one thing I learned at the therapeutic boarding school I worked at 7 years ago

 This school was the first time I heard the phrase "cannot distinguish other people's emotions from their own."

There were some boys there who were working on differentiating their own feelings from the feelings of people around them. So like if they saw another boy who was sad or angry or frustrated then they would assume they also felt that way.

When I first heard about it I thought it was the wildest thing. How could you possibly mistake someone else's feelings for your own? That's like thinking something someone else said was something that you said. 

Now I don't think it's such an out-there concept. Today I was thinking about not letting other people's stress become my stress. And, in turn, not stressing other people out with the stress I got from someone else. 

I AM A RIVER! I AM A FRESH SUMMER BREEZE!

 Sometimes when you're 33 and you start practicing to get better at jumping you learn things that you feel like you're too old to have learned. I've been doing these things called 'pogos' a lot which is where you jump with your legs pretty straight and you try to bounce basically instead of bending your knees every time. Anyway I was really bad at them at first and recently I've started to realize that if you sort of anticipate the landing with your feet and ankles you can get an extra little push into the ground. It's hard to put into words but it's been one of many discoveries. 

I'm gonna go watch Bob Beamon's Olympic long jump

be present. be your best self

 camp is fast approaching and I'm starting to think about all the things I could be planning and preparing and that can feel overwhelming but then I remember that most of the best things I've ever done were not planned out well in advance but came out of a spontaneous moment where I was really paying attention to what was going on and open to the spark of the moment.

my big goals for the summer are

1) be present as much as possible. specifically, recognizing when I can do the most good at any given moment.

2) react calmly when stressful and unexpected things happen

3) build a culture of attentiveness and chaotic goodness

my door swells shut

 my door has started to do this thing where something about the heat and humidity causes the door to swell or the frame to shrink or something but basically I can't get out of my apartment with just one hand. I pull and pull and then I use both hands and I still can't get out. And then I have to throw my whole body into the door to try to break the seal and then it opens very easily.

AND THEN there was this time I found an earwig on my kitchen countertop so I put it in a plastic bowl and was going to take it outside but my door was sealed shut so I was furiously trying to open the door with one hand as it was sealed shut and with the other hand I was holding the bowl with the earwig in it and the earwig kept trying to crawl up the sides of the bowl and get to my hand so I had to keep readjusting it so it wouldn't get me and it almost broke me.

the scorpions were on the radio

And the Scorpions make me think of my dad because he likes the Scorpions and then after that the George Thorogood version of "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" came on which also makes me think of my dad because we quote lines from it nearly every time we see each other and we have since I was in like middle school or something. Which is pretty funny that we've joked about this song where this guy is a deadbeat and has no place to live and goes to a bar and gets blasted out of his mind.

I said I know.

Everybody funny.

Now you funny, too.  

may

 the way I remember May is that it's the month that's asking the question

"may you go on to summer?" And the answer is yes, you may. When? June!

getting better at jumping

 when I was in 3rd grade they had us fill out this survey about ourselves and then they told us they were going to give it back to us at the end of 5th grade and we'd be surprised by how much we'd changed.

And I remember thinking in third grade, 'ha! nice try. you won't get me! I'm gonna remember this stuff.'

And then I got it back at the end of the 5th grade and had zero memory of writing down that my favorite activity was JUMPING. 5th grade me even thought that was kind of a lame answer.

Well 33 year old me thinks it's an awesome answer and it's time that 5th grade me takes a backseat because GUESS WHAT? We're working on jumping again.

everything is so green and alive

 I mean this stuff is good

It's good out

like really good

are you seeing this? are your eyes open to the splendor?

cuz buddy it's happening right now

when? everywhere

where? right now

drink it in!

I don't like AI

 I think it's dumb and stupid and bad and gross

now when I Google questions instead of seeing search results I get this AI overview thing

terrible

so then I started testing it

if I search 'what's the largest country on Earth' I get an AI overview

but if I ask 'how many stomach a cow got?' then I think it's too weirdly phrased and so Google just does its normal thing

but then I tried 'which country of them the most biggest one' it gave me the same AI overview as before

so I don't know. I am more than willing to completely alter my phrasing and vocabulary to try to thwart it

Feed the Cats

 this is one of those long rambly posts that's really just for me but whatareyougonnadoyaknow?

For the past 2 months I've been looking into sprinting training and trying to learn more about how to coach/improve sprinting and speed. Pretty quickly you'll come across something called "Feed the Cats" which is this program developed by this high school coach named Tony Holler. 

Feed the Cats is the opposite of how I developed as a runner. I looked like an 11 or 12 year old until I was about 17. Growing up I never felt like I was someone who was naturally talented or athletic, probably because I was way smaller than everyone else. The one thing I was good at that other people seemed to not enjoy as much was running a lot and putting in a lot of work. I think before my sophomore, junior, and senior year I ran more miles over the summer than anyone else on the cross country team. I won the most improved award my sophomore and junior year at the end of the season. The longer the race and the harder the course, I would do better and better relative to everyone else on the team. It's the classic you get out of it what you put into it and I think it affected me more than anything else in my life at the time. I put a lot of my identity into being someone that works hard and puts in long hours that other people aren't willing to put in.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. It got me a long way. It got me all the way to my 30s before I started thinking things like, "I don't think this easy 10 mile run is really doing anything for me." It got me to the 10 miler this year where I knew my training had been really good and I checked the mileage and intensity boxes and ran the worst time ever (the weather was maybe a larger factor but whatever). It got me to playing capture the flag in the summer last year and realizing, "man, I'm SLOW" 

What I'd told myself was that I couldn't get by on athleticism and that my route was hard work hard work hard work and that I'd eventually be able to out work other people. And in the process of that I think I lost whatever athleticism I did have.

In college I was doing my thing of running hard nearly every day and trying to run a lot of miles and it felt like on any given week I could race an 800 in about 2:08 or 2:09. It was something I raced a lot in high school and even though I had gotten away from a lot of that training I could still pull it out when I had to. Earlier this Fall I would struggle to run 2:20 pace for 500 meters. I would run a 500 and a 300 with a 3 to 4 minute rest between and the combined 800 time would be about 2:18. I was doing more or less similar training but I'd lost the ability to be fast.

And you could say, 'well aging is just like that. what you really gotta do is move up the marathon where it's all about endurance.' But that sounds awful to me. If something feels wrong, why make the ruts in the path even deeper? I don't feel older. I think I want to let go of something that isn't serving me anymore.

Maybe a reasonable person would look at all this and think, 'well gosh why's it so important anyway?' but when you get into running and you see your weekly mileage numbers go up and you're running longer than you've ever run before and you're setting PR's and beating people you used to lose to and winning (?!) races it's like the most affirming, identity building--you're gonna be chasing that high for the rest of your life. Or until you're 33. 

But anyway Tony Holler of Feed the Cats would look at all that mileage and all that effort and hard work and, what he would call "conditioning" and say, "Of course you're slower now, all that work killed your athleticism and speed." His philosophy centers around peak speed and athleticism. He wants athletes to be as fresh as possible, running as fast as possible as often as possible. It's the antithesis of my work hard all the time and be a little to a lot tired all the time approach. He wants racehorses, not workhorses.

And two or three years ago I would've looked at that and said, "But I'm a workhorse!" I need a lot of volume because if I'm not working hard then I'm automatically going to get beat by everyone who's more talented. Which, maybe that's true but two things have changed since then:

1) I really don't care if I run another 60 or 70 mile week again. I know I can do it. I did it for a whole year. I could go out and run a 100 mile week but it would just make me really tired. It wouldn't be the fun challenge that it was my junior year of college. 

2) Climbing has taught me that I can still improve at new skills. I don't have to be a distance runner for all my days forever more. I can get better at things I thought that I had no affinity for. And that's fun.

Even as I'm writing all this, a part of me from high school and college is thinking, man you sold out. you lost the way. what do you mean you don't care about mileage anymore? what about once a runner? what about the trial of miles? you're soft now.

To which I'd say, the whole point was to get better! Mileage was a means to an end. To improve! I know I put in a block of work that can stand next to any other season in my life and I didn't get better! At some point you just have to be honest with yourself. 

I feel like I've done a poor job of explaining Feed the Cats but you can look it up if you want. I've been watching his videos nonstop for the past day and a half and it's made me reflect on everything I've been writing: who I am, what are my beliefs when it comes to sports, what makes a good athlete. 

The thing I love about Tony Holler is he seems like a guy who's doing it right. He cares about performance. He cares about discipline and intentional effort and most importantly he cares about a program that serves his athletes and makes them better at doing something they love doing. I had the unspoken belief that sprinting was something I wasn't any good at and was incapable of getting better at and good sprinters are just born with it. And now I'm at a place where I can see the road map of how I would go about trying to get better.

Be an athlete!

somebody cut the lock on the gate and broke into camp :/

 that's lame, dude

they didn't do anything but still

lame

you wouldn't know what to say to yourself

 

 

may10

 

 tape two french fries together make em bigger

tape two french fries together make one bigger fry

use tape and now a fry of double the width can be crafted

twice as much

tape two french fries together them them big fry

buy tape

buy french fries

must be more than one

tape two fry make one

people say the tape doesn't stick to the fry

an invitation to smash the fries together into a mass of potato

just like entropy

it releases heat

here's some things that I think would be cool if my generation started doing

 more pack formation. like the way previous generations centered around the idea of the nuclear family, I think it would be really cool if we focused more on wolf packs. packing up.

estimating wrong. I always thought it was really dumb and kind of insulting that every few years in school we had to learn how rounding and estimating works. Like "if you wanted to round up 256 to the nearest ten, what would it be?" That's stupid. Just tell the person 256. Or you could also say 250. It doesn't matter. I never liked it and I still don't. 

get really into sequins. just seems like a market we could really take over if we wanted to. "THESE ARE FOR US NOT FOR YOU!"

destroying things we don't like. we should just destroy things. like buildings or whatever. And I know that's a crime and bad but no one ever considers the violence and destruction that went into making all the terrible buildings that no one likes. Destroying forests and wildlife is a violence that's regulated and deemed permissible but it's still awful and destructive. Right? 

In every house there should be a puke calendar and whenever anyone pukes in the house you mark it on the calendar and it lives in the basement with the circuit breakers and whatever and when you move you don't bring it with you it just stays there.

in every town there should be a bad guy who is always causing trouble and if you want you can try to catch them and if you do they throw a parade for you and the bad guy has to stay home for one week until they can be a bad guy again

that's all I got for now. I think these ideas are really good and everyone within like 5 to 10 years of my age should start living by these rules and I think it will really...I think it would mean just as much as if you did anything else but, despite that, things must still exist anyway.

point of art

 ask people what the point of art is and you'll probably get a bunch of nimbly pimbly answers like

I don't know

and

art doesn't have a point

and

to affect people emotionally in some way

or 

communicate ideas through a medium

or something like that which I think is lame. The point of art that I like the best is to give you permission. Art succeeds when it gives someone else permission to make the art or do the thing they have been wanting to do.

Art is a hammer not a ravioli. That's what I'm trying to say. 

You can eat a ravioli yum yum and that's fine but that's not what art is. What do you do with a hammer?

You pick it up and drive sharpened steel into planks of lumber.

You wouldn't just look at a hammer, a mighty sledge, and go, "wow gosh em gee that sure is nice."

And I'm not trying to say that art has to be practical in any way. Regardless of practicality or purpose, art should flip some switch inside you that makes you want to do a thing you maybe didn't even know you wanted to do. Art can reveal the nails you've been meaning to pound and give you the tool to do it.

I'm also not saying it's a perfect 1 to 1 relationship. Like if you see a painting you like and now you want to make paintings like that. It can be. But it could also be a song that gives you permission to think and act a certain way. Or a sculpture whose process inspires your own process. 

The process of making something is "doing something" and so it doesn't make sense to me why the appropriate response should be "receiving". Doing begets doing. 

photo-shoot fresh. looking like wealth.