the year with my waist an inch and a half larger: not at all what I was aiming for.
The unevenness itself is telling. My eating is not "fixed," and I doubt it ever will be: I think the safest assumption is that my appetite is permanently broken, and I will always have to monitor and deliberately control my eating. So that's discouraging, although I expected it: most people who have maintained weight loss over years report the same thing. The other thing to note is that going off the rails corresponds exactly with stress: it's not difficult to locate my parents' health troubles in the summer, or the onset of the holidays, on either graph. That's the decisive factor, and it's largely out of my control. This probably runs into the ditch any time my family has serious worries.
But backing off a bit, it's worth pulling up the full charts, back to the beginning of this project in May 2017:
 |
| Weight Since May 2017 |
 |
| Waist since May 2017 |
On this scale, the failures of this year look less important. Basically I lost the weight in the course of 15 months, and have kept it off for a subsequent 16 months.
I decided from the start that "success" in this project meant still being on track and in control five years later -- to wit, in May 2022. And in fact, my goal at the start was to get down to 180 lbs and stay there -- my present 160 is way beyond what I had thought possible. I need to remind myself -- since I tend to forget -- that this has still been, according to my original goals, wildly successful.
Other notes. The experiment in quitting red meat, and substituting bean salad for my nightly hamburger, was a resounding failure, and is involved in the end-of-year collapse. I've backtracked on that one. Maybe someday. Maybe not.
The other thing to note here is that now, in maintenance mode, exercise actually matters. I attribute part of my success in losing my weight to totally ignoring exercise as a contributor to weight loss: it's a trivial factor, not worth taking into account, if you're trying to lose a pound a week. Calorie intake totally swamps calorie output ("you can't outrun your fork," as they say.) But when you're talking half a pound a month, or half an inch a year, the exercise is an important factor. I had cold viruses twice in December, and basically stopped lifting for that month, and even stopped walking for a week or two, which had a lot to do with how bad the numbers look there. I'm lifting again now, and have done some thinking and planning about how to get back on track after exercise setbacks: hopefully I won't be so derailed again. Not exercising at all feels really crappy and depressing. I need to get back to it as quickly as possible, even if it's just "ghost workouts": going through the motions with light weights (or none.)
So that's the year: 2019 is a wrap.
Thursday, January 02, 2020
Unsettling Prospects
A deeply discouraging start to the new year. More on that anon, maybe: I have my end of the year report to get out. Stepping back a ways, I can see that I'm just a couple pounds and a waistline inch on the wrong side of the blue lines, with both numbers being about where they were a year ago: I haven't gained ground but I haven't lost it either. The important habits are in still in place. The recent defeats may have been local and temporary. We'll see.
A lot of reading that has given me furiously to think. Tony Judt's Postwar, a history of Europe from 1945 to 2005 (which is when it was written), was excellent. I, like everyone else in the West, paid far too little attention to the details of the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Finally making up a little lost ground there. But I have at least some context for understanding the EU and Brexit and Orban and so forth, now. It's strange to be so old that I can read judicious and illuminating narrative histories of times I actually lived through.
And, running athwart that stream, I read David Sinclair's Lifespan: Why We Age -- and Why We Don't Have To. From the title you would assume a tiresome and stupid book full of silly claims, but it's actually a serious and thoughtful book by a respectable Harvard medical researcher. He thinks, with good reason, that living to 120 years in good health will soon be normal, rather than exceptional -- for people who can afford it, anyway.
It's an interesting thought-experiment: what if I have sixty good years in front of me? How would I change my life, how would I think about it? I have been assuming, reasonably enough, that I have five to fifteen years of good health in front of me, which is time enough to wind down and tidy up. How does the prospect of sixty years change things? That's another lifetime, as we have traditionally reckoned these things: plenty of time to establish a new career or two, or to take on some really big projects. It's an appealing prospect, and whether Sinclair turns out to be right or not, it's interesting to just "try on the view," as Lama Michael used to say. I am by habit inclined to focus on cutting losses: it's healthy for me to buck that tendency. Supposing I don't deteriorate? What if fifteen years from now I'm getting fitted with new-grown eyes and ears, and can do calligraphy and eavesdrop in cafes better than ever? Priorities shift: proportions change.
You don't realize how confined your point of view has been, until you come to a sudden prospect and look into the distance.
But it's also unsettling, and stirs up anxieties from the bottom of the pond. Questions about being good enough, and unwelcome impulses toward grandiosity. I don't want those demons back.
A lot of reading that has given me furiously to think. Tony Judt's Postwar, a history of Europe from 1945 to 2005 (which is when it was written), was excellent. I, like everyone else in the West, paid far too little attention to the details of the collapse of the Soviet Empire. Finally making up a little lost ground there. But I have at least some context for understanding the EU and Brexit and Orban and so forth, now. It's strange to be so old that I can read judicious and illuminating narrative histories of times I actually lived through.
And, running athwart that stream, I read David Sinclair's Lifespan: Why We Age -- and Why We Don't Have To. From the title you would assume a tiresome and stupid book full of silly claims, but it's actually a serious and thoughtful book by a respectable Harvard medical researcher. He thinks, with good reason, that living to 120 years in good health will soon be normal, rather than exceptional -- for people who can afford it, anyway.
It's an interesting thought-experiment: what if I have sixty good years in front of me? How would I change my life, how would I think about it? I have been assuming, reasonably enough, that I have five to fifteen years of good health in front of me, which is time enough to wind down and tidy up. How does the prospect of sixty years change things? That's another lifetime, as we have traditionally reckoned these things: plenty of time to establish a new career or two, or to take on some really big projects. It's an appealing prospect, and whether Sinclair turns out to be right or not, it's interesting to just "try on the view," as Lama Michael used to say. I am by habit inclined to focus on cutting losses: it's healthy for me to buck that tendency. Supposing I don't deteriorate? What if fifteen years from now I'm getting fitted with new-grown eyes and ears, and can do calligraphy and eavesdrop in cafes better than ever? Priorities shift: proportions change.
You don't realize how confined your point of view has been, until you come to a sudden prospect and look into the distance.
But it's also unsettling, and stirs up anxieties from the bottom of the pond. Questions about being good enough, and unwelcome impulses toward grandiosity. I don't want those demons back.
Friday, December 20, 2019
Daytime
Blue spaces open, luminous, behind the black branches and leaves. Through the skylights, I can see the the trees shrug and shiver in the wind: then they settle again. Behind them the blue-gray increases in brightness, and I consider the paradox, that as the light increases the color fades. It's not really a blue sky, it's gray one, even dark gray one. Those earliest pools of light are intensely blue when they first appear. Now there are dark gray layers of cloud hurrying across a lighter gray field: it's all still blue-tinged, I suppose, but the color barely registers. Dawn settles into place. Shakes its coat, pats its pockets, smooths its hair. Daytime.
A couple deep breaths, a few business-like coughs. I sputter into life. Dig the sleep out of my eyes. Sketch out the day ahead: much to do, much to do. Finish the week's soup, pack up food for the day, shower and launch.
But I take the time to close my eyes, and slow down. What was it I said? "Close your eyes and turn toward the sun." Listen to the pipers of tinnitus. Let things fall away. There's time.
A couple deep breaths, a few business-like coughs. I sputter into life. Dig the sleep out of my eyes. Sketch out the day ahead: much to do, much to do. Finish the week's soup, pack up food for the day, shower and launch.
But I take the time to close my eyes, and slow down. What was it I said? "Close your eyes and turn toward the sun." Listen to the pipers of tinnitus. Let things fall away. There's time.
Tuesday, December 17, 2019
Walking Naked
Nah, you know, rewind, all the way back. All the way back, lad.
What should be in your life?
heart work
Well, this should be Spanish and Writing, yes? Any kind of Spanish, any kind of writing. This has been totally out of wack since I've been sick and stressed over the holiday work surge. I shouldn't need an especially compelling book to make this happen. I need markers, milestones. I need to get my kindle reading going. Perez-Reverte's history of the Civil War, (or the one he refers to?) would be an excellent choice. History in general, if available. Profitable reading that doesn't have to be literary.
In any case: there should be a minimum of two hours' Spanish work daily. Get real about this, Dale. A hour and a half of hard reading with vocabulary building, half an hour of listening to videos. See how that goes: see if the tempo accelerates. I think it will: but record the time. And make yourself really do the listening. Use your earbuds and just do it. The half-assed stuff really doesn't cut it. Do you think you're going to live forever?
money work
I'm getting ready to retire, in my mind, which means it's probably a damn sight closer than I presently know or understand. Eight years from now is the longest timeline. Think some more about this. Think about the transitions. Think about whether a three- or four-day work week would make sense, after the end of the year. All that. A lot to think about here, actually.
social stuff
Right now this absorbs a lot of "soft" time -- social media "checking in" that I think is pretty low-nourishment for the amount of time spent, and has lots and lots of negative side-effects. A lot of these habits were set when I was low-level prowling for flirtation prospects all the time, honestly; and I don't need that shit any more. Maybe less of open facebook, more of closed-group... something? This bears a lot of serious thinking.
exercise
The exercise, really, feels like its stable and handled, or will be anyway when I get over this damn cold. Daily back exercises, three workouts per week, five walks to and from the train per week. Done. Handled.
what's it for?
So really -- it's handled, all handled, except for: what the hell is it all for? What is this life? I mean, you have to fill in the days, one way or another, and this is one way. But might another way be better? And how would I know? I'm beginning to feel that I need a... vision quest? A psilocybin trip? An intense artistic imagination? The pieces must all be here, somewhere in this fluctuating chaos of a mind. How to locate them, to order them, so that in moments of bewilderment or dread I can get my bearings?
My Buddhism didn't so much collapse, as fade. I didn't really want to be wired in to a group and lodged in an institution. I didn't want this -- this heart center -- to be muddied with wanting to please and impress people. I wanted it to be a different kind of thing than that. No disrespect to people who find that helpful. You use what works. But for me... I think of Prince Andrei, murmuring, "this life... this life is not to my taste."
Of course, one crossway is the Christian, or Deist, one, which frames the question -- disingenuously but sometimes fruitfully -- as, "what does God want me to do?" As if that was something a creature could usefully discern! And as if you could actually do anything else. But we are wired that way, partly: wired to look to the Big Man and fret about whether we're pleasing Him. Another of those things: you use what works, and no disrespect. I don't think that one is going to work for me either, though. I want truth, or as close to the truth as this poor mortal can cut.
The mushrooms, if they worked, could be a shortcut. But they could only work, really, if the stuff is all here in my mind already. Whatever can be imagin'd, said Mr Blake: and he should know. As Martha said, what's available by way of mushroom should be available by way of meditation. It's just that you'd have to walk rather than drive. And what has my life of the past three years been, but a continual demonstration that driving is actually slower, more expensive, and more roundabout? You end up serving the car, not the trip. There's more enterprise / In walking naked.
Walking naked: the dream of the Puritan. No priest; no middleman; just you and God, face to face on the blasted heath. (Heh. As if anyone could keep their feet in the gale.)
But enough: the grandiosity doesn't serve, either. All it has to be is the discipline of turning. Even with your eyes closed, you know where the sun is, and you can turn towards it.
But, but, but -- and here is where the Buddhists can really help me -- it ain't worth a damn if it ain't a practice. Turning toward the sun once a year, because you're stressed out by work or by Christmastime, just means you turn toward the sun thirty times -- or more accurately, you imagine turning toward the sun thirty times -- before you pop into your pine box for your nice refreshing nap. Is that the program? If so, then gluttony might be a more rewarding one.
This -- this, what I'm doing right now, tippety-tappety, hunched over a keyboard at dawn; a skinny-fat virus-ridden old man with his head thrust forward at an unattractive angle, his face lit ghastly blue from beneath -- this is maybe the half of it. Bring myself back, reel myself in, tease myself into remembrance with bucking and prancing words. Because eventually the sun comes up. And eventually, you -- even you, Favier, even you -- can be brought to remember: Oh yeah. I need to turn toward the sun. I need to close my eyes and do this thing. Like, now: not next year, not next month, not tomorrow. Now.
What should be in your life?
heart work
Well, this should be Spanish and Writing, yes? Any kind of Spanish, any kind of writing. This has been totally out of wack since I've been sick and stressed over the holiday work surge. I shouldn't need an especially compelling book to make this happen. I need markers, milestones. I need to get my kindle reading going. Perez-Reverte's history of the Civil War, (or the one he refers to?) would be an excellent choice. History in general, if available. Profitable reading that doesn't have to be literary.
In any case: there should be a minimum of two hours' Spanish work daily. Get real about this, Dale. A hour and a half of hard reading with vocabulary building, half an hour of listening to videos. See how that goes: see if the tempo accelerates. I think it will: but record the time. And make yourself really do the listening. Use your earbuds and just do it. The half-assed stuff really doesn't cut it. Do you think you're going to live forever?
money work
I'm getting ready to retire, in my mind, which means it's probably a damn sight closer than I presently know or understand. Eight years from now is the longest timeline. Think some more about this. Think about the transitions. Think about whether a three- or four-day work week would make sense, after the end of the year. All that. A lot to think about here, actually.
social stuff
Right now this absorbs a lot of "soft" time -- social media "checking in" that I think is pretty low-nourishment for the amount of time spent, and has lots and lots of negative side-effects. A lot of these habits were set when I was low-level prowling for flirtation prospects all the time, honestly; and I don't need that shit any more. Maybe less of open facebook, more of closed-group... something? This bears a lot of serious thinking.
exercise
The exercise, really, feels like its stable and handled, or will be anyway when I get over this damn cold. Daily back exercises, three workouts per week, five walks to and from the train per week. Done. Handled.
what's it for?
So really -- it's handled, all handled, except for: what the hell is it all for? What is this life? I mean, you have to fill in the days, one way or another, and this is one way. But might another way be better? And how would I know? I'm beginning to feel that I need a... vision quest? A psilocybin trip? An intense artistic imagination? The pieces must all be here, somewhere in this fluctuating chaos of a mind. How to locate them, to order them, so that in moments of bewilderment or dread I can get my bearings?
My Buddhism didn't so much collapse, as fade. I didn't really want to be wired in to a group and lodged in an institution. I didn't want this -- this heart center -- to be muddied with wanting to please and impress people. I wanted it to be a different kind of thing than that. No disrespect to people who find that helpful. You use what works. But for me... I think of Prince Andrei, murmuring, "this life... this life is not to my taste."
Of course, one crossway is the Christian, or Deist, one, which frames the question -- disingenuously but sometimes fruitfully -- as, "what does God want me to do?" As if that was something a creature could usefully discern! And as if you could actually do anything else. But we are wired that way, partly: wired to look to the Big Man and fret about whether we're pleasing Him. Another of those things: you use what works, and no disrespect. I don't think that one is going to work for me either, though. I want truth, or as close to the truth as this poor mortal can cut.
The mushrooms, if they worked, could be a shortcut. But they could only work, really, if the stuff is all here in my mind already. Whatever can be imagin'd, said Mr Blake: and he should know. As Martha said, what's available by way of mushroom should be available by way of meditation. It's just that you'd have to walk rather than drive. And what has my life of the past three years been, but a continual demonstration that driving is actually slower, more expensive, and more roundabout? You end up serving the car, not the trip. There's more enterprise / In walking naked.
Walking naked: the dream of the Puritan. No priest; no middleman; just you and God, face to face on the blasted heath. (Heh. As if anyone could keep their feet in the gale.)
But enough: the grandiosity doesn't serve, either. All it has to be is the discipline of turning. Even with your eyes closed, you know where the sun is, and you can turn towards it.
But, but, but -- and here is where the Buddhists can really help me -- it ain't worth a damn if it ain't a practice. Turning toward the sun once a year, because you're stressed out by work or by Christmastime, just means you turn toward the sun thirty times -- or more accurately, you imagine turning toward the sun thirty times -- before you pop into your pine box for your nice refreshing nap. Is that the program? If so, then gluttony might be a more rewarding one.
This -- this, what I'm doing right now, tippety-tappety, hunched over a keyboard at dawn; a skinny-fat virus-ridden old man with his head thrust forward at an unattractive angle, his face lit ghastly blue from beneath -- this is maybe the half of it. Bring myself back, reel myself in, tease myself into remembrance with bucking and prancing words. Because eventually the sun comes up. And eventually, you -- even you, Favier, even you -- can be brought to remember: Oh yeah. I need to turn toward the sun. I need to close my eyes and do this thing. Like, now: not next year, not next month, not tomorrow. Now.
Wednesday, December 11, 2019
The Arteries of the Spirit Harden
 |
| Arthur Rackham: illustration for Ruskin's King of the Golden River |
6:30, and the dark is still complete: windows and skylights are dull black, except where they reflect an old, shrunken fellow huddled over his laptop. Not a hint that dawn is anywhere near.
I get on with the work of clearing phlegm from my lungs. My cold is ceding a little bit of territory, so there's some hope of getting ahead on that, at last. I've taken the last couple days off work, but that means, this being the giving season, that work is piling up for me, gifts that need to be entered into the database. I've tended this database for over a decade now, and I don't really like anyone but me entering the crucial gift data. Which means that, at this time of year, data entry tasks accumulate relentlessly.
On the other hand, there is an end to the task. Every year the spigot shuts off, abruptly and completely, on midnight of December 31st. The mail straggles in for a couple more days, and there's a couple big end-of-year tasks, but that's it. If I can stay on top of things till then, then I will have shot the rapids for another year, and be out into still water.
I began reading Isabel Allende's memoir, La Suma de los DĆas, but lost interest after sixty or seventy pages. My tolerance for vague and self-indulgent mysticism has dropped sharply. A wealthy Marin County lady believes herself to be witch who makes things happen with the aid of her prayer circle: well, sure. Why not? What's the cost? And the fact that the centerpiece of the narrative is a marriage which I know busted up a short while after she finished writing adds, unfairly maybe, to my skepticism. The woman who wrote Eva Luna had things to say to me: I'm not sure this woman does.
And that, of course, stirs my deepest fears of mortality. The body dies, sure, that's right and proper, but it strikes a chill into me that the imagination dies. The arteries of the spirit harden. You look into the windows for a hint of dawn, and see nothing, and pretty soon you start making things up just to relieve the blankness, to fill in the darkness. But there's nothing there but your own reflection.
Well. You have to be willing to travel. And you have to be willing to wait for the darkness to resolve, on its own schedule, and to see whatever finally does appear. Whatever it is, welcome or not, and whatever it demands of you.
But beyond that, the point is, there are stories that belong to you and stories that don't, and there are stories that should be told, and stories that shouldn't. (These are separate distinctions, mind you, not the same thing said two ways.) That's what troubles me.
And if the dawn doesn't come, then it doesn't come. You leave the page blank. You go for a walk, or you take up the next duty that presents itself.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Less Red Meat, More Chinese
Little surges of delight.
The joy of figuring out practical things. Algorithms of daily life, such as "supplement vitamin D, lightly, in the dead of winter, when I stop walking to and from the train with bare arms."
I think I've quit eating red meat. We'll see how that goes. I've eaten (at least) a quarter pound of hamburger daily for most of my adult life. I'm very, very used to it. I couldn't have succeeded in my weight loss without it. But now it might be time. There's a tectonic rhythm to these lifestyle changes: the pressure builds for a long time, and then suddenly, one day, for no observable reason, there's abrupt, surprising movement, and everything reorders around the new behavior.
... or it might not. My body's kicked back pretty hard against efforts to stop meat-eating before. But I'm still eating tons of animal protein, more than my body can possibly process. So swapping in bean salad for my nightly burger might pass under the radar.
It would be nice to not be supporting the factory feed-lot world any more. And nice not to have to clean grease off the stove top (wall, counter) every evening. Meat is kind of a chore.
In unrelated news: I've been reading about language acquisition recently, and it seems that "massive comprehensible input" method is what's recommended now. Read and listen -- to stuff you can mostly understand -- and your brain does the rest behind the scenes. But you have to do a lot of it, and it only works if you're receiving comprehensible, interesting messages. There's not much point in even trying to speak or write until you've absorbed a ton of it. Which makes my failure with Chinese make sense. I never had comprehensible input, of any kind: so my dogged memorization of Chinese characters yielded exactly nothing in the way of reading capacity. You have to understand something, and build on that kernel. It's a bootstrap problem. If you're not actually receiving messages the clutch doesn't engage: you can rev the engine all you like, but you're not going anywhere.
So if I ever take up Chinese again, I'm going to get a tutor I can hear and make them point to things and talk about them in Chinese, walk me through kids' books with pictures. What's that? What's he doing? Why?
Thanksgiving tomorrow. Going to my daughter's wife's aunt's, for a totally low-stress, unfraught holiday. Grateful for that.
The joy of figuring out practical things. Algorithms of daily life, such as "supplement vitamin D, lightly, in the dead of winter, when I stop walking to and from the train with bare arms."
I think I've quit eating red meat. We'll see how that goes. I've eaten (at least) a quarter pound of hamburger daily for most of my adult life. I'm very, very used to it. I couldn't have succeeded in my weight loss without it. But now it might be time. There's a tectonic rhythm to these lifestyle changes: the pressure builds for a long time, and then suddenly, one day, for no observable reason, there's abrupt, surprising movement, and everything reorders around the new behavior.
... or it might not. My body's kicked back pretty hard against efforts to stop meat-eating before. But I'm still eating tons of animal protein, more than my body can possibly process. So swapping in bean salad for my nightly burger might pass under the radar.
It would be nice to not be supporting the factory feed-lot world any more. And nice not to have to clean grease off the stove top (wall, counter) every evening. Meat is kind of a chore.
In unrelated news: I've been reading about language acquisition recently, and it seems that "massive comprehensible input" method is what's recommended now. Read and listen -- to stuff you can mostly understand -- and your brain does the rest behind the scenes. But you have to do a lot of it, and it only works if you're receiving comprehensible, interesting messages. There's not much point in even trying to speak or write until you've absorbed a ton of it. Which makes my failure with Chinese make sense. I never had comprehensible input, of any kind: so my dogged memorization of Chinese characters yielded exactly nothing in the way of reading capacity. You have to understand something, and build on that kernel. It's a bootstrap problem. If you're not actually receiving messages the clutch doesn't engage: you can rev the engine all you like, but you're not going anywhere.
So if I ever take up Chinese again, I'm going to get a tutor I can hear and make them point to things and talk about them in Chinese, walk me through kids' books with pictures. What's that? What's he doing? Why?
Thanksgiving tomorrow. Going to my daughter's wife's aunt's, for a totally low-stress, unfraught holiday. Grateful for that.
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Anodyne
“Death I think is all right, you know? It’s a natural ending of everything. But I think it’s very important to be alive until the last moment. It’s important that death seem to be just an accident.” Mario Vargas Llosa, a 2015 interview in The Telegraph.
A sudden sharp yearning for everything to come to a point: it comes of years of reading stories, watching movies, listening to songs. The turn, the denouement, the moment the wave crashes -- so important to narrative, and so rare and ineffective in life.
I view weddings and graduations and funerals and so forth with a distant horror: people are prone enough to fetishizing their expectations and encapsulations, without being encouraged in it. Let's all sit around and reinforce each other's prejudices, and wrap ourselves up on the bandwagon with barbed wire! I escape such things when I can.
The universe does sometimes squeeze itself into a ball, but it does so on its own timetable. Generally at dawn, or just before. With this, as with so many things, the trick is to wait, with my hands empty, and with all distractions put aside. So if that is, in fact, what I want, as I so often say -- well, there's how to do it. No secrets there: it's pretty obvious.
In the meantime, I follow the Wordsworthian life of accumulation, willy nilly. I don't believe in it but I don't know what else to do. Another day goes by, another four Spanish words learned, another eighteen pages read. Even when you don't want to harm anyone, you don't particularly appreciate being so obviously harmless. "Anodyne" is the tag I would spray paint on an urban wall, if I were to do such a thing, which of course I wouldn't.
And this, I suppose, is simply my version of the pathetic lament of the middle aged white guy, indoctrinated to be a soldier but unwilling to shoot or be shot. So I reread my military history, fiddle with my toy soldiers, train for combats I fully intend to avoid: a wearying business, really. Housework is a better return on investment. A clean sink may not be the sun over Austerlitz, but it does at least shine.
A sudden sharp yearning for everything to come to a point: it comes of years of reading stories, watching movies, listening to songs. The turn, the denouement, the moment the wave crashes -- so important to narrative, and so rare and ineffective in life.
I view weddings and graduations and funerals and so forth with a distant horror: people are prone enough to fetishizing their expectations and encapsulations, without being encouraged in it. Let's all sit around and reinforce each other's prejudices, and wrap ourselves up on the bandwagon with barbed wire! I escape such things when I can.
The universe does sometimes squeeze itself into a ball, but it does so on its own timetable. Generally at dawn, or just before. With this, as with so many things, the trick is to wait, with my hands empty, and with all distractions put aside. So if that is, in fact, what I want, as I so often say -- well, there's how to do it. No secrets there: it's pretty obvious.
In the meantime, I follow the Wordsworthian life of accumulation, willy nilly. I don't believe in it but I don't know what else to do. Another day goes by, another four Spanish words learned, another eighteen pages read. Even when you don't want to harm anyone, you don't particularly appreciate being so obviously harmless. "Anodyne" is the tag I would spray paint on an urban wall, if I were to do such a thing, which of course I wouldn't.
And this, I suppose, is simply my version of the pathetic lament of the middle aged white guy, indoctrinated to be a soldier but unwilling to shoot or be shot. So I reread my military history, fiddle with my toy soldiers, train for combats I fully intend to avoid: a wearying business, really. Housework is a better return on investment. A clean sink may not be the sun over Austerlitz, but it does at least shine.
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Tired, Bone-Weary, and Old
An immense liberation: the heartbeat, slosh and knock, like a dishwasher heard from the other room -- sure, all that, and the fear that wakes you in the night with a sour taste, and a sudden jolt of forgetting -- but mostly the clouds moving, the dappled ground, the sense of space that comes when you have drastically, drastically shrunk.
And I have shrunk, and I may shrink some more, in prosaic inches and pounds. The desire to vanish altogether is almost overwhelming, at times. When I first lost my weight, I immediately embarked on a project to build more muscle. I was panicked by the thought of being small. But now I don't care. I want to be small. I want to turn sideways and vanish. I want to feel the air blowing through between my ribs and carrying the last bits away. Something for the squirrels to build nests with.
But that too is one of the deflections, one of the ways I have always evaded the real issues, and my patience with all those subterfuges is pretty much gone. The truth is that I have always been fearful and desperate for approval, and there is something unlovely and sly about the way I linger. But another thing I have lost patience for is blaming myself for being what I was inevitably made by my circumstances. I need only do that if I am determined not to change, if I'm not willing to do the work. I'm willing to do the work, now.
I ate lunch in my car, today. Romaine with bits of carrot and radish; almonds; two bananas and an apple. A rain shower visited while I ate, and moved on, and a rainbow appeared to the north. I wasn't feeling up to lunching with the other people in my workshop, even though half my motive for taking it was to find people to practice Thai with. Time out. And eating is still so hard, so fraught. I remind myself of our older, rather neurotic cat, Kiki, who can't bear to eat if anyone is moving about within a few yards of her. I sometimes try to sidle past her in the kitchen without disturbing her at her meal. I'm usually unsuccessful. She hurries away, and like as not Van Buren saunters up to eat her dinner before she can stand to come back.
So no: one thing at a time. Willing to do the work, but not all the work all the time all at once: that's not possible either.
The almonds were sweet and good. And I am tired, bone-weary, and old.
And I have shrunk, and I may shrink some more, in prosaic inches and pounds. The desire to vanish altogether is almost overwhelming, at times. When I first lost my weight, I immediately embarked on a project to build more muscle. I was panicked by the thought of being small. But now I don't care. I want to be small. I want to turn sideways and vanish. I want to feel the air blowing through between my ribs and carrying the last bits away. Something for the squirrels to build nests with.
But that too is one of the deflections, one of the ways I have always evaded the real issues, and my patience with all those subterfuges is pretty much gone. The truth is that I have always been fearful and desperate for approval, and there is something unlovely and sly about the way I linger. But another thing I have lost patience for is blaming myself for being what I was inevitably made by my circumstances. I need only do that if I am determined not to change, if I'm not willing to do the work. I'm willing to do the work, now.
I ate lunch in my car, today. Romaine with bits of carrot and radish; almonds; two bananas and an apple. A rain shower visited while I ate, and moved on, and a rainbow appeared to the north. I wasn't feeling up to lunching with the other people in my workshop, even though half my motive for taking it was to find people to practice Thai with. Time out. And eating is still so hard, so fraught. I remind myself of our older, rather neurotic cat, Kiki, who can't bear to eat if anyone is moving about within a few yards of her. I sometimes try to sidle past her in the kitchen without disturbing her at her meal. I'm usually unsuccessful. She hurries away, and like as not Van Buren saunters up to eat her dinner before she can stand to come back.
So no: one thing at a time. Willing to do the work, but not all the work all the time all at once: that's not possible either.
The almonds were sweet and good. And I am tired, bone-weary, and old.
Thursday, October 17, 2019
Haidt
I just read two books by Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind. I heartily recommend them both: I think they both shed a great deal of light, and they both say things I've struggled and failed to express. As well as much that I had never thought of.
I am not likely, of course, to agree with the political opinions of someone who calls himself a centrist. While I agree with him that conservatives bring a great deal to the table, I do not think the current crop of Republicans are conservatives; I think they are simply a nightmare version of liberals -- far more like us, in all important respects, than they are like the Republicans of, say, 1970. They are not concerned with conserving anything but their own prestige and their own assets: and they are sold on a version of Christianity that Bonhoeffer neatly summarized as "cheap grace." No need for messy crucifixions or time-wasting penance! God approves of you right out of the box, and all He wants you do do is feather your nest.
(I actually think of myself in my heart as a conservative, although I longer call myself one, since it only confuses people. Those little online quizzes consistently identify me as "very liberal." They ask no questions about Edmund Burke, or perfectibility, or the importance of custom and tradition.)
Anyway. Where was I? Yes. I completely agree with Haidt that we arrive at the best solutions when Liberals and Conservatives (as he defines them) bang up against each other and knock each other's rough edges off. But I think the political positions of, say, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, are, in fact, just such compromise positions -- old compromises, informed by both conservatives and progressives as we used to know them. The Left used to have some bargaining power, because our labor was needed, and the sinister figure of the Soviet Union was lurking behind us. Now our labor is superfluous -- plenty more where that came from, should you need it, which you probably don't; and where the Soviet Union used to be is the gangster state of United Russia, a China which really would rather not bother with us, and a European Union that can't even mind its own store, let alone anyone else's. Different world. Our leverage is gone. And in the meantime, the very wealthy coalesced, under the Kochs, into a formidably organized and fabulously rich political machine. They hold all the cards, now, and they can only fail by drastically overplaying their hand. (Which seems to be exactly what they are doing, so maybe we have a chance after all. Who knows?)
But. Read Haidt, who is much cleverer about social psychology than he is about politics: both his books are very illuminating reads.
I am not likely, of course, to agree with the political opinions of someone who calls himself a centrist. While I agree with him that conservatives bring a great deal to the table, I do not think the current crop of Republicans are conservatives; I think they are simply a nightmare version of liberals -- far more like us, in all important respects, than they are like the Republicans of, say, 1970. They are not concerned with conserving anything but their own prestige and their own assets: and they are sold on a version of Christianity that Bonhoeffer neatly summarized as "cheap grace." No need for messy crucifixions or time-wasting penance! God approves of you right out of the box, and all He wants you do do is feather your nest.
(I actually think of myself in my heart as a conservative, although I longer call myself one, since it only confuses people. Those little online quizzes consistently identify me as "very liberal." They ask no questions about Edmund Burke, or perfectibility, or the importance of custom and tradition.)
Anyway. Where was I? Yes. I completely agree with Haidt that we arrive at the best solutions when Liberals and Conservatives (as he defines them) bang up against each other and knock each other's rough edges off. But I think the political positions of, say, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, are, in fact, just such compromise positions -- old compromises, informed by both conservatives and progressives as we used to know them. The Left used to have some bargaining power, because our labor was needed, and the sinister figure of the Soviet Union was lurking behind us. Now our labor is superfluous -- plenty more where that came from, should you need it, which you probably don't; and where the Soviet Union used to be is the gangster state of United Russia, a China which really would rather not bother with us, and a European Union that can't even mind its own store, let alone anyone else's. Different world. Our leverage is gone. And in the meantime, the very wealthy coalesced, under the Kochs, into a formidably organized and fabulously rich political machine. They hold all the cards, now, and they can only fail by drastically overplaying their hand. (Which seems to be exactly what they are doing, so maybe we have a chance after all. Who knows?)
But. Read Haidt, who is much cleverer about social psychology than he is about politics: both his books are very illuminating reads.
Friday, October 11, 2019
Ellen and W
Well, I'm on Ellen DeGeneres' side.
Of course by several criteria George W. Bush is a war criminal. So is Barack Obama: I can't think of any criterion that rules George in that rules Barack out. Waging undeclared war? Check. Authorizing strikes intended to kill civilians? Check. Maintaining prisoners in inhumane conditions, because it's politically inexpedient to release them? Check. Authorizing torture? Check. The difference is that Barack is our war criminal, the scale is smaller, and the justifications are slicker. The victims, though, are just as scarred, injured, and dead.
Tu quoque is a much used and abused argument these days. I'm not saying I find the two men morally equivalent: I don't. George is more to be blamed because he caused a great deal more suffering. Barack is more to be blamed because he knew better what he was doing. For those who get a thrill out of reckoning up exact quantities of blame, and being sure to assign people to the correct seat in the correct circle of hell, no doubt there's hours of excitement here. I'll pass.
I'm not offering anyone forgiveness, and I don't hear DeGeneres offering anyone forgiveness either. What she's offering is kindness. The recognition of humanity, even in our erstwhile or present enemies. There are some notable authorities who recommend that. I stand with them.
People can be wrong. They are wrong. I am wrong. I recognize at least one time when, had I been president, I would have made a disastrous foreign policy mistake that would have cost thousands, probably tens of thousands, of lives. It would have been a sin of omission -- failure to act in the face of the Serbian ethnic cleansing -- but that wouldn't have made it any less disastrous, or made the suffering of the Albanians any less. You all could have rightly despised me forever.
If you can't think of a disastrous policy mistake you would have made, as president of the United States, then -- to put it as gently as I know how -- you're an ignorant idiot. So shut up and let Ellen and W watch their football game. And hope you're never in a position to display to the world the depth of your ignorance and the shortfalls of your compassion.
Of course by several criteria George W. Bush is a war criminal. So is Barack Obama: I can't think of any criterion that rules George in that rules Barack out. Waging undeclared war? Check. Authorizing strikes intended to kill civilians? Check. Maintaining prisoners in inhumane conditions, because it's politically inexpedient to release them? Check. Authorizing torture? Check. The difference is that Barack is our war criminal, the scale is smaller, and the justifications are slicker. The victims, though, are just as scarred, injured, and dead.
Tu quoque is a much used and abused argument these days. I'm not saying I find the two men morally equivalent: I don't. George is more to be blamed because he caused a great deal more suffering. Barack is more to be blamed because he knew better what he was doing. For those who get a thrill out of reckoning up exact quantities of blame, and being sure to assign people to the correct seat in the correct circle of hell, no doubt there's hours of excitement here. I'll pass.
I'm not offering anyone forgiveness, and I don't hear DeGeneres offering anyone forgiveness either. What she's offering is kindness. The recognition of humanity, even in our erstwhile or present enemies. There are some notable authorities who recommend that. I stand with them.
People can be wrong. They are wrong. I am wrong. I recognize at least one time when, had I been president, I would have made a disastrous foreign policy mistake that would have cost thousands, probably tens of thousands, of lives. It would have been a sin of omission -- failure to act in the face of the Serbian ethnic cleansing -- but that wouldn't have made it any less disastrous, or made the suffering of the Albanians any less. You all could have rightly despised me forever.
If you can't think of a disastrous policy mistake you would have made, as president of the United States, then -- to put it as gently as I know how -- you're an ignorant idiot. So shut up and let Ellen and W watch their football game. And hope you're never in a position to display to the world the depth of your ignorance and the shortfalls of your compassion.
Thursday, October 03, 2019
Peeling Eggs
For over a year now, I've been eating three boiled eggs every morning. It's not that I particularly like my eggs boiled: I prefer them scrambled, and I make good scrambled eggs. But boiling eggs is easy, and one of the secrets of my dietary success has been the rule, "if it ain't easy, it ain't happenin.'" I start them boiling, and by the time I'm done with my oatmeal and brocs, they're ready: the part of my breakfast I most enjoy.
So I have a lot of experience now with boiling eggs, and I feel I can make authoritative statements about it. In particular, how to do it so as to make peeling them easy.
First, and most important: don't boil new-laid eggs. Just don't. There is no way to make really fresh eggs easy to peel. (And anyway, if they're as fresh as that, why wreck them by boiling them? Make an omelet.) I deliberately age the eggs I'm going to boil: I want them at least a week old.
Second: "shock" them with cold water. This helps, a little, though not nearly as much as some people think. Mostly it just makes them easier to handle when they've just come out of boiling water.
Third: some eggs will never peel easily. Ever. No matter how old they are, or what you do to them. The occasional egg comes along with a membrane that sticks tighter to the flesh of the egg than to the shell, and there is no good way to peel it. Surrender gracefully. You can strip the first layer of flesh off and scrape it from the shell with your thumbnail. Whatever. Do what you must. It's not your fault.
It's delightful when the shell slips off an egg all of a piece, and it makes you feel very skillful and clever. The impulse to take credit for it is overwhelming. But in fact it's just dumb luck. Anybody would have found that egg easy to peel. If you only boil eggs once in a while, you can be forgiven for thinking that you've got the hang of it now and you've solved that egg-peeling thing and you know exactly what to do with them. It's an illusion, I'm afraid. There is an impossible-to-peel egg in your future. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but soon.
So I have a lot of experience now with boiling eggs, and I feel I can make authoritative statements about it. In particular, how to do it so as to make peeling them easy.
First, and most important: don't boil new-laid eggs. Just don't. There is no way to make really fresh eggs easy to peel. (And anyway, if they're as fresh as that, why wreck them by boiling them? Make an omelet.) I deliberately age the eggs I'm going to boil: I want them at least a week old.
Second: "shock" them with cold water. This helps, a little, though not nearly as much as some people think. Mostly it just makes them easier to handle when they've just come out of boiling water.
Third: some eggs will never peel easily. Ever. No matter how old they are, or what you do to them. The occasional egg comes along with a membrane that sticks tighter to the flesh of the egg than to the shell, and there is no good way to peel it. Surrender gracefully. You can strip the first layer of flesh off and scrape it from the shell with your thumbnail. Whatever. Do what you must. It's not your fault.
It's delightful when the shell slips off an egg all of a piece, and it makes you feel very skillful and clever. The impulse to take credit for it is overwhelming. But in fact it's just dumb luck. Anybody would have found that egg easy to peel. If you only boil eggs once in a while, you can be forgiven for thinking that you've got the hang of it now and you've solved that egg-peeling thing and you know exactly what to do with them. It's an illusion, I'm afraid. There is an impossible-to-peel egg in your future. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but soon.
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Reflections on a Tour of the Grand Spreadsheet
I just went through my grand spreadsheet, updating it with the weekly averages for my weight and waist, which meant filling in data for two and a half years. It was inefficient -- I could have written formulas to do the same thing -- but I find it useful sometimes to wade through data and get a feel for it at different scales and tempos.
In general, I'm happy with what I've accomplished and where I am. The great disappointment, of course, has been that no magic resolution has presented itself. The grand fantasy is that at some point one recovers normalcy of appetite, one can eat ad libitum without gaining weight. I'm pretty much certain, now, that that will never happen. I can restrict my daily eating carefully, or I can be obese; there is no middle option.
Given, then, that I'm restricting carefully, weighing and measuring, going to all this trouble (and the trouble is enormous: it occupies quite a bit of my uncommitted time), I might as well get exactly what I want out of it. So what do I want?
The question arises because I have been batting back and forth several potential steady-states, and how to arrive at them. Should I ride the present regimen down to a 32" waist, and see what that looks like? Or should I continue my gradualist, "follow the blue lines" strategy, trying to keep my waist very slowly dwindling while my weight very slowly increases, as my lifting program progresses and I put on more muscle? What, exactly, am I aiming for, and how will I know when I've gotten there?
One risk, as so often, is mistaking markers for actual goals, and obsessing on hitting numbers that don't actually capture the end-goals. And another risk, one I'm especially prone to, is setting a goal of endless progression: at present really what I'm attempting is to perpetually build muscle mass while perpetually reducing fat. I used to design my exercise programs that way, until I finally understood that basically what I was doing -- piling on more weight, more reps -- was guaranteeing that I eventually exercise to exhaustion or injury. Not clever. I should have end-points.
What are the actual goals, then? There's an optimal body composition: I should get there and stay there. It's not that far off. I pretty much like how I look now. I don't particularly want to be bulky and hugeous. I'd like my waist to be a little trimmer, my legs to be a bit thicker; but that's about it. I think that if I do get to having my waist measurement be 90% of my hips, I probably will have something like a 32" waist, and I'll probably look as good as I want to bother with.
But backing off to get a wider view, looking good -- although I must ruefully admit it's the best motivator -- is only a side goal. What I really want is -- as a duty -- to live vigorously as long as I can, so that I can avoid being a burden on my loved ones, and hopefully help them out, for as long as possible; and what I really want for myself, my deepest wish, is for mental acuity and physical energy. That's what I want to maximize. And here's where I need to be careful to measure what I'm actually interested in.
I am much more energetic at this weight and fitness. I used to be basically exhausted by dinnertime: now I often do things in the evening. Every night before bed I do the dishes and prep for breakfast, which would have been totally beyond my powers. But of course this extra energy is largely devoted to... keeping up my diet and fitness regimen. My disposable energy has not really increased: it may even have declined.
It feels better though. And feeling mentally sharper is priceless. I think better. I'm more concise, more methodical, quicker on the uptake. That's what I care about most.
I have long harbored the notion -- probably picked up from the elderly protagonists of Michael Innes mysteries, and offhand comments by longevity buffs -- that if I restricted calories really severely I'd be sharper still. Now that I examine it by daylight, it doesn't seem especially likely: it's probably an ascetic fantasy. There's probably a sweet spot, and it's probably considerably this side of starvation.
There may be actual information about these things. I should seek it out.
And I should think about how to measure these things. Energy and acuity. People like to say that this, that, or the next thing can't be measured. They're always wrong. Anything that can be perceived can be measured.
In general, I'm happy with what I've accomplished and where I am. The great disappointment, of course, has been that no magic resolution has presented itself. The grand fantasy is that at some point one recovers normalcy of appetite, one can eat ad libitum without gaining weight. I'm pretty much certain, now, that that will never happen. I can restrict my daily eating carefully, or I can be obese; there is no middle option.
Given, then, that I'm restricting carefully, weighing and measuring, going to all this trouble (and the trouble is enormous: it occupies quite a bit of my uncommitted time), I might as well get exactly what I want out of it. So what do I want?
The question arises because I have been batting back and forth several potential steady-states, and how to arrive at them. Should I ride the present regimen down to a 32" waist, and see what that looks like? Or should I continue my gradualist, "follow the blue lines" strategy, trying to keep my waist very slowly dwindling while my weight very slowly increases, as my lifting program progresses and I put on more muscle? What, exactly, am I aiming for, and how will I know when I've gotten there?
One risk, as so often, is mistaking markers for actual goals, and obsessing on hitting numbers that don't actually capture the end-goals. And another risk, one I'm especially prone to, is setting a goal of endless progression: at present really what I'm attempting is to perpetually build muscle mass while perpetually reducing fat. I used to design my exercise programs that way, until I finally understood that basically what I was doing -- piling on more weight, more reps -- was guaranteeing that I eventually exercise to exhaustion or injury. Not clever. I should have end-points.
What are the actual goals, then? There's an optimal body composition: I should get there and stay there. It's not that far off. I pretty much like how I look now. I don't particularly want to be bulky and hugeous. I'd like my waist to be a little trimmer, my legs to be a bit thicker; but that's about it. I think that if I do get to having my waist measurement be 90% of my hips, I probably will have something like a 32" waist, and I'll probably look as good as I want to bother with.
But backing off to get a wider view, looking good -- although I must ruefully admit it's the best motivator -- is only a side goal. What I really want is -- as a duty -- to live vigorously as long as I can, so that I can avoid being a burden on my loved ones, and hopefully help them out, for as long as possible; and what I really want for myself, my deepest wish, is for mental acuity and physical energy. That's what I want to maximize. And here's where I need to be careful to measure what I'm actually interested in.
I am much more energetic at this weight and fitness. I used to be basically exhausted by dinnertime: now I often do things in the evening. Every night before bed I do the dishes and prep for breakfast, which would have been totally beyond my powers. But of course this extra energy is largely devoted to... keeping up my diet and fitness regimen. My disposable energy has not really increased: it may even have declined.
It feels better though. And feeling mentally sharper is priceless. I think better. I'm more concise, more methodical, quicker on the uptake. That's what I care about most.
I have long harbored the notion -- probably picked up from the elderly protagonists of Michael Innes mysteries, and offhand comments by longevity buffs -- that if I restricted calories really severely I'd be sharper still. Now that I examine it by daylight, it doesn't seem especially likely: it's probably an ascetic fantasy. There's probably a sweet spot, and it's probably considerably this side of starvation.
There may be actual information about these things. I should seek it out.
And I should think about how to measure these things. Energy and acuity. People like to say that this, that, or the next thing can't be measured. They're always wrong. Anything that can be perceived can be measured.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Morning
Morning: a fine rain, and wet branches gleaming.
At one point I grew self-conscious and annoyed with myself: It turns out I begin about half my posts by informing my public that it's morning. Morning is important to me. Morning is not a time of day so much as a state of being. Morning is freedom, possibility, freshness. A whole new world with the dew still on it, and not a trammel or a busybody to be seen. I love mornings. But not everybody does, and even if they did, the whole point of writing is to Make It New (we know this because Ezra Pound told us so, which maybe should rouse our suspicions right there) and anyway, how new and fresh is this morning, when to the reader (very possibly not inhabiting morning at all, or inhabiting it and wishing they weren't) reads the same damn thing every morning? So I pulled up my socks and tried to avoid it, or at least cut it out when I was done.
But this, O Reader, turns out to be a very bad idea. Because it means I begin my morning self-consciously, in an editing frame of mind, which is a very fine frame of mind in its way, but is NOT the writing frame of mind. And besides, most of what I have to say, if you boil it down, is that it is in fact morning. I write for the same reason the cock crows. There it is. So from now on, I am going to begin every post by informing you that it's morning. Feel free to skip that part.
---
Some time ago I read a book about cultural evolution, The Secret of Our Success, by Joseph Henrich. I recommend it, both for itself and for a way of thinking about our present political polarity. We do have a culture war going on, and it's important, and it's not as simple as it looks. I am thoroughly and unapologetically on the liberal side, and I think actually that we are winning handily, dark though the days look sometimes: but that's not my point, not at the moment. We liberals are outcompeting conservatives for several reasons: we pay more attention to science, which gives us a consistent edge; we're more open to innovation; our childrearing practices are more effective; we have a near-monopoly on education, the media, and the arts. Short of nuclear war or genocide, we are probably going to win this thing. But we do ourselves no service by refusing to examine the conservative strengths. They understand things we don't (culturally speaking), and they can do things we can't. We should think about that.
The winner of this culture war is not going to be the smarter, better informed side (that's obviously us.) It's not going to be the more stubborn, belligerent side either (that's obviously them.) It's going to be the side that makes people feel safest, most special, most connected to each other, most like they belong to something, most like their lives are important and make sense. The side that seizes and holds that redoubt is the one that's going to win. We need to think about that. Because the problem is hard and the stakes are enormous.
At one point I grew self-conscious and annoyed with myself: It turns out I begin about half my posts by informing my public that it's morning. Morning is important to me. Morning is not a time of day so much as a state of being. Morning is freedom, possibility, freshness. A whole new world with the dew still on it, and not a trammel or a busybody to be seen. I love mornings. But not everybody does, and even if they did, the whole point of writing is to Make It New (we know this because Ezra Pound told us so, which maybe should rouse our suspicions right there) and anyway, how new and fresh is this morning, when to the reader (very possibly not inhabiting morning at all, or inhabiting it and wishing they weren't) reads the same damn thing every morning? So I pulled up my socks and tried to avoid it, or at least cut it out when I was done.
But this, O Reader, turns out to be a very bad idea. Because it means I begin my morning self-consciously, in an editing frame of mind, which is a very fine frame of mind in its way, but is NOT the writing frame of mind. And besides, most of what I have to say, if you boil it down, is that it is in fact morning. I write for the same reason the cock crows. There it is. So from now on, I am going to begin every post by informing you that it's morning. Feel free to skip that part.
---
Some time ago I read a book about cultural evolution, The Secret of Our Success, by Joseph Henrich. I recommend it, both for itself and for a way of thinking about our present political polarity. We do have a culture war going on, and it's important, and it's not as simple as it looks. I am thoroughly and unapologetically on the liberal side, and I think actually that we are winning handily, dark though the days look sometimes: but that's not my point, not at the moment. We liberals are outcompeting conservatives for several reasons: we pay more attention to science, which gives us a consistent edge; we're more open to innovation; our childrearing practices are more effective; we have a near-monopoly on education, the media, and the arts. Short of nuclear war or genocide, we are probably going to win this thing. But we do ourselves no service by refusing to examine the conservative strengths. They understand things we don't (culturally speaking), and they can do things we can't. We should think about that.
The winner of this culture war is not going to be the smarter, better informed side (that's obviously us.) It's not going to be the more stubborn, belligerent side either (that's obviously them.) It's going to be the side that makes people feel safest, most special, most connected to each other, most like they belong to something, most like their lives are important and make sense. The side that seizes and holds that redoubt is the one that's going to win. We need to think about that. Because the problem is hard and the stakes are enormous.
Saturday, September 14, 2019
The Light of Summer
Morning: the throb of the washer: a single fat sparrow in the hedge, cautiously investigating the birdbath.
The skylights are covered with dew, and beyond them the sky is gray. A somber day: the light of summer already seems far away and long ago.
Ironic, that this new moment of nationalism comes precisely when global capitalism has made us all so much alike; and that we should be extravagantly focused on cultural difference precisely when there is so little of it left. There was more cultural distance between a Southerner and a Yankee in 1860 than there is between a Honduran and a Norteamericano now. We live in the same conditions: we respond the same way. If I were a strategist for the Right, I would put all my energy into trying to suppress language learning: I don't think there's any other way to try to keep up the fiction that we're terribly different from each other. We wear the same t-shirts and bill caps, eat the same food, watch the same kitties on YouTube. We work the same absurdly long hours under the same unremitting financial stress. We have the same loss of faith in government and the same witless loathing of our political opponents. The same inability to conduct a legitimate election. It's at this moment that we choose to defend our borders? What's to defend? Our uniqueness consists of playing football with a prolate spheroid, instead of a ball.
Speaking of which, what the hell, Thorns? losing 0-6 against North Carolina? Sheesh.
Just finished reading Jonathan Haidt's "Happiness Hypothesis," which I found disconcertingly like my own thoughts on the matter. I think I'm going to just turn back to the beginning and read it over. As always, finding my own thoughts in print makes me doubt them: if somebody else thinks the same thing, then we're both probably wrong, right? But it's also interesting. And I don't at all understand what he means by saying that "Happiness comes from between," so I need to read that last chapter again, in any case.
The other book I'm reading is La TĆa Julia y El Escribor -- "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" -- by Mario Vargas Llosa, which is really quite a wonderful book, so far, though you have to be alarmed by the thought of a man dictating the story of their courtship to his lover, which is apparently how this book was written. Yikes.
The skylights are covered with dew, and beyond them the sky is gray. A somber day: the light of summer already seems far away and long ago.
Ironic, that this new moment of nationalism comes precisely when global capitalism has made us all so much alike; and that we should be extravagantly focused on cultural difference precisely when there is so little of it left. There was more cultural distance between a Southerner and a Yankee in 1860 than there is between a Honduran and a Norteamericano now. We live in the same conditions: we respond the same way. If I were a strategist for the Right, I would put all my energy into trying to suppress language learning: I don't think there's any other way to try to keep up the fiction that we're terribly different from each other. We wear the same t-shirts and bill caps, eat the same food, watch the same kitties on YouTube. We work the same absurdly long hours under the same unremitting financial stress. We have the same loss of faith in government and the same witless loathing of our political opponents. The same inability to conduct a legitimate election. It's at this moment that we choose to defend our borders? What's to defend? Our uniqueness consists of playing football with a prolate spheroid, instead of a ball.
Speaking of which, what the hell, Thorns? losing 0-6 against North Carolina? Sheesh.
Just finished reading Jonathan Haidt's "Happiness Hypothesis," which I found disconcertingly like my own thoughts on the matter. I think I'm going to just turn back to the beginning and read it over. As always, finding my own thoughts in print makes me doubt them: if somebody else thinks the same thing, then we're both probably wrong, right? But it's also interesting. And I don't at all understand what he means by saying that "Happiness comes from between," so I need to read that last chapter again, in any case.
The other book I'm reading is La TĆa Julia y El Escribor -- "Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter" -- by Mario Vargas Llosa, which is really quite a wonderful book, so far, though you have to be alarmed by the thought of a man dictating the story of their courtship to his lover, which is apparently how this book was written. Yikes.
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Corymb
I said to myself, "I need to take a walk and figure out what it is I want to be doing for the next ten, twenty, thirty years."
I started walking, and realized: "no, I don't need to figure it out. I need to discover it. I've gone as far as figuring is going to take me. I need to speculate -- brainstorm -- and then try things out. Run pilot programs. The last thing I need, right now is to figure things out."
My life is already replete with rumination. I do all the ruminating I could possibly need to do. What it lacks is experimentation. I need to build prototypes, and see how they perform.
--
Corymb: an inflorescence with the flowers growing in such a fashion that the outermost are borne on longer pedicels than the inner, bringing all flowers up to a common level
--
Woke to silent lightning, this morning. And now the daylight: slow and halting, and as yellow as evening light. The sound of a sparrow bathing in a plastic tub lid, and little chirps and quick leaf-shudders in the hedge. It's quiet this morning, as quiet as a weekend morning: maybe lots of people are already embarked on their Labor Day weekend? But the chickens are finally tuning up, with those long, quavering moans. "My God," they say, "I can't believe it's another day: why, O Lord?"
I think of moving to a riverside cottage, if such a thing is still possible, and learning to shop once a week, and going for long walks at dawn in the hills. I used to be sure I wanted to be forever in the city, where things were happening, and there were lots of new people to fall in love with. Now -- I don't know. A quiet morning and flowing water, maybe a kingfisher, the splash of a fish? I tire of fret and striving and hysteria of high-strung, overcrowded primates. Who cares what anyone thinks of me? And what new world is going to be brought to me by strangers? All the worlds are old, now.
Wednesday, August 07, 2019
The Fall of Meredith
 |
| Illustration for George Meredith's The Adventures of Harry Richmond. George du Maurier (1834-1896) |
In my youth, George Meredith was one of those novelists you were always going to get to one of these days. There was no hurry. His novels were always sitting, fat and well-bound, on the library shelves. But I never did get around to him. A couple days ago until I happened to pick up Chesterton's little book on Victorian literature -- sheer happenstance: my eye had fallen on it at the library when I was looking for something else -- and there was Meredith, ranked beside, if not above, Thomas Hardy. Huh, I thought. I'll read a Meredith novel. After poking about a little I settled on Harry Richmond, and went to the library website to slap a hold on it: that's the usual way I obtain books these days. To my astonishment, they held exactly one Meredith novel -- The Egoist -- and that was that. The solidity and permanence of Meredith was a mirage, a trick of the light.
I was piqued, rather than discouraged, and went off to Gutenberg. Sure enough, plenty of Meredith there, although apparently not much in demand. So now I'm eight chapters in to Harry Richmond. It's interesting, so far -- well worth reading, and it casts oblique lights forward and back. Many of us young men are in a similar plight, I often think: raised to princely expectations, groomed for monarchy, and then rudely thrown into the world as ordinary people after all.
I wonder why Meredith fell? So many mysteries.
Monday, August 05, 2019
Sad Cypress; Glad Morning
 |
| Cyparissus (1670s) by Jacopo Vignali: Wikipedia Commons |
Cool morning air drifting in from the windows; a light blue sky beyond the hedge. For the moment, untroubled and at peace.
It's an arborvitae hedge. Martha pronounces it, charmingly, as "arborviety," rhyming with "variety." Tree of life, that is, which seems a little highfalutin for a hedge shrub. But apparently it got the name because tea made from it cured scurvy.
It's a kind of cypress. A thuja. The which name is another anomalous perplexity, at first sight, but it turns out to just be an odd spelling of the Greek name for a particular sort of cypress. Thuia, would be the normal English spelling. What possessed some botanist to spell it with a 'j'? 'i' and 'j' are originally just variant forms of the same Roman letter, but to anyone with linguistic sensitivities the 'th', which fairly screams its Greekness, sits very uncomfortably in the same short word with a Latin 'j'.
I do not know why cypress trees are associated with sadness, though I suppose the internets would tell me. They don't strike me as particularly sad trees. A little dusky, but not strikingly dark like a yew.
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
... I'm back! The internets say that of course cypress trees are sad because once upon a classical time Cyparissus accidentally shot and killed his pet stag, and he made such a nuisance of his grief that the gods turned him into a tree: an immortal cypress so that he could grieve forever. But then other of the internets say that Cypress trees are not only immortal but protective (here the arborvitae theme is foreshadowed, no?), so they're planted in cemeteries to guard the dead from demons. That seems more likely than the stag story, but of course you never know. So I will put Mr Vignali's picture up top. One does hope he gave the model a comfortable pillow to embrace, but artists are notoriously ruthless.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Absorbing a Setback -- Naps -- Deep Work & Deliberate Practice
Morning. Up before the sun today: for the first time since the solstice, I had to turn on lights to perform my morning ceremonies. A little sad for the waning of the light. I have, now, a late-found affection for summer and warm weather. Some combination of getting older and getting thinner: I tolerate heat much better than I did when I was younger and stouter.
Speaking of thinner and stouter, I dropped back below 160 lbs yesterday. During the stresses and disruptions of this Spring I went off the rails with my eating for a week or two, and skipped or reduced a bunch of my workouts, and found myself at 165 lbs, with a 34 1/2 inch waist. It's taken four weeks to bring things back to where I want them to be. One complexity is that I don't have a goal weight or waistline, any more. My goal is a relationship -- the hips measuring three inches more than the waist -- and what that may work out to, in absolute pounds and inches, I can't know until I get there. Plus, I don't know whether the three inch thing is really appropriate for my age. Some people think that more padding is to be desired, at my advanced age, but what they base that on is (so far as I know) a single study that shows that you die slower if you're fatter. I don't know that I want to die slower: I just want to die later. The active and healthy-looking old people I see are skinny as a rail. I suspect that's the way to go. Not having absolute numbers to aim for, though, is a bit of a psychological disadvantage. My graphs show me moving in the right direction: but the waist and hip measurements are mushier than the scale's. It will be nice when I have a simple stable number of pounds that I want to weigh.
Anyway -- to the purpose of my rather thought, as Mr Chaucer would say -- this is important to me because I had two criteria, from way back when I started this weight loss enterprise. One was, I had to keep the weight off for five years. The other was, that I had to be able to absorb a setback -- to go off the rails and get back on. For the first, well, I won't know for another three years whether I can declare success or not. But I seem to have demonstrated the second, now. I can recover from driving into the ditch, using exactly the same methods I used for the long march. They haven't magically become ineffective. (If that sounds absurd, well, it is: but it is also my experience of all the diets heretofore that have failed. Once they "broke" their effectiveness was wrecked.)
So -- that's all good.
The other thing: I'm learning, in earnest, to take naps. In experimenting, a la Cal Norman, with trying to make space for blocks of "deep work" in my schedule, I discovered something important: the problem was not so much that social media was sucking up my time as that I was too fatigued. That is, I was lingering on Facebook and so forth because I was too tired to do real work, and I was too tired because my nightly sleep is regularly broken -- BPE -- and I was never making up the deficit. So I'm learning to sleep in the day. So grateful for having the flexibility of schedule to make that possible. A huge luxury.
There are two things I want to focus "deep work" time on: "deliberate practice" of Spanish, and "deliberate practice" of massage. I have periodically little fits of anxiety and dismay about whether my massage is good enough, which have never been wired to actually doing anything to improve it. But it does get better when I study and practice it. There's nothing magical about it. It follows the same path as any other skill.
The anxiety is kind of stupid anyway, since it's already good enough, in practical terms: there's no way that the average kid just a year or two out of school is going to do work as effective as mine, and about half of the massage therapists out there are kids just a year or two out of school. From the business point of view, it hardly matters how good I am. It only matters from the point of how I feel about myself, and how I respond to anxiety. I'm sick of responding to anxiety about my worthiness with extravagant spiritual projects or literary enterprises that never quite happen. For more decades than I care to think about, my response to doubting my skills has been to work on a new and secret set of skills that I will someday unveil to the astonishment of the world. Screw that. I can just work on the things I actually do, and actually get better at them, right out in the light of day.
Speaking of thinner and stouter, I dropped back below 160 lbs yesterday. During the stresses and disruptions of this Spring I went off the rails with my eating for a week or two, and skipped or reduced a bunch of my workouts, and found myself at 165 lbs, with a 34 1/2 inch waist. It's taken four weeks to bring things back to where I want them to be. One complexity is that I don't have a goal weight or waistline, any more. My goal is a relationship -- the hips measuring three inches more than the waist -- and what that may work out to, in absolute pounds and inches, I can't know until I get there. Plus, I don't know whether the three inch thing is really appropriate for my age. Some people think that more padding is to be desired, at my advanced age, but what they base that on is (so far as I know) a single study that shows that you die slower if you're fatter. I don't know that I want to die slower: I just want to die later. The active and healthy-looking old people I see are skinny as a rail. I suspect that's the way to go. Not having absolute numbers to aim for, though, is a bit of a psychological disadvantage. My graphs show me moving in the right direction: but the waist and hip measurements are mushier than the scale's. It will be nice when I have a simple stable number of pounds that I want to weigh.
Anyway -- to the purpose of my rather thought, as Mr Chaucer would say -- this is important to me because I had two criteria, from way back when I started this weight loss enterprise. One was, I had to keep the weight off for five years. The other was, that I had to be able to absorb a setback -- to go off the rails and get back on. For the first, well, I won't know for another three years whether I can declare success or not. But I seem to have demonstrated the second, now. I can recover from driving into the ditch, using exactly the same methods I used for the long march. They haven't magically become ineffective. (If that sounds absurd, well, it is: but it is also my experience of all the diets heretofore that have failed. Once they "broke" their effectiveness was wrecked.)
So -- that's all good.
The other thing: I'm learning, in earnest, to take naps. In experimenting, a la Cal Norman, with trying to make space for blocks of "deep work" in my schedule, I discovered something important: the problem was not so much that social media was sucking up my time as that I was too fatigued. That is, I was lingering on Facebook and so forth because I was too tired to do real work, and I was too tired because my nightly sleep is regularly broken -- BPE -- and I was never making up the deficit. So I'm learning to sleep in the day. So grateful for having the flexibility of schedule to make that possible. A huge luxury.
There are two things I want to focus "deep work" time on: "deliberate practice" of Spanish, and "deliberate practice" of massage. I have periodically little fits of anxiety and dismay about whether my massage is good enough, which have never been wired to actually doing anything to improve it. But it does get better when I study and practice it. There's nothing magical about it. It follows the same path as any other skill.
The anxiety is kind of stupid anyway, since it's already good enough, in practical terms: there's no way that the average kid just a year or two out of school is going to do work as effective as mine, and about half of the massage therapists out there are kids just a year or two out of school. From the business point of view, it hardly matters how good I am. It only matters from the point of how I feel about myself, and how I respond to anxiety. I'm sick of responding to anxiety about my worthiness with extravagant spiritual projects or literary enterprises that never quite happen. For more decades than I care to think about, my response to doubting my skills has been to work on a new and secret set of skills that I will someday unveil to the astonishment of the world. Screw that. I can just work on the things I actually do, and actually get better at them, right out in the light of day.
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