No, I haven't tried it yet, I'm just blogging it here so I can remember to try it soon. Doesn't it sound good? I think it'd be perfect with homemade French bread (even bread machine French bread) and a big spinach salad.
bearing blog
bear – ing n 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
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More on cleaning up after yourself: Refusal to commit.
Remember when a few days ago I wrote a post called "Number Five Subdivided" about seven ways to clean up after yourself? And how I said that I don't do any of these things regularly but that I was inspired to try them?
Well, I have been trying them! And do you know what, I think I am really on to something!I've mostly been working on these (see the original post for details):- Clean up after dressing and undressing
- Clean up after going somewhere in the car
- Begin cooking with these seven items available: apron, dishwasher, soapy sink, trash can, dishcloth, two towels
- Keep the kitchen sink empty (from the original article that inspired me)
I have been surprised at how quickly they've become second nature, and how much they've cut down on the general visual clutter in my household AND the size of the cleanup after dinner. There is a lot of bang-for-the-buck in these things (counting the original seven from the original article too).
As I have gone through my day making some of these changes, I realized there's a pattern to the habit of not-cleaning-up-after-yourself, whether it's in the car, in the kitchen, in the closet, or in the office.It's this: Refusal to commit.Take measuring cups, for instance. Let's say I'm making dinner and I measure a cup of stock and add it to my pot. Now I have to do something with this measuring cup. Do I wash it, or do I set it aside on the counter?If the very next thing I have to do is measure a quarter-cup of soy sauce for the same pot, of course, it would waste time and water to wash the measuring cup, right? But on the other hand, if I know I won't be measuring any more liquids while I cook this evening, I may as well wash it (or put it in the dishwasher) right away, leaving the counter a bit clearer and one less thing to put away later.Of course, lots of times I'm not sure if I'm going to need the measuring cup again. So I set it down on the counter and leave it there in case I might need it.See? Refusal to commit. I don't know for sure whether I will save more work by washing it or by not washing it, so I leave it till later.What am I afraid of? That I will need to measure something else and will have to use a clean measuring cup for it? Will I say to myself "Damn! If only I had known before I washed that cup that those ten seconds would be in vain!" Or (let's get real here) am I afraid of the effort of retrieving the dirty measuring cup from the top rack of the dishwasher, should I need it?Refusal to commit!The same thing happens in the closet. Why do I take off a pair of not-actually-dirty jeans and toss it on the floor NEXT to the basket, or roll it up and stuff it on a shelf, instead of putting it IN the dirty-clothes basket or putting it away in the drawer?Because I might decide to wear them again in a day or two!If I don't get around to wearing them, then they could go in the laundry. But if I put them in the dirty laundry, they might get dirty from contact with dirty clothes. So why don't I hang them up or fold them into a drawer? I guess deep down I think that because they've been worn once, they might "contaminate" my clean clothes! For a while I contemplated creating a special separate "purgatory" section of my closet just for clothes I've worn once and could still wear again. Finally it struck me — this is ridiculous. If something is clean enough for me to put on my body and wear out into the world, it is surely clean enough to hang next to freshly washed clothing, no? If I'm really worried that something is going to contaminate my clean jeans — what, does it smell funny or something? — don't I deserve to WASH it before I put it on my body?Commit! If it's not wearable, put it in the laundry; if it's wearable, hang it up or fold it away. So simple.All kinds of clutter come from this basic refusal to commit. How many items in your house go unused? We refuse to commit to a life with it, and we refuse to commit to a life without it; so instead of giving it away or getting rid of it, and instead of making changes that would allow us to use and enjoy it more easily, it just sits there taking up space.Refusal to commit also encompasses the refusal to accept the clean-up time as an integral part of any task. Why, if we admitted that it really takes 45 minutes to make dinner (counting cleaning up as you go), instead of 30 minutes (not counting cleaning as you go), we'd have to start making dinner 15 minutes early! I might have to sacrifice some of my blog reading! And yet, that refusal to commit the necessary time can create a separate chore where before there was none.We're doing paperwork in the office and as each bill gets paid, the stack of papers to be filed grows. It would take a few seconds to slot each paper into the right spot in the filing cabinet — but it's so much more urgent to "get the bills paid" (meaning the part where you put the checks in the envelopes and the part where you put the envelopes out at the mailbox) — and won't it "save work" to save all the filing for the end? It might save some work, you don't know! You refuse to commit the few extra seconds to file each paper because it MIGHT be faster to file them "all at once," and then you're left with an unhappy pile at the end… but that now becomes part of a different chore, called "cleaning up the office." Maybe somebody else will get stuck with that one… in a month or two…I have found that if I stay aware of what I'm doing — You're leaving this thing here because you're worried you'll want to use it again and then the work of putting it away will have been "wasted!" – or — You're leaving this mess on the table because you're hoping that you'll have some excuse not to do it later and then Mark will have to clean it up! — I can kind of shame myself into cleaning up after myself!Remarkable!(Credit where credit's due: The original spark of this idea came from a book I read a couple of weeks ago by professional and semi-celebrity organizer Peter Walsh, whose point about "committing" to dirty or clean laundry rattled around in my head until I realized it was generally applicable to all sorts of clutter and cleanup.) -
Failure-free: My habit constellation, part two.
So why do I call my habit constellation (described in part 1) "failure-free?"
I started to write a sort of philosophical post about having the right attitude, but I changed my mind. Let me instead report on my behavior — just give you my observations of myself — of the day I decide that I need to drop a couple of pounds, and the days just after.
That first day, I step on the scale, mark a dot on my weight chart, notice that all the dots of the last couple of weeks are high, or maybe a trend going up. I make up my mind: It's time to go into weight loss mode.
I know what the extra habits are that will help me turn it around, curb my intake and bring my weight back down into the proper range. I go over them in my mind and I resolve to practice them today. There aren't very many of them. It's a short list.
I don't execute them perfectly. Some of them I don't hit at all — I forget, or I decide in the heat of the moment "it's not really all that important, my weight will eventually go back down," or I simply give in to temptation. Maybe I hit just one of them well. Maybe I hit several of them, a little bit.
I notice that, nevertheless, I set out to "practice" those habits, those skills, and I DID "practice" them. I behaved differently than yesterday when I wasn't "practicing," didn't I? Well, then! I practiced! I can always point to at least ONE time during the day when I did something differently because I was trying.
That's the first day.
The next day I do it again, and my observation is that I usually do a little better. I don't execute everything perfectly. Some of the skills I performed well on the first day, I don't do so well on the second day. Others I do better. A lot of the "misses" I can attribute to simple forgetfulness — the habits are a little rusty, since I haven't needed to deploy them in a while. I haven't gotten into the groove quite yet. But my overall impression is nearly always that I improved.
This goes on for a couple of days.
After just a few days, I can usually point to one habit that I've gotten a handle on. I may still be missing all the other ones, but there's at least one habit on my list that I am consistently remembering and executing with little trouble. That's one thing that I'm definitely practicing. I make a mental note: Before I started "practicing" again a few days ago, I wasn't doing this one thing. I've made a little change. It's a real change and even if I made no other changes, I know it would help. Scratch that, I know it's already helping.
Over the next few weeks — or days if I'm able to really concentrate — the other habits start to fall into line. I stop forgetting. I remember what I'm doing from hour to hour. I can much more easily dismiss unhelpful thoughts. I still don't have any days that are "perfect." Usually there are a couple of the habits that I have not yet even begun to try to practice. "I've got time," I'll think to myself. "Right now I've got a couple of skills well in hand, still spotty on this one and the other one — in a few days I'll have those more under control and I can put my effort into the next couple of habits. And that last one, well, I don't even have to worry about it at all unless I get the others going and things aren't happening fast enough."
Meanwhile, I'm still charting my weight, and after just a couple of days the numbers have started to look a little better. I keep that in mind, because it helps motivate me.
Eventually the extra pounds are gone, and I stop thinking about the habits, because, well, I'm done. If I feel like continuing them (they are, at root, healthy habits) I can, but I usually let them slide after that. They are there if I need them, ready to be called on again.
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Here's what's missing from this scenario, which I've now repeated several times.
Urgency. I know there's no hurry to get it right. It took me a good year to learn these habits and to really get in the habit of practicing them; still, forty pounds came off and stayed off while I was learning. Two or three or five pounds can also come off while I'm re-learning.
Self-pity. I continue to be so thankful that I'm aware of these skills and that I have enough power in my life to make the changes — thankful for my supportive husband, thankful for the increased awareness I have, and thankful for the many wonderful and healthy ways I can enjoy my food — this gratitude engulfs any little "poor me" feelings that may surface in the moment. I remember what it was like to wallow in confusion over what to eat and when and in what combination. I know what works for me now. That knowledge alone makes me so grateful, I notice it almost at every meal when I'm trying to be careful. In a way, having to "diet" once in a while is a bit of a gift now, because it truly makes me aware of how much I have to be thankful for.
Perfectionism. Now that I've been through this several times, I have seen that it is simply not true that a less-than-perfectly-practiced habit today means even more slippage tomorrow. No, what really happens is that each day I am a little bit farther along than the day before. Call it three steps forward and two steps back if you want; it's still one net step forward.
All-or-nothing-ism. I'm also no longer a slave to the "I slipped up here, guess the whole day is shot, pass the Doritos" mentality. It's just another kind of temptation, you do realize that? A particularly insidious one? Everybody falls for it sometimes. But I know from experience that one slip up reflects only on that single moment. It does not expand to encompass that whole day. It is possible at every moment to say "Okay, I haven't stopped yet, but I am stopping right now." This far and no farther. I have done it, at varying levels of "far" over the line. I have seen myself do it time and time again.
Failure. Yes, failure is missing from this scenario. I don't fear it because it doesn't happen. There is no failure for me anymore, not when it comes to these weight loss habits. There's only "I practiced these" and "I didn't practice those
." There's an observation that today my behavior was not the same as before I decided to practice. So the deciding was not in vain. I can see it. I don't have to pretend. There is no failure.Continue reading in part three… Why even unplanned eating doesn't mean failure anymore.
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Short lived.
Something about this memoir of a severely malformed baby's short life, written by his 16-year-old sister, brought something home to me. One of those things I knew in my mind but that nevertheless struck me with new, raw power as I read her words.
How crazy that a substance as unimaginably beautiful as the soul must be contained in something so material and tangible as the body.
Why does the world require that he bring a healthy body with him?
Little Miracle is a gift, but he does not belong here. I do not belong here. None of us belong here. If the Divine desires only to grace us with Little Miracle’s presence for a few fleeting moments, so be it.
It is pretty crazy that a soul must be contained in a body, that the body must be healthy for the soul to stay with us.A life so brief, and yet. Haven't we all had brief encounters with people who touched us deeply and permanently even in the few seconds or minutes that our encounter with them lasted?I remember that in the seconds of shock after I learned my mother had died moments before I arrived in her hospital room, a big warm woman, a hospital nurse, African-American, with glasses and bright-flowered scrubs — she enfolded me in her arms and said to me: It's a beautiful day out there, honey. "A beautiful day to just fly away," that's what I told her. She wasn't alone.I never saw that nurse before and never saw her again. I spent twenty seconds in the presence of that soul, twenty seconds in her embrace. My life is fuller and happier for those twenty seconds.It's hard to know sometimes that, in this life, some people suffer so that others may thrive and grow. Suffer involuntarily even. Yet it's true. It's one of the inescapable ways that suffering has meaning.If a short encounter can have meaning that lasts a lifetime — well, then, a short lifetime can have meaning that lasts — how long? Forever, no?(h/t Amy Welborn) -
Exercise vs. antioxidants.
So often, health recommendations are offered in a vacuum: "Do this, it's good for you." As if there were no interaction between different "healthy habits," and as if certain habits might not be good for some people and bad for others.
I think there's a general tendency for policy makers to frame health recommendations almost as if they're moral imperatives!
Well. Here is an interesting conflict, via Derek Lowe's excellent chemistry/pharma blog In the Pipeline: Studies seem to indicate that exercise and antioxidants work against one another. Here's what Lowe writes (my less-technical translation follows):
Now, this is an example of an idea being followed through to its logical conclusion. Here’s where we start: the good effects of exercise are well known, and seem to be beyond argument. Among these are marked improvements in insulin resistance (the hallmark of type II diabetes) and glucose uptake. In fact, exercise, combined with losing adipose weight, is absolutely the best therapy for mild cases of adult-onset diabetes, and can truly reverse the condition, an effect no other treatment can match.
So, what actually causes these exercise effects? There has to be a signal (or set of signals) down at the molecular level that tells your cells what’s happening, and initiates changes in their metabolism. One good candidate is the formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the mitochondria. Exercise most certainly increases a person’s use of oxygen, and increases the work load on the mitochondria (since that’s where all the biochemical energy is coming from, anyway). Increased mitochondrial formation of ROS has been well documented, and they have a lot of physiological effects.
Of course, ROS are also implicated in many theories of aging and cellular damage, which is why cells have several systems to try to soak these things up. That’s exactly why people take antioxidants, vitamin C and vitamin E especially. So. . .what if you take those while you’re exercising?
A new paper in PNAS askes that exact question. About forty healthy young male volunteers took part in the study, which involved four weeks of identical exercise programs. Half of the volunteers were already in athletic training, and half weren’t. Both groups were then split again, and half of each cohort took 1000 mg/day of vitamin C and 400 IU/day vitamin E, while the other half took no antioxidants at all. So, we have the effects of exercise, plus and minus previous training, and plus and minus antioxidants.
And as it turns out, antioxidant supplements appear to cancel out many of the beneficial effects of exercise. Soaking up those transient bursts of reactive oxygen species keeps them from signaling. Looked at the other way, oxidative stress could be a key to preventing type II diabetes.Exercise might reduce your risk of diabetes, in part, because it makes your muscle cells produce certain compounds. Those compounds, however, are known to accelerate cellular damage. Taking vitamins that deactivate the "damaging" compounds also deactivate the good effects of the compounds.
The whole post is worth a read.
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A short series: My failure-free, real-life habit constellation for weight loss.
A few days ago I discovered that I'm definitely up a couple of pounds, as happens every once in a while. It wasn't that long ago, it seems, that being up a couple of pounds sent me into a panic or an obsession. (So did being down a couple of pounds.) But the last couple of times this happened, I realized that the panic and obsession is gone. I think I know what to do now, and I think I have settled into the right attitude — an attitude that is positive not negative, calm not panicked, rational not obsessive, and helpful not destructive.
A lot of the things that I write that people really take off on (here's an example) make me laugh, because they're, um, theoretical. I made them up. People like them because I have the gift of sounding like I've got it all figured out!
But occasionally I have something to share that is much more empirical. This is one of those things. It is my observation of what I really do that really works (caveat: FOR ME). So I'm going to throw it out there for you to chew on, with some suggestions (that's the theoretical, made-up part) on how to adapt its observations for your own life.
Maybe the things I do that help me drop my occasional 3 extra pounds, will help some other person begin habits that will help them take off 10 or 20 or 30.
Just to keep you reading, I promise you at least one list of seven things. Stay tuned.
Why did I decide to call this a "habit constellation" instead of a "plan?"
Mainly, because there isn't any order to it: no first do this, then do this, then do that. I have a certain number of habits that I practice (not adhere to, but practice, with all the connotations of skill building by trying and falling short of the ideal and trying again) only when I perceive the need to control my energy intake.
Also because I find that I often select subsets of them — mini-constellations – to work on. (You know, the Big Dipper is only part of Ursa Major.) Just these three today, or just this one habit another day. There is no reason I have to practice all of them every single day, though of course the extra pounds will come off faster the more habits I enlist.
The third reason I call it a "habit constellation" is that it is not without its background, the inky sky and the nameless fixed stars. One of the reasons I need concentrate only on a manageably small number of habits when I need to buckle down and drop a few pounds, is that I have already established a firm background of certain habits I no longer need to think about at all. Some of them set me apart from the average person, and others are quite normal behavior, but the point is that my particular constellation works for me because of the particular background against which it is set in me.
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Focusing on just one thing: it doesn’t have to mean everything else falls apart.
One of my biggest reasons for taking up swimming is that it's kind of an all-in-one exercise: you get some cardio, and because of the resistance of the water you get some strength training too. You can get better cardio through running, and you can get better strength training by weight lifting, but it's hard to find a single exercise that combines the two quite so well. And so, even though swimming is time-inefficient in some ways (because of changing and travel, I have to commit at least 75 minutes for a 40-minute swim), in other ways it is very efficient (strength and cardio simultaneously: two workouts in one).
14 months or so later, my upper arms and my core are stronger than they've ever been before. I even have muscles! Girly muscles, sure, but they are definitely there, my biceps, triceps, and the muscles across the wings of my back.
Bu my legs haven't seemed to strengthen quite as fast, so I was contemplating some targeted strength training, just a few minutes at the beginning or end of my workouts. Maybe some squats, or resistance bands? A week ago I stopped in at the fitness desk in the Y to pick up a brochure for personal training, and the fitness director asked if I had any questions.
"Well, I swim, but I've been wanting to increase my leg strength, so…"
He asked a few directed questions. How often did I swim? What strokes? Did I do flip turns? (No, not really, I have a sort of made-up underwater turn) But do I push off with my legs against the wall at the end of my turns?
"Yes—"
"And how far do you glide after you push off? Do you glide out as far as the backstroke rope?"
"Five yards? I — I don't know if I do or not! I've never noticed!"
"Well!" he said, smiling. "Next time, find out. Try to push off so you glide out as far as you possibly can. You should be able to glide out at least as far as the rope. Then come back and let me know how you did. You shouldn't have to add separate strength training."
"No charge?"
"No charge."
I wrote down his suggestions on a Post-it note and stuck it to my YMCA picture ID.
A few days later I tried it. I could push off to nearly five yards at the beginning of the workout, but the glide distance got shorter and shorter as the workout progressed. (One annoying habit I'll have to break: Every time I pushed off hard, with a little grunt of effort, I involuntarily squinched up my eyes, broke the seal under my goggles, and got an eyeful of pool water.)
I worked hard at it anyway, all my focus throughout the workout on pushing off. And when I finished my cooldown, emerged from the water, and picked up my stopwatch I discovered something amazing: I'd shaved nearly seven minutes off my workout. Instead of 46 minutes, I'd finished the same distance in a little more than 39 minutes.
This is something I hadn't been able to do in months of generally "trying to go faster."
A lot of times we think that if we focus on just one thing, "all the rest of it" is going to fall apart. This didn't happen here: I focused on one thing, and apparently I improved generally.
I mused about it on the way home.
I can certainly remember a few days when I announced, e.g., "I am going to focus on LAUNDRY today" and by 5 pm, though the clothes were all clean and hanging in the closets, I was knee-deep in clutter, hungry children, and unfinished schoolwork.
What's different here?
Even though I had been focusing on one little improvement — pushing HARD off the wall — I, of course, didn't stop all the rest of the "work" in my workout. I still had to trundle from one end of the pool to the other, executing all the other tasks on my list. I would guess that a lot of the time I wasn't working very hard on things like my breaststroke timing or slicing my hand at the right angle into the water, but I can't be sure because I wasn't thinking about any of those things at all. I guess you could say that I "went through the motions" in all the other parts of my workout. What's next on the list? Swim a paced 200-yard front crawl? OK — check. The only thing I have to think about is the pushoffs.
Focusing on one thing does not have to mean "I'm just going to do this one thing and ignore the rest of my work." It can mean "I am going to put this thing at the top of my priority list." It can mean "I am not going to waste mental energy on anything but this one thing." It can mean "In everything else today I will just go through the motions; on this one thing I will lavish my full attention."
Maybe "my full intention" is a better phrase.
I wonder if I can import this insight into other areas of my life. Focus on one thing at a time, perhaps in short bursts, but keep swimming all along.
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Ten numbers you should have in your cell phone.
From Marc and Angel Hack Life. I wouldn't have thought of the locksmith on my own. That's a good one.
The kinds of numbers you need are the kind you might need if you're not at home, lack internet access, and/or will be in a desperate hurry if you need them. I have a few more contacts that I'm glad are in my phone:
- Several contacts labeled "Emergency" or "In Case of Emergency" or "ICE." I have two, one labeled "ICE – Spouse" and one labeled "ICE – Family Friend." Let's hope nobody ever needs to call them.
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A friendly neighbor, likely to be home, willing to check on your house. Like the friendly colleague in the article, you can offer to reciprocate.
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Poison Control hotline: 800-222-1222 .
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The pizza place that delivers to my house. Does this sound like a no-brainer? I didn't always have it in my phone, but now that I do, I call it from the road surprisingly frequently. When you're on your way back from a camping trip and your kids are starving, it's nice to save 20 or 30 minutes of wait time.
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Pick up somebody from the airport a lot? Then you need the flight status hotline for the airline he usually comes in on.
Any more ideas?
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What’s so hard about running.
Yesterday evening I got back on the treadmill.
What? No applause?
I spent a lot of time, on the treadmill, before the 5K, telling myself, "Don't worry, after the 5K you won't have to do this EVER AGAIN." And now, there I was, on it again.
(Huh. It almost reminds me of the time I came home from my office in tears and told Mark "That's it, I'm done. I'm quitting grad school," and he soothed me and put me to bed and the next morning I was like, "Why are we in the car, driving me back to the university?" And then after a while they gave me a degree. I was GOING to quit, but somehow it never happened. I often have trouble following through with things.)
I have a boring training regimen. After a warm up walk, I turn up the speed. I run that fast for 30 minutes. Then I turn it back down and walk again. The last ten minutes were really tough last night. I kept looking at the ticking down seconds. What? It's only been thirty seconds since I looked at it the last time? Argh!
This is the thing I didn't know about running that I know now. When people say it's hard? It's not physically hard. Maybe if you run with chronic pain it is, I guess; but I don't run with pain, at least not since I lost 50 pounds. My knees don't hurt, I don't get sore. No, it's truly difficult, but the difficulty is all in my head. It took me a while to put my finger on it, but I think I've figured it out, and here it is:
Running is hard because of the desire to stop.
No, really, that's it. That is what makes it hard. At least for me. The whole time I'm running, I keep wanting to stop, and it isn't fun to keep going when you want to stop.
It's no more complicated than that. There are no layers to it. I don't want to stop "because I'm tired" or "because I'm sweaty" or or "because I have other things I want to do more" or "because my throat hurts" or "because the guy on the treadmill next to me just farted" or "because I forgot my iPod" or "because the sun is in my eyes." No, none of those "becauses." It's very simple. I just want to stop. And when I refuse to satisfy that desire, it feels crummy.
It has never been so obvious to me, the difference between long-term and short-term satisfaction, than in running for half an hour. It's almost comical, because the desire to stop (a very immediate desire) is so strong, and the time lapse before I satisfy my other, rationally chosen desire (to stop AFTER I have finished my run) is so very short. And of course, that's one of the things that I remind myself, the whole time: This is only half an hour. Only twenty minutes left. Only fifteen minutes left, I can put up with this for fifteen minutes. And so on and so on. But you know what? The desire to stop NOW doesn't go away. I just keep on refusing to obey it, until the 30 minutes is up.
Somebody asked me if getting through running was like getting through childbirth. (Unmedicated natural childbirth, that is, the only kind I've any experience with.) I know lots of people compare childbirth to running a marathon; I think maybe they do that to put a connotation of powerfulness, strength, worthwhile-yet-difficult endeavor on it in an attempt to cut off the argument of Why would you want to do that when epidurals exist? But no, getting through a 5K doesn't feel anywhere close to childbirth. "Childbirth is maybe easier," suggested Hannah when I brought it up to her yesterday, and I think I agree.
One of the things about childbirth that makes it not quite so mentally hard is that there really isn't a stop and let me off option. I mean, I suppose you can go to the hospital and get numbed, but even that isn't the same as stop and let me off. Plus I started all my labors from a mental space (and a physical space — my home) where "getting numbed" wasn't an option on the table anyway. Maybe it's more like that if you're in a hospital and every 10 minutes someone is sticking their head in the door and offering you an epidural, and maybe after a while it gets too exhausting to keep saying no.
But running is mentally a little bit harder, because it's obvious with every stride that you have a choice, to keep going at the same speed or not. It's very immediate too; you can go from full-tilt to dead stop in just seconds. To keep choosing to keep going is… well, it's not that it's hard to do exactly, it's a small choice, requires just the strength of putting that foot forward, but it's paid back with a measure of anguish, just a bit. The anguish of "I am not getting what I want." Tiny, whiny anguish, but it adds up over half an hour.
So I spend the time distracting myself, not from physical discomfort, but from the mental discomfort of not getting what I want. I point out to myself that I am getting other things that I want: perhaps that I am out in the sunshine and the fresh air, or that I am giving my body its dose of exercise, or that I am, at least for a little while, alone with no one demanding anything from me. I listen to the iPod (music's much better than an audiobook or other kinds of talk — hits somewhere lower on the brainstem I think). I watch syndicated reruns of The Simpsons on the newfangled treadmill televisions they've just installed in our Y. I gaze out the window at people in the parking lot and try to guess which person will unlock which car. I compose blog posts in my head. I think about how I look to the other people in the gym: Do I look like I belong here? That last one, I come back to a lot, because one of the things the interior whiner says to me is Why are you doing this? Who do you think you are?
You know, I've never thought of myself as having a self-esteem problem (rather the opposite), but when I began running, I really started to understand something of what it is like to believe that I am not good enough to accomplish something. I never believed I could do this. When I was a child I convinced myself that physical ability was frivolous compared to intellectual ability, and anyone who thought otherwise was a stupid jock. As I grew older I convinced myself that even if sports accomplishments were worthwhile, they were for other people and not for me — I was not that kind of a person and never would be. It didn't ever occur to me even to try. And yet at the same time I thought of myself as the sort of person who was not afraid to try new things. A blind spot as large as my own body.
A girl I knew pretty well in junior high said to me once on the school bus, "I play soccer because I love to run." I remembered that ever afterward and turned it over my mind in a sort of amazement. How could anyone love to run? She must be one kind of person, and I must be another kind. That's what I believed. And no, I don't know, can't remember, what changed my mind.
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Trying to get a handle on your behavior? Mathematically inclined?
Six Easy Ways To Graph your Life, at Lifehacker.
Oh, and for parents, don't forget the Trixie Tracker. (No, I have never used this. I swear.) -
Brilliant monetary motivator.
Okay, I was checking out who linked to me this week and in this post from Building Cathedrals was buried this great idea for rewarding children (especially small children) for the chores and little tasks they do. It's a variation on gold-star stickers, and a variation on paying kids for their chores, but better — oh here, just read for yourself:
I am thinking of printing out Erin's list [seven ways to clean up after yourself] and also trying to figure out a way to hold everyone accountable for their participation.
In the past, we have been using pennies for the church collection as an incentive for small chores (buckling your own car seat belt, hanging up your towel and coat), unfortunately, I tend to forget to follow through with the system. Perhaps the kids can see this list and earn a penny for their bag each day? Or something else? Any ideas out there?
Come on! Isn't that a great idea? I know my little ones are always clamoring for coins to put in the collection basket (we are boring old fuddy duddies who do all our donating in a lump sum once a year, no fun for kids). Why not earn them through good works and obedience? What do you think?
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Time waster of the day: Design your own ringtone with the folks who brought you Mathematica.
Wolfram Research helps you get a free ringtone. Generate one randomly, and then tweak the scale, instrumentation, and timing till you get what you want.
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