The Horse Doesn't Even Get a Medal!

I realize now that I have made an error. I should have switched this blog over to an all Olympics theme while the Tokyo games are going on. I think it would have been fun because I know so very very little about sports. I would have written posts with titles like: “So Fencing is Still a Thing, Apparently” or “Dressage is an Olympic Event, but The Horse Doesn’t Get the Medal???”

Alas, I missed the boat on all that.

However, I was reading this morning about Simone Biles and how she pulled out of her gymnastic event the other day. I’ve got nothing but love for her and how great is it that she was willing to do that to safeguard her own mental health?! We should all be a little more like her.

I had heard yesterday that she referenced something colloquially called “the twisties” when she was explaining why she’d stepped back from competing. I’d assumed that this was a term that the kids use to mean “nerves” or performance anxiety or something along those lines. Like when I was young and did theater and would get super nervous right before going on stage. 

This morning though I discovered that that is not exactly what she’d meant. Amongst gymnasts the term “twisties” actually has a very specific meaning that the rest of us wouldn’t even understand. It has to do with performing the sort of twisting or flipping or rotational moves that gymnasts (especially at Biles’s level) do during their events. It is not uncommon that when making these fast and frequently airborne moves that an athlete can essentially lose track of where their body is in relation to their surroundings. 

I’d honestly neve thought about this before. If you leap through the air while flipping, obviously you need to know - know in your bones - where the various parts of your body are in relation to the floor so that you can get your feet to land on it. Your brain has to be making calculations and adjustments IN MID-AIR WHILE SPINNING! So if you lose track and get lost, you are in grave danger and it seems like a really good way to break your neck.

That is what a gymnast is talking about when they say “twisties”.

How insanely terrifying is that???

Apparently that is what Biles experienced the other day and so it isn’t simply a case of stage fright. It is more like flying a jet through the mountains and suddenly you go blind. So while I think all right thinking people were already sympathetic to the idea that She needed to step back for her own mental health, the reality is actually more than that: she was making a responsible decision based on the status she was getting from the jet that is her body. She had some warning lights going off and so she behaved accordingly. 

Can you imagine the discipline and self-awareness that it takes for someone as young as she is, at the pinnacle of her sport, and competing in the GD Olympics to make a decision that smart? To not be cowed by other people’s expectations? To not allow herself to be forced by ego and ambition to do something her body was telling her not to do? As a lifelong maker of bad and impulsive decisions, I’m really humbled thinking about it. Well done Miss Biles.

If you’d like to know more about ‘the twisties”, NPR has a pretty good article about it here.

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Be Best.

Yesterday when I posted I was feeling pretty down about my own lack of follow through when it came to building a more effective and productive life. I should mention that I am not one of those self-help-book-reading people who wants to maximize their output and vibrate into some sort of astral projected new plane of productivity. In fact, I tend not to like those people. All I’m looking to do here is be better. Be best.

The work of a life is never done until — you know — one day it suddenly is, and with great finality. Until then though, I think it is important that we should make efforts to build lives that we can both enjoy and be proud of.  That is a weirdly tall order. Both ENJOY and be PROUD of. We live in a society that requires us to have these jobs that consume so much of us, that exhaust us so, that most of us, all we have the bandwidth to do after them is eat crappy food and watch TV. If you’re lucky maybe you find love (or a close enough facsimile). Maybe you have kids and in them can find both joy and pride. So much of ourselves though we are forced to abandon along the side of the road of life. Some people make it work, I guess, squeeze their passions into “side hustles” or something like that. Or convince themselves that what brings them joy are actually childish things that must be put away.

None of this seems great.

It is almost as though we live in a system that prizes capital over people …

Zoom out from our own lives to everyone’s lives. What would a world look like if it wasn’t organized this way? What would a world look like if it was organized around people and not profit? I’m not trying to be a dorm room Marxist here. This is something I think about a lot. 

It probably would be a world with fewer cars and televisions, but a shitload more public access television shows. But who builds the cameras and the who strings the cables that move around the electricity to power those cameras? Who works at the power plant that makes the electricity? I’m sure there are probably people out there whose passion is running a nuclear reactor, but probably not enough of them to make this all work.

There is a fallacy that we have to choose between an electricity-less, pre-modern world or the one that we have now. As if those are the only two options. Discussions like this usually degenerate into those kind of blunt abstractions. 

Often I like to think on a world like ours, but better. We can keep our electricity, but it is solar and wind now. And yes, someone still has to run the power lines, but it is a hard job, so maybe they don’t have to work as much. Maybe we can just all agree to 20 hour work weeks instead of 40 hour work weeks. Or, as is the reality for so many people, 50, 60, 70 hour work weeks. I believe it really is possible to construct a way of life that cares about people and so reduces the size of our capital-focused activities. I believe we really can create a mode of socially organized life where working for a wage is only one of many parts of our lives. That society would have to be structured a little differently than ours and it would likely result in a world that physically looks a little different than ours (higher density housing, fewer cars, more communal spaces, community gardens, etc.). It would be a world where you can’t necessarily get a banana 12 months out of the year, but it would also be a world where Jeff Bezos doesn’t buy a second yacht to follow around his first yacht because the first yacht doesn’t have a place to land his helicopter. 

I’ve been thinking lately about the phrase, “From each based on ability, to each based on need” and even now, all these years after I first read it, I still think it is one of the most beautiful ideas I have ever heard of. I think we can nudge our lives closer to that idea. 

It would have to start with nudging one another. It would have to start by spreading the word a little, which is what I am doing here (to all of my non-existent readers).

This post was not supposed to unspool into my own take on post-late-capitalist utopianism. All I had planned to do was tell you that after feeling down about my life yesterday morning, I worked on getting my shit together a little. I worked hard at work. I ate clean all day. After work I went running even though it was cold (I ran a 10k and my time was TERRIBLE!) and then I made a simple dinner and then I read a book for a while and then I went to bed on time. Yesterday was one of my (treasured, but hard to pull off) RWR days, where I ran, wrote, and read all in one day.

I worked at making my own life a little better yesterday and I will try to do the same thing today. Living a good day is like adding a dash of hope to the next day. So this morning I have a little more hope than I did yesterday morning. Maybe that’s why I’m thinking on a world that is better. 

I hope your day is better today and I hope it makes your life a little better.

Be better.

Be best.

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Day 1 (For Real).

Okay, today is the day I am getting things back on track.

I have refined my daily schedule a little more. There is no junk food in my apartment. There is no wine in my apartment. I have pretty clean food to eat this week. I have vitamins and supplements on the way. I have engineered what should be a relatively low impact work week. My running gear is all set out and ready to go for this afternoon. There are books to read set out in my living room. More than all that, I have tentative plans to travel with vaccinated friends to a beautiful lake house in June, which means that I have a whole month to clean up my life and maybe even lose a little of this quarantine weight before I spend time around people again, so that maybe I don’t have to feel so terrible about my body.

So I have a plan and a goal and a timeline. 

Does it get better than that?

I even moved my dusty sit-up bench into my home office where I work all day so that I have to LOOK AT IT all day long. I know how I am and I can make myself do sit-ups if the thing is right there all the time. 

What I have learned over the last few months (having several bad moths and one good one) is that I do genuinely feel better when I living cleaner. I love me some potato chips, I love me some red wine, but I also love being someone who can go trail run a 10k without any real preparation. I like being someone who doesn’t pull their pants up over their little belly bump while they are sitting at the computer. I like being someone who can carry groceries up the stairs without feeling a little winded. I think that I would like being someone who is comfortable talking his shirt off around other people (a type of person I have never been even once).

I’m in my 40s now and this is when the decisions you make really make a difference. I was really fat in my early 20s and I managed to work off that weight. In my 30s I learned that I like to run and backpack and be outside and I learned how to eat better and pay attention to food and that combination of things helped me stay at least a little lean. Now though, I work an office job, I have weathered the anxiety and depression and loneliness of the last year, and I can feel all of that made physical in the way my body looks and feels and so I can’t just keep doing what I did in my 30s, this body won’t let me coast on that anymore, so I have to become actually serious about this stuff. So let’s consider everything so far this year as test runs; the good months and the bad ones, they helped me to figure out what I need to be doing.

Now is the time to actually do it all.

I need to use both hands to keep my work life inside its box and I need to keep myself motivated enough to stick with the clean living long enough that it becomes habit. That will probably take a few weeks to get rolling.

You want to hear something silly? I have even printed up little signs and posted them around my apartment. They are not motivational, so much as they are reminders that I have plans, goals, and a timeline.

Does it get better than that?

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My Ideal No-Bullshit Work Day Schedule.

 

This will have to be a brief post because I slept in a bit today because sometimes I get to do that! Get off my back about it, I was tired.

This week I am trying to get back onto that schedule I designed a while ago and which was working for at least a month before my job ate my life again. It really did have me healthier and feeling better, so here is the schedule. I have not been able to quite live up to the ambition of it yet, but I am going to take another run at it starting this week.

Ideal No-Bullshit Work Day Schedule

6:00     Wake up

6:00-6:30     Yoga

6:30-6:45     Shower/Clean up

6:45-8:15     Daily Drawing & Blog Post

8:15-8:30     Breakfast/Prep for work

8:30-     Work  

                    Work

                    Work

5:00     Work

5:00-5:15     Run prep

5:15-6:30     GO RUN!

6:30-7:00     Shower/clean up

7:00-8:00     Dinner (Make & Eat)

8:00-9:00     Write and/or Read

9:00-10:00    Journal/Free time

10:00     Go to bed

I know it looks a little over-planned, but that is what I actually need. I have this tacked up in my kitchen so at any moment I can go look at it and say, “Well shit, I guess I have to go do that right now.”

If I can keep my job in it’s 8 hour-a-day box and also keep myself from simply wasting all of my time on Twitter, then I know that this will ultimately work for me. The difficulty is getting to that point. But running up a hill is harder than running down one. So let’s get started.

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To Breakfast Margaritas.

 

So it has been a few days. I told you I was going to have a rough week and let me tell you, a rough week was had.

But I have (so far) survived and now it is Friday and my day should be fairly unexceptional today and that is all I am hoping for.

I should be able to start transitioning back to my normal/better schedule; doing things like this in the morning, working only a 8-hour day, then running and cooking real food in the evening. I’ll need to spend some time really re-tying to devise a way to insulate my life from the invasion of my work life into my personal life. It simply is not acceptable that this keeps happening. I took the job I have for several reasons, but one was specifically because I thought it would fit into a 40 hour week and that has not turned out to be the case. So I may have to reassess some things.

That being said, I don’t mean to sound like I’m bitching. I recognize that I still have it much easier than lots of people out there in the world, but I also am acknowledging that I have some responsibilities to myself here too. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I’d like to live a life with a baseline somewhere around or slightly above the median quality.” No one is ever going to put that on a t-shirt, nor should they.

How though, do we determine what we do want?

I suppose the answer to that is probably quite easy: we want what we want. You know what you want because it is simply the thing that you want.

That isn’t an entirely satisfying answer though. I mean, it is 7:22 in the morning and what I actually WANT is to be sitting at the roulette table at the El Cortez in Downtown Las Vegas, drinking a breakfast margarita and flirting with the working girls, but I recognize that is not the basis for a good and fulfilling life. So sometimes you can’t really trust what you want. Or at least you can’t trust what that will get you.

Look, I know that in this little blog post this morning I’m not going to come up with a workable framework for determining what constitutes a life worth living, but I suspect this is an iterative process and that the repetition is what makes the progress happen.

So I’ll see you tomorrow.

(Probably not though because tomorrow is Saturday and I don’t usually blog on Saturday, so I will see you Monday. Unless I do somehow end up at the El Cortez by then.)

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