Zachary's Blog

Relations with a Bottle

Pic unrelated: Just a snap from my time in Denver.

The beginning of March 2021 was officially one year without drinking alcohol. I didn’t knowingly start out with a plan to not drink for this long, but it’s been a good decision. I turned 30 this year and looking back, I spent a good amount of my 20’s inebriated. That was all fine and well and fun while it was fine, well and fun. It’s untenable forever though, and would get in the way of what I’d like to do the rest of my life.

My habits definitely leaned into being a binge drinker, not a daily drinker. When Friday rolled around I’d go wild – pretty much every week. I wish I could say it led to some memorable and magical nights. But once per week is 1/7th of your life, so it’s just routine at that point. The magic dried up when it became habit.

Drinking was a large component of my social life, and that’s been the hardest part to extract out of the routine. There is such a thing as drinking buddies, and when that mutual interest is gone, there may be minimal bonds left. I have to build a social life upon other things, which took a bit of time, but I think now its far healthier even if a bit smaller.

I think if I told my 20 year old self that its been a year since I’ve had a drink (possibly the longest dry spell since I was 16) he probably wouldn’t understand. I remember my mindset at that age. I know now that 10 years of hangovers and troubles and waking up without enough sleep wrought with anxiety is enough. There is not much new to get from the experience and at 30 my days of FOMO are a bit in the past.

When I think of a night out at the bar or a pub crawl, or going to a brewery; the idea of going out is 9 times out of 10 much more satisfying and memorable than actually being there. There have been times at breweries that I have had a great day at. I had a full on bender in New Orleans and it was a raucous time that I’d love to repeat. But these are the exceptions not the rule.

I know myself well enough that when I have a craving for a beer, having a beer only strengthens the craving and never satisfies it. I know that when I have 3 or 4, I don’t get tired, I get WIRED. That’s a recipe for bad decisions. Not to mention the enormous calorie intake once per week and a mess I probably made in the kitchen at 2am because I got hungry as hell.

Drinking is never something you get better at, and it’s not really a hobby. I think being a wine or beer or liquor connoisseur doesn’t hold value to me anymore. I sold myself a bad bill of goods when I was younger. I would identify with these traits and had them ingrained into my personality, as if liking a $5 beer could be a cornerstone of who I am. I don’t wish things were different in my 20’s. I think they were important to get to where I am and know who I am. Now I know the opportunity costs of the habit and that there are other things I could be spending my limited time and energy on.

Summed up, I am not a teetotaler, and I admire folks who can honestly have one glass of wine or one beer and call it quits. I wish that could be me, but I don’t think it is, at least not now. Would I drink again? I won’t rule it out completely, I really only have to make the choice day to day. Today it’s no, and tomorrow it’s no, but if I find myself in Scotland at Laphroaig someday, maybe?

Rituals

2021 Run Gear, Teal and Pink 90s Retro is cool again, right?

We all have little rituals that are unique to us in our life. Little patterns in which we do things again and again. One of my better rituals is my run ritual. I always run on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I usually get out on a Saturday or Sunday too. I pretty much always do the same set of actions beforehand as well.

I shut off from work for the day around 5 pm. Maybe a little bit earlier if I am able during the Winter so I can get out and back again before sundown. I push later in the evening in the summer so I don’t die due to sweating every ounce of liquid in the hot Texas heat.

I have slammed some caffeine between 4 and 5pm. Its definitely detriment to my sleep that evening, but the tradeoff is worth it in my opinion. My body is AMPED and I am ready to go.

I change into temperature appropriate wear, sweat shorts in the winter, short shorts in the summer, usually accompanied by some old 5k shirt from a Color Run or something, a national park tee or my Legend of Zelda ‘Make it Rain’ tee shirt. It never rains when I wear it and I am not sure if that is good or bad luck.

I bush my teeth before heading out – this is very important – there is nothing worse than cardio with coffee breath or the taste of hour old Red Bull. There is nothing better than winterfresh breath on a hot day. I know it doesn’t really cool the air down, but I pretend anyways.

I put in my wireless earbuds. I hate taking my phone with me on runs, so I got a made-in-China MP3 player to connect it to. (Well actually its a FLAC player because I am a bitrate snob – also, nobody really makes bluetooth MP3 players outside of China. Who would’ve thought it would become so archaic so fast?)

I usually have Drum and Bass on deck for a run. The tempo matches my run cadence perfectly. I keep several dozen mixes on the MP3 player to cycle through. BCC Radio One’s Essential Mixes make up at least half of them. I’d recommend London Elektricity as a classic 2000s DnB Essential Mix. For a lighter longer run, maybe something slower yet fun: Mat Zo or Todd Terje. Or a Podcast. You can get a lot of podcast time in when running.

I then start timing on my Garmin Fenix and hit the neighborhood, usually with a good idea of what I want to do. I like to go out for about an hour, about 6-7mi. Some days I am really feeling it and do more. Some days I don’t and head back early.

When I am back, sometimes I meditate. I can get really in the zone. I should do it more. Today I got back and wrote this blog post. On today’s run I thought about how simple this ritual is and how consistent I am with it and just wanted to remark on it.

Common Experience

It almost never snows in Austin, Texas. When it does, it is usually overnight and leaves a small coat of temporary frost on everything. It briskly melts and turns the ground to slush and mud.

Today it has been snowing for 6 hours straight so far. The snow is the deepest I’ve seen in memory. Austin looks completely different, as if it was painted over or temporarily placed in another world.

I went out for a bike ride around my neighborhood, and everyone was out reveling and playing in the snow. I saw an elderly couple out for a walk under an umbrella. I saw children throwing snowballs. I saw a middle age man rolling up a sizeable snowman in the park. I saw families sledding down a hill at a neighborhood park on lunch trays and pool floats.

So many people were out enjoying the oddity of a snowstorm that would make a ski destination envious.

I love these positive common experiences.

Since Covid started, I don’t think there has been many of them. Moods have been dour and the experiences society has since shared have been grim. Just earlier this week the whole Country had a common experience of watching nutjobs (Meal Team Six, Yall Qaeda, WalMartyrs, what have you). I think everyone stopped what they were doing that day to watch and hope for the best.

Lets have less of that and more snow days.

2020 was a weird year.

These are just some sporadic thoughts thrown at the keyboard about this past year.

I cycled a lot around Austin in April when nobody was on the road. That was a time unlike any other. It was truly an empty city and I felt like I had it all to myself and every lane was a cycle lane. That was about as otherworldly an experience as I’ve ever had.

Overlooking Austin from Cat Mountain during an April day

It was a good year for new hobbies, I picked up a mountain bike right before Covid and have been having a blast on it. Austin has a bunch of trails and nearby Burnet has a chairlift operated mountain bike park which was one of the highlights of biking this year. I think I’ll try to get out to Angel Fire in 2021 to hit some bigger trails.

Top of the lift at Spider Mountain in Burnet, TX

I started the year with the intent to cook a bunch, I am the type of cook that prefers to go all out and make something extravagant and delicious and different. Keeping up with this week after week took a lot of time and planning. About halfway through the year, I decided to patron a bunch of new local restaurants in lieu of that and I am pretty happy doing it both ways. I think I’ll try to mix them up better this year.

Scallops: Easy to cook, easy to impress.

I went vegetarian to pescatarian along with a few cheat days this year. All in all I like this diet, I think the foods are more creative and I pretty much don’t even have an appetite for red meat anymore.

I helped my sister write and throw a 1920s murder mystery costume party for her 20th birthday. That was a lot of fun planning and putting together. I think more parties should be costume oriented, it adds to the sense of occasion. See the below images for a pair of pages of the newspaper written for this mystery to give a bit of background on the characters.

The first page of the New

Politics is getting ridiculous. I made a promise to myself to keep my nose out of as many current events as I used to, but this year it was hard to avoid. Society is what the people who belong to it collectively believe it to be, and unfortunately we have what we have: abject greediness and disdain for others. I think my best contribution would be to pick one cause to push for. This is a long term goal I’d like to meet.

Bernie in Austin in 2020, no masks, we were so innocent then.

My line of work became busier, I work in technology consulting and implementation at the medium business level. We had a bunch of businesses rush to change and update their systems in response to Covid. In addition to my normal workflow, these challenges were all thrown in with it and I met them all. It was a shock at first, but I think I came out the other side with an immense growth in capability and experience and professional relationships.

My backyard, where I worked from most of April and May before it got Texas hot.

I put a lot of rubber to road this year. I calculated it up and I ran 730 miles, I biked around 1000 miles. It was an exceptional year for my cardio fitness. Next year I’d like to run a bit more and do a full 100 miles in one go on the bike.

A good Sunday run, followed by a stop at Koriente on 7th Street and dessert from Quacks!

Video Games had a great year – a great way to spend isolation during Covid. Some of the highlights for me were Half-Life: Alyx. The VR Half-Life experience is just nuts. I’ve been meaning to play through it again. Another VR game I’ve put a lot of hours into is Beat Saber, its like Guitar Hero with lightsabers. Another great cardio workout. Cyberpunk 2077 just recently came out, I am about 25 hours in and love it. I’ve also delved more into narrative games. The Wolf Among Us and Detroit Become Human were the two standouts I played this year.

I am most excited next year for a widespread Covid vaccine. I missed concerts and open cities the most this year. I generally go to SXSW and ACL, both were shutdown. I went to Taos and Santa Fe and the square was drastically empty. I went Snowboarding in Angel Fire, and the mountain was sparse (good for running a lot of trails without waiting at the lift, but it felt empty). I was supposed to go to Italy in June, but that fell through. I had further travel plans for Korea, but again, who knows when other countries will let Americans in. I think most travel plans would need to be outdoor related, which I do enjoy, but I’d like the option.

Quarantine Quarter Year Check-In

I started this blog and this year with a ton of goals for myself and I have met some of them in the first three months and I will reevaluate some of them to see if they still have meaning. At the end of this post I have some brief thoughts on Society in Pandemic.

The Check-In

Goals I have met:

Hit 150 LBS: I went from about 160 LBS at the beginning of the year to 148 Now.
Run 300mi in 2020: I have run 161 in January thru March. Way on target here.
Stay under 2000 KCal per day average: My BMR is around 2000 Calories and I am exercising a bit, so I will eventually need to reassess or else I will start to lose muscle. Right now it is still sustainable.
Cook More at Home: I have been cooking a lot at home an expanding my mental cookbook and skills, which leads to the next goal
Go Vegetarian: This was a smashing success and I have enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. Other than a mix-up when catered at a work-sponsored lunch once, I’ve not eaten meat this year and I definitely feel healthier. (I had chicken salad instead of tuna salad – whoops)
Getting Rid of Clutter: I spring cleaned early this year and did this in January. I have enjoyed the benefits of a cleaner house since. There are still some boxes of old stuff I have stored around that have minor sentimental value. But really, it is still clutter and I will target them next.
Better My Wardrobe: Some of this is related to the clutter. I’ve gotten rid of stuff I won’t ever wear again and I’ve added a few pieces here and there. Being stuck at home gives me less opportunity to shine though =).

Goals I still strive for but I wouldn’t consider a success so far:

Meditate: I was good about this for a month and then fell off. I feel more distracted now when I try than I was before. My level of stress has gone up significantly since January and I know this would help with it. Right now I run to blow off stress and it works well. This is something I need to get back into because I really find it beneficial when I put time into it.
Yoga: Same as meditation. I put some time into this and then fell off. I didn’t feel the same benefits as Meditation, but I also had stuck with it far less. I’d like to try this again at a lower priority to meditation.
Listen to More Music: I’ve done a pretty slow but steady job checking out more artists. To be honest most of it is Drum and Bass to listen to when I run =).
Blog/Journal: I’ve kept a journal off and on this year, but writings have grown sparser. I was hesitant to blog unless I felt inspired. But I don’t think you can live life waiting for inspiration to strike and at times you have to force it. I DID however write a murder mystery with my sister. It was thousands of words of exposition, and was creative writing – so I will count it towards this. I want to make a bigger blog post about that subject. It was a ton of fun.

Goals I have not started but I want to keep on the front burner:

Practice the Piano: Now that I am stuck at home all of the time, I should really get going on this for several hours per week.
Get a Certificate for Work: Same as the piano – being locked up at home is a good excuse to do some continued education. It will probably mean a bump on the paycheck which is helpful too.

The Check-Out and Some Thoughts on Society in Pandemic

A lot of the other goals have less importance to me or feel less relevant now. I think it was good to have a manic brainstorm of a lot of habits that could implement to better myself and I stuck with most of them which I felt were important.

I started the year trying to shield myself from the news because it didn’t impact me much on an individual level. It was needless information, was usually infuriating and didn’t have a day to day bearing on my life. I still kept politically active and went to rallies and fundraisers. With a pandemic, now it is crucial to be in the know.

I think being stuck at home is going to mean I will be watching more TV and playing more Videogames than I set out to do this year. Speaking of which – Half-Life: Alyx was dope, and I still have Beat Saber, so I can remain fairly active and play VR games more.

I am going to do a lot less traveling and meeting people than I had hoped too.

An Empty S. Congress Avenue – Taken by Reddit User AutumnMuffin

I think this year has been a downward spiral for society and it may keep getting worse. But I don’t think that is any reason I need to halt progress on myself. At work I’ve had more responsibility than ever, and I think I rise to the challenge. I’ve been consistently running and am reaping the health benefits of that. My culinary skill-set is ever-growing. I will have time to get better at piano and other activities I’ve been putting off.

I think this fracture of society is also an eye opening experience. All of my adult life, society has been pretty much the same, and the machine has been operating at full steam. It is finally collapsing and people are forced to see that there is a life outside of their world they built for themselves (or in a lot of people’s cases, built for them). Everyone’s routine is shattered and there is a threat of a lethal disease on everyone’s doorstep. There is a collective consciousness and worry beyond race and class and nation, and I think there can be good forged from the experience. I think catastrophe and the need to behave and operate a different way could provide some positive opportunities and mindsets that otherwise would take generations to develop. I know the situation is bad and I am definitely not celebrating a deadly disease. But I will be mindful of how billions of people are changing their way of life in the span of weeks, and just how rare and strange and different this all really is.

Cheers and stay safe out there.

There is Good Stuff on the Internet Part 1: Raptitude

I wanted to write an appreciation post for some of the stuff I like best on the internet. I thought I’d get this all in one, but I have a lot to write about. These series will be on authors and essayists and critics I admire and have watched or read on the internet over the years.

Raptitude

At this point, I am not 100% sure on how I found this blog. I think I started reading David’s writing in 2010 or 2011 because I landed on the page through an old Firefox add-on called StumbleUpon (here is the page circa that year), a roulette of curated webpages that was acquired and reacquired to death through the 2010’s

In 2011 I was 20 and didn’t have anyone around my age exploring their ‘self.’ I knew of self-help books, but as I knew it those were primarily written with a reader as the intended audience to receive advice. Raptitude was different in that it was an open book into David’s self-insight and self-improvement. What he thought of himself and society, his feelings, and what was important to him. He wrote with an audience in mind, but not an explicit to-do list of what a reader would need to be happy. His topics were what he did, thought and what he found to work for himself.

The post that hooked me into Raptitude was an epiphanies post from October 2010 about 9 of David’s insights in life. At 20, I had never given thought to how much of my experience was subjective and in my head. I had never truly examined my thinking, my feelings, how much of life is just made up. I had been told and could feel what was important and I just floated along that path. Still, some of this insight was out of reach, I was still impulsive through my early 20s. This didn’t become something I could regularly practice for a while longer, but it did stick in the back of my head and was my first exposure into mindfulness.

https://counselingwellnesspgh.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/mindfulness-1131155369-1170x780.jpg

One thing I admire are David’s experiments, his concerted effort into a lifestyle change, driven only by the desire to see if it works for him. In my experiences, the primary lifestyle driver comes from necessity. I don’t think enough people, myself included, take a look at an aspect of their life they wish to change and just act without external cause. Many less write a report on it for others to see. Some of my favorite of his experiments include:

His very first one, the 30 day meditation experiment (a failure, but with valuable insight).
The Soylent experiment, which I also tried for a month, but was completely unsatisfied to drink a meal.
The 8hr workday for himself, in which David questions why he can work for others for 8hrs a day, and why he can not do the same for himself.

I am gushing about this blog a little bit and I think I could keep going for a while. David is a great and insightful writer. Sometimes his posts just cut right down to a truth about life. His ‘Essential Raptitude’ on the right hand side of the page is a great place to start.

My favorite is the first of the Essential: Wise people have rules for themselves. This post is about how having rigid rules for ourselves doesn’t limit freedom, it is empowering and keeps us honest. There are decisions we make for ourselves a long time in advance that we should not leave open to self-negotiation. This is the very foundation of discipline, which has unashamedly taken me a very long time to learn.

I used to find it very easy to negotiate with myself to go out for a few drinks the night before a busy day of work or to skip class because the weather was too bad or even too nice for that matter. Short-term Zach could always win out over long-term Zach. It’s still a work in progress but I am getting better.

I also like: The person you used to be still tells you what to do. In this post, David recounts a story of how he and a romantic interest discussed going out and dancing to electronic dance music, much to David’s dismay. When David was barely an adult he decided he didn’t like EDM, and had let this opinion drive his entire 20s. He ended up going out dancing and had a blast. This experience caused him to begin to reexamine everything about his personality that he had chosen for himself when he was a decade younger.

I think I am a good: “I’ll try anything once” type of person, but who I am now at 29 is a vastly different person from when I was 19. So now I can try anything ‘once,’ again, as a new me.

Another oldie that I remember from way back that made David’s Essential list is: How to walk across a parking lot. This post is a breakdown on mindfulness and how we rush through almost every activity like a task. How taking it slow and giving mundane activities meaning can be enlightening.

https://s3.envato.com/files/42345555/HDV_114_relaxing_on_the_beach_off3_3943_.jpg

It is funny, a stereotypical image of vacation is a person on a beach under an umbrella with a drink. “Now I can relax” this person says. I don’t think people relax as much as they dream on vacation, especially if they are a hectic and stressed person otherwise. Take solace in enjoying the small things. A walk in the park, driving without worry of being late, making a cup of tea, looking over a selection in a bakery, writing a blog post =). A large part of life is relaxing and enjoyable if you just let it be. How to walk across a parking lot was the first piece of writing I had read that made me think about that.

As an aside: while writing this, I am walking back through the older posts on Raptitude looking for the ones I best remember. David is about 10 years older than me, and reading his posts from a decade ago frames his experience better now than they ever did when I was 20. Its more peer-like than mentor, and it’s obvious how much older and wiser and mentor-like he seems on posts he is writing now at 40.

Just Get Started

Today I was faced with the killer of the majority of attempts at habit formations: Needing to create motivation without inspiration.

I have done nothing all week. I’ve been sick with the flu and only started feeling better yesterday. I had lost my inertia. I’ve been riding my bike or running almost every day, meditating several times per week. Journal or blog on a frequent basis. I had done none of it for about seven days. Today I looked at my running shoes and felt no drive to put them on at all. Is a week all that is needed to go back to running on fumes?

Thinking back, this has killed great running streaks so many times. I’ve stopped practicing the piano for an embarrassingly long time. I hardly ran at all in 2019 except for several races and a few dozen fitness sessions. I’ve gone through periods where I let my house and room get dirty. Despite loving cooking, I’ve ordered out for many weeks in a row at tons of points in my life.

Something generally happens that throws off the routine, even if it was a routing kept for a year or longer. It could be vacation, sickness, change in stress levels, social issues, etc.

The big example I have: In the first half of 2015, I was in decent shape, wasn’t drinking to excess, ate healthy, was in school full time and working around 30hrs. These habits had taken years to build up to. That summer I went to Europe for the better part of August (partly by cruise ship with an open bar). I destroyed all of my good habits by the time I got back. I hit the buffets and the open bar. I tasted anything Europe would let me eat. I probably burned it all off walking around Munich, Venice, etc. But I stopped being mindful about what I was eating and drinking – for years.

By February 2016 I was a college graduate working full time. I hadn’t been exercising since before Europe. I had new disposable income. I moved back near my hometown for work and reconnected with other working-professional friends. My job was stressful and I had not learned how to deal with it. I was not in a permanent structured environment like school anymore. I had a 24/25 year olds idea of what being an ‘adult’ was. I think a lot of my peers were in various stages of unhappiness and trying to find themselves out too.I spent a lot of this time drinking, grilling, and playing video games. Pretty much for two years. Thinking back, I don’t know if I made a single good habit during this time frame.

March 2018, I finally took a look at where I was and sat down and calculated just how quickly I could turn my life back around, and what I’d have to do to get there. I made a habit of tracking what I ate, I resolved to run or work out 5 days per week. I quit drinking. I got a scale and created an excel log book and measured everything.

By September 2018, my months of dedicated effort paid off, I lost all the weight I put on and was pretty much as fast as I had ever been. Unfortunately most of these habits fell by the wayside slowly over the next few months except for the mindful eating habits.

I know there was a day that I practiced the piano last, I can’t recall exactly which day. On that day I didn’t resolve to stop playing the piano. Same with running in 2019. I never just picked a day. But I know there was a day that I skipped. And then I skipped the next one, and the one after.

Today I noticed that I felt those feelings and I just powered through it. When I got back home from the run, I noticed that I had motivation to write this blog post too. I guess motivation begets motivation. Writing this just got me thinking about how silly it is to quit a habit or postpone a goal because the habit isn’t on schedule and the inspiration to keep going is missing.

Metaphor time I am going to relate it to a car because that’s how it makes sense to me.

Motivation is kind of like getting a car going. The first gear, and most amount of effort, is required just to get moving. Once you’re cruising you switch it into a higher gear and can coast off the initial effort a bit easier.

Sometimes you get a burst of inspiration, such as a New Year’s resolution energy, or meeting someone who makes you want to be a better person. That is like starting the car on a hill and letting it get a little momentum from gravity. But it’s not always like that, and that’s okay, you just have to get started and the gearing will make it easier later.

Praise for Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine is my favorite road-trip movie. It’s hilarious, it’s heartfelt, and it keeps it’s script, setting and thematic focus razor tight. The movie is perfectly cast as listed below:

Greg Kinnear plays Richard. He is a bankrupt self-help guru and is completely disillusioned with the prospect of selling his 9-steps-to-success program to a nationwide publishing house. He forces his self-help theories ad nauseum to his daugher, Olive, and step-son Dwayne.
Toni Collette plays Sheryl, wife of Richard and the mother of the two children, who is overburdened with attempting to keep the family together. She is the glue that holds her suicidal brother, nihilist son, raunchy father-in-law, type-A husband and doe-eyed daughter together.
Steve Carell is the suicidal brother, Frank, a professor and foremost authority on French author Marcel Proust. He fails a suicide attempt at the beginning of the movie after being rebuffed by his love interest, a graduate student who falls for his academic rival.
Paul Dano plays the 15 year old, Nietzsche-obsessed and nihilistic, Dwayne. He has taken a vow of silence until he is accepted into the Air Force Academy.
He. Hates. Everything.
Abigail Breslen is Olive, a 7 year old who is obsessed with beauty pageants. She is the runner-up in a regional ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ child beauty pageant contest at the beginning of the movie. Olive’s love for her family and her innocence is the force that keeps the family pushing through all the hard times they encounter.
Alan Arkin delivers a hilarious performance as the Grandpa. He is a raunchy old man who loves his drug use, smut rags and his family. Despite his shortcoming, he supports each of the characters in his own odd style. His bond with Olive is especially close, he coaches her on her pageant routine.

Olive wins her regional Little Miss Sunshine contest in Albuquerque after the winner is disqualified (for using diet pills) and the entire family loads up in a beat down Volkswagen Bus to cross three state lines to California for Nationals. They deal with repeated inconveniences and tragedy on the road, such as having to push the Bus to get it started after burning out the clutch, Frank running into his graduate student in Arizona, and Richard coming to terms with the fact that nobody wants his self-help guide.

With support from each other, every member of the family is forced to accept their own failures into their identity. The most obvious example is Richard’s transition from a Winner or Loser mentality to a Winning for Trying mentality. At the start of the film he chides Olive for eating ice cream while preparing for a beauty pageant and tells her not to enter unless she is absolutely positive she could win. By the end of the film, he couldn’t care if Olive wins nationals or not, and supports her either way.

Each character has personal growth over the course of the film. The movie ends at the horrorshow of a child beauty pageant (Olive’s routine here is seriously so funny – definitely taught to her by her raunchy grandpa). Each of the characters are farther from their goals, but have new perspective and ability to come to terms with it. Nobody has what they want, but they have what they need.

In today’s popcorn-laden cinemaverse, it’s refreshing to watch a movie that has a simple, well-executed script. Each character feels alive and has something to do. The banter between the cast is top notch. The screenwriter Michael Ardnt went on to write Toy Story 3, which I adore, and Star Wars 7 among other big budget flicks. I’d love to see him drop back down to this indie-style cinema script writing again, I think this sort of movie is what stands the test of time.

Balancing Act

How’s this for a cliche hook: Life is about the journey, not the destination. I’ll casually lift this saying and apply it to riding a Motorcycle.

Though they share a same basic function, there are stark differences to driving a car and riding a motorcycle. A car is a sterile experience. A car has AC, a radio, safety from the elements, and balances itself on four wheels. A motorcycle requires full effort and work from the body. The throttle brake and clutch work both hands, the shift peg and foot brake work the feet. The entire body leans in and out of turns. The bike sends feedback from every feature of the road. A rider is truly exposed to the world, rain or shine. The bikes engine is whirring just below, bellowing heat to the legs a soundtrack to the ears.

Riding a motorbike gives me the same feeling as a young teen riding a bicycle around the neighborhood. It was an event itself, I didn’t care where I was going. It was about being out on my own, exploring around, enjoying the day with no deadlines and no final destination in mind. I was out riding my bicycle, not going to work, or to get groceries. A motorcycle is the big kid version of that. I finally get why groups of motorcyclist get together and ride around: it’s bunch of 50’s going on 15’s cruising around a much bigger neighborhood.

I’ve been riding for about half a year. I started on a Honda Grom at a Motorcycle Safety Course in July and can’t recommend the course enough. Living with a bike is cheaper and easier than I expected. The bike, fuel and maintenance costs are negligible. It’s easy to work on and customize to your liking and it’s as much of a lifestyle as you want to put in – go wild. If you’re interested in motorcycles, check-in with a local MSF course, it cost me a couple hundred dollars and a weekend to get my Class M. They teach how to ride – and more importantly – how to ride safe.

I’ll take an aside here at the end to be all metaphorical and preachy:

I want to view more of “life’s road” from the motorcyclist’s vantage point instead of from a car’s. I want to feel the uneven road, to enjoy the sun and breeze when it’s fair-weathered, to feel the cold and rain when poor. I want to lean-in when the road twists and turns and switchbacks. I want to balance on my own. I’ll wear a helmet of course, but I don’t want to be sealed in a box, cut off from the world till I am 6 under.

Thanks for reading!

Running and Meditating

Today’s post is about getting into the habit of a pair of activities I love that I would like to do consistently.

Meditating
Running

I feel stupid for every time I stop doing these. I forget how enjoyable these activities are. They are relaxing, healthy and require almost no money and minimal effort.

Meditating: If I had to describe the effects of meditation, it is that your soul feels lighter. A burden is removed. The burden is the mind wandering from problem to problem. By problem I generally mean small to large worries: what am I having for dinner, how interpersonal relationships are going, how to cure a rout of boredom – and especially -how to deal with some embarrassing thing I did.

This problem-solving and worry is constant, its taxing and meditating cures it and releases the brain from fatiguing itself.

What I like to do is sit down and breathe slow and deep until it becomes natural. Then I focus on a serene location and state of mind. A term I rent from a Carlos Castaneda’s book, Journey to Ixtlan is a ‘place of power.’ For me this place of power is usually one of several impactful vistas or places I’ve been to. Calming places, like a mountaintop, beach, or a river or stream. I focus on its appearance, smell and feeling. Once constructed, my mind sort of just parks there for the next quarter hour.

This ends up feeling like a mini vacation. Its nice. I come back 15-20 minutes later with a healthy perspective. I’d encourage you to try it if you have not before. I’ve found guided meditation videos on YouTube to be helpful for early attempts.

Running: What meditating does to the mind, running does to the body. There is a certain lightness in life when you regularly run. The endorphin high does not have a comedown and an cardio afterglow can last a few days.

Its amazing how quickly I get better at running as long as I stay on a schedule. The lactic burn goes away in a few sessions. The heartbeat drops from 180+ bpm to 150bpm in a few weeks, and mile times go down significantly after a few months.

If you have not tried to run on a schedule for a few weeks and your knees are in good shape, I’d recommend doing a Couch to 5k program. This is a program for the general public who have not ran much before, there is a highly active subreddit dedicated to the it that I followed when I first began. The running community is a treasure.

Also, if you are thinking about running as a long term hobby, I’d recommend a GPS watch (and a good pair of shoes). I have a Garmin Fenix and love it. You can pull some serious metrics off of it. I find I have better success in running (and just about everything) when I consistently measure progress and it gives me the tools to do so.