rating how appropriate it is to state your mental or physical state out loud

"I'm hungry"- this one is pretty appropriate. but it loses its effectiveness and appropriateness the more you repeat it. also, letting people know that you're hungry is a good way to give context to any other behaviors or feelings you might be having. so that's pretty good.

"I'm full of murderous rage and intent."- this one is not very appropriate. if you're full of murderous rage and intent you should probably say something more socially acceptable like "I'm hungry" and then in a very quiet voice, "--for murder"

why is my sister going to czechia?

 because my sister's husband's sister's husband's sister's husband lives there. and is rich.

button experiments

 I don't like button experiments. Things like 'oh if everyone in the world had to make a private vote and if over 50% of people pressed the blue button then everyone survives but if under 50% of people press the blue button only the people who pressed the red button survive.' 

I don't like it. It feels like it tries to get at some sort of truth about human nature or morality by treating people as brains floating in jars. You're not. You're in a body in the world. I don't think it's insignificant to throw that out. It's such a crazy construction that it almost scorns the body and the physical world. 

One time when I worked at the therapeutic boarding this kid was really upset and he wanted to talk to the headmaster of the school and go into his office and the support counselor told him 'no. you won't do that. I am bigger than you and I will stop you.' And then he just physically stopped him for like 10 minutes until the kid gave up. 

And I'm not saying that reason or logic is inconsequential in the face of physical strength or violence but that your body informs your thinking about yourself and the world. 

Imagine. Imagine some Johnny Baskethands trying to tell you about the nature of napkin holders but he never actually put napkins in them.

'Well, if we assume--'

Put the napkins in the napkin holder!

I don't know. And then almost always thinkers and philosophers you had something to say about humanity had a notable relationship with their body. 

And I'm also not saying that to have a valid opinion on something you have to have any specific kind of body or meet any standard of health or anything to have something worthwhile to say. I just think the value of any results that assume everyone is virtually a brain in a jar don't amount to much.

beuatiful found poetry in the bodo's parking lot

 

God is with us

God can you help me

do good at golf Amen

thank you for family

without worms there would be no flowers

 without leaves there would be no leafblowers

what good is it to cultivate an affect where you watch life as if it was hot sand poured into your eyes

what good is it to scream into a horn while buried in the ground

I could go along as a bird does. Sitting in a tree and chirping and singing, with a wide field of vision and moving my head in jerky robotic motions as if fixated on a tiny bug between blades of grass

would it mean so much to try to live honestly? could I do anything different even if I tried?

there are no secrets. everything is on display always. the speed of a bat's wing. a dance overheard. the swirl and turn and pivot of warm evening air.

I can go on this way as long as I please. As long as this way to go on pleases me. 

breaths counted out. languish and bloom languish and bloom languish and bloom.

Fruition is not derived from the word 'fruit'. It's from the Latin fruit to enjoy or use.

it's always the calves, man

 Still trying to get my knee better. Today I had better range of motion and I decided to go to the gym even though I can't do too much and I had a minor 'ah HA!' moment when I went over to the stairs to stretch my calves and felt a lot of tightness in my left calf and then after stretching it out I could almost immediately bend my knee more so that was a good discovery. Today was a lot better than the previous days and I should have suspected the calves sooner. I was doing heavy weighted calf raises with a barbell and I jumped the weight up too heavy too soon. It all makes sense.

Dang. I felt like I had about a week or so where I was really firing on all cylinders and doing so much and then got hit with a one-two punch of wrist hurt and knee hurt and I was really in shambles for a few days. Feels like this keeps happening this year. Oh well. Getting back on track now I think. Ever forward.

I don't like when I can't pursue my goals

being hurt is no fun. but I'm still pursuing my goals. even if I'm taking some steps back. I'm still pursuing my goals. 

knee is acting up

 I've had some bad luck this spring with missing training. Coaching, sickness, and now my knee is swelling up. I don't think I did anything to seriously injure it, it just came on the last few days and seems like it wants to linger for a bit. No pain. It's just swollen and doesn't want to bend all the way. This happened a couple times in high school and college and then it would disappear and I never knew why. Still frustrating though.

All the little red mites are out. They're on every surface. They're everywhere. All the little red mites.

you guys think the future is determined?

 I'm not sure. On the one hand it's like,

Of course the future is determined. The architecture of it is all laid out. Time is an unfolding event based on the start position from the Big Bang. You'd be a daggone fool to think your limited perception of time and reality has any bearing on what will or won't happen. It's an illusion of the ego.

But on the other hand,

Even if the future is determined, that determination is still unknowable. And so the events themselves don't really matter as much as your anticipation of them. The future is undetermined in the sense that you don't know what you're going to think or feel about it. 

Which I think speaks to the point that you can also point at larger truths and that can provide useful context but at the end of the day you're you in your body. 

thoughts on bees and trees

 From sitting outside drinking coffee:

If any other bug or animal got as close to you as bees and stinging insects did, you'd just swat them away. You wouldn't even think about it. You'd be like 'get away. rude.' But because of that deeply ingrained threat of violence you just kinda freeze up and wait for them to leave. Maybe some people still swat at them. I've seen that. Seems silly to me though. What if they sting you?

There's something there about the threat of violence and closeness that I don't want to explore.

But I'll say this. The bee or yellow jacket or whatever doesn't want to sting you. I don't think. I think they're curious. I think they started from curiosity. And then that aggressive curiosity eventually necessitated a retaliatory threat. 

And maybe there's something there too about curiosity and violence. 

I don't know. I don't have the answers. I'm a guy trying to be on screens less and sitting in a chair. A guy who scrunched his face up when a yellow jacket gave him a once over.

And then, later, I thought "If you didn't know about wind you would think that trees can move like that on their own and that would be wild."

'Helloooooooooooooo thereeeeeeeeeeee. I'm a treeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Hiiiiiiiiiiiii'

little bird

This morning I sat outside. I wanted to see if I could be still for long enough that birds would fly down and do their bird thing in the little yard outside my apartment. One pinkish bird flew down and was attacking all the old dandelions. I couldn't figure out why it was doing it. It wasn't eating them I don't think.

Do birds eat dandelions? I'm pretty sure dandelion seeds spread through the wind. By their design.

Are birds in really windy places better adapted at flying in the wind? 

Sometimes at track practice in high school it would be really windy and I would watch birds try to fly across the field and the wind was too strong so they wouldn't get anywhere. They would just be blown backwards. 

My other memory of the wind is from middle school when I was trying to get to my bus at the end of the day and walking into the wind I wasn't able to exhale and it was like I was choking on air and I had to turn my head to breathe. 

Today I cleaned a lot of the glass out of the bus. Calvin wanted the kids who broke the windows to clean the bus but I didn't want that because I don't think they would do a good job and also I think cleaning something you care about shouldn't be a punishment. Like that's caring for the bus. I don't like the idea of it being forced upon people who don't want to do it. That seems hurtful to the bus in some way. I don't know. 

My right wrist is a little strained so I couldn't use it as much to lift today but that's okay because at some point my right hand and right shoulder got stronger than my left side so I view this as an opportunity for my left side to catch up.

The last time I saw a dog that I knew the name of was like...ages ago. So long ago. Distant distant past. I do not interact with dogs.

That's not true. I saw my parents' neighbor's dogs last weekend and I know their name. I lied. 

my eyes felt irritated all day

 not sure why.

a good day though.

Oh. I had a thought today.

I was walking up the stairs to my apartment and it's like this tunnel that goes through the hillside and at the top of it where the entrance to my apartment is, is this little grassy area and as I was getting to the top of the stairs my head poked out of the stairwell and this little squirrel that was squirreling around in the grass saw me pop out of nowhere and kind of freaked out and scurried away and my immediate thought, my instantaneous reaction was

Oh, what if I was a little kid that saw that I scared the squirrel and got really upset and started crying because I accidentally scared it.

'I'm sorry I scared you squirrel!'

another week another post about sprinting

ok ok ok ok ok here's what I learned.

Ever since I started taking video of myself sprinting I've had the question

why do I look like that?

And also when I watch the elite sprinters I ask

why don't I look like that? how do they look like that?

And I thought I had figured it out and had been trying to get there over the past month by focusing on straightening my leg before touching the ground. The only problem was when I would try to sprint like that I'd run really slow. And then when I went back to just doing what feels fast I would run much faster. So we had to readjust. 

I had a hypothesis so I took video of myself basically running in place but imagining that I had a small roughly knee-high hurdle in front of me that I had to step over. When I went back to watch the video, all the cues and positions that really fast sprinters get into were there. I was doing it. I was doing the thing. I wasn't going anywhere but I was at least moving my legs the way fast sprinters move their legs.

So that was exciting and encouraging. In future workouts, my warm-up is going to focus on hitting those positions and stepping over that imaginary low hurdle (they're also sometimes called wickets) while gradually increasing the speed. I think what's happening is that as I'm speeding up, I'm not able to maintain the form. So I'll do the right form while basically standing still. Then I'll try to go a little faster. And I'll progress over like 3 or 4 reps until I'm not hitting the form anymore. And then I'll just sprint. But one would hope that over time the form I hold at true top speed and my "consciously trying to have good form" form will become more similar.

Yes yes yes. That is the plan.

 

sat outside again today

 it was nice. go to my camp.

gonna start sitting outside in the evenings. maybe during the day. maybe whenever I can

 it's part of my dwelling initiative. it's called sitting outside in the grass. just do it as much as you can.

 people like to bring up the quote attributed to albert einstein "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." and in a lot of cases that's true but I do think there's an important kind of meaning that can only be uncovered through repetition. A repetition that doesn't even show any noticeable differences for a long time.

I've been doing these drills for over two years now. Well, I was taught them over twenty years ago but when I wanted to get better at sprinting again I started doing them with intention and it's been interesting how over time they've become different. They feel different. It's kind of like a chant. You say the same words over and over and eventually they take on different meanings than they used to. With the drills I feel different muscles and the movement feels different. 

I would argue some things warrant a little bit of insanity. 

had some good breakthroughs in climbing today

 felt really strong. picked up some things. did some moves and climbs I've been working on for a while. felt extremely gratifying. I think being at home for the weekend and resting and relaxing helped a lot. yay!

the partridge family bus

 

it's actually a pretty awesome looking bus

filed under: things my dad told me to look up that I didn't get around to looking up until now

quit bending your knee

 I run with a squishy knee. I bend my leg a lot when I run. I want to fix it. If I do nothing else this year I will fix my bent knee. I will do it.

some kids smashed the bus door windows with rocks

 I saw them in the back of the parking lot near the bus and so I kinda took the long way around to go home and the second I was out of sight I heard a loud sound so I turned around and walked up and said 'hey that's our bus. I just heard a loud noise. What's going on?' Not in an aggressive way. Just trying to be straight forward about it. When I went around the side of the bus to see where they'd smashed the windows they ran off. 

Pretty unfortunate. Kids being stupid. It happens. I'm not really mad at them. They threw rocks at other windows and mirrors too but the only ones they managed to break were the passenger door windows. I suppose it could've been worse. I had been nervous about leaving the bus there and in the back of my head I was worried someone would come along and mess with it. I don't know if it's better that it happened and ultimately wasn't that bad or if I'm more nervous that they might come back or that it could happen again. I don't know what I'd feel if it happened again. Defeated, I guess. 

I will say though, my friends at the gym helped me clean up the glass and we taped up the windows and parked the bus in the corner so the broken side isn't as much of an issue. And my friend got a picture of the kids. I called the police but I'm not expecting anything to come from it. I don't know. Stuff happens I guess. I think it's better to not read too much into it. You fix it up and keep going. 

It means a lot that people were there to help me. I felt supported when I really needed support. 

history of April Fool's

 Originally every month began with a 'Fool's'. But over time people began to tire of it and they relegated the Fools to a single day in April when everyone is generally in a good mood on account of spring time. 

Terrible. Just terrible. Bring back a Fools day at the beginning of every month!

And! Another thing. It wasn't always about pranks. It was just about being foolish. The prank thing was also a negative PR campaign to make the holiday seem more annoying than it actually is. 

Oh what's a fool do? Yeah, they just lie. They just make stuff up to trick you.

No. That's not what a fool does. You see, they took the holiday about being a fool and they made it into one where you unwittingly become the fool. And you hate it because of course you do. One must willingly become the fool.

I'm beginning my campaign to reclaim April Fool's Day.