Category: rant

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It’s Our Fault, Not the Kids

I’m getting fed up with the “Kids these days” stuff going around the Internet.

We snark and snarl about them being addicted to video games, having no ambition or drive, having low frustration tolerance, you name it.

I’m telling you right now, that if you’re over 40, it’s not the kids’ faults. It’s yours.*

You bought into a culture of fear that never let your children or the children around you take a risk. You taught them that failure was too painful to tolerate instead of teaching them to deal as part of life. You taught them that following the rules and being good at tests was going to make them successful, when there has never been a truly successful person in this world who did it by the book. Not one.

You got too frustrated with them making messes in the kitchen, so you didn’t have them cook with you. You didn’t think they made the bed neatly enough so you didn’t teach them to clean for themselves. So, tell me. Who has the low frustration tolerance, if you couldn’t stand the mess involved in teaching your kids to be grown-ups?

Yeah…

 

 

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* I’m well over 40; this is on me, too. No high horse.

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Modern Medicine

needleIn the fall of 2012, I had a peritonsillar abscess.  This is an extremely painful bacterial infection of the tonsils. Think strep throat gone wild and partying in a single tonsil.  You can’t speak clearly, you can’t breathe well, and swallowing is incredibly painful.  Treatment?  You slice open the tonsil to let the infection drain, then give the patient antibiotics and some reasonably heavy duty pain drugs.  If you’re lucky, this treatment is on an outpatient basis, but people are often hospitalized due to complications.

It is painful enough that you welcome the relief of the incision, by the way.

It used to have another name – quinsy.  While it can still be fatal, people die of it less frequently than they used to.  (Elizabeth I and George Washington are thought to have died of it).

While I do think modern medicine has its problems, I get upset at people sneering at it.  I really, no kidding, would be dead by now if it weren’t for modern medicine and antibiotics.  That peritonsillar abscess was the most recent of a series of infections (I used to be prone to strep) and illnesses that I’ve never really mentally tagged as serious.  After all, I got better, didn’t I?

But looking at them from the lack of modern medicine perspective, and friends, I’m quite lucky to be alive.

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Focus and Flow

flowandgend1
I like playing on Habitica.com.

It’s cute and silly. The basic concept is that you gamify habits you want to create and keep. You can join a party and do quests to defeat monsters. You “attack” by staying on habit.

What I’m really using it for now, rather than specific habits in specific areas, is balance.

I keep my house clean. I work out regularly. My diet is as good as it needs to be.

What I am having a problem with is obsessiveness with one activity to the exclusion of others. While it’s okay to have a Major Focus, I don’t think it’s okay to let everything slide in the face of that.

A skill I’d like to develop now, and one I haven’t before, is the ability to hyperfocus not based on what seems shiny at the moment, but what needs to be done.

I knit well because I got obsessed with it for a while then went on to another thing. Same with my sewing abilities, or my skill with spreadsheets and various other things. For the most part, I think that’s okay. Obsessions can be fun and useful, and the hyperfocus I apply to them has netted me a wide range of skills over the years.

What I don’t like is when I’m focused on knitting, I don’t want it to be hard to think about swimming, or when I’m focused on weight training, I don’t want it to be hard to focus on teaching, and so on.

The skill I want to develop now is that of being able to choose to pay attention rather than randomly focusing on what seems like most fun at the time.

What, you mean like actual grown-up self-discipline?

Yeah, pretty much. I can do it a little. I’d like to be able to do it nearly on-demand. Yes, this article is part of that — writing my 750 words every day!

The problem is that I feel like my time is so often chopped into little pieces. I’m fine with context switching from time to time, but it’s really hard to get into that flow state if the phone is ringing or someone is asking for my attention or help. Creation becomes hard that way. I am sure that at least in part, my focus on knitting had to do with the fact the projects I choose are easily picked up and put down. Same with my sewing.

I am also sure that’s part of why I love swimming so much, and why I resist certain types of training. That flow state is easier in the pool when you’re just swimming those long, slow distances. You swim and while you’re thinking about your stroke and balance and what have you but after a awhile, your mind grows quiet and your body just takes over and you go.

Writing is also like that when you get a large swathe of time. You write, letting your thoughts flow out into the computer. Your surroundings disappear and it’s only what you want to communicate and convey that becomes the whole of the Universe.

I adore that feeling.

It has been postulated, and I think with some justification, that women are socialized to make flow states difficult. We must have some part of our attention out for others. We cannot do anything or dive into anything that allows us to ignore the demands of others. Even when we try to break out of this, our socialization will slam back pretty hard.

Can we simply announce, “Hey I want some time to myself” and then get it?

I can.

But the ground state presumption is that I’m available mentally and emotionally for interaction.

I sometimes wonder if that is why I tend to guard my solitude so very carefully. When I am able to be fully and utterly alone is when I can do and create better. Certainly that’s why swimming holds such an attraction to me, and why the idea of training on a team holds almost none.

It’s not that I won’t get better/faster doing intervals and watching the clock and interacting with other members of the team and coaches to get feedback. Totally will. There’s no doubt at all about that. And for things I really want to do, I do need to get better/faster.

But that means it would be one more aspect of my life where the opportunity for flow is taken away.

And that does more than irritate me. It actually scares me a little.

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What if Happiness Isn't an Emotion?

I’ve often talked about love not being an emotion, but a set of behaviors, a commitment, and a way of interacting. That’s true. Sure, sure, emotions are included in that, but it is not the sum total of what love is.

One thing I’ve often pondered, chewed on and driven myself crazy with is the idea that happiness is an emotion and there’s something wrong because I don’t often feel it.

What if happiness (as in a state of being with one’s life) is like love, and actually an emotion, but a state of being over time that has to do less with actual emotion and more to do with life and choices in relationship to it?

(I know this is weird, but stay with me here. I just asked this question about thirty seconds ago when my To-do Beepy Reminder went off to tell me it was time to get some writing done. This is not a planned-out essay.)

There is some background to this. I am always looking at systems for things. It’s just kind of the way I am built. If there’s an underlying logic or method to doing or being, I’m going to run in that direction. It’s just the way I am, and in general, I like it that way.

So, I was feeling kind of upset and depressed and frustrated about things a few months ago when I downloaded a mood monitoring app for my smartphone. (How Are You mood tracker. You can get it on Google Play, I know).

You’re asked to rate your mood on several criteria — how determined and ready to act you feel, how frustrated you feel, etc. You get a beepy reminder to do this three or so times a day, and the results were kind of interesting to me.

No, more than interesting. They were an uncomfortable revelation.

My mood was pretty consistently above 70% on the scale as an average. Oh, sure, it dipped from time to time, but overall, my mood as I was self-rating in the moment was generally pretty damn high. You’re asked if you’re feeling: Alert, Hostile, Friendly, Determined, Active, and a couple of other things I forget. It’s nine different questions, anyway. You have this circle slider where you drag to estimate how much of each of the different states of being you’re feeling at that moment.

I just took the test and it had my mood at 86%. Now, I’ve been pondering Life, the Universe and Everything most of the morning, and it’s a gray day, so I wouldn’t have said I’m all that happy at the moment.

But, maybe I’m tagging the wrong state of being as happy. I mean, the test could be a load of crap, but I’m wondering if my point of view is really what’s been messed up. I’m wondering if I’m mapping joyful to happy, and happy is a quieter thing. Seriously. To me, happy is being on a boat on the ocean or being at the beach or swimming or finishing writing a novel or teaching a class or knitting something or being with my family.

Maybe those things are better than happy. Maybe those things are joyful. Which is cool, ’cause I get a lot of joyful stuff in my life, and that’s pretty awesome.

But if happy is really more about some ratio of Attentiveness, Determination, Active, and Inspired over Upset, Hostile, Nervous, Afraid, Ashamed (yes, I looked it up rather than guessed), Determination, Attentiveness and Inspiration are almost always pretty strongly present in my mental landscape. They’re gonna be there whether or not I am feeling what *I* would call a positive mood in the moment. That means, I’m going to be rated as “happy” by this scale more often than not.

While I’d never really considered myself a particularly positive person, I’m beginning to wonder. Maybe I kinda am, and while I’m moody as hell, that may have less to do with my overall state of being than once I thought. Maybe it’s like waves, you know? They knock you down, or you dive under them, but if you know how to swim, and pay attention to the push and pull of the water, you generally can cope and even have fun with them.

Maybe it’s like my view of love, and happiness isn’t entirely an emotion, but a amalgam of many sometimes conflicting things, just like swimming in the ocean can be.

Whether or not it’s true, it kind of makes me feel better about Life, the Universe and Everything.

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Concern V. Concern Trolling

This article is part of a project to write 750 words a day for 100 days without breaking the chain. Today is my 100th day.

So, I can achieve goals. This is a happy thing, and it’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about the difference between concern and concern trolling.

I have, a couple of times after a workout, been asked if I was okay. To put this in perspective. I am short. I am fat. I wear about a size 22 (US) in clothes. I am fair-skinned, which means that if I am working out hard my face gets red, yes, even in a pool. That’s never going to change no matter how much weight I lose or how athletic I become. It’s the way I am built. But, it becomes a big deal when someone assumes that the fat lady working out is a walking heart attack. As an aside, I just took my pulse. 66bpm. Lowish end of normal. Haven’t taken my blood pressure recently, but it was never high. I’m a swimmer, for pity’s sake. We tend to have lower blood pressure when we’re not trying to kill ourselves in endurance events.

A few weeks ago, I had someone (who I don’t know and haven’t seen in the gym since) say after my workout while I was drying my hair, “Are you okay? You know, maybe you’re pushing yourself too much. You ought to be careful about that.”

It got under my fingernails, and I can only say if you don’t believe fat people have self-control, keep in mind that I did simply say that I was fine and even smiled while I did it.

The reason it got under my fingernails is contrasted strongly by someone asking if I was okay after my workout today.

As some background, I hit the gym quite under slept. For whatever reason, I could NOT fall asleep early enough to get in my usual sleep ration and woke early even in spite of that. But I was feeling more zombie than chipper and I did kind of plod into the pool to get in my swim.

Normally when I swim, my pace is very steady throughout a set. My sets have specific patterns, and I work hard on good stroke technique throughout them.

Today wasn’t like that. I kept forgetting where I was in the middle of sets, my stroke form was off, I even inhaled some water and had to cough it out. Instead of jumping out of the pool and getting on with my day after my swim, I lingered in the water for a bit, rubbing my sleepy eyes and wishing I could just float for a while.

More background. This particular lifeguard is incredibly observant. She knows workout patterns, stroke styles, lane preferences, and even typical workout lengths for all of the swimming regulars. (This is way above and beyond what’s needed for a lifeguard, by the way. It’s more like what you’d look for in a coach). She *knew* what my normal workout looked like, and knew that today was a struggle.

When she asked me if I was okay, that wasn’t concern trolling. She knew what my swims looked like and could see that I was off today.

This is NOTHING like some stranger coming up to the fattest woman in the locker room who happens to still be a bit red in the face to give her advice on a workout she hasn’t seen.

Prickly as I am, I actually do appreciate concern. I really do. It felt nice to know that the lifeguard knew my workout patterns and was concerned enough to comment on a variation.

But the difference between concern and concern trolling in my mind has a lot to do with whether or not the person is qualified through expertise and observation to make that judgment. Even if that person in the locker room were a cardiologist (and don’t think she is, as I work at the hospital and know most of them on sight), she would not have had sufficient data on my workout patterns, heart rate, blood pressure or other factors to be able to make any sort of decent judgment about that. She saw a fat chick who was red in the face (I was no longer breathing hard, having showered and dressed) and decided to put in her two cents.

Concern is great, but for concern trolling, I wish those people would keep their yaps shut.

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Fitness, Exercise and Intersection

I didn’t actually ponder a great deal in the pool today. At least, nothing that is worth writing down. I thought about work and the way I’d like to teach some classes, and how happy I am that there seems to be a serious excitement about them. That was cool.

I even tried to come up with some subject to chew on so that I could write about it this morning, and totally didn’t. I’m okay with that. My goal isn’t to come up with neat ideas in the pool, common as it is and nifty as it is when it happens. My goal is to swim for 30-40 minutes and then get on with my day.

Swam a 1200 today, just because it seemed to be going well and I figured if I went over on time, I didn’t have to spend all that much time in the locker room. I am off today, so I can go home with a wet head.

It took 35 minutes, so that was all good. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to swim a mile in a half an hour or not, but it doesn’t really matter. The 35 minutes mattered.

I’m trying to decide on what to do for strength training. Sure, sure, I’m getting some upper body strength back in the pool — no doubt!     It’s awesome and it makes me happy. But in terms of preventing osteoporosis, swimming ain’t it. The things that make it wonderful for me in terms of getting in a workout without hurting joints in my legs are the very things I need to keep up bone density.

Well, sort of.

Studies are showing that it’s not only the impact that helps build and keep bone density. Weight training provides about the same benefit. Surprise, surprise, chickadees! Weight training is actually low impact. I’m sure that’s a lot of why I like it so much.

And that’s also a reason I’m trying to decide how to get back into it. I plain like it. Running can be good for you, too, and notice I’ve no plans in the world to start that up!

I wish that people that promoted exercise more did place more emphasis on finding something you like. And “like” can be really intersectional. I mean, I can think of someone who really likes to run, has plantar fasciitis, and just ain’t gonna be running because that’s a big nope now. Like does need to include “can” as well.

That’s where it gets hard. Just to run around saying, “Get your heart rate up for 30 minutes a day!” is fine for a lot of the population. I’m in that category now, myself, and believe you me, I’m glad I can.

But sometimes, it’s, “Sure, I can work out. But I’m going to have to get an extra three hours of sleep a night to do it. Gonna take over my job for me while I do that?” I went through a period of that about 18 months ago. It was terrifying. No doctor had anything for me on that. For a while, all I did was work and sleep. Then I started to get better, and I didn’t know why or how. I spent a fortune on tests that told me nothing. That’s some scary crap, let me tell you what. You want willpower? I was getting by on willpower.

I didn’t start feeling better because I started working out. I started working out when I started feeling better enough to do it, and it sure as hell wasn’t about losing weight, because I started to feel better after I’d gained some, and I’m not exactly slender. (No, I don’t think that’s what caused it. Correlation ain’t causation!)

So while I really do, no kidding, believe in being active and all that smack, I don’t think there’s any such thing as a universal prescription. Yeah, I’ll push swimming for people with mobility issues, because I know how beautifully it works for me, but nope, it wouldn’t work for everyone.

I wish health professionals would think about this instead of assuming people with baffling conditions are lazy liars. I find it incredibly frustrating to deal with, and I think it’s causing some serious issues with health care in general. Then again, the state of health care is another rant that’s going to take more than a blog post, so it would probably be better to leave that off for another day.

So, I leave with this question: What place does exercise have in your life, and why?

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Pondering in the Pool

Swimming is where I do a lot of thinking. Now, at first, when you start to swim, what you’re going to be thinking about is swimming. It’s very technique based and focusing on stroke, the feel of the water, your body position in the water, the relationship of kick to stroke and your breathing rhythm are all so overwhelming that when you’re in the pool, this is what you’re thinking about.

This is exactly as it should be. You do need to take time to work on these things, because swimming is very skill-based.

But after a period of time, all of this will become ingrained in muscle memory and you’ll be able to put your body more or less on automatic — except for maybe keeping count of laps and the stroke you’re doing, if that’s your thing.

Then you’re just in the water. It’s not silent, for all that we portray underwater as silent in films. No, there’s bubbles, splashing, and noise. Maybe there will be whistles if you’re in on a swim team practice. I generally am not, so it’s the bubbles and the splashing. But that’s a background noise that tends to fade away.

Then it’s really just you and the water. Unless you’ve invested in some expensive electronics, you’re probably not listening to music or audiobooks. There’s no television like the elliptical users often have in gyms. There’s just you and your thoughts.

It’s a great time to write. No, seriously. This is where I get a lot of my writing done. I can fantasize about characters, or I can think about turns of phrase or subjects I want to discuss. It’s not like meditation, because the point of meditation is to clear the mind. I make no attempt to do that, but find things that are interesting and ponder them.

Recently, I took a survey on how to make gyms welcoming to people who are overweight. You’d think a gym would be a welcoming place for someone who wanted to improve physical fitness, but there is a kind of weird aura around it. If you’re visibly trying to lose weight, yeah, you can get a kind of patronizing cheering section. I say patronizing, because there is this presumption that only if you knew HOW to lose weight, you poor ignorant thing, you’d do it.*

But what if that isn’t a major goal?

That can be stickier.

Me? I don’t need a gym to be welcoming. It’s five thirty in the damn morning. I need a lane to swim in, or a place at the squat rack, and a place to shower and dry my hair afterwards to get to work. Leave me alone to work out and I’m dandy.

Oh yeah, the locker room.

It is a sort of unspoken thing that you have to earn your place to speak up and participate in casual conversation there if you’re not visibly an athlete. For those who don’t care about that kind of thing, it’s awesome, ’cause you get left the devil alone.

For more social creatures, and for people who really do like to belong, that can really hurt.

Thing is, there are times when one DOESN’T belong to the specific group. A lot of the people I see in the locker room in the morning? They’re often triathletes. You know, endurance athletes who log hundreds of miles a years running, biking and swimming? Friends, I ain’t. I’m in there to keep from developing a blood pressure problem, and that’s about the extent of it. You’ll never see me in a spinning class, and I hate running to the depths of my being.

Now, that isn’t to say I don’t belong in the gym. I do. I paid to be there, and if someone had a problem with me working out during “athlete time” they can make a fool of themselves by making a stink if they want to. I genuinely don’t think anyone does have a problem with me being there, and even if they did, I doubt anyone really wants to risk me getting acerbic, anyway.

But let me let you in on something. If you spend all your time telling someone they’re unworthy because they’re fat, that they don’t deserve nice things because they’re fat, and then make them feel like they don’t belong in a workout space because they’re fat, they’re probably NOT going to respond with my sigma-6 level of scrappiness.

So, if you see the fat person in the gym, try something really outrageous.

Treat ’em like a regular person. Works wonders.

 

 

* It’s a subject I’ve studied in some depth, and it’s unlikely as hell that the patronizing person has done anything but read a few badly-reported studies in fitness mags whose main goal is to sell protein powder, for pity’s sake!

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Training, Athletes and Working Out

Because we all know that the body needs to move some period of time to be healthy (30 minutes a day seems to be the sweet spot for a range of health issues), many of us will find some physical thing to do.

Some of us walk, others choose running, or getting into a sport, or dance or many other things. When we haven’t been active enough, we go to the gym.

It’s the gyms I want to focus on.

This was brought to mind one morning last week. As we were checking in to the gym to do our thing, the person behind the check in desk commented to me, “I know you’re a swimmer. I wanted to give you a heads up that the hot tub is only 70 degrees this morning.”

The phrasing hit me. Not, “I know you swim” but “you are a swimmer.”

There’s a difference, though it might be subtle. I got to thinking about it, and questioning whether or not I could consider myself an athlete. Do I follow a training model when I work out? Yes, when I swim laps, I really use swim workouts mixing up strokes, drilling on technique and all of that. I’m not on a Master’s team or anything, so I don’t have a coach, which means my progress is probably laughable. But since my goal is to be active for 30-40 minutes on weekday mornings rather than competing in anything, I really don’t care but so much. I eventually decided that since I don’t compete or anything I’m not really what you could call an athlete.

Since I don’t care but so much about the competition side of things, why would I bother with the training model? My body doesn’t care. All my body needs is 30 minutes of movement that gets my heart rate up and doesn’t injure me. I’m not unusual in this. Plenty of people who aren’t athletes use a training model in their workouts. So why?

Mostly, I think, it is because in terms of getting in enough movement, it’s all we know. Our gym classes are taught by athletes. Athletes follow training programs. Many of us were involved in sports as children. When we try to get motivation to become active, we might read articles online or hire someone to help guide us. The people that write these articles and are by profession personal trainers? They’re usually athletes.

The problem inherent in this is a cross-purpose of goals. There is an enormous difference in what is required to move half an hour a day to get the heart rate up a bit for a while and what is required or athletic progress

It’s fine to use the athletic model if it keeps you motivated and interested. It’s fine to use it if it works.

But what if that model is discouraging? What if you’re not making enough progress to keep yourself interested? At a certain point, you do hit a physical limit, or a limit to how hard you want to work out and how much time you want to put into this. Elite competitive athletes spend enormous amounts of time and energy, making some lifestyle decisions that have a high emotional cost to go along with it. If that’s what you want to do with your life, it’s a fine choice. But to say it is the better or more moral choice is absurd. You can make a project out of your body, but it’s not the only project you can choose in this life, and it is up to you what you choose.

So, if your choice is just everyday maintenance to keep the body as healthy as you can manage (and isn’t THAT a range in itself!), the athlete model might actually interfere. Why? Unless you’re an athlete, there’s a good chance training like one isn’t going to be worth it to you on any real level.

But, in spite of the message we get from fitness writers, this is not a binary choice between being an athlete and never moving your body. It isn’t necessarily even a choice between using the training model or not when working out.

The choice is making sure your real goal is firmly in mind? Is your real goal to be able to run a 5K under a certain time, or is it to be consistent in getting up every day and moving? Is your real goal being able to lift a certain amount of weight, or is it to make sure you lift heavy things regularly to get or stay strong?

Sure, sure, have goals to motivate you, but don’t let those goals get so out of hand they prevent you from showing up out of discouragement.

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Video Chat

When I was a kid in the 1970s, video chat was mostly science fiction. Some high end companies were starting to play with the idea of video conferencing, but it was expensive to set up, and not too reliable. There were some exhibits using it in Futureworld in Disneyworld, then later in EPCOT center. But it was still this really advanced thing.

Flash forward to today. Now, I’ve had video chat capability for about a decade, but I don’t use it much. Goodness knows why, but I don’t. Mostly, I use it to talk to my son as the cheap version of chatting, because videochat over Skype doesn’t use phone minutes, and we both have devices that do it.

I think it’s kind of weird as all get out that we have this total science fiction technology that all the science fiction books and movies said we’d be using on a regular basis. And yet, for the most part, I kinda don’t.

Do you use it? And if so, and you’re an Asimov fan, do you ever get kind of a Naked Sun vibe from doing so?

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History Buff

When I was in tenth grade, I damned near flunked a World History class. Might sound strange to someone who has anything more than a nodding acquaintance with me, as I’m a pretty serious history buff. But yes, I did get a D for the year in World History in the tenth grade.

The teacher told my mother that she thought I had problems reading, and that was why I was doing so poorly. Mom laughed at her, and I don’t think the teacher ever did figure out that the reason I was doing poorly was that I didn’t want to do what I considered busywork, not because I did not know the material. (I ignored the teacher in class and just read the textbook, which was interesting)

Towards the end of the year, when we were to sign up for classes, I noticed that there was an Advanced Placement American History class available. You had to apply, you had to have an interview, and you had to provide a writing sample.

I applied, pretty sure I wasn’t going to get it, as my World History teacher was going to tell the committee that I was an unmotivated moron. But, hey. I really am a history buff, and I wanted to try and see if I could get into the class anyway.

I don’t remember all of the questions on the application, but I do remember being asked to estimate how many books I’d read in the last three months (~100. I read a lot fewer books a week than I did then) and to list some of titles. I forget all of the titles I put down, but Shogun and Gone with the Wind were on the list alongside I,Robot, Dune, and a fictional biography of Anne Bonny called Sea Star. I did not list the Johanna Lindsay romances. I felt like they wouldn’t help. Though looking back, I suppose it would have been blisteringly obvious that anyone reading over a book a day probably isn’t only reading Great Literature.

The writing sample? No, I didn’t write an essay. I felt like I should have, but there was this ghost story I’d read about the Tower of London and the ghost of headless queen. I decided to write the only historical fiction I’ve ever written to date and did this short story of Anne Boleyn’s last night in the Tower.

Now, Tudor history was something that was not taught in Stafford County history classes at the time. We went straight from Columbus to Sir Walter Raleigh. So, this was clearly something I’d learned about on my own, and was interested enough in to use as a writing subject to try to get into the class.

Yes, I did get in. I think it was less on the reading claims (which I suspect were not entirely believed) and more on that short story. As much as I’d cringe at my sixteen year old self’s writing, ya know, I wish I still had a copy of that story!