opera used car salesman

I just saw this video of this guy standing in front of a Corvette at a used car lot and pitching it while singing opera

this used corvette

it was a dream to drive

it can be yours

for the small price

come here now

ask for Andrew

It was really good, the guy can actually sing. And it's funny because of the contrast and all. And someone in the comments was like 'Shame that this guy has to sell used cars instead of singing.'

Which is true and I agree BUT, at the same time, it is also absolutely true that if that guy was just straight up singing opera in a opera house, opera-style that same person wouldn't care. Not nearly as many people would care. 

It's why T-Pain sang with auto tune even though he can actually sing well. No one cares about another guy who can sing well.

It's why I put paintings on craigslist free stuff. 

The juxtaposition is more important than the parts themselves.

Don't be a big fish in a small pond. Or a small fish in a big pond. 

Be the right fish in the wrong pond. 

what do you want to run a business?

 you want to run a multi-national corporation? or be in charge of a bank or large sums of money and assets? Is that your aspiration in life? To command respect and power through capital? To exploit the weak and people who have enough sense to know that they have to share this planet with everyone and to take what they need and be grateful for what they have? None of that appeals to you? Your just want to grow and grow like a tumor and have conspicuous wealth and bankrupt the environment and make the world a worse place for everyone who comes after? You want to fill with pus like a festering sore and create the conditions for atrocities to take place on the daily like a well-oiled machine? Constant growth is an aberration. And its fruits are on display for all to see. 

Assembling Raw Data into a Storyline

 I run the climbing league at the gym and the main challenge is taking the data from the climbs people do and converting that into points and then taking those points and crafting a story out of it. You want people to be invested and excited about the outcome. There's not much inherently exciting about it because you don't see the action as its happening. It's like narrating a sporting event where you only ever see the scores instead of the home runs or touchdowns or alley-oops themselves. 

And so as part of that narrative I've crafted a persona as a fraught and capricious commissioner who is fast and loose with wielding his authority and intentionally stirs the pot. I try to incite as much drama as possible because the worst thing people can be is bored.

The problem is when people want to participate in the bit and accost me and call into question the validity of the whole operation and do the very same dramatic narrative crafting that I'm trying to do but I get overwhelmed and defensive and, on the whole, too sensitive about it.

But that's okay. 

The test of a true rabble-rouser is that even he grows to fear the rabble he hath roused.

what did I make on this day in 2015?

 

I made this comic when I was 23 years old, in the middle of student teaching which I often tell people was the worst time in my life but at least I made this comic. 

mark my words

 I will do my taxes this year. As I have done every year since I was born.

And I will bring you along for the ride.

What new awful things will TurboTax do this year? 

Stay tuned and find out.

Vote in the comments for when you think I should do my taxes.

The top comment will be considered unless I don't want to do my taxes that day. 

I'll negotiate with the top comment for when I do my taxes. And then ridicule or ignore the lower comments.

this is going to be a pretty boring post about sprint training

 BUT stick around until the end and I will pay my electric bill and renew my vehicle registration!

got back on the track today after about a month-long hiatus. took video of myself.

times were not great so I was frustrated in the moment BUT I also got video and upon watching it back a few times and comparing it to older videos I realized that I'm doing a much better job of extending and straightening my leg as it's coming down into the ground. So that's good. Even while being moody and just trying to run 'hard', my form still noticeably improved.

my big goal for the year is to break 12 seconds in the 100 meters and the biggest form change I'm going to focus on is keeping my leg straight while landing. that's going to make me run 'taller' and also my center of mass will pass over a straight leg faster than a bent squishy leg which equals faster running.

Steps to straighten my leg while sprinting: mentally cue it and practice running with exaggerated form. straight leg one legged hops for distance. sprinting while trying to keep my legs straight. doing can-cans. modifying the speed drills I already do to focus on keeping a straight leg. 

I'm pretty sure the need to bend my legs comes from having weak hamstrings so I'm going to continue strengthening my hamstrings with deadlifts and hamstring curls. also banded kicks.

I'm confident the strength training and drills I'm doing are helping me improve and it's a matter of continuing that work and getting used to sprinting on the track again which I'm confident will come back fairly quickly.

alright time to pay my electric bill...

done

alright time to renew my vehicle registration...

done

I thought I was going to write more about sprinting but I'll end by emphasizing how gratifying it was to see a noticeable improvement in my form. Sprinting is fun but it does feel like beating your head against a wall sometimes trying to figure out how to get better and so for me to take video of myself and identify something worth changing and then actually finding a way to change it feels really good. If I hadn't taken video today I would've been pretty disappointed with my performance even though I can tell just by feel that I'm running differently and have gotten stronger. 

I ran 6.60 for my first flying 50m sprint and I thought to myself 'you're washed up old man. you're done. hang up. it was nice while it lasted but looks like this it.' And I knew that wasn't true but I did think it in the moment. 

 

there's monsters. there's real flesh-and-blood demons and they hide behind power and prestige

 does nationalism or the nation state as a concept help to serve the interests of common people or does it help powerful people further consolidate power?

something about knowing you need to drink more water and then drinking more water and feeling better feels humiliating

 'drink more water' is like the 'do unto others' of health advice.

you need to be reminded of it because you aren't doing it enough but you get reminded so much that it stops feeling necessary so it just becomes background noise until you remember, 'oh yeah. it actually IS super important.' crazy

I take some amount of pride in thinking that I took good care of myself and then you find out you aren't drinking enough water and it's like 'well shooooooot' that's really like step one isn't it?

another simple joy in my life

 people notice something I'm wearing or holding and say, "is that new?"

And then I say,

"HA! New to YOU!"

It's a pretty needlessly rude thing to say to someone who's just trying to make a friendly observation but I like to imagine that I have all sorts of esoteric knowledge and wisdom that I've known for years and is only just now apparent to wide-eyed green-horned first-rodeo individuals.

Maybe don't do this one. It never gets a laugh or a good reaction.

I will keep doing it though.

actually, go HARD

 One piece of running wisdom that I've accepted for a long time but recently started to question is the idea that most of training should be done with a controlled approach. If you watch videos of athletes and their coaches doing workouts you'll often hear the coach saying that the most important thing is that they stay relaxed--"RELAX! RELAX!!" The whole video is them screaming "RELAX!!" They'll say that the only time they want to go 100% is during a race or maybe a few key workouts leading up to a big race. 

"RELAX! RELAX!"

The idea is that going too hard too often can fry the nervous system and slow recovery between sessions. It's like there's a continuum between Low Intensity, High Volume that Produces Little Stimulus for Adaptation and High Intensity Low Volume that Produces  High Stimulus for Adaptation. And most training plans seem to want to aim for like 80% Intensity. That seems to be where most people can train the longest without breaking down and still get a fruitful response. 

It all seems very sound and there's plenty of anecdotal and clinical evidence to support it but something really irks me about coaches preaching RELAX! and DON'T PUSH in workouts. Yesterday I was reading this tweet from Steve Magness about how the way the brain and body perceive discomfort is super subjective. If you tell an athlete to relax and go easy, then you're priming their system to notice any discomfort and it tends to make the reps feel harder. By the same token, races where athletes push as hard as they can can feel relatively easy. You're priming the body to ignore as much as discomfort as possible for the sake of performance. 

Caveat: it is absolutely the case that you can assign 4 reps in a workout and an athlete goes way too hard on the first one and can't run the last 3 reps with any quality. But I would argue that thinking about relaxing and staying controlled and patient isn't the only way you can achieve smart pacing. You can try hard and still pace well. 

my favorite use of social media is giving my mom kudos on her runs on strava

 that's a simple joy of my day

I think you should buy a heated blanket

 if I had to guess the percentage of people who own heated blankets I'd say confidently that it's not enough. you need a heated blanket. those things are good. don't believe me? ask me!

Um, yeah, I'm right about that. Heated blanket best sleep you've ever gotten in your life kid don't even question about thinking it. Regular blanket no heat from the blanket whatsoever heated blanket heat from the blanket makes all the difference.

feel like the club kids have been throwing me a lot of curveballs lately

 Things have just felt a little more hectic than usual. I blame the cold and how much school they missed. Everybody's routine is off. I'm proud of myself though for how I've had patience while still maintaining boundaries and structure. I like that working with kids can still be challenging and make me question how I can be better. I know I'm a better coach than I was a year ago and two years ago.

I like having tough times because it reminds me why I do what I do.

another story from the comp a week ago

 this kid I coach was on a slab climb where he didn't have anything to put his hands on and he was balancing on this really slippery piece of textured wood and his foot pops off and as he's sliding down his shin brushes against what he was standing on and takes off a good patch of skin. And immediately on his face I can see he's in so much pain and he's hobbling away from the climb and the judge asks if he wants his score card back and he musters up politeness from deep within himself and very calmly says, "no thank you" and takes the card and goes back to wincing and limping. I was amazed at the composure he was able to summon.

We were running out of time fast in the comp and he had another climb he wanted to try and so to cover his raw shin he takes the band-aid he'd placed on his bloody knuckles at the beginning of the competition and moved it to his shin. Not a sanitary move whatsoever but it demonstrated is drive and determination in a way I have rarely seen.

everything has a quality you can cherish it for

 you can cherish something for being big

wow! I just made a BIG mistake!

you can cherish something for being small

my W2 form came on such a SMALL paper! I feel like they're not normally that small. Why is it so small?! I cherish that!

you can cherish something for being yellow

yellow M&M. you're the dumb one. and the red one is the angry one. but I don't think dumbness is a quality inherent to the color yellow. I cherish you all the same

Sometimes when I feel like using fancy words I like to get in people's faces about it and ask them if they know what the word means because I think they probably don't and then I tell them what it means by using simpler words and then they'll say "WELL WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST USE THAT WORD' and then I smile because they've fallen right into my trap and then I say "Because the human experience is endlessly vast and varied and occurs and infinite detail so why would not want as many colors as possible to paint with?!"

Which is true. If you give all the burden of being understood to the speaker and none to the listener then yes you should be as specific as possible BUT it's just as easy to put the burden on the listener and say 'I like the painting because it's BIG and YELLOW' and as the listener if you dismiss that as trite and banal it's because you didn't take the time to consider how cherishing something for being big and yellow is actually a beautiful thing to do.

big pile of snow outside of sign making business had sign on it that said 'FREE SNOW'

tell on myself

 "Maybe you should tell on yourself more," he says to me.

"What's that?" I say back.

"Well you keep doing things you're not supposed to do and then someone goes and tells on you and get in a lot of trouble. Why not skip the middle step and tell on yourself instead of waiting around for someone else to do it?"

"Won't I just get in trouble faster that way?"

"No. No. No. It's a brave and honorable thing to admit your own faults. Everyone is doing something wrong all the time so it's very honest to confess."

"I don't think it works that way."

"Sure it does. If you do something wrong because it's convenient for you in that moment and then admit to doing it--all you've done is exert your will without shame. It's much worse to not act at all or to act but then have someone else talk about it--you'll seem a coward."

I rip out the Tree of Life by its roots and throw it into the Sun. The world freezes and burns as it ceases to turn.

responding to a conversation I had this weekend

 To some extent I understand the logic of, I'm going to give people I care about a hard time or challenge them or antagonize them because I want to inoculate them against the people out in the world who are going to do that. But I think the emphasis should overwhelmingly be placed on caring and understanding. I'd put it at ratio of 9 parts understanding and support to 1 part teasing. 

Yeah I'm sure if someone only ever received support and never got any push back, they'd probably be overly devastated when some stranger tried to antagonize them. But I think the inverse is way more dangerous. If you teach someone that the people who care about you are supposed to be mean to you, you're gonna end up drawn to horrible people OR you're not going to know how to assess someone who decides to show you support and they could be genuine and you don't trust them or they don't have your best interests and you can't see that because they're telling you things you've always wanted to hear. 

Priority number one should be being safe, stable, unequivocally supportive and that's your baseline you can work from. But if you don't have that then all the other stuff gets really screwy. 

ipad doodles

random bit of word thinking

 I was looking about the etymology for the word 'saint' and it was pretty boring. It was just some Latin word for sacred that sounds like saint.

But then I found the Old English version 'hallow' which shares the same root as 'holy' and basically in Old English the word for holy, 'halig' was derived from the word for 'whole' which was 'hailaz' and so a connection is made between things being sacred and divine and things being complete and healthy and whole. 

That's kinda cool I think. The Greek word 'hagios' also means divine and sacred but its connotation is 'different' or 'set apart from'. 

I think that's a very different sense of divine and I think the Greek sense is how most people interpret the word holy. The Old English version feels much more earthy and worldly. 

Which would you prefer? A divine that is separate and set apart or a divine that is healthy and complete and whole?