The Things We Eat

According to an NPR story even though Americans are exercising more, more Americans than ever are obese.

Americans are again one of the most obese countries in the world. This strikes close to home for me, as I have have been overweight since the age of six. A quick survey of my father's fridge, freezer and pantry leads to one very obvious problem. Even though my dad has a mostly healthy diet since his stroke several years ago I found only ONE fresh vegetable anywhere: the broccoli I bought. There is more fresh fruit than I would expect, apples, oranges and bananas. There is also a tomato and an onion and some garlic. He has lost about ten pounds in the years since his stroke, and that's after quitting drinking. So what's the problem?

If you aren't eating vegetables, you are filling your stomach with something less than spectacular. Pita chips and hummus is my weakness. My dad enjoys tortilla chips. In order to lessen the effect of random acts of food I have moved to a five meals a day plan.

Of course, I still don't eat enough vegetables.

It seems to me that one of the main causes of obesity is the average portion size of an American meal.

Solution: (1) Five meals a day, smaller meals at each mealtime. (2) Three to five servings of vegetables per day.

Obstacle: Fewer local growers than ever before. Americans are supermarket fanatics. Our fridges are generally bigger than our European counterparts. The ideal situation would be having a corner store, like in Italy.

My solution: If I don't have fresh vegetables in the fridge I will walk to Albertsons to get some. This way I get fresh vegetables and exercise too.

This is NOT a Test

Time to step it up and work on my physical health.

So here's the deal. I have studied enough improvement and motivational books to be an amateur life coach. Of course, who wants to live an amateur life? Regardless, I clearly have an interest in this sort of product or service, and most of the time I can talk to someone and recommend one of a hundred books, programs, seminars or other related technology that will help them get from where they are at to where they want to go. More importantly, I actually enjoy helping people find an honest road to goals in tune with their life situations. Is this something I can do seriously or professionally? Not yet. Why? Good question.

First of all is my physical shape. I am overweight at best and obese at worst. In my teens this was a problem because it made me seriously depressed. In my twenties it was a problem because it meant I had fewer sexual partners than I would have liked to have (this is subjective of course). On the edge of thirty I am starting to be more concerned with the health issues of carrying around over a hundred extra pounds of weight. My knees have been injured in the past and they are getting worse every step I take. I am getting back pain for no apparent reason. But worst of all are the things I can't see or feel - fat deposits around my organs, diabetes risk, heart disease risk.

Having taken a quick but ruthless self-examination this is one of my biggest barriers to having a healthy balanced life (I believe balance is one of the most important aspects of a life well lived, and I will go into my ideas of what balance means in the future). In order for me to achieve success on every level I have to strive to step up the parts of my life that out of synch with the rest of my life. The first of these parts was my financial health, and since I now have gainful hourly employment and the starts of a business as well the next major goal is to get my physical health up to par.

Project P90X

Vision: I am committed to this program. I will work the program every day in the morning with the proper equipment. When it comes to individual exercises I will give my best, but not push myself to the point of injury or health risks. I will also get enough rest every night, getting at least seven hours of sleep. I have used a training nutrition program before, and I will use this same program (which I will describe later).

Next Action: Procure the proper equipment by July 1, 2010. On this date I will start the program and post my before pictures.

An Unalterable Commitment

I will go into the title of this post a bit later on. As of right now I am detailing a new project: the books I will read before I hit 30. Based on this list I found on this list. Both very good lists.

When I read the 30 before 30 list I was depressed to see how many fine books escaped my attention throughout the years. Some of these books I have read part of, but very few I have finished. I was also surprised that I have a B.A. in English focusing on Contemporary Literature without having read War and Peace.

So here they are in the order I plan on reading them, and a few notes about each:

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
I've read most of this one already, so it's a slam dunk first book. Complicated poetry? No problem. Eliot's The Waste Land was the subject of at least four papers (all with different theses) at Berk.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau
NOT EASY, NOT SHORT. I've tried reading this wholly twice now, and failed both times. But the rhetoric contained in this book is very prevalent in a green society.

1984 by George Orwell
Read all but the last thirty pages in Jr. College. Good recovery from Walden.

To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee
No problem.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
I don't know much about this one. I expect it to be complicated and full of satire and allusion.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The beast. If I finish this before September I will consider myself on track.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Great book, on my list because it's been like fourteen years since I have read it.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Great book (again), and I've read bits and pieces. I know it will be hard tog et anything from this one without some kind of analysis.

The Wisdom of the Desert by Thomas Merton
Never heard of it.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Two never "heard of it" in a row. It's a gamble on this one.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickins
The magician?

Catch 22 by Joseph Helley
Looking forward to this on.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
How have I never read this? I must be afraid that I am a Manchurian candidate or something.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I have read this book. But it was for school. So I skipped around a bit >>:)

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
As above >>>:)

Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Like the Salinger, again, how?

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Read this one about ten years ago.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Never heard of it.

The Republic by Plato
Why am I ending with what will likely be the most difficult to consume text on the list? I can only imagine War and Peace being more difficult than Plato's masterwork.

If I finish all these before February 23, 2011 (thirty.. shit...) I will come up with some sort of amazing achievement award. Sex in a library sounds appropriate. With the cougar librarian who is staring me down as I read Plato's Republic? I think so.

Two Professors

Two professors were walking behind me on my way home to TKE today. The conversation went something like this:

"Yes, but polarity is important so you can see the electron valence and..."
"Sure, it's important, and according to the Aufbau principle, the electrons of an atom occupy quantum level..."

Or something like this. I know very little about chemistry and even less about the atom. But I was struck at the historicity of this discussion (I can't rightly call it an argument since I could not distinguish two sides even though it may have been exactly that). But the historicity was readily apparent. This was not an undergraduate discussion, this was a discussion that was years in the making with multiple lectures, notes, experiments and textbooks involved in order for these two men two effortlessly talk about a subject in such a way that it was basically a different language for me.

That's when I realized what the life of a scholar or theorist meant. It meant continuously training the mind until one can speak about fetishization, reliquaries, the trafficking between thing and object, Platonics, tropes and instantly realized obsolescence until you are well-versed in what basically accounts for the language of an intellectual microsociety. And I wondered if that was what I want before I realized that I was already on the road leading to a world of theorizing and critically analyzing every aspect of life as it is lived.

And I decided that life is a grand adventure. Beyond that, it is also something that can be analyzed and dissected. But this is a spice one must use sparingly. Some analysis makes you positive you get life, you really get it. In fact, you are getting more out of life at every minute than most people are. And you are happy about that, not because it makes you better, but because it makes the world better. But at some point you analyze something too much, you see the joke so clear that it is no longer funny. You understand the recipe so well that the joy of the mysterious aroma is dead. Life becomes death at the moment you know everything about it.

So a toast to those of us who know just enough to know that we don't want to know too much more. And a sad lament to those who have gone so far down the road without knowing where it leads only to realize at the last moment that they can't turn back.

Of course, no one can ever turn back. Being on the road has it's perils.

My New Favorite Movie (after Fight Club)

In the last three days I have watched Donnie Darko several times. I have not watched it all the way through every time, but I certainly have noticed that every scene has infinite meaning compacted into it. My two favorite scenes are first the scene where it cuts back and forth from Donnie burning down the Cunningham house and second the first montage showing the character of the school. I will be discussing the shot where Donnie burns down the house.

The shot begins with Donnie leaving the movie theater, and over his shoulder is the marquee displaying the movies The Evil Dead and The Last Temptation of Christ. Donnie Darko is set in 1988, Evil Dead came out in 1981 and Last Temptation DID come out in 1988. Donnie has a sick little grin on his face, and there seems to be a question of which marquee is actually the caption to Mr. Darko. Is he a Christ-Like figure, or he is simply the conglomeration of horrific comedy? This is the central argument to the entire movie, is Donnie actually crazy, or is he able to mold reality to his own liking? This question cannot be answered with a review of this scene alone, and there are arguments to both sides. The importance is not the question itself, but to how much we can identify or impose the question on our own lives. Are we crazy, or can we make a difference? Is there one possibility in the infinite amount of possibilities that we can choose?

Moving forward we cut scene to the talent show that Donnie's little sister Sam is performing in. This show is the complete antithesis of the question inherent in Donnie's character. For the audience is not filled with people who ask these sort of questions, the audience is filled with gawkers laughing at the artistic portrayal in dance by Sherita who have likely never questioned reality or their subjective place in reality. These are the other's, people who will never be able to understand Donnie or reality in any way other than it is different and therefore beyond their scope.

I could go into much more detail, but for the sake of brevity I will skip ahead to the part I particularly enjoy. It's when Sparkle Motion starts their dance. Their dance is perfectly anti-personality. All the girls look the same, move the same, are dressed the same, and have the same facial expression-blank (the same as the people in the airplane escape manuals in Fight Club). They cease to be human and represent only that spectacle for which the audience can understand because the spectacle is all they know. As a friend of mind says, how can you ask a fish to describe water? The people watching the show are the fish, the spectacle is the water. They don't see it, because they can't see it! (By the way, friend, you can learn to see things completely different with an internal reference point) The girls are robots, that is why they sparkle and move. Is that all humanity is?! To these people, yes. The spectacle has reduced them to a point where all they desire is to sparkle (appearance) and go through the motions (to be an object).

I haven't even got to the fire and everything going on when that happens. I will have to do that in a subsequent post.

My Former Co-Worker

So I used to work with this gal named Loma. I say Gal because she surely wasn't a girl, yet she had somehow retained enough of the boisterous energy so often found in that race that I would feel uncomfortable calling her a lady. Loma was hot blooded, not in the typical quick-to-temper manner, but in as that she was always hot. She had to have a fan pointed at her at all times, and she would complain profusely and with as little tact as possible and in the most passive-aggressive way possible. This consisted of commenting on how hot she was constantly, and asking if the temperature on the thermostat was set at the right level. This inevitably involved her turning down the thermostat to increase the cold air blowing on her from every direction possible. And on it would go until someone noticed that the office was freezing. At this point, one of her co-workers would come out and complain first about the air-condition and then about Loma because she was always turning the AC on too high. Our boss was always concerned because she wanted to save money, and the girl that complained was the girl who was most likely the most deceptive and egotistical in the office. She wanted a promotion every three months, was looking for something to brag about, something to tell people was important enough about her so that she could feel better about herself, something to convince her small mind that she was better than you when deep down what she really believed was that she wasn't better than anyone; or at least she wasn't worth a damn until mommy or daddy told her that she was. I of course never noticed all these things at the time, because I was far too ignorant to notice these things day in and day out.

Now day I notice these things, not day in and day out, but moments like these when you think about a person and see past all appearances to the things that really motivates them. I see this, and I ask myself, how can one not be a pessimist? Dear reader, did you like the people that I described above? Well let me tell you something, the first gal was one of the most caring mothers on earth, she would watch her grandson at any time, would brag about her son constantly, and would do anything for her daughter-in-law that she would ask for. The girl was one of the friendliest, charming and charismatic girl you had ever seen, and she was at the time dating my brother. You could not have asked for better people to surround yourselves with.

Witch brings me to the boss. A woman it is still hard for me to find faults in. She owned apartment buildings, threw parties whom she welcomed people from all over the place too, and over-indulged all her employees. I can't tell you how many free lunches (fresh sushi nonetheless), contacts and bonuses I received from this woman. Did I mention I was paid for the lunches? Did I mention she bought me a plane ticket to Oklahoma, and gave me a week to go to Oklahoma and be with my girlfriend? This woman cared so much for the people around her that they would do almost anything she asked them to do.

Yes, these are real people. The complexity of character is not so much shocking as unbelievable. The effort it takes to see these things all at once is alarming; not one of the characteristics would naturally point to all the others. This is the reality of complexities of character. Not every unique character trait points to every other character trait in that person; one may point to one, which may point to another, and another, and another on down the line until you can go from saint to sinner in a metaphysical game of 6 Degrees of Separation. This is how Loma could be the selfish worker and the doting mother in the same person. This is how the other girl (whose name completely escapes me) can go from loving and charming girlfriend to conniving courtier in the same person.

We are not one dimensional, two dimensional or three dimensional. We are the living embodiment of infinite dimensionality... of character.

The boss owned apartment buildings that she rented at a comically high rate to those who were looking for the status symbols to get that promotion they were hunting for in their jobs. She threw parties for her elite circle-peopled by those as rich as her-and invited her lower income friends to some of them so that she could remind the rich people that she still cared about people less fortunate than her, over-indulged her employees so that they would do whatever she wanted for her, gave away free lunches and vacations so that she could keep her businesses in the red (and usable as a write off from the money she made renting apartments). She also gave me a week of vacation so that she could test out other writers without committing to that fact that she was looking for a new writer. It was genius; look for a new writer while keeping the college student on staff in order to have enough time to decide if it was worth keeping on staff for the measly paycheck I earned every week. I was also paid under the table; I don't want to go into how many benefits this was for her.

After I got back she told me she had to hire an outside writer to do some work while I was away. I told her she could have called me and I would have done it while on vacae, but she was sweeter than honey and she didn't want to bother me. The next time it was because we were all over-booked and she didn't want to give me any extra work. I understood-and it was another way she could see how far down she could turn the thermostat.

One day I want from writing press releases to doing graphical work and calling radio stations. I didn't feel the cold air. I had just gotten out of high school, and I had no idea how the world worked. I also didn't want to spend so much time seeing how the world worked. Hindsight is 20/20. I thought I learned a lot while I worked there, I realize I learned a lot more after I left.

And me? Well I was personally happy to take the vacation-I was going to get laid a lot. I also didn't mind working less-I was able to avoid traffic by coming in later. I didn't really care about the company, the people in it were cool, and I liked the cash I was getting paid. I was also happy I had my own office so I could play stupid video games when I knew I could get away with it. I didn't care about that office-it had nothing to do with me at the time.

Of course, it did. And for all the time it took me to figure this out, I wonder how long it will take me to figure out the lessons I am learning right now. Experience is invaluable.

Goodnight.

On Writing

Marx said: "The writer naturally must make money in order to live and write, but he should not under any circumstances live and write in order to make money"

I have forgotten this recently.

DJ always said that he chose not to be a writer because he wasn't good enough to make money from it. This was true. But what he forgot was the purpose of writing was not to make money, and therefore a writer is not someone who makes money from writing. The greatest art ever created was not created for any other reason than it forced it's way from the artists soul through his ego and burst from his brain because it could not be withheld. That is to say, it was created for the ease of the artist and no one else.

There are no ends to art, art is an end in itself (Rivera).

So the reality was the DJ never chose to not be a writer, he was just really good at forcefully imprisoning those things within him that needed creation. He was not a writer also because he forgot the reason to write. For his entire life he thought writing was about quality, to show a presentable and pleasing form that evoked some sort of emotion from his audience. But *slap* there is no audience in art's perception, only in the fool's belief's is an audience necessary.

In a world full of liars, the biggest crime is lying to yourself. Lying to yourself means you don't think you deserve to see the truth. As soon as you realize this, you are slapped. Or not really, you are just hopeful.

So this brings us to emancipation. The veins pop at the very thought of the world, the effort upon which it fights constantly to stifle emancipation. This is not a societal struggle, it is the struggle of one man.