Apples and Oranges

Perfect example of what is wrong with me, for the many who wonder. I am in the grocery store and see a blood orange nearby the honeycrisp apple.

The next thing you know I'm posing them for pictures together because I had to.

Who gets where I was taking this? Let's see which among you are as mentally ill as I am.

New Division?

I was informed at dinner tonight that there is a new way to perform division, and for that matter, a new way to perform multiplication.

Mind = blown.

In the inimitable words of J.Fu: why the fuck was this necessary?

Strip Malls Think You're a Delicate Flower: A Minor Rant

I am sort of over it with these "Yield to Pedestrians In Walkway" signs popping up all over the place.  

There are places where crossing the street is legitimately akin to a game of Frogger (yeah, I'm that old).   And, I'm *not* talking about situations where it's legally required to yield to pedestrians; e.g., when you're driving in your car on a real street, turning on a green light.  PA law does require you to sit still, enjoying your music while the stream of humanity crosses the road.   Once the road is clear, then, and only then, are you legally permitted to move your car.   I don't mind this, and actually appreciate the way drivers in most cities (NYC notwithstanding) actually pause and allow the nice pedestrians to cross. 

The signs that vex me are the ones appearing in supermarket parking lots or similar places, popping up with a frequency and tenacity that rivals dandelions in spring, legislating that you yield right of way, whether you're driving straight or turning, any time you see a human being who intends to cross.

Reasons why these signs are annoying:

1.  I am opposed on general principle to the pussification of the American people.   If you cannot be trusted to puzzle out crossing a street, despite the encumbrance of your weekly groceries, you probably shouldn't be out unsupervised without your helmet.   Where does the nanny state end?  Next thing you know, someone will be stationed at every street corner, sending you home if you've forgotten your hat and gloves on a cold day.  I want to go back in time and sit in the meeting where it was decided that this benefited anyone other than people who make metal signs.   If drivers are driving like assholes, hire some extra police to pull them over and let the localities get some extra money in the coffers.  God knows, most of them need it desperately and there are plenty of people who would be happy to take a job doing something useful.
 
2.  This trend is clearly endowing the average pedestrian with an overly-developed, and false, sense of entitlement vis-a-vis crossing the street.   People used to walk closely to the parked cars, and look around before they moved into the flow of vehicles.   This is happening less and less as people now seem to believe they are protected from on high, no matter how carelessly they are walking, or where, regardless of signage or crosswalk presence.   Was this the plan all along?  Is someone in city planning Machiavellian enough to have thought this through to the logical conclusion: if you encourage people to rely on a nanny state, soon enough you'll create a true need for it?

The horror.

On the plus side with signage are the new stop signs cheekily informing you that a "full and complete stop is free, while a rolling stop will cost you $195".  Way to have a sense of humor, local townships.

curmudgeon or not?

Me: What does it take to be considered a curmudgeon?  Am I there yet?
He: You need a penis.
Me: What? Why?  Why is curmudgeon a man thing?  Why can't I be a female curmudgeon?
He: They have a female curmudgeon.  It's called "harridan". 
Me: I don't want to be a harridan.  I want to be a curmudgeon.  I like that word better.  Anyway, let's pretend having a penis is not a requirement.  Let's lay out the requirements for this.
He: Why do I have to be the arbiter of curmudgeon?
Me: You know this is going on the blog, right?

*time passes*

Later, I happen to comment that a relatively rare thing is occurring--I am actually able to decipher the handwriting of a teenage male with little effort.

He: I think you're right.  You ARE a curmudgeon.

And they just called "34"

It appears I'm going to be sitting here at the DMV for a while. No matter what time of day I've shown up here in the past two weeks, it's been at least 20 people ahead of me. Since sitting doing nothing is not a specialty, and it's only intermittently amusing to listen to the DMV drones butcher all the foreign names, and it's been a few days since I've blogged, I figured no time like the present.

Of course that means I need something to discuss. There's a few options. First, a brief update on my experiments.

1. Dead butt syndrome seems to be contagious as now at least one other friend has it. I am hateful about the exercises. I can barely get through half the set I'm supposed to do before I lose the ability to isolate the muscle. Also, my friend discoballdad sent me a link to an article that discusses another possible piece of the puzzle. I'm still puzzling through that one. I've done a few WODs since the DBS discovery, and I've scaled them (to what feels like a humiliatingly sad level) to help me work more on lungs than strength, deliberately avoiding WODs that I think will aggravate the issue.

2. Burpees: much to my surprise (and everyone else's), I have not yet needed to perform any burpees. I have come insanely close to burpees at least three times so far since the challenge. My biggest obstacles thus far appear to be over-scheduling myself, time flux, and teaming up with other people who are not burpee-burdened (and who are probably less than appreciative of my rushing them along because of my silly little experiment). By time flux, I mean how I can sit down at the computer and suddenly it's 3am. I am not sure how to fix that. Maybe set an alarm for time wasting?

3. I did make one completely unnecessary purchase this past week. Just about one year ago today, I played my first game of "Castle" on a visit to some friends in the UK. It's a heavily strategic board game and I loved it. It's impossible to find in the US for some reason...or so I thought until I wandered right past it in Barnes & Noble the other day. I paused three times saying "no" before i said, "fucking buy it". I bought it. Otherwise I've been pretty fiscally responsible this week.

Finally, yesterday's event is big in my thoughts. Our box participated in the MLK Day of Service yesterday. My friend Stephanie is a genius, and came up with a great event. She dreamed up the idea to connect with a military crew, Kandahar CrossFit, and have our Steve's Club affiliate do a tandem WOD with them yesterday in real time and with a live Skype feed going, and then put together a care package. In the package? Among cards and letters, written by our Steve's Club kids, there is a whole lot of chalk. Steph found out that it's super hard to get that over there and they go through it like crazy. Words cannot express how impressed I am with Stephanie's creativity in coming up with this event. It was really amazing and my hat goes off to her and to everyone who made yesterday special.

Just got my new license...signing off for now.

point of interest

A Swiss Army knife is much sharper than you'd expect, in case any of you hadn't yet tested this theory on any of your own appendages. Luckily, Dori had a bandage handy.

some experiments i'm conducting

My close friends know I have a little habit of conducting experiments on myself, and less delightfully, upon them.   One memorable experiment was intended to be dinner, and instead resulted in a new form of plastic.  Luckily, they keep me around for reasons other than my culinary delights.   And yes, I'm absolutely dying to have a reason to try out one of my holiday gifts, so I can post a picture of it.   I promise, you will love it too.

Anyhoodle, I am presently conducting two three experiments to see where they take me.  They are:

1.  Get my ass back into CrossFit fighting shape

This starts with the process mentioned in yesterday's post re: dead butt syndrome rehab, but while I get that in order, I'm also thinking I should work on rebuilding my endurance/lungs.   The challenge is doing this without running, as it's actually a prime causal factor in DBS, and it's one of the things I least enjoy doing anyway.  I'm hoping that a few months of DBS rehab combined with endurance work, overlaid with skill work and heavy lifting as my body tolerates, will leave me in a place where I can start hitting WODs again regularly this spring.  By the end of 2012, I'd like to achieve the following goals:

• Back squat 200 vs 165 today...but 165 is with sub-optimal muscle usage (dead butt syndrome)
• Front squat 165 vs 135 today, ditto
• Deadlift 300+ (please GOD) vs 275 today, ditto
• Overhead squat: 125 vs 105 today, ditto
• Clean & Jerk: 150 vs. 135 today
• Bench: 150 vs 115 today
• I'd also like to get a muscle up, figure out how to string double unders, and get HSPU with full range of motion.
• Stop faffing around with losing that last 10#, and just fucking do it already.  The next 2.5 months will be pivotal in moving toward that goal, while I'm ramping up the cardio/rowing/endurance work, and staying off regular heavy lifting for now.  This is at least as much about performance gains as it is about aesthetics...doing pullups and HSPU gets easier with less body weight.  Am I going to pretend I don't want to see more ab muscles in the mirror?  Hell no.  I'd like it a whole lot--I'm not going to lie.   It's not the *only* thing though, and to be sure, as soon as I start going heavy with weights again, I'm going to gain muscle/pounds back.  I'm cool with muscles though--very damn cool.

This plan will push me further into the hole relative to WOD and strength performance for now--but it's the best I can come up with until this DBS thing is fixed.  As I'm fond of telling the people at the box about deadlifts, dropping weights to rehab bad form habits hurts the ego in the short term, but when you break through and start consistently nailing PRs again, the sting will abate.  Time to take my own advice.

2.  The "No Spend" Experiment

I'm presently "funemployed".   December 30th was the last day at my previous job, and now I'm taking some time to figure out what the next move should be.  Feel free to make suggestions!   But, in the interim, I've decided to roll back the spending and see how much I can take down my lifestyle.  To that end, I've instituted a "No Spend" experiment.  Short of essentials (food, etc), I will not make any unnecessary purchases for myself this year.   I'm not going into deprivation mode--I'll still visit my favorite sushi joint, for example--but I'm not going to buy a new shirt just because I want one.  If I don't strictly need something, it's staying in the store.  Since I didn't lead an extravagant lifestyle already, I think this will be an issue of mindfulness.

3.  The "Be On Time" Experiment

This one terrifies me, and I'm certain I just heard at least three people say "holy shit!" when they read this.  I have a near-lifelong issue with being on time.  I have heard every explanation for why I am late, and I honestly cannot tell you why this keeps happening.  I swear I do not think I'm more important than anyone else, which the most common reason I hear for chronic lateness.  I do think, to some extent, I'm guilty of being overly optimistic about how long things take, and I do try to cram 10# of life into a 5# bag, but no matter.  It's all excuses.  I'm going to try to fix it.  Starting now, through the end of March, if I am late for anything at all, I owe you a 15 burpee penalty whenever I finally get there.  I don't care if I'm wearing an evening gown.   I don't care if there was a major accident on the Sure-Kill Expressway.  I don't care if it was raining, snowing, hailing, or all three.   This is a zero tolerance policy.  I fucking hate burpees.  Let's see if I hate them enough to stop this insanity.

Am I really going to post this?  Fuckkkkkkkkkkkk yeah.

more on dead butt syndrome & what it means to the Donkey

Parenthetical side note: the ass/Donkey connection tickles my fancy.

I'm posting these entries under the assumption that my audience is entirely comprised of people who know me personally, most of whom I see on a regular basis, so I'm wasting little time with explanations about some of the wackass things I do for fun, an example of which is CrossFit.  If you have found my blog by tragic accident and don't know what CrossFit is, let's start by saying it's better explained pretty much anywhere but here.  Next I'll take the lazy way out and send you to this website.  Yes, it's every bit as nuts as whatever you found on the website, and I love that whole thing, but I also really dig the community that can be found in the boxes across the world.

With that out of the way, I can now resume discussion of my dead butt syndrome, which I still cannot take seriously, but I need to, because it's a huge pain in the knee.  How does my ass have anything to do with my knee?   As best as I can understand it:

The muscles in your body are designed to work in synergy.  People with dead butt syndrome have an especially weak glute muscle, usually glute medius.  For someone who sits around eating bonbons all day, this isn't really a problem.  For someone who really really REALLY wants to deadlift 300+, however, it's a huge problem, for two reasons.

1.  Without this muscle firing properly, an athlete cannot hope to achieve greatness at lifts like deadlift and squat, not only because you actually need this muscle (among others) to execute the lift to full potential, but also because if you cannot fire this muscle, your body (clever thing that it is) will recruit other muscles to do the work, which leads us to item 2.

2.  I've been unable to work out regularly this past year--if I was lucky, I got in 1 WOD a week, and there were weeks at a time when I was out of the game entirely.  My knees have both been mysteriously swelling up, though not typically both at the same time.  This is an issue that has been rearing up from time to time for years before I ever found CrossFit--in fact, it was also a huge problem when I was doing little more than power walking.   This past year has been one experiment after another trying to find a solution.  Finally, I saw an ortho, who has identified the issue as the incredibly unglamorous sounding "dead butt syndrome".

Basically what's going on is that my glute medius is a lazy bastard, and all the other muscles are recruited to work harder when I do anything active.  This makes either hamstring or quad/IT band tighter than it should be and no amount of rolling/stretching can fix the resulting problem, which is a fucked up knee.  For a while I was focusing on the slow lifts, thinking that the problem was more about jumping, running, and similar activities, rather than muscles out of balance.  I made the problem so much worse with this focus, because I wasn't doing anything to fix the weak muscle, and I kept asking more and more of the other muscles.   Then, in October, we had a Oly Lifting seminar.  Since that weekend I've been virtually unable to do any CrossFit at all.  I could still row, and I did that, but always with pain afterwards to varying degrees.

The result is that over the last year, I've lost strength, the precious little endurance I had, and tonight's WOD showed me exactly how bad it's gotten.  Not only was I unable to come anywhere close to Rx, but I also had one of the slowest times on the board, despite only using 95# for Push Jerks--a weight I'd have considered easy peasy lemon squeezy a year ago.

At this point, it's not even about being competitive, although I know that I am pushed by other athletes, and enjoy the times when I can keep up or even push others with my numbers.  I am officially what I'd call "deconditioned".

Among other things, this means I have a lot of work to do and the first step is addressing this dead butt business, which cascades into a host of other things, namely, keeping my knees healthy enough to assure a continued ability to hit the WODs.  I doubt I'll ever be a firebreather, but there was a time when I was getting really strong, and I miss that.

If you see me in the gym doing Jane Fonda-style leg lifts and glute bridges, that's why.

toilet paper and perky people: a theme made in heaven.

Cleverly skipping over the whole "what conversation did Donkey have last night" discussion, because seriously, I'm doing it for your own good, let's chat for a moment about ordinary things that people do wrong.

Toilet paper only has one way to hang.  The new piece should come from over the top of the roll.  There is absolutely no sense in having it the other way, and if you have it that way in your house, it's wrong, and I will probably fix it while I'm there, if I find occasion to visit your loo.

Moving on.

Boyfriend posits that I have an issue with perky people.  Any time I remark to him that I don't care for a certain person, it's with almost 90% surety that the person in question is undeniably perky.

What is wrong with me, that I reject the perky?  There are certainly worse things to be.  I thought about trying to prove him wrong, by going onto my Facecrack page and surveying my friends to see if I have any who could be so considered, and you know what?   Off the top of my head, I cannot think of a single one I'd readily call "perky".     On that basis, I conceded his point.

Why are these two things blogged together?  Because I couldn't decide which was more important for you to know, so I decided not to decide.

In which i (nearly) overshare

I very nearly posted something discussed at tonight's dinner, in between bites of truly outstanding Indian food, served up at my favorite West Philly haunt, when I recalled the faces of all three of the people who read this blog, and then I considered carefully the fact that while I do not care what anyone thinks or knows about me, you gentle readers may not feel reciprocally.

I shall refrain.  For now.

one day of blogging and i'm already over it with tumblr

tumblr is just a huge pain in my ass.  i am resorting to blogspot again because i've used it before and i seem to be intelligent enough to make it work.   i am clearly either too stupid, or not trendy enough, to use tumblr properly.

so now, we have comments.  post your comments, oh yeah.

the index post, shifted over from tumblr

At the gym tonight ( a WHOLE other discussion), it was suggested, probably in jest, that I should start a blog. After carefully weighing the idea in the time it took to consume tonight's dinner of peanut butter straight from the jar*, like a sheep being led to slaughter, I decided to give it a go.

My reasoning:
1. Im presently unemployed and have little else to do
2. I am occasionally able to make my friends laugh
3. ???

I know, it's a stunning victory for logical conclusions. I dunno. I can’t really imagine anyone not personally acquainted with me who might be entertained by my musings (most of my funniest comments are context-specific) and I find most people’s blogs to be, at best, self-indulgent navel gazing of the most horrifically boring sort.

Feel free to tell me that my posts are spelunking in the cave of horrifically boring navel gazing. For real.

I'll leave you with a few things I've uttered in the past 24 hours, with minimal explanation.

1. “I have dead butt and I cannot lie”(this was actually sung, a la Sir Mixalot). I seriously do have something called “Dead Butt Syndrome” which sounds ludicrous no matter how many times I try to take it seriously. Apparently this means that I'm not using all the muscles in my ass properly, specifically my glute medius. This explains, in part, why my squat and deadlift are not increasing despite intense effort to move the needle.

2. “I TOLD YOU ELLEN WAS A CYLON!” Talk about late to the party. Necessary Disclosure: I have not owned a television, on purpose, since 2007 when I gave away the one I owned via Craigslist because I realized it hadn’t been switched on since 9.11. Accordingly, I missed the whole Battlestar Galactica series when it originally aired. Flash forward to modern day, when Boyfriend convinces me to watch a few episodes via Netflix. He's already seen the entire series, start to finish, including the webisodes. (Side note: is that a fucking word,“webisode”? Too lazy to check.) I was immediately sucked in, but it has provided much hilarity for Boyfriend to watch me get mindfucked by all the plot twists. Today was the day that they revealed that Ellen Tigh is one of the final five, and I have thought all along that she was.

3. “Are you in there reading the manual?”, said in mildly accusatory manner. I am not a fan of the RTFM policy. Let's be honest; I'm probably going to fuck up the set up with or without the manual.


I have no idea if this blog idea will stick or not. I'll commit to it for 30 days and see how it goes. No promises after that.

* a perennial favorite