I love it when two great (but unrelated) things get mashed together. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jane Austen’s Fight Club.
It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn close. (For those of you who need some context: Fight Club is one of my favorite movies, and not because of the fighting — it’s about much much more than that. I think you can figure the Jane Austen stuff out for yourself.)
All my life, I’ve been the proverbial 98-pound weakling. I’m still no great shakes (something like a 185-pound weakling, I guess), but Crossfit has made me stronger than I’ve ever been in my life.
Just now, as I was outside mowing the lawn, I decided to do some push-ups. Usually when I try to do push-ups, I can do three. Tonight I busted out twenty good push-ups in a row, stood up, and walked to the mower without breaking a sweat.
I love Crossfit because it’s making me a stronger man than I ever thought I could be.
Yes, I know. Twenty push-ups is nothing to some of you. That’s fine. As I say, to me, twenty push-ups is amazing. And to do twenty without stopping? Unbelievable. I know a lot of people don’t like Crossfit because they think it’s too hard-core, etc. I don’t care. To me, it’s an amazing regimen that is helping me build strength and confidence.
Three months ago, I couldn’t do a pull-up. I could only do thee push-ups at a time. I weighed 203+. Today, I can almost do a pull-up (I need the blue band to assist me). I can do twenty push-ups at a time. And I weigh 185. (Actually, I weighed in at 183.2 this morning, but I think that was an anomaly.)
Have I turned into a Crossfit evangelist? If so, it’s only because it works. After I finish mowing the lawn, I’m going to jump rope — just for fun.
Sometimes Kris wonders why I’m so easy-going, or why I don’t care passionately about politics like she does. Or a blog reader will wonder why I don’t get uptight about a comment. Or a friend asks why I don’t stand up for what I believe in. I’ve never been able to articulate it until now.
Colinmarshall recent posted this (awesome) Ask Metafilter question:
What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you’ve been doing wrong all along?
This question generated 750 responses from all over the map, both practical and philosophical. The response that resonated with me — the one that clarified for me why I’ve come to value relationships more than being right, than finding Absolute Truth — comes from joost de vries:
What I used to do wrong when I as younger is that I thought Truth was much more important than it is.
Yes, I could demolish a lot of positions by holding them up to the harsh glaring light of objective eternal truth. Hardly anything measures up actually. But then nothing much is left.
My discovery was that I realized that for me this seeking of ‘eternal truth’ had emotional and social underpinnings. Being happy and engaged with people would obviate the paramount need for logical truth.
Another take on this is that logic shows inconsistencies perhaps but can’t say anything about what is of value. What is of value is necessarily founded on subjective emotion and experience and thus inextricably linked with dependent truth, inconsistencies, experiential truths. Those people whose logic I criticized were much better in reasoning in this experiential logic than I was. I came to the conclusion that this kind of reasoning is an essential life skill to have a fulfilling life and that I had a lot to learn.
In other words: It’s better to be happy and have friends than it is to be right. Especially if what is “right” changes as you age.
This is why my personal motto is do what works for you. I really don’t believe there’s One True Way to anything. If you want to be Christian, be Christian. If you want to be Muslim, be Muslim. If you want to be atheist, be atheist. Choose the political party that makes you happy.
It saddens me when people feel the need to evangelize their positions, especially to the point that they say and do hateful things. What’s the point? What does that add to life?
The older I get, the more joy I get out of personal interaction, out of spending time with people of all ways of thought. What does it matter if my personal convictions are different than theirs? I can still learn from them and laugh with them. And it’s the learning and laughing that are important.
I’m in Breckenridge, Colorado this weekend, high in the Rocky Mountains. I’m presenting at the Savvy Blogging Summit, which is a gathering of ~65 amazing women bloggers (and Alex, the token man). I’m honored to have been asked to present on Building Community and Effective Monetization. I also gave the keynote talk last night, and though such a thing is far outside my comfort zone, I had fun. Here’s the written version of the talk (which is a bit different than the version I gave).
I started my first blog on 16 August 1997. I didn’t call it a blog — that word hadn’t been invented yet — I called it a web journal. I’d been reading other web journals for about a year, and I’d had a personal web page since 1994. Because I was a young man who wanted to be a writer, and because I was a young man who loved computers, starting a web journal seemed to make perfect sense.
For two years, I participated in what is now a sort of blogging joke: I wrote about what I ate for lunch. And for dinner. And for breakfast. I used my web journal to track my fitness. Then, as now, I struggled with my weight, and I figured a web journal might provide some accountability. It worked. Even though my web journal only had a handful of readers, they’d e-mail me to comment on my progress. Using this web journal, I lost 40 pounds.
I kept a web journal on and off for the next couple of years. Gradually, I wrote less and less about diet and exercise, and more and more about my daily life. I found that I enjoyed writing for the web, and other people seemed to like what I wrote.
It was tough going, though. In the olden days, we didn’t have blogging tools like WordPress and Moveable Type. If we wanted to keep a web journal, we had to update it by hand. Today, we just type in our text, press “publish”, and we’re golden. But back then, we had to write the HTML to format every page. We had to build our archives by hand, and update them every day. It was a lot of work, and it was a colossal pain in the butt! How many of you would like to hand-update your blogs every time you upload a post?
Fortunately, some folks in San Francisco saw a business opportunity. A company called Pyra came along and created a tool called Blogger, which people could use to automatically update their weblogs. And what were weblogs? Nothing more than web journals!
Blogger was clunky and prone to crashes, but it sure beat updating a web journal by hand. So, on 16 March 2001, I made my first Blogger account and I used the software to start my first weblog.
My cat Max is gigantic. He’s huge. First of all, he’s been eating his sister’s food. Because Toto is slowly dying, we’re indulging her by feeding her ocean whitefish and tuna, her favorite canned wet food. But her appetite is declining — and Max is pushy — so that big meatball is getting a lot of her food. Plus, I think maybe he’s eating at another house in the neighborhood.
Whatever the case, Max is fat. Like a hippo.
Speaking of hippos, here’s a crazy story about a domesticated hippo, one who thinks she’s a member of the family:
That story is crazy! From everything I’ve ever heard, hippos are Not to Be Messed With. They’re big, mean, and ugly, and they’re perfectly happy to squish you to a pulp. But apparently not Jessica. She just wants to be fed.
Too bad Jessica doesn’t live around here. I could introduce her to our hippo, Max.
Oak Grove was once — long ago — a thriving community. Back when the trolley line ran through the “downtown” area, the neighborhood supported a number of businesses. Many of those storefronts still remain, but since the trolley left in 1959, Oak Grove has struggled to keep the businesses around. Folks head out to the Superhighway (as 99e was once known) or into downtown Milwaukie.
Kris and I like to support the handful of businesses that do try to make it in downtown Oak Grove. I’m a too-frequent customer at the convenience store on the corner of Arista, where the owner Joe and I chat about books and politics as I buy my diet soda and sugary candy. And Kris loves the Oak Grove Coffeehouse, the neighborhood’s only real business of character.
Jason started the Oak Grove Coffeehouse a couple of years ago, and though business seems tepid at times, it seems to be enough to keep the doors open. I think it helps that Jason and his staff have become sort of community hubs. The coffehouse puts on “open mic” nights, hosts art shows, and more.
For reasons that are opaque to me, the Oak Grove Coffeehouse hosted a fund-raiser last Saturday. Okay, the fund-raiser part I understand; it’s the type of fund-raiser that baffles me. On Saturday, the OGCH held a Star Wars-themed barbecue. Seriously.
Kris and I didn’t stop by, but because we’re fans of the store on Facebook, I was able to see photos of the event, including this one, which cracks me up:
Such a hilarious photo. I’m not sure how Darth Vader is going to get that coffee through his ventilator, but it sure looks like he’s going to try!
On January 1st, I set just one goal for 2010. (I don’t do resolutions.) I vowed to lose 50 pounds by the end of the year. To that end, I dubbed 2010 The Year of Fitness.
Losing fifty pounds in 52 weeks is ambitious but doable. Nutrition and fitness experts suggest that losing a pound a week is a sustainable weight-loss goal. (Some even say that two pounds a week can work.)
In 1997, I dropped from 200 pounds on May 6th to 160 pounds on Halloween, so I know I have the mental toughness to do this. And make no mistake — losing weight like this takes a lot of hard work, yes, but it’s mostly about psychological strength. It’s about dedication.
I’m now six months into The Year of Fitness. How has it gone? Let’s review.
