Shaking engine gnashes teeth
Stalling, choking, living mind
Chewing through some shred of dross
Caught in motor's tearing splines
Twisting shafts while bearings jump
Until the shred is mangled through
And engine settles, running true
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Gears crash and grind; Shaking engine gnashes teeth Stalling, choking, living mind Chewing through some shred of dross Caught in motor's tearing splines Twisting shafts while bearings jump Until the shred is mangled through And engine settles, running true |
| date | 2000-12-05:22:20 |
| SelfConciousness |
I've tried twice today to put up some commentary on Chapter 7 of Caro's thesis, and both times have been defeated by computer problems. The first time the left button of my mouse stopped working, which I've never seen on a machine barely a year old. By the time I figured out that the problem was hardware, I'd dicked around wtih the window manager and X-server to the point where Netscape was dead, and I'd lost my text. The second time, Netscape just packed it in spontaneously, which goes to show that even on Linux, it's still possible to write crappy software. So I'm writing those comments offline, and on the third rendering they've lost a bit of the spontenaity that they orginally had. The first go was particularly fun because I found myself reproducing part of Caro's argument before I realized what I was doing. It was at that point that I realized I should be writing a commentary on that part of her thesis. Why reinvent the wheel when you're priveledged to work with one of the best wheelwrights on the planet? |
| Poem | Self-discovery can hurt a lot. It's like getting something caught in the gears of an engine. The sound of its pain is a measure of the engine's power. A weak engine just stalls. A powerful one will kick and buck and scream, but keep running until it's digested the obstruction. |
| Play |
Dunno if this counts as play or not--yes, I guess it does. Anything I do for fun is play, which means almost anything I do could wind up here. I've been back at the gym for two days after almost six weeks off with either a nasty cold or possibly mono (what's the point in getting tested when there's bugger-all they can do for it anyway?) I'm down in the weight I can lift by about 20%, which is a pain, but I'm sure it'll come back soon enough. A year and half ago I was something like fifty pounds overweight, at 220. I'm now at about 175 and plan to go down another ten, although I think my long break means I won't make it before the end of the year, although you never know. I've noticed I tend to go down in sudden drops after longish hiatuses. Weight of course is not the thing that matters, but percentage body fat, and my target there is somewhat below 15%, probably in the 12 to 15% range. I'll see how I look and feel, which after the constraints of health are met is what matters. So I've been bumping up my aerobic excercise to take off mroe weight, although I've not done a step class yet, which is also one of my medium-term goals. But at my gym they're pretty intense, and I find the whole prospect pretty daunting. The psychological secret of losing weight is to love yourself, to care about yourself, to want to live a long time and to live well and have fun. The technological secret is the Zone diet, which I recommend without reservation, and exercise. Caro's fluffy biscuits are an integral part of that technology, and you'll have to pay her millions for the secret. I love the feel of my body, the feeling that I'm strong and physically competent. I'm in better shape now than I've been at any time since I was a teenager, and that's been a very important helper as I've unfolded emotionally. There's nothing like feeling good about your body to help you feel good about yourself. When you know you're out of shape and flabby and not all that nice to look at, it doesn't help. When you realize that slowly, bit by bit, your physical condition is improving and you can feel that you can do more, it helps a lot. There've been times in the past year when I've felt pretty brutally down. Now is one of them, in fact. But at least when I look at myself in the mirror I can see that the person looking back isn't sagging and rapidly aging. There were two real turning points for me: one was a few years ago when a very beautiful, young, fit woman I worked with replied to a comment I made about how much I admired her fittness by saying, "Well, I've got quite a few years on you, so you shouldn't worry about it." I told her my age, and her face fell a bit and she said, "Well, maybe not quite so many years as I thought." She was about two years younger than me, and looked ten years younger. That was a motivator, but the real turning point, as it is the real turning point in so many things in my life, even things that haven't happened yet, was Caro. When we were first corresponding she would mention sometimes that she was sore from working out, or had to cut a message short because she was headed to the gym, so I asked her, "Ok, how do I do it? What should I do?" She replied, kind generous dear that she is, with many pages of detailed advice, which she described as my "desktop weight training reference". So I took her advice and joined a gym that has an emphasis on strength and a good free-weight room because, as she said, "If you want to build you've gotta get down into the iron pit with the big scary kids." It was scary, at first, but it's part of my routine now. And having had such a detailed briefing from an expert I trusted meant that I could talk to the trainers at various places and make some rational judgement about whether or not the place was any good. As it happened, the first place I went to met all the conditions I was looking for, and I joined the next day. I go four days a week, and it takes around an hour a day. It isn't a small investment in time, and it isn't a small investment in money (though considerably less than I was spending on beer before.) But it is hugely rewarding, both in the length of my expected life and the quality. One of the things I was noticing, as the father of two pretty acitive kids, was that I was already starting to have trouble keeping up with them. I didn't want to miss out on that fun, or other kinds of fun as well. One of the other secrets to losing weight and getting fit is to not try too hard or expect too much. Take it easy. Work into it. You have to build up new habits, good habits, and that doesn't happen overnight. Before I joined the gym I was running in the mornings, only about half a mile, but just enough to get a little spring back in my legs. And I lost about 20 pounds before Caro told me about the Zone diet, which make the next 25 a lot easier, and the ten after that simply a matter of time. My goal is to live a long, healthy, happy life, and I'm willing to make big investments over the long term to achieve that. This is the way I tend to be--I commit to a particular course, and then I pursue it gently but persistently. I never give up, but I don't worry if it doesn't happen overnight, either. Direction is more important than rate., because if you head in the right direction for long enough, the universe has no choice but to let you get where you want to go. |
| Reading |
I'm making a bit more progress with Homer, but have started reeding Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Waugh writing as a genuine satirist, rather than whatever the hell he thought he was doing in A Handful of Dust, is brilliant. He's really a carricaturist, painting outrageously distorted, over-emphasized characters behaving bizarrely. This is the novel as editorial cartoon. As always, his grasp of converstation and vocal style is brilliant and he uses it to replace paragraphs of description. On a rough sea crossing on which a missionary has cajoled the passengers into singing to forget their sea-sickness and terror of being drowned, we get the following complete scene from the bridge:
It's hard to imagine a more compact, efficient, yet complete rendering of two bored old salts wiling away their time in what, to them, is a mild blow, while the feckless passengers live in ignorant fear. I don't write much satire, but Waugh's methods are ones that can be turned to more subtle uses. |