Transitioning Thus Far

I've seen the light! or I have an idea!

I feel I have changed so much over the past year and 4  months. I started hormones August 7th 2015 and though I had been making minor changes to my appearance going back a year before, the hormones were the biggest step for me, the biggest thing I feared. Mostly that was because I'm generally a pretty health conscious person and I know there are increased health risks with hormones. Most everything has been positive but there have been a few negatives.

Emotions

As far as emotions go, it is hard to distinguish between my social status change and my medical one. While I feel free to express my emotions fully, this may just be from years of repressing and just feeling like I can open up now. Experientially I felt that my emotions were hidden behind a thick barrier where they could just barely get to me. Post hormone therapy, my emotions are laid bare, clear as day. Regardless of the cause I feel closer to my emotions, experiencing them in a more unfiltered way. This cashes out as crying about of lot of things, especially sad movies or music or situations. I was somewhat like this before but now it's like I've got tears on tap. As for aggression in any form, I don't feel it at all. Sometimes I'm blunt or abrasive with my speech but beyond that, I lack the "macho man" tendencies i had before. The lack of aggression changes my training motivation too. I'm much more relaxed and find I can enjoy it more even if I'm not as physically powerful as before.

Strength and Training

I have lost a hefty amount of strength and have struggled to get most of it back. The loss is not entirely due to hormones. Part of it is a layoff from training after quitting my last parkour teaching job and holing up for a while in my room afraid to deal with the social consequences of transitioning. I was also fairly depressed about my failed marriage. I lost my zeal for training after burning out teaching and cycling for hours to work/home every day. I stopped cycling and just started walking everywhere, sometimes quite long distances. I was using a step counter so I was quite motivated to get a certain amount of steps. I started to get more training when I got around people more and that has kept me sane. Freediving, climbing, running, and parkour became my life staples instead of just add ons. Since the winter has hit, freediving has taken a backseat and mostly it's parkour and tumbling. I can run quite far (most was 8 miles a few was weeks ago) easy again due to a different kind a running technique I recaptured. Acquiring strength has been an up and down process that has mostly been determined by my weight loss/gain.

Diet

What a mess, to be honest. I have gone through so many different strategies to tackle this piece since it is, for me, what most affects my bodily appearance as I transition and my success in training as I seek to maximise my strength to weight ratio. Upon quitting eggs and dairy again, I lost about 15lbs right away. The variety of processed vegan junk food did not help me at all and the weight has fluctuated up and down quite a lot. My goal weight is somewhere between 122-145lbs essentially the lower to middle end of my healthy bmi range for a height of 5' 9". The lowest I have gotten to was about 153 but I've since jumped back up to 165. Now I'm dropping at a slow steady rate due to my most balanced approach yet.

I fully understand the mechanics and energy balance required to lose excess fat. The psychology of losing weight, however, is something I ignored. Most of my behavior is quite self directed. Though I may have biological limits to how long I can train or sit down and write before I become uncomfortable, I have a pretty high degree of self control. Trying to just "not eat so much food" was a test of one of those biological imperatives we will never get over: our hunger drive. Since then, I have learned to control  my food choices, a much easier variable to handle. So it is not a matter of IF I will eat but WHAT I will eat. So long as I control for the energy density of my foods, i can eat as much as I want and still lose weight. With proper food sequencing (greens then veggies then fruit then starches) I can take advantage of my limited stomach volume to feel fuller with less calories, thus satiating my hunger drive. My main mistake was measuring the scale instead of my behavior, so even though i  was able to lose a little bit of weight, it always came back on. With the correct behaviour, the weight will take care of itself so I'm only checking once a month by taking the average of 3 days of measurements. This has been my best approach yet as it supports my training goals instead of ruining them. I have much more to elucidate on diet but it deserves its own post.

Salt is the one issue that deters my dietary goals. I have an insane craving for it. I have hypothesised that craving is due to my medication spironolactone which is a potassium sparing anti-diuretic. Essentially it makes me pee a lot more so I'm not holding on to as much water. Water follows salt I guess. I have tried several times to go salt free but my stamina takes a dive immediately every time. I could be wrong about this particular issue and I'm seeing a doctor next week to figure the whole thing out. If this is the case, I am coming closer to considering orchiectomy since it means I can drop spironolactone altogether and just take estradiol.

Breasts!

They have grown steadily and considerably over all this time. I have found that it is good to keep measurements to buy the correct bra size, otherwise it will be quite uncomfortable. I can feel them bouncing around when I run or jump. Having breasts has been the most validating part of this whole transition, making me feel more at home with my body. I feel more connected to my body than I ever have.

Appearance,passing, make-up, clothing, 

My thoughts on passing have shifted from wanting to pass because of embarrassment to wanting to pass as part of my relation to others and the philosophical concept of what it means to be a woman. I've dealt with plenty of embarrassment now and I can handle going out looking like a half man/woman creature any day. Different people will call me she or he throughout the day and though it is a little jarring, it is to be expected. I now realize that I can't expect to be thought of as a woman if I don't have enough social cues to suggest that I am. There are only so many ways a person can be considered a woman from a philosophical standpoint. The ideal norm is being born with certain parts and growing up socialized as a woman. I am not a woman in that way. I was not socialized to be one. I have to pick up from where I never left off. I can change my body with hormones actualizing my subjective experience of feeling more like a woman but this can still be largely hidden. I get closer to the social part by doing makeup that feminizes my face more, wearing clothing that suggests a more feminine shape.

I used to think that feeling like a woman can only be about me and my feelings about my mind/body. But it is important to recognize that humans are social beings and that my relations with others are a huge part of my transition. This is why passing matters to me.

Voice

My biggest lingering fear. I've put my voice training off for far too long. In the rare situations I do pass, my voice immediately gives me away. This has made me not want to talk much whenever I'm out and about and it's a pretty life altering thing. So currently doing exercises on this and working on integrating it into my life more, as awkward as it may be.

That's it for now. I usually try not to talk about this stuff too much because I feel there is so much more to me and I don't want my life to be all about this. I hope this helps people who are on a similar journey.

Another Lateral Move for Experiential Alchemy

My latest book conquered, "Consider Phlebas"

Break Apart, Clarify, Understand

In a previous post, I used the term "lateral move" in the context of parkour training. I'm developing the idea that reading is a lateral move for the mind. Making a lateral move, in the context of one's experiences, involves expanding what we know outward. So instead of accumulating knowledge through our senses from the outside world, we move inwards drawing on our experiences to bring life to the words we read. The words we read break apart and reorder our existing experiences to give us a new take. If we don't allow for experiential alchemy, our experiences lie dormant as mere knowledge. 

This effect can work in reverse as well. Words have a way of clarifying our experiences. There is a base level crudeness to any given experience that is wasted on the conscious mind.  A detailed description about the setting of a room or about, say,  the complex emotions of a character in the grip of indecision, gives us new tools with which to articulate our own experiences. Understanding comes from clarity. It's like the myriad number of  Eskimo names for snow. We know that there are all types of different snow but we can have a fairly flat understanding of it if we do not make finer distinctions. That flat understanding can feed back into our experiences, dulling our ability to perceive the world in a more complex way.

Take back your exploratory nature

In terms of exploration and discovery we often talk about the world of the big and the small. The frontiers of our scientific understanding go as far as they possibly can in those directions. Scientists invent new ways of measuring to understand the world of the small. Scientists invent new spacecraft so we can get closer to the really big things. There is usually a natural limit to how much we can discover and when you ask any given scientist about the stuff on the frontier, you get the kind of response you would from a mechanic working on your car: "workin' on it". The "you'll know when we know" approach works better for humanity as a whole since we're not all qualified to jump in a space shuttle and sample asteroids or whatever. That said, discovery and exploration can still be about the individual. It's about learning something you didn't know before, even if other people know these things. That's why people still travel. No-one's reason for not visiting Japan is "well there are already people living there, so what's the point?" Even with travel there is a natural limit and unless you're living somewhere new for a while until it becomes old to you, chances are you don't sink your roots far enough in to understand what you've experienced like the natives do. Fiction promises no limits in time, geography, or even universe for that matter.

When we read, we call upon our inherent ability to model reality, to make predictions about the future. So in some sense, every experience or situation described in fiction calls upon our ability to anticipate succeeding events within that story. When we consider what might happen next in real life, we create stories and models. Sometimes these can be so vivid, they cause us to flinch away from an imagined pain or twist our faces in disgust over a sight we're not even seeing. Our powerful imagination affects even our physiology. Maxing out our modelling abilities may serve us in other practices such as creating positive associations in meditation. For that matter, any quality we develop in our meditation gets practice when we encounter scenarios in fiction where it might be possible to never come up against any major challenges in real life which test our ability to keep calm and present. Just kidding! There are tons of those but perhaps the more extreme examples don't come up in modern life so often that we can adequately prepare for them.

The moral piece:

Reading is like the movie Groundhog's Day. You go over similar types of stories again and again and you learn something beautiful/helpful from it. You go through the next day again without the deficiency you had before, with new insight, you can move further than you did, you've improved your perspective. You fill out your mind map, uncovering corners of your mental world you may never have experienced. How many lives have you lived? When you read a story, you are born into a new world for a little while. You have a chance to take on the perspectives of characters who experience things you may never encounter. The clarity with which I feel these things depends on my understanding of the words presented and the richness of my own experience. Knowledge, on some definitions in epistemology, is about interacting with the truth of the world in a very particular kind of way. Perhaps we are not gaining new knowledge when we read fiction, but we do work with what we know, bending it, twisting it, reordering it. Though we usually work with the field of our senses, that information combined with the ability to read multiplies the experiences we have. This experience explosion puts us through a gauntlet of moral fortitude which can shape and sharpen our moral sensibilities to a fine point.

Anyways, I found that I was missing some good reasons for why I enjoy reading fiction beyond fun and stimulation. Elucidating the benefits pushes me to feel like it is not just an indulgence, but an active practice which makes me a better person.

Anger Sharks and Is Anger Ever Justified?

To give life to my wayward metaphor. 

Found on google images, failed to find original source

I've been thinking about the concept of anger mostly as it shows itself in annoyance/irritation. One idea I have is that it is possible to avoid such negative states altogether, or to only experience the tiniest fragments of it. The idea is that anger is like a spark that leads to a fire which turns into an inferno. It is possible to stamp out the spark upon its arrival in the mind. If one is mindful, attentive to their thoughts and bodily sensations, one can catch the seed of anger before it becomes an inferno. Oddly enough the technique for dissolving anger is somewhat indirect. As the anger forms, their may be associations that come with it and it is possible to bypass these reactions simply by focusing on one's breath. So you notice that you're feeling hints of anger, then you jump into a concentrated state and though the anger may get a few words/phrases/images in, your focus on the breath pushes everything else to your periphery. So the anger simply dies out, it may go through its usual spin cycle of rumination but it's a far away conversation or more like an ambulance passing by, it comes up loudly at first, then it dopplers its way on out of your life.

That's one way to do it but I guess it does not fully dissolve the anger, it just doesn't feed it anymore. As far as behavior brought on by anger, the basic concentration technique can combat that altogether, but there is still an internal piece of anger that can sit beneath the surface and, if we lapse in our attentiveness, can break through into our behavior again.

The vippassanna technique of observing one's sensations and noting them takes the dissolution process one step further by putting anger in the same category as all the other sensations. When you start to note every little sensation as it arises in consciousness, you spontaneously get  a sense that these sensations are "not you/not coming from you", they clearly don't last, and that holding onto them causes us to suffer. Sounds like some weird claims here but I've had some experience with this, albeit brief. I don't exactly know what happens when you get further along with this particular practice, but it is likely that one will dissociate more and more with one's negative mental states including anger.

The third technique is the build up of positive associations. The idea is to generate positive states regarding oneself, people, events, etc. This practice is a non-neutral reinterpretation of one's experience but we can find reasons to associate with things positively while acknowledging the practical aspects of life. For example, you may feel compassionate for someone who has done you wrong, but you're practical enough not to put yourself in harm's way if such circumstances can be avoided.

Okay so I've written about those techniques several times already in previous posts but I wanted to go over them again to establish that there are at least 3 ways one can dissolve anger before it becomes something that we act on, or even before we can suffer from the feeling of it. In fact, the highest ideal level of at least one of these practices suggests that we can eradicate negative mental states like anger altogether (though this a lofty goal that would take a lot of skill/time).

When asking people about whether anger was justified or not I expected some more straightforward arguments from people. Instead I got an exasperated "hello, anger is not an optional thing". More than one person told me that it's something that is inevitable, that we are stuck with it, that it is natural. Anger, in Buddhist thought, is one of the big no-nos. At the very least, the goal is to never express any outward signs of anger because it is a form of violence toward others. And sure, perhaps monks are seething beneath the surface and suffer internally with anger sometimes. That has to be the case for some novice monks anyway, I must say that personally I experience the dissolution of my anger for short periods of time when I am consistent with my meditation practice. If I skip a few days, it's like getting cast out to sea and I lose my way. Sometimes I get bitten and thrashed around by an anger shark until I can make my way back to the shore, bloodied up and in pain. To continue this analogy, consistent practice would be like heading in the opposite direction of the sea, getting as far away from it as I can by perhaps climbing to the highest mountain. So no matter what might be happening, it is going to take a lot of time and effort for me to get bitten by an anger shark again.

I started writing about anger a month or so ago to talk mainly about how irritation/aversion arises. I've reworked my presentation a bunch of times, left it, came back to it. It is now post-election right now and I'm seeing a lot of angry people reacting to what has happened. Maybe this post can help people out who are caught up in an angry or other averse state of mind. Also I hope no one confuses my condemnation of anger as acceptance for the current political state of affairs. I believe action is required, but mindful action, never in anger.

Book Review: The Attention Revolution by Alan Wallace

This book is essentially an updated meditation manual with commentary interspersed between each stage of the practice. Wallace manages to bring an ancient tradition of cultivating concentration to bear on our current cultural crises of attention. He points out that attention is a skill, not a fixed attribute, which has tremendous potential to change one's life.

I've experienced the lack of attention skills in others pretty clearly, especially nowadays with phone technology sweeping over the world. I've noticed it in myself as well though in the past I would have prided myself on having pretty good attention skills. So my own experience has shown me how attention can grow and shrink as we go through life. No matter what level one is at, it's clear that having the ability to direct one's mind at any point has practical applications internally and externally.

Why not just practice something that requires attention to get better at like playing an instrument or something? People enjoy intense levels of concentration when they are engaged in their craft but once they are finished, it's back to the standard monkey mind, bouncing back and forth between different thoughts and associations. What if we could be awake to the world in every moment? How much fuller could we live? My thoughts as a parkour practitioner make me think of the moments during a jump which requires a sustained bout of focus or even balancing on a rail. I've noticed that I become fastidiously aware of every step I take on the rail and monitor my balance quite precisely. When I jump off of the rail, however, I go back to a dullness of mind with regards to that level of focus. Another extreme example I can think of is wing suit flying. Those people must be so connected to the present moment because every little movement is important and any mistake could spell death for them. These high levels of focus are apparently possible to induce by training the attention on its own. I find myself wanting this both for the reason of being more awake in life, experiencing it more fully, but also as a preliminary to further, deeper investigation of my own mind.

Anyways, the layout of the book describes each stage of the meditation practice in fine detail. For each stage of concentration, there is a supplementary meditation practice designed to nurture positive states of mind like compassion, lovingkindness, vicarious joy, etc. Peppered in the later chapters are practices involving lucid dreaming. Apparently it is possible to be so awake in life that one can continue on even into the dream world. I love this analogy of the waking world the the dream world. Becoming lucid in a dream is akin to becoming lucid in the real world to "waking up" in a sense rather than slogging through one's life as if in a dream.

As each stage progresses we extend the amount of time we can attend to our meditation object and start to refine it more and more. The process is supposed to take months, even years for some people though. It all depends on how much time a person can spend refining the attention. To actually get to the highest stage of meditation requires months of going on retreat along with consistent practice. I think this is the part of the book that will lose a lot of readers because it puts a much larger demand on their time as most people who get into meditation are just trying to find a way to relax. It all begins with simply developing momentary attention, and culminates in the ability to maintain a more refined version of that attention for up to 4 hours at a time. It's fascinating that the actual purpose of meditation goes far beyond mere relaxation techniques. Relaxation is just the tip of the iceberg.

At the very least, refining one's attention has the effect of suppressing emotions, negative thought, etc. Though they may hang out beneath the surface, we can get the jump on our negative states as they arise, using the attention skill to let those fall away into the background. At some point along the path of concentration, one can diverge, moving toward vipassana (aka insight) meditation, rooting out out our mental afflictions, instead of just suppressing them. Seems like goal worth striving toward.

Toward the end of the book, I became somewhat dismayed because Wallace starts talking about the "mind powers." literally 99% of the book is practical advice and insightful commentary. So it is striking to see a discussion of telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation tacked on, it stands in stark contrast to everything else. As with all of the other wackier claims, unsubstantiated by sufficient evidence, I will leave such possibilities to their own devices until they become more apparent otherwise.

Regardless of the bizarre ending, most of the manual stands alone a highly technical meditation manual. It's quite nice to be able look at each stage of the meditation and have a particular sign to look out for to know where I've gotten to.

Some lateral moves

Been thinking lately about the different styles of movement emerging. A lot of people may be inclined to think that the level for parkour has been raised to an impossibly high degree. At least that was one of my first thoughts seeing someone land a double flyaway precision in a recent competition. Where does one go from there at that point? Well obviously triple flyaway is the next logical progression.

All kidding aside I've had to make certain concessions with my training regarding my current strength levels and the risks I'm willing to take now. I've found that instead of making the vertical move upwards to ever higher strength/speed/power I'm forced to make some lateral moves instead, to fill out the map a bit more. 

The main concept here is to derive attributes from the current practice, and build those up to a high degree. The main example I can think of is training barefoot. It's not required and it greatly reduces ones degree of freedom. In fact, it feels like learning parkour all over again especially for those who only ever trained parkour with shoes. New techniques, levels of strength, awareness, and balance naturally appear when one takes up this kind of training. This lateral move can then feed back into some of the more standard vertical progressions almost incidentally, as a happy side effect. Just as a side note, I've gotten back into training barefoot more due to seeing a few different videos of some high level practitioners working at it. I felt immediately drawn to it partly because of the stark contrast between this more connected way of training to more popular movements/competitions that have been showing up in my feed.

I guess the point of even getting into this concept is to suggest movement possibilities that feel meaningful still amidst a the power/strength sport mentality. I don't mean to suggest that the other way is wrong, bad or "diluting" the sport. I'm a movement pluralist in this regard, let any and all forms arise. I will just get into a few more here and then just name off more as I remember/discover.

Disadvantaged leverage in calisthenics is a pretty obvious and often used tactic which can replace the more vertical move progression of just adding weight.

In a similar vein, training movements in a handstand, or even with the hands behind the back. This "subtraction" method creates new movements and exposes weaknesses pretty quickly. For a more concrete example I am thinking of the box jump movement. Instead of just jumping up higher and higher, you do it with your hands behind your back, and build your way back up with that restriction.

Endurance routes. One can create a line that requires a medium to high degree of power/strength and just cycle through it with an endurance mindset as opposed to just doing bigger, more powerful jumps.

More to come. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not covering any new ground since parkour has always had these ancillary practices, but it's useful to start categorizing and distinguishing between  the vertical/lateral moves we are making. It's important, in my opinion, to show the other ways we can go and still have a meaningful practice.

Kame House

Hard to articulate my thoughts on having to leave the house I'm living in right now. Something got messed up with the mortgage and it's in foreclosure. When I first moved out to sacramento, I had an apartment near my university but would drive all the way out to meet up with a group of fellow parkour practitioners. I felt immediately welcomed. It wasn't long before I was staying over at this house, eating homemade cookies and watching late night movies after a long day of training. I still had to go to school but I would come back to that house and the surrounding areas to train as often as possible. I had been borrowing someone else's car to get there but lost access to it and ended up having to ride my bike down there. Sometimes I would stay for an entire week just crashing on the couch in between exhaustive bouts  of training and chocolate milk. I had a weird class schedule during the week, I think it was just tues and thursdays so I would be at school for as little as possible and head out along the american river bike trail as soon as I had the opportunity to get out. When I would arrive at the house, no one questioned whether or not I was meant to be there, I fit in perfectly with all my pk buddies and things just flowed as naturally as they possibly could. At some point my bike crapped out and/or I was so inspired by reading "ultra marathon man" that I would run the 15-20 miles from my apartment to that house, it would take me almost 4 hours. I would pick fruit on the way as I had learned the area so well from my friends. It felt right and necessary that I get myself there.

I immediately understood that this place was an important hub, the most important pit stop in my universe. It's Kame house from dragon ball z. It's a place you can go to where you won't be judged, ridiculed, made to conform to the conventional social norms and you're always training something. Your hands hurt while you were here, your arms ached. If you closed your eyes spun in a circle and opened them in any given direction you'd find someone punching something, or pulling up onto something, or doing a handstand, or eating a ridiculous amount of food, or wrestling, or smiling. 

I would have to leave for a year to go back to my hometown, unsure of my university path but with the ideal of paradise in my head  still. I became strong, not on my own, but with the understanding that I would come back there one day and I needed to be ready. I did come back incidentally, for a sad reason, ended up living there at some point while I went to school and things hadn't really changed, the spirit of training was still there. No matter what happened in life, I could just come back to this place and have a little more perspective. It felt like a secret place to me, like the people around me just had never had a true home like I had, they would never understand that depth of belonging, that feeling of "rightness" in terms of where you fit in the world.

I moved out again and got married and got divorced and came back and came out. Kame house was always there throughout all of it. I gravitated toward it always and secretly knew that I would have to come back here one day. It's been almost a year here and i've healed so much of my mind and heart since then. I can't imagine having done it anywhere else. I always knew it had to end at some point but my fondest memories in my short life so far come from this place. Really it feels like I've lived here all of the last 8 years. All the sweat, blood, and tears I've had here, the burnt skin and burning muscles, all have this place as a backdrop. I've got to let it go but I won't forget how it healed me and made me a better person. It's clearly the people here who have come and gone and stayed that have made it what it is in it's entirety. It's just easier to point to the place and get attached to it. I do hope that degree of openness continues wherever I go, that the feeling of home can be created again, I know it can.

Life in 2016 vid

Put something together from the last 6 months since I was just sick of not recording anything. Been dealing with ego stuff, trying not to present myself in a narcissistic way but I've realized that we're all a bit like that and there's nothing wrong with wanting to show the world, let alone, just your friends so long as i don't create some sort of caricature of myself on social media that I identify with, that I attach to.

Fat Acceptance and Trans issues

I ended up responding to two different topics on social media the other day. It provided a nice writing opportunity so I thought I would preserve it.

Video about Fat Acceptance

I have a few close friends who are overweight (using this term for a reason) and I totally agree that the stigma against fat people is terrible. I just don't see how we go from "accept fat people as the human beings that they are" to "being fat is not unhealthy." It seems like psychological eating disorders are being hidden behind the bid for fat acceptance. Being fat is the clearest evidence of the behavior that we have eaten in excess of our dietary needs. Now it may be the case that our culture pushes us to look at a biologically healthy person as overweight. That is, there is a tolerable range of fatness where one can still be thought of as healthy, but surely there is a line determined by specific health parameters like blood pressure/cholesterol,etc. That said, I agree that the health issue is not a reason to shame people especially about behavior (thinking that fat people are just being lazy, don't have enough willpower).

The issue of choice is complicated and if someone wants to lose weight, yet is compelled to eat more, they clearly need help from someone. This is someone who has lost the ability to choose, they are powerless and taken over by an addiction. If they choose to remain overweight and accept themselves, that's akin to someone choosing to smoke imo. They will be susceptible to being rejected by potential mates. It's the same reason I don't want to date a smoker. It doesn't mean they're a bad person. If they want to quit but can't, they need help. If they just want to accept themselves as smokers they are going to have to be okay with people not wanting to date smokers. Yes beauty is certainly subjective but we can't fault people for their choices either way. 

The other idea that struck me in this story was the tug between what you are and what people's perceptions push you to be. There's a pretty clear parallel for me with the whole trans thing and dating. Though I was always the same person in my mind, I looked different and there's no way the kind of people that I would date now would have been into me beforehand. But I think it would be crazy to expect them to have been into 'my essence" or whatever because the body is still part of who you are whether you're trans, fat (trans fats lol) or what ever. Also we're going to shift who we are because other people's perceptions feed back into our how we express ourselves, no one is an island, completely detached and there's nothing wrong with that imo. thanks for posting this, it was very interesting, lots of parallels for me regarding social stigma stuff.



 
Ok yeah so I was nodding in agreement at the beginning of this video until it started really going sideways, 
Points of agreement: 


1)If all a person does is talk about their trans-ness all the time, that's pretty annoying, there is so much more to life than your gender identity though it can be a huge thing for some people especially if they've been hiding it their whole lives and they've just come out. Kinda like when someone just went vegan, or just learned how to jump with a pogo stick, they might be annoyingly in your face about their change all the time in the beginning. If that period continues on, that's just kinda lame, get a life, I get that, you can use a pogo stick now, get over it.

2)I agree that if someone is not willing to date you because you're trans, it's a matter of preference, not bigotry, that's an easy one.

3)Children transitioning is also a super complicated thing, kids are very suggestible so messing with hormones is maybe not the best approach. Having said that, I wish I had been able to transition before puberty, I'm not sure if that kind of hindsight is a good enough reason to say that all potentially trans kids should undergo hrt. It's good enough to say that maybe some of them should. I think this is an empirical question. How many kids who transitioned early detransition later in life? If it's a super crazy high amount, we have reason to believe that it's not a good practice, if it's tiny or none, then we can more confidently choose hrt for kids. Another piece to add to this is that we know that people undergo great suffering when they have gender dysphoria and are not allowed/able to transition so the thought that this can be avoided is the motivation behind early hrt. Again, we need more data on this, especially for the younger ages like 10 (the example in the video).

4)The world does not need to accommodate such a small group. Being misgendered sucks but I can't control other people's behavior/understanding/perception, I can only hope to inform people about these things and they'll call me whatever they want anyway. There are much more pressing issues than whether or not someone called you she instead of he or whatever. 

Points of disagreement:
1) The idea that trans people are just born trans is still being studied but it's pretty obvious to me that the causes are not merely biological, but a confluence of forces involving one's upbringing, social interactions, environment,etc. How could it not be, especially given the ways trans people express their identity with specific cultural affectations? That being said, from the subjective side of things, it certainly does feel as biologically determined as having blue eyes or being 5' 9". I mean if the choice is suicide or living the rest of your life in a miserable state, that's hardly a choice. And I suppose it is an altogether different thing to feel like your body is wrong your whole life.

2)There are only two genders. There aren't even 2 biological sexes if you count intersexed people. This can't be right simply because gender is based off of how people identify and they clearly identify with being feminine, masculine and everything in between. So the threshold is pretty low for gender identity. That makes it sounds like any crazy person can just identify as whatever but assuming people are genuinely expressing how they feel, we can't just ignore that. I mean that's what has happened to trans people in the past, it was thought of as a mental disorder that needed to be fixed to fit the appropriate gender roles but such "corrections" are clearly just based on the society at the time since other societies recognize more than 2. Our views and conflicts with gender variance are more a product of how history has gone down. If you're in a society where gender roles have been strictly enforced, of course gender variant people are going to be pushed to identify one way or another. 

3) All the new pronouns and accommodations don't really make sense to me but I haven't looked into it. I say only make up a new word if there is a use for it, so if someone is androgynous, gender neutral, using "they" and "them" covers it. No need for new words. Also this androgynous person shouldn't just expect to be gendered correctly every time (and get all pissed about it) because most people do fit the binary. Save "ze" for the Vogons.

Strengh Training Log, weeks 1-6

So my main goal for this cycle is to get back up to 10 pullups and 10 ring dips. I have a few other skill goals at BV that require some stronger legs so I included deadlifts a few weeks in but my consistency wanes with it. At some point I started a step challenge of 15,000 steps a day, something like 7 miles a day. I dropped handstand pushups early on because ring dips took so much out of me. Including L-sits and handstands kind of randomly if I feel like it on the days that I'm strength training. Rows, dips, and hanging relate more to my shoulder health but I'm not always doing them. I would like to include weighted pull-ups, weighted ring dips, and HSPU in the next cycle. On top of all this on any given day I am doing: a comprehensive stretching routine, buildering, parkour runs, routes, acro training, swimming, and running. I've not been very good about tracking everything but I'm doing better than I was and trying to get more organized. I also noticed that my weight jumped up almost immediately when I started this cycle and I've been kind of hovering around 168 trying to drop it. To be honest it has to be overconsumption of salt because there's no way I gained 8 lbs so quickly, I've just got a lot of water retention. Latest strategy is alternate day fasting and portion control, and low salt, details soon. Towards the end of the cycle, everything just kind of drops off except the pull ups and dips but at least I kept those.

-5/31/16
I'm used to being at 160 and struggling around that area so it has been very frustrating to deal with my dietary failures. I know it has not just magically "jumped up" I'm just eating too much but trying my best to mitigate it. i would really love to get back down to 155 where I was before, I'm sure it would make pull-ups much easier.
WEEK 1
05/02/16 Mon
Bw 162.6
Hanging prehab, 6x30s,
Stretching and compression work
Handstands 5x20s
Tuck L-sit 3x15s
L-Sit one foot 3x3s,1x6s
Pull-ups 6x3 GTG

05/03/16 Tue
BW 160.2
hang 5x60s
Hang Prehab, 5x30s, scapular retractions
Morning meditation 25min
Limbering, not going for more rom
Pullups 6x3 GTG
Handstand 3x20s

05/04/16 Wed
Pullups 8x3 gtg
HSPU 5x10s eccentrics
Ring Dips 3x3
Hanging, 2x30s,4x45s,1x60
L-sit: 6x6s one leg each side
Lock off static hold 3x12s
pistols(right leg) 3-4x1
05/10/16
Mile Time 8:01

5/06/16 Fri
pulls 4,4,4
dips 3,3,3,4
HSPU 3,3,3

WEEK 2
5/09/16 Mon
tuck planche 4x10s
Lsits one leg 3x9s

5-13-16 Fri
BW:
pullups 3,3,4,4
ring dips 4,4,4,5
pike hspu- 5,6,6
hanstand 20s
LSIT one leg-10s, 5s

WEEK 3
5-15-16 Sun
pullups 4,5,5,5
ring dips 4,5,3,5
Deadlift 115x5,165x5,185x5,185x5
rows 15,8,8
pushups 10,10,10
pike hspu- 5,6,6
handstand nope
LSIT nope

5-16-16 Mon
Hanging 5x60s
pullups 5,5,6
ring dips NA
Deadlift NA
rows NA
pushups NA
pike hspu- NA
handstand NA
LSIT NA

WEEK 4
Mile time: 8:20
BW: 168
5-23-16 Mon
Hanging 5x60s
pullups 7,7,7
ring dips 7,7,7
Deadlift 115x5,160x5,190x5,190x5
rows NA
pushups NA
pike hspu- NA
handstand 20,20
LSIT one leg 10,10,10

5-25-16
Hanging 5x60s
pullups 8.8. chins 8
ring dips 8,8,8
Deadlift NA
rows NA
pushups NA
pike hspu- NA
handstand NA
LSIT NA

WEEK 5

5-29-16 Sun
Hanging NA
pullups 7,8,8
ring dips 8, 8, 8
Deadlift NA
rows NA
pushups NA
pike hspu- NA
handstand NA
LSIT NA

5-30-16
Hanging 1x60s Mon
pullups 6,5,5,5
ring dips 7,5,5,5
Deadlift NA
rows NA
pushups NA
pike hspu- NA
handstand NA
LSIT NA

06-01-16 Wed
Pull 8,6,6
Dip 8,5,6

WEEK 6 Last week!

06/06/16 Mon
BW 165
Pull 9,9,6
Dip 7,9,9

06/08/16 Wed
Pull 6,6,5, chin 5, weighted chin 1x2x25lbs
Dip6,6,5
A little frustrated with the inconsistent pullup numbers in this 6th week so will probably scale back down to at least 5 reps with some weight whilst checking pull-up numbers every so often. was able to pullup with +25lb today though.
06/10/16 Fri
Pull-nope
Dip-nope
tried a few but couldn't really get past 6, still feeling tired and sore from it and other adventures, swimming mostly


Deload week^

So to recap, I got up to about 9 pullups and 9 ring dips, got a bit stronger in a lot of other areas and seems like I've had a natural deload week on the 6th week because I hardly did anything, so now I'm hitting the weight this week with pull-ups/dips and I need to be more organized/not fall off at the end of my cycle. Also bodyweight went up for a bit in the beginning, then dropped back to the same. at least I know how to maintain the weight but I really need to start dropping it more consistently. I just want to be done with "dieting" soon. oh yeah and I made this cool graph:

Training Log 05-04-16

Mostly strength training today:
Pullups 8x3 gtg
HSPU 5x10s eccentrics
Ring Dips 3x3
Hanging, 2x30s,4x45s,1x60
L-sit: 6x6s one leg each side
Lock off static hold 3x12s
pistols(right leg) 3-4x1

morning meditation 25min
reading "Descartes' Error"
Stretching sequences
Ran to BV, trained there, ran back, so probably a mile and a half total of running

Diet
Food Log
L: oatmeal with raisins, one banana, a bit of sugar, almond milk, an orange
D: Half rice/half veggies, 2nd serving of rice, another orange


Pull-ups feel strong even though I'm only doing 3 at a time, I'm greasing the neurological groove (gtg). Was able to perform a symmetrical muscle up at the school later too though with still a bit of a struggle, I want a surplus reservoir of strength. Working toward building up my pull up reps back to at least 10, When I checked on Sunday, could only do 5 max. My record in the past is 14 so I would like to blast past that, the lock off is so that I am stronger at the top range where I seem to be the weakest, got a little elbow trouble out of that so I backed off.

HSPU I can still do a handstand pushup! just one comfortably though. The negatives really helped me to remember what it was like, my goal in the past was about 7 freestanding HSPUs but I feel I can get back there and past that.

I was so tired from the strength stuff and running in the heat. If I train PK on the same day, I'll need to do the strength training as early as possible so I can get a rest in between. Bv training consisted of some tree climbs, one high up tree precision, stair jumps, buildering, brachiating, kong pre, kong pre plyo plyo, a bit of flowy work, and finally a few backflips on the way home. Some struggles: The white wall precision eludes me on a psychological level, it is at the end of my range. Like for a lot of things, I used to be able to do it no problem but I've lost a lot of leg power, More specific jump training and I'll probably need to start throwing in deadlifts again. Same with back flips, I can barely muster the power for it, still can, but not like it was. it's mostly from disuse, I tried to back off training and just focus on diet for a few months but totally failed and am clearly paying for it with my strength losses. Same for the jump up the stairs in the quad, trying to get that jump again.I slogged through everything else only really practicing something a few times before moving on but at least I got out there. Today should be a better day for PK since I won't be doing all the strength work.

Forgot compression and handstand work, need to remember to just tack on compression at the end of my stretching routine.

Pistols on just the right leg, I can only do one rep and it feels like my leg is going to explode so I have been mostly focusing on the eccentric. Left leg I can do 5 pistols no problem, butt cheek still hurts from fall so it's an opportunity to just focus on the right.

Training Log 05-03-16

Tuesday
Hang Prehab, 5x30s, scapular retractions
Morning meditation 25min
Limbering, not going for more rom
Pullups 6x3 GTG
Handstand 3x20s
random pistol eccentrics and one good concentric on right leg. Left butt cheek injured from falling during brachiation last wed. Doing Fire hydrant prehab for it.
Cycle to Lake Natomas swim across, run barefoot back up hazel bridge and down to the start, x2, cycle home. I've not been timing this but working to doing 3 rounds, maintain once a week, then spending the rest of swimming time going for longer distance, the lake is not so cold now, was able to freestyle most of the way without brain freeze.

Diet

Food Log 05-03-16:
Lunch: cold oatmeal w/ banana and almond milk, some sugar
Dinner: Half lb of cooked veggies, half rice, marinara, frozen blueberry smoothie.

I'm at 160.2, another two lbs down in one day, the next day after eating all that. Seems that sodium was the culprit. I want to see if I can just eat roughly the same things every day and just adjust according to weight.

Training Log 05/02/16

Monday:
Hanging prehab, 6x30s,
Stretching and compression work
Handstands 5x20s
Tuck L-sit 3x15s
L-Sit one foot 3x3s,1x6s
Pull-ups 6x3 GTG

Was supposed to get a lot of other stuff done but had to run a bunch of errands, was missing sleep, took a long nap, ate okay.

Breakfast- None

Lunch: Oatmeal with peaches
2nd Lunch: TB 2 7-layer burritos, no cheese/sour cream + potatoes
Dinner: Dates, Sweet Peppers,Kale, almond milk, plate of half rice/half veggie w/marinara

Ate too much salt over the weekend, ballooned up to 165 by Monday morning, weighed in at 162.6 this morning. Water weight/sodium and water/glycogen make a huge impact on daily weight fluctuations so it's more of an indicator of eating too much salt. I would prefer not to eat at tb and just cook at home, someone was buying for me though. Guacamole and flour tortilla are a no go for diet. Everything else I ate was satisfying. I expected an increase in weight due to higher glycogen stores with the starches. I'm saving on veggies by only eating half the bag with my rice. Assuming I'm able to avoid other refined grains, oils, and salts and if I plateau, I would switch to brown rice due to higher fiber content. I will be adding leafy greens back in next paycheck. I feel overall more satisfied eating more grains especially with my training schedule.

Training Log: Mega Training

I have a lot of time now but I've not been idle.  My training schedule is looking something like this:
Stretching Sequence 2x/day+
Apnea Practice 2x/wk C02/02 Tables
Running 5-6x/wk at least a mile, 1-2 longer runs during the course of the week
Cycling 3-4x/wk out of necessity, usually no more than 20 miles per day
Swimming 2-3x/wk Lake Natomas swim across the Lake
Climbing 2-3x/wk Traversals at BV, Tree Climbs, Tree Squeezing
Acro once/wk
Parkour 5-6x/wk specific PK work
Strength Training 3-4x/wk
Daily Meditation 25-40min/day+
Daily Reading 1 chapter+ cycling between a few different books
Guitar practice once/wk
Drawing practice 1/wk
Dieting: whole foods plant-based diet

It may seem like a lot but I'm combining a lot of things together which gives me better movement "nutrition" so to speak so it doesn't always cash out as 8 straight hours of grueling torture every day. I'm cycling intensity as well. I spend quite a lot of time in relax mode via meditation and stretching in between my different bouts of training as well. My diet, though I have had many slip ups, always includes a ton of fruits and veggies. So with the meditation, stretching/prehab, diet, and adequate sleep I am mitigating a lot of the factors that would normally lead to overtraining. I know to back off too if I'm not feeling right and fight another day.I'm regaining a lot of my strength as well, every step forward toward my previous strength and skill makes me feel very fulfilled. I'm somewhat addicted lately, tapping into my obsessive nature for the power of good. I want to talk about all these different practices but each deserve their own post as I have delved quite deeply into my reasoning for each one.

Barebones vipassana practice and my experience with it so far

This was written for a meditation group but I started writing too much so I put it up on my blog too.

Basic Vipassana/Mindfulness and Walking/Moving meditation instructions:

Once you've developed a bit of concentration, it's time to direct that ability towards one's overall sensory and mental experience to gain insight into the nature of your experience. I've had only glimpses of this but it is basically just shifting your perspective such that it fully immerses you in the present moment "as it is" rather than being obfuscated by our mental talk, emotional storms, etc.

1. Take a seat and get comfortable. You can also just start with walking meditation first, then sit, there are really no rules here.

2. Begin with a bit of concentration on the breath, then note your observations of the breath, "rising, falling, etc".

3. Now begin to note every sensation you experience both mental and physical as it comes up. For example, you might start thinking, "oh man, I was supposed to water the garden yesterday" this can simply be labeled as "thinking, thinking" or "past, past" then go on to note the next thing.

4.For walking meditation it's the same concept but now it has to do with how you're moving, "lifting, moving, stepping" as you're doing it. It's possible to do this practice while doing any kind of movement such as parkour or even just doing the dishes. It's just easier to start with simpler movements because it can get pretty difficult to track.

The point of noting is to ground you in your sensations and break them down into their smallest components but it's possible to do that without noting anything, though it is easier to get mixed up in the contents of sensations (our abstractions about them) rather than simply experiencing the sensations. Shinzen Young's system uses more formal noting labels which simplify things greatly in my opinion but you can use your own. One of the effects of the "focus out" technique is a feeling of merging with your external surroundings, becoming part of the landscape without any sense of separateness. Surely this has happened to you at some point spontaneously but it can become an every day if not every moment experience.

This kind of meditation practice is very different. While concentration meditation can be quite peaceful and relaxing, when you switch over and jump into the torrents of the raging river that is your bodily/mental sensations it can be pretty overwhelming. When I first switched from a deep concentration state and tried to do vipassana,it was so overwhelming that I got this strange flickering sensation somewhat like an old movie reel, there was so much going on. I jumped in without the noting idea and it was pretty difficult to swim. Another thing I've noticed is that this practice can lead to a lot of negative effects which you want to look out for. In particular, it can make you a bit agitated. At least for myself, I was so used to the blissful trance-like state that concentration can give that it felt like I was starting all over again. I thought that I had control over my thoughts, but concentration just helps to suppress them for a bit(there's no attention left for everything else that is not your object) which is certainly nice when you need it. Agitation or any other negative mental state can be dealt with through the noting practice too though, so while it may be an unpleasant experience, it will not last, just keep noting. You can also always retreat back to concentration of the breath if things get too heavy.

Another thing to look out for with both concentration and insight practice is disassociating from others as you've been practicing letting go of things so much that you can have kind of a "neutral affect" thing going on. Other people are just another distraction or another thing to note and move on from. I see this a lot in other meditators who clearly have much more experience than I do (like certain monks). I interpret this as a matter of personal preference. Not everyone has to be cheery and smiling all the time, i'd just personally prefer to have that going for me,mostly so I don't put others off with robot-like expression and behavior.This is where Shinzen's "nurture positive" can come in to alleviate these effects which i think also pushes you to be able to fully express yourself in an untethered kind of way. More about this kind of stuff in the next post. Just read the nurture positive section in Shinzen's Five ways manual if you're interested.

Review/Analysis of The Monk and the Philosopher

The book I'm reviewing today is The Monk and The Philosopher by Matthieu Ricard and his father Jean Francois Revel. Matthieu Ricard was a french biologist who fled to the mountains and became a Tibetan Buddhist monk over 40 years ago. The philosopher is his father Jean Francois who has a firm western style philosophy background. The fact that they are father and son just makes is such an interesting contrast worth looking into anyway.

Straight out of the gate in the forward lies an explanation of my interest in such a book in the first place: "for American science and philosophy, Buddhism has generally not been on the agenda." This is certainly true of my experience. I loved my philosophy classes, just about every one of them satiated my quest for intellectual fulfillment. But after having gone through all my courses and getting my degree I felt somewhat robbed because I somehow seemed to have missed the details that had gotten me into philosophy, namely how to live the good life. Toward the end of my schooling I spent a lot of my free time studying buddhism and stoicism in addition to my courses in metaphysics and probability theory.  I had finished without really getting any formal exposure to the subject material. Actually, we wrote a paper on the 8 fold path in my intro course back in community college, but nothing else later on. Anyways, this book in so many ways has shown my thought processes throughout the years as I ping ponged my way between western and buddhist philosophy.

One thing that irked me a bit about this book is that Ricard is a Tibetan Buddhist and so constantly speaks in the name of buddhism as a whole about certain aspects that I'm sure are not representative of the other branches of buddhist thought. Lately I have largely confined my study to early buddhist thought as shown through the Pali Canon. My thinking is that I can use the early writing as a litmus test for everything that comes after, determining whether or not such additions to the main canon really fit with the teachings of the buddha. It's not that big of a deal since the basic teachings are essentially the same, but one should understand that Ricard's perspective is filtered through a particular flavor of buddhism. Also I should mention that even early buddhism is still being researched and debated about.

A wise friend once told me that there are as many religions as there are people. I wonder if Ricard has had to make a western translation of the rights and rituals that go on in a lot of buddhist sects. With regard to iconography, art, devas, and superstitious behavior he gives us an interpretation that brings everything back down to earth in the sense that all such expressions/behaviors are actually just buddhist thought in practice. A deva for example is not some deity, but actually can represent a quality of mind which allows one to remember certain aspects of the path. A mandala is a sandy representation of the universe that is wiped away after completion as a way to represent the impermanent nature of things.

With regards to faith, Ricard likens it to confidence in his teachers. Though he himself has not witnessed past lives, examining the character of his teachers over the years lead him to believe such things. This is  a kind of blind faith in my opinion and a distortion of the concept of faith/confidence in buddhist thought as I understand it. Having confidence for me has been about believing that it is possible through training to reduce or possibly even eliminate one's suffering. All the other metaphysical ideas are up in the air and we'll just have to wait and see but they are doubtful propositions at my current understanding. I can't know his experiences. I did like, however, the connection to ritual and how it can remind one of certain aspects of the path as a sort of every day mnemonic device. The wheel of life is a fascinating example of this:

It represents the dharma in an easy to remember way, but is not supposed to mean that these realms actually exist (in my opinion.

One of my main criticisms of Buddhist thought on my first pass was that it was a path of passivity where you essentially seek to lobotomize yourself, never feeling pain or joy again. My understanding has improved greatly since then. Jean Francois echoes my criticisms and makes the same mistake in claiming that the path does not lead to action in the real world. Ricard reflects the the notion that the path is about cutting out the roots of suffering: craving, attachment, and negative mental states. This practice naturally allows the wholesome mind states to flourish. Additionally, there are specific practices of compassion and loving kindness to cultivate these states, so it's not as drab as I used to think so many years ago. As far as action is concerned, sorting out your psychology facilitates wholesome actions in the real world. Sure you can help others without your own meditation practice, but perhaps you do so grudgingly or with the expectation of reciprocation, fighting and feeding parts of your ego. The practice encourages action rather than passively bouncing off of the river rapids of sensory phenomena and the reactive mind. The idea is that a person who has freed their minds from greed, hatred, and delusion will naturally want to act in the world without such hindrances. 

There were some strange parts about consciousness being separate from the brain but both speakers make metaphysical assumptions about free will that I feel don't hold up. Often the idea that we have the ability to make a choice at any given moment gives the illusion that our will is free in some way but we are clearly conditioned beings, subject to cause and effect. Ricard states that the current science of the mind makes a metaphysical assumption that the brain gives rise to the mind, that it is based on a physical substrate only. As Sam Harris would gleefully retort, even if a disembodied consciousness were really what the mind is, it would still be subject to cause and effect or indeterminism, but certainly could not be considered free. This is actually two different problems mushed together that sill have no satisfying answers. I've found that believing that I can make a choice at any time to arrest anger or hatred before it arises helps me to do just that. It clearly doesn't mean that my will is free, I am just somehow lucky enough to have gotten the idea in my head that I can change certain parts of myself. I'm a self changing machine. Moving on. Ricard and Jean Francois come to a stalemate about this issue of the physical basis of consciousness because buddhist thought makes an experiential claim that may require years of meditative training to test out whereas modern science makes its claim a priori. Again, there are a lot of claims being thrown around on both sides and I won't claim anything until I experience it.

Overall a fascinating read that confirmed my observations that Buddhism has engaged and continues to challenge philosophical ideas in a relevant, practical way.

Training log 3-21-16

I continue to get behind on both my reading and writing now as I am constantly being absorbed into meditation lately. I have been newly inspired to ramp up my practice due to a very clear presentation of the benefits of doing so. Yes I know a lot of the science on meditation is showing it's effectiveness for relaxation/stress reduction but I'm more empowered by some of the loftier possibilities, a larger write up of meditation specifically will ensue.

Monday

Slow run to the river, at least 4 miles round trip, foraged for edible greens, ran back

Tuesday

long walk from light rail, probably 3 miles or so

Wednesday

backyard training lashed a pipe to a tree which created a lot of new movement, tons of plyos/running pre, psh, pl, standard reps, getting easier though

Thu

repeat of wed but a little less, a bit sore, more slackline

Fri

walked to river, barefoot for the first half cold immersion, john is a beast, stayed in for 10-15 minutes straight, I had to keep going back in and out. Usually I go longer but it doesn't always work out

Sat

cycled to coffee republic, then walked to folsom prison, so probably 8 mile bike ride, 4 mile walk/run, went back to folsom lake after for some cold water and hammocking with good friends, so peaceful

Sun

Nothing at all but a lot of stretching. I have been following Kit Laughlin's book, Stretching and Flexibility. It feels so good to get my body to not be so bound up anymore even though I've come pretty far. I can almost hold a close squat position, my measure of success for this is complete relaxation in that position. 

Also I have been losing weight with another one of my house mates who is about the same weight/height for a little more incentive. It has been up and down for the last few weeks, I should have been down to 147 by now but things have not worked out exactly as planned. The lowest I have gotten this week was around 157 and I'm 158 today. 2 weeks ago I was at 155 so it's good to know that if I was ever to get into a survival situation, my body would hold to the sparse calories pretty well. I have my strategies though.

Updates for the future, to organize myself a bit better, I will do better to note my progress in:

Strength

Running

Parkour training

flexibility

meditation

weight loss

Training Log 3-14-16

Monday
cycled one mile, rested

Tuesday
Walked about 6 miles total,
Pull: 1x5,2x4,
Dips:3x5, 1x7
picked up groceries from store and walked back home one mile with probably 30 lb bag, switching up arm positions so i wouldn't drop anything
Ran 1 mile  to BV, climbed some trees, checked a few standards. I am significantly weaker than before. there are a few jumps that were cake for me before that i can no longer make. I'm trying not to be too disconcerted, the strength will come back
Random amounts of pushups, squats, and pull-ups after getting home
Slept with no blanket on 12mm yoga mat, cold exposure

Wednesday

Review of Parkour Strength

Usually I read books that are not about parkour and I tend to show how something can refer back to my discipline but this book is just all about parkour! It's almost too much to write about so I'm just going to pick up on some of the points that stuck out to me.This is by no means a comprehensive review.I read this thing about a month or two ago but it has taken forever to catch up on my writing/reading ratio. Anyway, this book can be extremely useful for all experience levels in parkour. It can serve as a quick reference work for an experienced practitioner who might be looking for something new or perhaps to get back on track once they've plateaued at some point.

Treating Yourself Like a Dog

We're both dogs really

I learned this concept from one of my philosophy professors and it stuck with me much more easily than, say, deriving baye's theorem ever did. Treating yourself like a dog is a self-discipline heuristic that allows you to be disciplined about something without the actual energy of exerting one's will. Some people seem to have iron wills and can face any temptation with spartan-like steadfastness. As for myself, I tend to fail quite often after a long, exhausting effort throughout most of the day. The idea is this: it makes no sense to punish a dog for eating all the food in the cupboard while you are away if you left the food out. The dog has the natural instinct to eat everything in sight and we don't expect it to have the "willpower" to be disciplined and just not eat all that easily accessible food. The smart thing for us to do is not allow the dog to have access to the food by making sure it's all packed away before we leave. This simple step requires zero willpower from the dog. 

So to treat ourselves like a dog we have to set things up so it is impossible to fail. I don't have a chocolate cake addiction because it's never around the house, my housemate's are all generally pretty healthy eaters (though one of them did just buy cherry pie). I can't help but eat apples because that's the only other sweet food that I have access to. I can't help but do some deadlifts every time I walk into the backyard because I left the thing right next to the entrance. I don't do it every time but I do it more often than I would if it had not been there. I just find it's so much easier to set myself up than to declare "I will do deadlifts 3-4 times this week!" and then find myself never getting around to it. Now, most of the time our environment is not set up nicely for us to make better decisions regarding our mental and physical health but I say that's all the better reason to manipulate the things you can control so that you can exert that little bit of self discipline when it is required. For another example, I've been experimenting with mild cold stress lately by sleeping without blankets every few nights. I found that if I leave a blanket out next to my sleeping mat, I will inevitably wake up covered in blankets. So the solution is to put all possible blankets in the closet to make it that much harder for my natural instinct to win out.

Another thing that seems to help me to focus is to try to only allow myself to do one task at a time. When you're playing fetch with your dog and you throw two balls at once, you often won't get either of them back, and if you had a dog like mine, he would lose interest altogether out of decision fatigue and just go chase a butterfly. It seems that most of the time people are doing 10 things at once which is really just splitting up one's progress. It works for some things, but a lot of time can just lead to plateaus. One thing at a time. Unfortunately, it seems we have a small "rationality window" of time where we can do some meta-thinking to actually set ourselves up. Perhaps most of us are floating around carried by the currents of the wind bouncing off this pleasure and narrowly avoiding that pain. People that are caught up like this are severely lacking in time wealth as they cannot take the time to consider and self reflect. I only know about this because I've experienced it myself though I now have an abundance of time wealth. It's only because of being caught up in all the daily struggles of life, work, traffic, children,training, deadlines, and relationships that there was a breakdown which forced me to take a big step back and focus on rebuilding one thing at a time.

Finally, I find the specific phrase, "treat yourself like a dog" has one important psychological effect: it breeds (pun intended) humility. No one wants to be thought of as a dog, at least I know I didn't. I'm a rational human being who can reflect and dream deeply! As much as I try to be as rational as possible, it's still pretty clear that my psychology is closer to that of a dog than a divine perfect being thingy. Recognizing this aligns my thought processes a little more closely with the reality of being human. Of course, this is all just a meta-scheme to result in seemingly "inhuman" discipline.

Training Log 3-8-16

I'm in maintenance mode right now because I'm still trying to lose weight to catch up with my muscle loss from the hormones. If I eat enough to stay at the same weight with smaller muscles, I'll start to lose out on my strength to weight ratio. I haven't had much muscle loss (it seems) but I'm pre-empting the loss that is likely to occur given that my testosterone is so much lower than even a natal womans levels.  I'm maintaining my strength by keeping up with my deadlifts, weighted pullups, and weighted dips 2-3 X per week. I get a long walk everyday, and some longer runs a few times a week. I'm mostly just trying to keep up with my friends on the weekends when we go on a long hike or swim. I get to swim rarely but I can still keep up with my c02/02 tables in preparation for diving/swimming at swimstitute. The river may still be too cold but I can test it. I will log my activities from the previous week just to get a practice of doing that. I really want to talk about diet because it has been my main focus but I want to wait until I have successfully reached my goal weight of 145. My strategy seems to be working for me but it may be another month or so before I can do a big post about it. I'm currently experimenting with a few minimalist lifestyle ideas which deserve their own post. That's it for now.

Last week's training from what I can remember:

Review/Synopsis of "The Time Ships" by Stephen Baxter

This book is a sequel to H.G. Wells time machine written 100? years later in the 1990s. I loved "the time machine." it created such a sense of scale and perspective on human life that has stayed with me even since I was a little kid. In that book, the time traveler (TT) travels to the year  -800,000, has a bunch of crazy adventures with the Eloi and the Morlocks, then eventually travels 30 million years into the future to find only a dying star and some giant crabs before returning to the year 1800. The main takeaway that I got from the book honestly was a sense of nihilism because everything humanity does is eroded away by time. All religion, philosophy, science, architecture, progress, everything is just swept away by much more ancient forces. There's also this sense of wasted human potential as humanity essentially degrades into two different classes that continually depend on each other for survival. Apparently, as evidenced by the giant crabs, nothing good comes from that relationship, no lasting technological progress of any sort. I didn't realize at the time, but Wells was critiquing class inequality.

Review of "His Dark Materials Trilogy"

    This series just feels like one big book so I decided to just lump them all together and mention some of the salient points. I also want to avoid the plot and just get into some of the ideas that i enjoyed.

    I'm not too into fantasy like I was when I was in high school but the cool thing about this series is that it crosses over into sci-fi territory rather quickly. There are multiple dimensions, discussions on dark matter, universe expanding intelligences, texans with zeppelins, and devices that

Lazy Review of "How Not to Die"

     This book is about how diet can prevent the most common causes of death, at least that's the first part. The second part, which i started first, is an in depth analysis of the 12 most nutritious foods (with the exception of herbs & spices and exercise) and how to get them into our diet every day. I've been a long time viewer of Dr. Greger's videos on nutritionfact.org so i've already been convinced of the benefits of a plant based diet but i wanted a resource that could synthesize all that information in one place so that i may act on it more easily. The thing I love about this book and his site is that all of the recommendations are based off of the latest nutrition research, not his random ass opinion, not an appeal to nature, nor an appeal to "spiritual" reasoning, nor even the ethics angle, none of that. Instead, he gives us the science on it.  I've read a ton of other diet books, and while some of them will cite their sources, nothing comes close to the 200 pages of studies cited in the back of the book. Now the volume of research cited is no indicator of truth or clear reasoning. He could, as many people have claimed, cherry pick his studies to confirm his preformed conclusions but there are enough meta analyses and individual threads of