P90X Day 64: Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps, Ab Ripper X

This is a hard one. This is always a hard one. The key thing is showing up. Even if it doesn't feel great, even if you think you didn't do that well, the fact that you showed up at all when it was the last thing you wanted to do means everything. Today was perhaps one of the most important days of my current round of P90X.

P90X Day 63: X Stretch

It's a bit like dessert.

P90X Day 61 and 62: Legs and Back, Ab Ripper X and Kenpo X

Skipped Friday, doubled-up Saturday.

P90X Day 60: Yoga X

⅔ point. 30 days left.

I've been able to keep up the exercise, but it's harder because the supporting habits are hard to maintain. This part--the part where it's a matter of habit to sleep well and prepare food--this has escaped me.

Exercising affects me more than I expect it to.
Not exercising affects me more than I expect it to.

Sleeping well affects me more than I expect it to.
Not sleeping well affects me more than I expect it to.

Eating well affects me more than I expect it to.
Not eating well affects me more than I expect it to.

Hmmm...okay, this is establishing either that 1. physiological needs are underrated or 2. there's some balancing, stabilizing force that's weakened or 3. some unaddressed unbalancing, destabilizing force.

Or maybe it's like how when you have a cold you forget what it feels like not to have a cold and vice-versa.

P90X Day 59: Shoulders and Arms, Ab Ripper X

Finally woke myself up to get this in before work! Great start to the day.

As good as I feel now, there is still a sense that there are deeper questions to be addressed. Purpose, meaning, and example. I worry I'm just a bad night's sleep away from facing down worry and regret. Before that happens  it's probably worth reexamining my life from first principles. That should help better absorb a hard night's sleep. Go go gadget Bible!

P90X Day 58: Plyometrics

There's a vast difference between the first time you do this routine and the seventh. Guess which is better?

P90X Day 57: Chest and Back, Ab Ripper X

This was an important day because I didn't really want to work out at all. These are the days that matter the most.

Sleeping and eating habits of late have not been optimal, which feeds into why I just wasn't feeling it. But I did it anyway. And I'll keep doing it. And my sleep and eating habits have no choice but to adjust.

Speaking of, better get to bed fast if I want to lock in a morning workout schedule.

P90X Day 56: X Stretch

Okay, hopefully I can get back on a first-thing-in-the-morning routine starting tomorrow.

Long weekend. Better use it. You can start calling this fall weather if you like.

P90X Day 55: Yoga X

Yoga + programming help = good day

P90X Day 54: Core Synergistics

This was another excellent opportunity to work out while simultaneously giving programming help. That's a fun way to do it.

P90X Day 53: X Stretch

Did this while helping my sister with some programming stuff. Yay for family fun time!

Had a horrible time sleeping the night previously and went way-broody on Thursday morning. Always get enough sleep, but also always address questions of purpose and maintain a focus on doing what you want to be doing. Minimize regrets.

P90X Day 52: Kenpo X

Kenpo is great. Taking the time for each workout is really the hard part right now. That's scary since there's slightly less of a time investment during recovery weeks. This is why they made P90X 3.

P90X Day 51: Core Synergistics

Rolling along, happened on schedule--just after work. Maybe I'll catch up with pre-work workouts after Labor Day.

P90X Day 50: Yoga X

Back on the train, no more repeats on the day index. Stayed up too late to get this one in before work today. Time for that to change.

P90X Day 49 (take 2): X Stretch

Stretch complete. Back on the train. Rebooted phone. FitBit still doesn't sync.

P90X Day...48, I guess. Let's do Day 48 again: Kenpo X

Re-doing kenpo went well today. Due to my break I had plenty of glycogen reserves and did bonus repetitions for just about every move in the sequence. Hit hard.

Two weeks is a long time. You need to exercise more often than that. While I've been...moving? during that time, I haven't kept to my workout schedule. I'll blame house guests at first and I'll blame a slight cold later, maybe I'll blame going on call somehow (which doesn't make any sense), but it's really, really, really, really important to not let myself off the hook too easily. In any case, the best way to get back on the rails was to do Kenpo today, go into the phase 2-phase 3 transition week next week, and rocket into phase 3 the week after. So my workouts are getting back in order.

Let's check up on everything else real fast:

• FitBit: MALFUNCTIONING. I need to try turning everything off and on again--I have no Phase 2 data from my FitBit tracker. I've still got the scale measurements, though.
• Photos: Luckily there are date stamps to reconstruct the history, but part of messing with my routine means I'm missing a few weeks of those, too.
• Sleep: Actually pretty good--though I'd rather let my FitBit be the judge of that. 
• Hair: Cut. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm irresponsible with long hair. I've resigned myself to always having a haircut that plays well with a bike commute with no maintenance. The marginal benefit of fancy-pants hair isn't worth the risk that it goes full-Goomba, unchecked, for weeks at a time.
• Food: The fridge is due for a cleaning again. I don't think I've cooked for myself beyond the microwave in a week. Sure, I can blame the cold again.

Me with long hair (artist's rendition)
nintendo.wikia.com

So there's a lot of work built up to get me fully back on the rails and I need the motivation to do it. This is in the midst of looking at buying my first home and ever-fancy plans at work. Plus there's a marginally-drivable car that I still need to get rid of. Priorities, priorities, priorities...right:

• Today: house BBQ, don't try any tough stuff
• Tomorrow: Morning: X Stretch, go to mass, Afternoon: clean fridge, Evening: Restart phone and FitBit, see if I can sync again. How have I gone this long without my heart rate data?

P90X Day 46 and 49: Yoga X, X Stretch

Forgot to post for these, but they happened! These workouts are resilient in the face of houseguests since I can do them in my bedroom just as easily as in my makeshift living room gym.

P90X Day 47 and 48: Legs and Back, Ab Ripper X and Kenpo X

The decent choice of a human being is to value the sleep schedules of guests above their morning workout, so I've had to get a little creative. I missed two consecutive days, so here's my plan to make them up (since I haven't been negotiating with myself about exercise. And I should stop negotiating with myself about food again):

Saturday: Legs and Back, Ab Ripper X, AND Kenpo X

These are days 47 and 48. Note that I'm missing day 46, which is yoga. The reason for this is that I can move that to Sunday, which should combo nicely with the X Stretch leading into the Phase 2 recovery week.

After the Saturday doubles workout, I felt amazing all-over. It would definitely be over-doing it to do these two workouts on the same day all the time. For now I feel great. But this is an extraordinary circumstance: keep to your daily workout schedule so that you can keep going and you don't feel tempted to resort to such measures!

Flew Saturday morning. Yay flying!

P90X Day 45: Back and Biceps, Ab Ripper X

I'm definitely way better at pull-ups than when I started.

My weight change has plateaued after "negotiating with myself" on the paleo diet since the end of phase 1. Or it could be mass built during the recovery week. But I think it's diet. I'm strong, which is great, but the path to ripped abs is forged in the kitchen.

This is the half-way point. Time flies!

P90X Day 44: Plyometrics

Having houseguests (August in Seattle!) has caused me to move my workouts to after work. Today's bike ride home was just a warm-up for plyo.

Plyo itself is actually pretty pleasant by now. I'm skipping the double-time jump knee tucks and rock star hops for now, performing them at normal speed because the last thing I want is to have to cut back due to over stressing my knees.

Sunday's amortized food prep paid off in tonight's dinner. It needed some spices, though.

P90X Day 43: Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps, Ab Ripper X

All of a sudden, this one was hard again. Probably because I got to bed late. I'll see it again in phase 3.

Rode my bike to work--glorious! So much faster. Just missed the omelette line. :-(

Biking home was easy in spite of weeks of a bus commute. I have no doubts about my fitness improvements. Zoomed up Belmont.

P90X Day 42: X Stretch

I waited too long to start the stretch this time and it bled over past my bedtime. Somehow, I didn't even quite stretch right. Probably because I was trying silence + cues while listening to podcasts again. Worked great for Kenpo, maybe not as well for getting a good stretch.

P90X Day 41: Kenpo X

Okay, I'm finally caught up to today. The kenpo routine reminds me a little bit of saying the rosary, since you're doing a set number of moves for several reps with very similar breaks between sets. I'm not sure whether combining the two would be brilliant or sacrilegious. I'll break the tie thusly: if it means you're praying more overall, it seems unlikely that God would object.

Today's workout was the first time I used P90X's audio option to play only silence and cues. This meant I could have my podcasts playing in the background otherwise, which is perfect for the kenpo routine.

Knocking out these posts in a short, time-boxed time is good for my growth as a writer. There's a strain of perfectionism that really slows me down with most posts. It's good to write mostly about exercising/diet/sleep habits with a few life observations thrown in. Getting in the habit of this pace of publishing should lead to less perfectionism, improving both the quantity and, ironically, the quality of my output.

Since it's Saturday and my siblings have left, I've been able to catch myself up to buy back my time. I didn't have ready-made paleo dishes and I had a flat bike tire. So I took the Saturday, bought new bike tubes and installed them (take that, bus 8!), and then I've got some stuff to cook before the opera tonight (Count Ory should be a good time).

A fixed bike tire probably saves about 45-60 minutes/workday for commuting. Taking an hour to prepare some microwaveable leftovers should save me another 25 minutes/day. Fixing the tire took about 20 minutes since I've done it before but I'm still bad at it, plus the 10 minutes to stop at the bike shop before grocery shopping this morning. Because the bike tire saves me more time, I made sure to do that first. Worst-case, if everything else falls off the rails, I immediately have that new time to right myself. This is an example of how the key to productivity is more about strategic thinking than about horsepower. It's fun to use your brain on decisions like this, it's rewarding that you've been so clever, and it's hugely beneficial to have the time back. I've gone from wondering how to do more with less to realizing that doing less (the right "less") is the path to more. And even this zeal for "more" is less about greed and more about being prepared for the rough patches in your schedule, like entertaining house guests during Seattle summers, which is both pleasure and privilege when prepared.

P90X Day 40: Legs and Back, Ab Ripper X

The ab ripper keeps getting easier, so I did cross-leg sit-ups rather than wide-leg sit-ups.

As part of negotiating with myself, I indulged last night in not only sushi but ice cream as well. So now I've got extra glycogen to burn, at least. The "Whole 30" program is a 30-day paleo experiment, which I had almost completed by the time I got to the wedding. Anyway, that's the sound of me negotiating with myself. Sounds weak, doesn't it? And when you're negotiating with yourself, how do you walk away? And what's your best alternative to a negotiated agreement? Do as I say, not as I do.

I'm re-remembering how good it feels to feel this good. A fit and healthy body is not for purchase; it may only be bartered for with exercise, wise food choices, and temperate eating habits.

P90X Day 39: Yoga X

I think for once I got to sleep at a reasonable hour, making my 90-minute Yoga X manageable.

This round of P90X has definitely focused me at work as well. I think that one of the reasons people who are already doing a lot are able to get more done is that they focus on eliminating time spent on things that don't move the needle. You cultivate an ability to be direct and to prioritize aggressively.

Charles Duhigg's latest book Smarter Faster Better is on productivity. It's a good one. I haven't done my GoodReads review for that one yet. I'm definitely behind on GR reviews. Because I read that book, I sidelined my Parallel Programming Coursera course in favor of this P90X round.

P90X Day 38: Back and Biceps, Ab Ripper X

Like chest/shoulders/triceps, this routing was much easier the second time around. Who knows, maybe the weight gain from the Pakistani wedding was really just overdue bulking thanks to the recovery week?

My legs and waist size are noticeably slimmer (thanks, pants!). I still don't know what to make of the fat percentage readings on the Aria scale. I'm not going to worry about it. I did, however, make sure to change the scale units from pounds to stone. Seriously, people: don't weigh yourselves in pounds.

The ab ripper was a bit easier today, so I went for single-grabs on the leg climbs.

P90X Day 37: Plyometrics

Okay, lots of catching up to do. I've been working out, but not updating because my siblings were in town. Let's see what I can remember.

So I did this round of plyo right next to my sleeping brother and sister. It was helpful to be on a morning workout schedule this week. It's much easier to leave an event early to go to bed than to come late or miss it entirely because you need to work out first thing after work.

I took the morning off to get breakfast with my siblings. It was at this point that I started negotiating with myself, which we all know is a bad idea. I slid shy of several paleo norms during the week, but for the cause of all of us siblings being united in Seattle, I'm at peace with this. There are many days left to the rad bod.

Oh shoot, that reminds me I'd better wrap up the rest of these updates quick so I can get out of this coffee shop, go back home, and try to cook virtually all of my food for the week (writing this Saturday afternoon).

P90X Day 36: Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps, Ab Ripper X

I'm amazed at how much easier this routine was the second time around. There's more room to go, but my improvement was dramatic. Possibly from good sleep last night after a great stretch. The ab ripper is becoming second nature again.

Oh, and I did the bus 12 trick again today.

P90X Day 35: X Stretch

I used the book to stretch the last few times. This time I used the DVD and it was after a day of walking. It was a great way to end the day. The DVD slowed me down so I was getting the most out of each stretch. Felt great. Got me ready for bed.

P90X Day 34: Kenpo X

Slept in. Hectic weekend with the picnic and siblings visiting. The weather is glorious. Playing Broomball yesterday made me realize I really like to play sports. More!

Calves are a little beat up, but the strength gains are real. The key will be to continue pushing myself without overdoing it. Plus fixing my bike and amortizing meal prep.

When there are so many things that could take your time, focus on the core. Make sure you keep it.

I've thought of sleep as "regenerating" lately. It's nerdy and I like it.

P90X Day 33: Legs and Back, Ab Ripper X

It's crucial I get my bike tire fixed this weekend. There's too much time lost to commuting otherwise. Similarly I should amortize a big pot of some kind and of food. Thankfully I've been able to stay on this morning workout schedule.

P90X Day 32: Yoga X

My plyo landings on Tuesday were a little rough on my ankles. I felt that today. Yoga by morning, Simpsons by evening.

The key with plyo is to focus on the landings above all. Otherwise it's so, so easy to sabotage progress. Especially that jump knee tuck. No shame in skipping doubles to land softly. No glory in a high-impact landing that affects you later in the week.

P90X Day 31: Back and Biceps, Ab Ripper X

Pull-ups! Brutal pull-ups! Also, 30 days. Time for some progress photos. Workout successfully moved to the morning for today. Must do it tomorrow for Simpsons Night also.

Time for some 30-day progress photos! And why not some graphs, too?

I'll update this post with the good news and the far-too-evident impact of the wedding in Houston. Luckily I'm definitely stronger, with therefore a higher basal metabolic rate. This really underscores how important diet and sleep are compared to exercise when it comes to weight. Exercise's chief role is as a keystone habit for encouraging good eating and sleep patterns.

P90X Day 30: Plyometrics

Plyo is here again! At night, again! Houston messed with my sleep schedule in spite of being on central time. Tomorrow I'll move back to morning workouts. I must. Otherwise I can't do anything after work any more.

P90X Day 29: Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps

These block 2 workouts are intense: they hit the same muscles going the same direction rather than the complementary pairs from block 1. It's definitely going to be and adjustment for this new schedule and it's clear why these are only introduced after almost 30 days of P90X.

P90X Day 28: X Stretch

Another hour of stretching. Feels good, but definitely rushed without the DVD, just like my other exercises while in Houston.

To say Operation: Dad bod to Rad bod took a vacation during my break is to understate the case. 60+ days remain in this round of P90X, and I figure any weight gained during the wedding festivities will only add resistance to hasten my inevitable triumph.

P90X Day 27: Yoga X

Good wedding prep. Made it to NASA today also. The Mythbusters and Angry Birds: Space exhibits had me worried that the visit would be like Fry's visit to the Moon in Futurama (where the Moon is a giant theme park in the year 3000).

A very hot day at NASA.

P90X Day 26: Kenpo X

Pakistani weddings are crazy! The events start on Thursday, scheduled start time at 8, but don't start for 2.5 hours after that, then after the official event ends after midnight you hang out in the hotel lobby playing board games until 4am.

So in addition to taking the weekend off from my clean eating, now my sleep schedule is messed up. I shall return to Seattle with the pendulum swung decidedly back.

Also it's friggin' hot in Houston.

P90X Day 25: X Stretch

Easy to do this one on vacation in the hotel room. Done by the book, no DVD player.

P90X Day 24: Core Synergistics

Done after work. Catching up before the Houston trip. Definitely not an easy workout, especially with only a day of yoga in between on this changed schedule.

P90X Day 23: Yoga X

My front bike tire is flat. This is more than doubling my commute time.

My body is starting to feel like a G. I. Joe as far as range of motion is concerned. That's yoga during the recovery week.

Have you seen the news lately? Do we really live in a society which has transcended the need for Thou Shalt Not Murder? #BlackLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter, and #AllLivesMatter seem to me woefully inept substitutes.

P90X Day 22: Core Synergistics

Got this done in the morning, but forgot to post.

Core Synergistics has a lot of planking and seems to hit the same muscles moreso than the other P90X workouts. It's definitely not a day off. With my altered P90X schedule for Houston I did it today and will do it again Wednesday. Yoga tomorrow. Bedtime now.

P90X Day 21: X Stretch

Field trip for today's exercise: The Seattle to Portland finish line. I didn't ride this year, but while waiting to meet up with friends who did ride I realized I had time to get in my stretch. Good thing, too, since I just got back to Seattle at 11pm. Tomorrow starts my permuted recovery week with Core Synergistics. It's more a core week than a recovery week. No ab ripper. No pull-ups. Few weights. See you tomorrow.

Also, 7+ hours in a car...yuck. I-5 North traffic was unpleasant. The rest stops and gas stops were welcome breaks at the halfway point. I'm not ready for a sedentary life. The standing desk at work has me spoiled.

Being at the STP finish line did make me wish I was riding again. I don't want to do it at the same time I'm doing P90X + operation dad-bod-rad-bod. The main reason there is I'm staying strict paleo for this P90X round and that just doesn't play well with supported bike ride food. I think you're perfectly healthy if you eat the STP food while doing STP, but then I'm just not incorporating my paleo half of the experiment into the mix.

I also don't want to do STP on a commuter bike again with minimal training. Next time is probably where I break down, get an actual road bike, actually train...maybe even single-day it. The riders couldn't have asked for better weather this year: low-70s + overcast. 16-18 hours of riding followed by an unapologetic burrito and a beer garden beer in Holladay Park with a Sunday to enjoy Portland sounds pretty good to me.

P90X Day 20: Kenpo X

Morning cardio on a Saturday is a great way to start the weekend. Good luck to all of my friends doing the STP ride this weekend.

Next week I'm in Houston for the weekend and will have to rearrange the recovery week workout schedule to accommodate. I'll have to workout away from home on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and maybe Sunday, and I'd rather not pack weights.

My training weeks start on Mondays, and the recovery week sequence is Yoga, Core, Kenpo, Stretch, Core, Yoga, Stretch. This is almost fine by default, except that second Core falls on Friday and uses weights. I'll be rearranging my recovery week as follows:

Core, Yoga, Core, Stretch, Kenpo, Yoga, Stretch. With that sequence, my weights can stay at home.

No coffee after noon is a good system.

P90X Day 19: Legs and Back, Ab Ripper X

Slept in Friday morning and worked late; did this Friday night.

With this workout I'm over the hump of the first block of P90X. The rest of the week is less intense, and the week after is the recovery week leading to block 2. There were significant improvements in my pull-ups and in the ease of handling the Ab Ripper.

P90X Day 18: Yoga X

So my P90X posts have mostly become sleeping posts. What I've had absolutely the most trouble doing is getting to bed on time to get up early enough to finish my workout, blog, shower, and make breakfast before going to work.

I drink a lot of coffee at work. Let's limit that to caffeine before noon only and see what happens.

P90X Day 17: Shoulders and Arms, Ab Ripper X

Pushing yourself on this workout really puts the "EERGH" in "P90X! EERGH!!"

Work until it works.

P90X Day 16: Plyometrics

The biggest advantage of doing Plyometrics this time around is that I know how to land softly. The first few times you really want the intensity of doing the moves and keeping up, but to really keep going you need to land softly and save your joints, especially your knees.

Also: A straight back when working out is so, so necessary. I think a lot of the reason people with poor posture shy away from working out is that slouching during workouts will be working the lower back the entire time in a very uncomfortable and unhelpful way.

To straighten your back, stand up tall. Now imagine you have hooks around your ribs about 4 inches below your nipples. Now imagine those hooks are attached to wires pulling you up and forward at a 45-degree angle. Now you're standing up straight. Whenever you think you might want to straighten your back, think nipple hooks.

Having a straight back is important for working the muscles that should be working during a move. Something I love about the P90X workouts is how they seem designed to really go muscle group by muscle group and deliberately strengthen each.

If you've never been this healthy before, you should try it. It's wonderful.

P90X Day 15: Chest and Back, Ab Ripper X

Just gotta push play and show up. This is the last I'll see of this workout for a little over a month, since next week is a recovery week and phase 2 starts the week after.

BeachBody no longer sells the P90X Results and Recovery formula. This makes me sad. It tasted great and really helped keep me going. I was less sore and more energetic when taking it after the tougher workouts. I ordered some Mike's Mix off of Amazon, which seems to be what P90Xers have migrated to. It's not the same. :-( I had to dump it out. I think there will be a lot more hard-boiled eggs in my future.

P90X Day 14: X Stretch

Stretching--good stuff. Alarm went off about the same time I was going to wake up anyway, yet I snoozed out of spite. One's behavior can be a mystery even to oneself.

P90X Day 13: Kenpo X

Weekends are a great chance to sleep in. I'm a bit annoyed with myself for spending time on my phone before getting out of bed. So dumb, and seemingly driven by social motives.

Life tip: When you're eating super-clean for two weeks, a dried date tastes like a friggin' Snickers bar. At ~70 calories, it's got about the same calorie density. The bonus is it's much easier to stop after one or two. Somehow your body is okay just eating a couple.

P90X* is a great keystone habit. "Keystone habits" are good habits that beget other good habits. Intense, inescapable workouts drive healthier food choices. Working out first thing in the morning drives better bedtimes. Or at least, in my case, it tries. On the other side of the spectrum you can have eating what you feel like, staying up with the computer, and moving in a way that never makes you uncomfortable until you collapse of a heart attack. For most of the time, for most people, you don't have to live either of those extreme examples. But if you haven't tried dedicated, regular exercise with eating habits rooted in recent lessons (NOT the old FDA Food Pyramid, for goodness' sake) and sleeping well, it's worth giving it a try to find out what you're missing. I recommend you try feeling awesome.




*If it's been forever since you've exercised, replace P90X with Power90. I wouldn't be where I am today if I started out from where I was by trying to make P90X work.

P90X Day 12: Legs and Back, Ab Ripper X

Well clearly I just need more sleep. My Ab Ripper X performance is increasing rapidly.

P90X Day 11: Yoga X

YOGA GOOD

LATE BEDTIME BAD

Luckily, I'm taking the morning off work to spend some time with family--still, this bedtime theme is a little bothersome. It's hard to let go of a day.

P90X Day 10: Shoulders and Arms, Ab Ripper X

Posting during breakfast today instead of right after my shower--the reason, again, being that I stayed up too late last night. I was working on some stuff for work, which is a most dangerous thing to do after work since it leaks so readily into bedtime--especially when you're not sure you have time to do it during the workday.

Which is itself a problem.

When you feel a deep, urgent need that something needs to be done at work, so urgent that you're willing to work on it at home to make sure it gets done, why would we feel it's impermissible to work on such a thing during the workday? It's bizarre that this should ever be the case. If it is the case, it suggests changing things at work. If it's not the case, I need to readjust and make the most of my 9-5 hours by including items such as this. This also underscores the importance of trust in the workplace: trusting that higher-level direction is being set appropriately, and trusting individual devs that they're working on problems that have real business value in terms of improving the system in important ways or in making it easier for future work to take place. There's also trust on an intellectual level, which can be established over a handshake, and real trust, which takes time and tests.

So why was I working after hours when I wasn't even getting paged for oncall support or working on a legitimately immobile and uncompromising deadline? Because I found something, and I wanted to see it through, and I haven't redeveloped yet the level of trust that made me feel comfortable not working on it. Fake-it-'til-you-make-it could apply here, but that's already a leap, itself an act of trust. I'd like to make that leap of trust--but I'd also like to hedge my bets.

I've had a go-to-bed alarm set on my FitBit for over a week. I should listen to it--especially when I'm already home and not entertaining. Shoulders and arms feel awesome. Yoga tomorrow.

P90X Day 9: Plyometrics

Late start due to fireworks last night. I clocked a mere 6 hours and 39 minutes of sleep, and that's with letting the snooze go a little bit. There are three prongs in Operation: Dad Bod to Rad Bod:

1. P90X
2. Paleo diet
3. Get enough sleep

The list above is ordered from easiest to guarantee to hardest to guarantee, but in order of importance as far as results are concerned, it's probably:

1. Get enough sleep
2. Paleo diet
3. P90X

Facing P90X every day is a nice focal point to ensure I'm getting enough sleep and eating right, plus it's been just great for my health in its own right.

I was a little surprised at how easy a time I had with Plyo today. I expected the first time to be easy and the second time to be a little tougher, but that wasn't the case.

P90X Day 8: Chest and Back, Ab Ripper X

Happy 4th of July!

The first repeat workout has arrived. Round 2 definitely showed some improvements in form and performance. It reminded me of how, when I finished P90X the first time, I merely had to command my body to move in such a way and it would obey. Gripping a pull-up bar, if I wished to rise, would rise, and so forth. I'm not 100% back in that state yet, but a taste of a return to that sort of relationship with my body came far sooner than I expected.

I enjoyed some very gracious hospitality this weekend full of options to stray from my nutrition plan. In one way, I resisted successfully, in that I didn't have anything off-plan, but in another way, I didn't resist nearly so much as you might think necessary. A riddle, no? How could I resist and yet not resist?

Here is the trick: The wine, the doughnuts, the cheeses, the crackers, all graciously offered and gladly enjoyed in other circumstances--I did not resist them. Rather, I pretended they were ghostly apparitions of such. This made the refusal easier on my part and less guilt-inducing on my honorable hosts. And truth be told, I suffered little. One living on broccoli, eggs, berries, and crab is hardly starving or needing pity in any way.

P90X Day 7: X Stretch

Feels great. Just an hour of stretching. I don't think my FitBit noticed, but it would have been a mistake to skip it.

Went easy on myself as far as snoozing goes today, but there's really no needs, since a lot of the stretching you could almost just do in a dreamlike state.

The body needs time to recover and rebuild. Omelette time.

P90X Day 6: Kenpo X

You didn't think I'd given up after 5 days, did you? It's Saturday and I didn't mind sleeping in one bit. I wouldn't want to make a habit of it, though. Like I wrote last time, the key to getting enough sleep is never catching up on the weekends, but getting to bed early enough.

Another welcome relief of a workout. I've really put my body through the paces this last week, and after that the cardio and ballistic stretching of the Kenpo X routine is almost restorative.

I've talked a lot the last few years about my "before body" and my "after body." While my starting position for this round of P90X is nowhere near the "before body," it does perhaps merit a label, which I'll borrow from one or two years ago: the "dad bod." Normally I would hate such a label, but check this out: this means I'll be going from dad bod...to rad bod.

I'll keep my day job, thank you.

In mid-June of this year This American Life had a show about fat people "coming out" as fat. It's called "Tell Me I'm Fat," and you can listen to it at thisamericanlife.org. The show is about fat people accepting themselves as fat and embracing it as part of their identity. There is one woman who loses over 100 pounds and keeps it off, but is then disgusted that her husband wouldn't have shown interest had they met before her change. Her story ends with the reveal (spoiler alert) that she still occasionally takes speed to stay thin and has problems sleeping at night.

These stories are heartbreaking, and editing them together is disgusting. The show seems to be pushing a point of view that obesity is a part of a person's identity. That is true if you are Santa Claus. For everybody else (even Penn Jillette [before/after]), that's not the case. It's not something that changes quickly about a person, and it doesn't entitle anybody to mistreat someone who is overweight, but to accept it as something that is unchangeable...I can't think of anything the 1/3 of obese Americans [source: CDC] need to hear less than that it's part of who people are and on its way to becoming a protected characteristic.

The fact is that obesity does cause you to miss out on so much of life. As somebody who has been on both sides, let me assure you: it makes a big difference. This can be either good news or bad news, depending on the following: If you believe that obesity is a fixed state, something that is part of you, from which there is no escape, even in spite of what we've learned even in the last 10 years about diet and exercise (paleo + Power 90 + get enough sleep), then that's terrible news.

If you believe your obesity is a part of you, then saying that there is an unavoidable price to being obese and inevitable benefits to achieving a healthy weight hurts deeply. I know. But it's the truth, and building the plan for your life on a foundation of lies is far more cruel than heeding the truth. And there is another truth: obesity is not part of you. It is not who you are. It is hiding you from so much of the world. It is not something to accept. It is not something to celebrate. By all means, enjoy life, and enjoy the present to the fullest, but don't be fooled by skinny, kind-hearted platitude peddlers [source: TAL's host, Ira Glass, is not obese] into trivializing a condition that robs you of so much happiness.

This post is too long. I'm hungry.

P90X Day 6: Kenpo X

You didn't think I'd given up after 5 days, did you? It's Saturday and I didn't mind sleeping in one bit. I wouldn't want to make a habit of it, though. Like I wrote last time, the key to getting enough sleep is never catching up on the weekends, but getting to bed early enough.

Another welcome relief of a workout. I've really put my body through the paces this last week, and after that the cardio and ballistic stretching of the Kenpo X routine is almost restorative.

I've talked a lot the last few years about my "before body" and my "after body." While my starting position for this round of P90X is nowhere near the "before body," it does perhaps merit a label, which I'll borrow from one or two years ago: the "dad bod." Normally I would hate such a label, but check this out: this means I'll be going from dad bod...to rad bod.

I'll keep my day job, thank you.

In mid-June of this year This American Life had a show about fat people "coming out" as fat. It's called "Tell Me I'm Fat," and you can listen to it at thisamericanlife.org. The show is about fat people accepting themselves as fat and embracing it as part of their identity. There is one woman who loses over 100 pounds and keeps it off, but is then disgusted that her husband wouldn't have shown interest had they met before her change. Her story ends with the reveal (spoiler alert) that she still occasionally takes speed to stay thin and has problems sleeping at night.

These stories are heartbreaking, and editing them together is disgusting. The show seems to be pushing a point of view that obesity is a part of a person's identity. That is true if you are Santa Claus. For everybody else (even Penn Jillette [before/after]), that's not the case. It's not something that changes quickly about a person, and it doesn't entitle anybody to mistreat someone who is overweight, but to accept it as something that is unchangeable...I can't think of anything the 1/3 of obese Americans [source: CDC] need to hear less than that it's part of who people are and on its way to becoming a protected characteristic.

The fact is that obesity does cause you to miss out on so much of life. As somebody who has been on both sides, let me assure you: it makes a big difference. This can be either good news or bad news, depending on the following: If you believe that obesity is a fixed state, something that is part of you, from which there is no escape, even in spite of what we've learned even in the last 10 years about diet and exercise (paleo + Power 90 + get enough sleep), then that's terrible news.

If you believe your obesity is a part of you, then saying that there is an unavoidable price to being obese and inevitable benefits to achieving a healthy weight hurts deeply. I know. But it's the truth, and building the plan for your life on a foundation of lies is far more cruel than heeding the truth. And there is another truth: obesity is not part of you. It is not who you are. It is hiding you from so much of the world. It is not something to accept. It is not something to celebrate. By all means, enjoy life, and enjoy the present to the fullest, but don't be fooled by skinny, kind-hearted platitude peddlers [source: TAL's host, Ira Glass, is not obese] into trivializing a condition that robs you of so much happiness.

This post is too long. I'm hungry.

P90X Day 5: Legs and Back, Ab Ripper X

So now that I'm paying more attention, the part of this new routine that I'm the worst at is getting enough sleep. This is due to getting up at a certain hour, which is based on being at work at a certain hour and working out beforehand.

This would all be fine, except that I'm a bit more open-ended about when I go to sleep. There are often very good reasons for staying up late, and the aim is to normally have a surplus, if anything, of sleep so that I can absorb the bumps a little better. That's not how I've been operating. I busted by alarm today by half an hour and now my day is shifted. One way that we're poor at negotiating with ourselves is that you can always think "I'll catch up later." Catch up now. Be clear about your priorities and stick to them.

If you're overloaded, you're going to drop something whether you want to or not (often in the form of "catching up later"). Be mindful of your load and make a conscious decision of what to drop. Unfortunately, I think I'll have to drop my participation in Coursera's Parallel Programming course during this cycle.

As usual, the start of the workout was the hardest part. By the time I was done I felt great. I stuck with lighter weights than last time I did it because I didn't want to make it too difficult to continue. Opportunities to push yourself when you realize you have a bit more gas than you thought you did are great, but committing to a certain burn that you might not be able to back up on that day could cause problems. Working out harder one day doesn't mean your week's routine will be more effective.

Late to work, time to go.

P90X Day 4: Yoga X

I feel very restored after Yoga X, but it didn't start that way. Coming back to this from P90X 3's X3 Yoga was a bit of a reminder of the difference between the two programs. X3 Yoga is basically a half-hour stretch. It goes by fast and there's only so much time for vinyasas. Yoga X is an hour of vinyasa stuff before it gets to the balance poses and stretching and all of that.

Had a call late last night. Was happy to take the call, but it did mean I had less sleep. Lucky for me, I didn't have the choice to skip my workout, so here I am! People are bad at negotiating with themselves. Sometimes the winning move is not to play.

P90X Day 3: Chest and Back, Ab Ripper X

I made the mistake last night of staying up past my bedtime reading. And before that, I was on my computer working on homework for the Parallel Programming course at Coursera. The consequences this morning were a round-trip of the snooze alarm (shameful!) and still being tired for my workout. Plus I was sore.

So today was a little tougher. Luckily, the workouts are aligned such that you're beating the crap out of different muscle groups every day, so my shoulders and arms were ready. The real challenge will come with Legs and Back day on Friday (thanks to Plyo + daily biking) and weeks 2 and 3.

Even though today was a little tougher, it wasn't nearly as tough as it seemed like it would be when I started the DVD. So just go for it. The routines are well-timed with breaks just when you need them, and even though you're working out for an hour, most of your muscles are resting most of the time. I really think that's why this program has gathered such a following (as far as routine design goes. There's a bunch of psychological/motivational stuff snuck in there, too).

I learned yesterday that BeachBody discontinued the old orange P90X recovery formula and that the new chocolate one tastes awful. I think this means more eggs in my future.

Tomorrow is yoga. Thank God for yoga. The first three days in the week really break you down, and yoga builds you right back up. It's a longer routine, so I'm getting up earlier.

P90X Day 2: Plyometrics

Had to cancel a JohnAir flight this morning due to low clouds--and so my workout schedule continues unabated. Had KPAE - 0S9 been VFR this morning, I would merely have moved today's workout to after work and prepared for a crunch tomorrow morning.

Date last night involving pub trivia. This would have been an excuse for the faint of heart to have a beer (because of the trivia tradition, not the date. She was great.)--and what are you supposed to eat at a pub if you're going way-ass healthy? Glad you asked! Unsweetened iced tea and a bunless/cheeseless burger. Extra tasty with caramelized onions and avocados. Believe me, that was a sacrifice. Not.

So, Plyo. Plyo appears every 3 out of every 4 weeks of P90X. It's there a lot. It's intense. I'm not at 100% of the motions, but it's good and I solidly made it through. It reminds me of the little muscles that have gotten slightly weaker in the last few months, some of which were surprising. Having heart rate data from my FitBit was nice, too. Compared to the first time I did P90X, I'm much better at keeping my landings soft and much more willing to compromise the range of a move in order to ensure a soft landing. It's good for the knees, and it's good for the muscles that are bringing you to a silent halt.

My weight has dropped below my never-exceed threshold, but we call that "water weight." And I like water. I have full confidence that I'll reestablish a set point at a weight comfortably below that threshold once more. You just gotta keep showing up.

P90X Day 1: Chest and Back, Ab Ripper X

Hello again, old friend. It's the original and best. It's P90X. And this time, it's quantified.

I've got my FitBit Charge HR to track heart rate during exercise, at rest, and while asleep (but not while showering). I've got my FitBit Aria scale to track my weight and body fat percentage(ish--it's obviously just the mediocre electric body composition thing). And finally, I've got daily progress photos from which I will spare all but the most genuinely curious in the world.

After I succumbed to allowing stress to flag my workout routine for several months in a row, I was horrified to have crept back over my never-exceed weight (set generously). I noticed similar patterns to before, long ago: thinking my weight was okay (as opposed to not thinking about weight at all), tighter clothes, polite but plausibly disappointed dates, and finally, a picture. Not the worst picture ever to exist of me, but an important reality check. The scale was a reminder that I've slacked off a little too long.

So here's a four-pronged counterattack:

First, a return to biking to work. That little bit went a long way. To hit the issue harder, today was Day 1 of a return to the original P90X.

Second, sleep. Sleep's huge. In order to wake up to work out at 6, I should be in bed, focusing on my breathing at 10.

Third, my eating habits. In an attempt to maximize in a crazy overcorrection fashion, I'll go paleo. This is less important than regular exercise, since mandatory exercise by itself is enough to encourage me to not overeat and to nudge me towards healthy, nourishing food. But let's go for broke and go full food hippy. This means I won't be accepting alcohol, cookies or cake.

Fourth, I'll write little blurbs after my post-workout showers, hopefully shorter than this one, for immediate publication. This will keep me accountable but also hopefully show a real record of what it's like to go this far. Why fall in the woods?

There are several challenges I expect along this front and several habits I will have to rewire quickly:

• P90X is over an hour of exercise daily. For this to work, the rest of my life will have to become more efficient. Will I really have enough time left in my day to enjoy life?
• Eating paleo means most food will be store bought and home-prepared. Amortization of food preparation will become critical.
• I'll be politely refusing most food offers, but discreetly. Nobody likes a fussy eater. 
• 10pm bed time will really make me seem like a party pooper. Luckily, I'm 30. PS--30 is great.
• Traveling: It's wedding season, and Seattle summertime means visitors. I can re-stack my workouts leading up to long weekends so I don't need to travel with weights.
• Lots of people fail at this. Why am I special? What will make me succeed? How did I succeed before? Last time I succeeded by not giving myself a choice. One folds so easily when negotiating with oneself. I expect it will be hard. I expect I will get drained. I expect there to be days when it will not be fun. And I await those days knowing that following through on days when it isn't easy is where success is made.

Day 1 was not easy. I've let my physical shape slip a bit, and I felt it. P90X is designed to take you from fit to super-fit, and I might need a reality check about where my fitness is right now. I'll check that later. First I'll try. Excuses come after the workout, not before.

-------

Re-reading this draft, I see I've identified the root cause of letting my fitness routine slip as succumbing to stress. On one hand, this is a choice, but on the other hand, replacing the fitness routine doesn't fix the sources of stress or the fact that I handled it with poor food, sleep, and activity choices. I'll certainly be revisiting this element of wellness this time around. 

Ready set go.

Write This, Not That!: Java 8 Optionals

The point of java.util.Optional is to free us from compulsive null-checking throughout our code base by using the type checker to force us to recognize that a value may not be present. Optionals make great return types for query methods. Transitioning from an imperative/null world to a functional/Optional world can feel strange in a vacuum. Here are some common themes taken from reviewing code over the last year.

Write this:

final MyData defaultData = ... ;
return optionalReturningMethod().orElse(defaultData);

Not that:

final MyData defaultData = ... ;
final Optional<MyData> oData = optionalReturningMethod();
if (oData.isPresent()) {
    return oData.get();
} else {
    return defaultData;
}

Write this:

final MyVariable var = ... ;
final MyData nullableData = externalMethodThatMayReturnNull(var);
return Optional.ofNullable(nullableData);

Not that:

final MyVariable var = ... ;
final MyData nullableData = externalMethodThatMayReturnNull(var);

if (nullableData == null) {
    return Optional.empty();
} else {
    return Optional.of(nullableData);
}

Write this:

public Optional<MyData> myMethod() {
    final MyVariable var = ... ;
    final MyData nullableData = externalMethodThatMayReturnNull(var);
    return Optional.map(Utilities::myTransformation);
}

Not that:

public MyData myMethod() {
    final MyVariable var = ... ;
    final MyData nullableData = externalMethodThatMayReturnNull(var);

    if (nullableData == null) {
        return null;
    } else {
        return Utilities.myTransformation(nullableData);
    }
}

Write this:

optionalReturningMethod().ifPresent(Actions::useMyData);

Not that:

final Optional<MyData> optionalData = optionalReturningMethod();
if (optionalData.isPresent()) {
    Actions.useMyData(optionalData.get());
}

Write this:

return yourOptional().map(External::nullableFromValue);

Not that:

return yourOptional()
        .map(External::nullableFromValue)
        .flatMap(Optional::ofNullable);

A surprise: .map() will filter the original optional to Optional.empty() rather than wrap a null value with an Optional. Nerds, note that this means java.util.Optional is not actually a monad (like how the "functions" of software developers aren't the functions of mathematicians). We'll see how this goes. We're denied some of the beauty of the math of category theory (which is studied in spite of having the most boring name in existence) in exchange for not needing to tack on a .flatMap(Optional::ofNullable) ourselves.

Write this:

public Optional<TheirSubSubData> subSubData(TheirData data) {
    return Optional.ofNullable(data)
            .map(TheirData::getSubData)
            .map(TheirSubData::getSubSubData);}

Not that:

public TheirSubSubData subSubData(TheirData data) {
    if (data != null) {
        final TheirSubData subData = data.getSubData();
        if (subData != null) {
            return subData.getSubSubData();
        }
    }
}

return null;

Note that if Optional were a full-blown monad, we would need to have a .flatMap(Optional::ofNullable) after each of these .map() calls.

Write this:

public class MyClass {
    private final FieldType field;

    public MyClass(FieldType constructorArg) {
        if (constructorArg == null) {
            throw new NullPointerException();
        }
        this.field = constructorArg;
    }
}

// or

@lombok.RequiredArgsConstructor
public class MyClass {
    @lombok.NonNull private final FieldType field;
}

Not that:

public class MyClass {
    private final Optional<FieldType> field;
    public MyClass(FieldType constructorArg) {
        this.field = Optional.ofNullable(constructorArg);
    }
}

Wanting to use Optional fields for a class is a strong signal that you actually have a subclass.

Finally, if you find yourself using a lot of Optional::flatMap, just be cautious. It's easy to use .flatMap() as a crutch for not properly breaking down your code. If the reason you're using .flatMap() instead of .map() isn't 100% obvious, call over someone else to see if your code makes sense or you're just too deep inside your own head.

Liking dislike

The Dislike button may be the best outcome of Donald Trump's candidacy.

If I had to guess why the Like button alone reigned supreme for so long, it would be that Facebook didn't want to encourage hate or a culture of negativity. It's strange that they held so long to this belief when so many Facebook employees are also Facebook users, as it was immediately obvious that you didn't need a button to express disapproval or a negative message.

The Dislike button is not a grand technological achievement, nor is it non-obvious. The first thing most people want when they see a Like button is a Dislike button. Reddit and the Big List of Problems are built on both up- and down-votes. Facebook was making a conscious decision to keep it off the page.

The altruistic guess at motives is that they want to foster an atmosphere of positivity (ha!).
The cynical guess is that if one movement gets really popular, the only way you can fight back is to write comments (hoping they're read, which still add attention) or spend even more time to come up with a counter-campaign. Given that Facebook is built around a machine designed to keep you scrolling and clicking as long as possible, the cynical explanation is that the Dislike button is far too great a time-refund to its billion-plus user base.

My serious guess is that Facebook introduced the Dislike button to allow people to register their opposition to Donald Trump. It took a force that was so galvanizing but so distasteful, so molded to fit the cracks of what a Like-only world leaves behind, to get Facebook leadership to realize that the disenfranchisement of upvote-only was getting them a world they deserved. The hopeless feeling you have seeing nonsense with likes. The inability to quickly set the record straight. So for once, we have an improvement to Facebook as a whole. Let's hope it sticks.

Chinese vs. English: Stroke Order

Chinese writing is cool. All characters are meant to fit in an equal-sized box. There are no spaces to break up words. Many characters are made from two other characters smushed into the same-size box. And clearly, these characters are complex compared to what we see in English.

Here's what English-speakers don't appreciate, or at least what I didn't appreciate until I started writing Chinese characters: Stroke order matters. Stroke order goes a long way towards forming the character correctly and making it "look" right. Stroke order helps manage the total space of the character within the box and it helps stay consistent with the proportions of angles and line segments within the characters. You might not appreciate it when learning to write 十 (shí, "ten"), or even 不 (bù, "no" or a generic negation), but you definitely appreciate it when writing a character like 我 (wǒ, "I"). Stroke order can make all the difference.

Just try drawing 我 some other way. I think you'll find this stroke order funnest, fastest, and most effective.
Source: wenlininstitute.org

My Chinese friends have commented that my Chinese handwriting is good (when I remember how to draw the characters at all). There's a counterintuitive explanation I hold for this: my handwriting is good because I am a beginner. As a beginner to Chinese characters, my knowledge of characters is not yet built-up enough to know when a sloppily written version of one character becomes another character entirely. My knowledge of only a few dozen characters, knowing there are yet thousands more, causes me to pay attention to penmanship.

English has 26 letters. Multiply by two for capitals. Add 10 digits. Now add in that we put in spaces between our words and that we pick up frequencies of letters and tuples of letters (rarely a q without a u, common suffixes -ing, -er, -ed, etc.). Just a smattering of punctuation added on top. A lifetime of English allows me the luxury of sloppy penmanship, secure in the knowledge that other English speakers will aggressively prune my hastily-spewed chicken-scratch into something intelligible.

Many software developers cite their poor penmanship as a source of pride. For me, this is related to the cryptic signatures doctors leave on prescriptions. The sloppier the penmanship, the harder to duplicate, and therefore the more status afforded to the owner of the hand. I saw to it that the signature I would develop for credit card receipts would skirt any pretension to legibility. But now I'm studying Chinese, so let's take another look at stroke order for English letters. A quick Google search turned up the following:

From superenglishkid.com

There are a few other competing stroke orders for English letters (noted by this Quora answer), because there are so few characters compared to Chinese that we can usually puzzle our way from intention to representation as writers and back again from representation to idea as readers.

What I found common to the few English stroke-order diagrams was that they heavily favored downward strokes for many characters. When I write A, V, v, W, or w, the diagrams start each stroke at the top, whereas my strokes have developed an up-and-over or down-and-around quality, linking the first two strokes of A and V into one and turning my W/w into one continuous stroke. It's kind of fun to try to follow this other stroke order. The capital M in the above diagram really sticks out to me. My M is a left-down stroke, a single stroke for a half-height 'v' in the middle linked to the right downstroke as a finisher. The above diagram shows M as four strokes, the first two setting up left and right goal posts. I can't help seeing something similar to the Chinese way of writing diverse characters into repeatable square boxes.

It's been a joy to continue studying English and Chinese. The languages are so distant from one another. The greater the distance, the greater the appreciation for human thought and reasoning that transcends expression.

Why tonal languages can be tricky

Tonal languages are hard for westerners not because we lack tones in the West, but because tones carry extra-semantic meaning. Superimposing this extra-semantic meaning where it isn't needed is disinformative but deeply ingrained in the way we speak.

Tones suggest to other English speakers that we asking a questions, being sarcastic, begging, and more. You can say the same sentence in several ways, and some parts of what you're varying are tones. So it's not that we don't hear tones, it's that we don't recognize tones as having to do with distinguishing one syllable from another but deciding whether someone is happy, upset, or confused. In English, tones are melodies. In Chinese, they're verses.

misspandachinese.com

Hearing sounds vs. hearing language

We don't hear languages the same way they hear sounds. It's not possible. We translate the sounds of spoken words and phrases to their meaning far faster than we realize. Let me prove it.

You know you think faster than you can talk.

You hear faster than you talk, also. Watch a video at 2x speed and you can still follow along just tine. It takes training of hearing familiar patterns of sounds over and over again.

My most convincing experience was my flight to Beijing. I hadn't been studying Mandarin very long, but I was listening closely to the conversations around me and to the Mandarin translations of the announcements, hoping to identify a word here or there. That's where it hit me that not only did I not understand the words, I couldn't even play them back to myself in my head.

The capacity of human short-term memory is commonly cited as 7 "thingies" plus or minus 2. I've heard more recent research suggests this capacity is much more towards the lower end of that range. How can we communicate when we have such a limited short-term memory? Look at any of these sentences. How many have more than 7 words? How many have more than 7 syllables? But are you having a hard time following? Not really. The reason is that we've built up a lifetime of experience using our language. We expect certain phrases to follow others, certain words to follow others, and certain syllables to follow others. The real information conveyed by our language is the series of surprises against that baseline of expectations. As a native English speaker studying Mandarin, I didn't have that any more. I don't even have cognates.

What about music? We can remember melodies longer than 7 notes, along with their rhythms. This is even more true if we have a grounding in music theory, which partially plays a role in compressing the universe of sounds into a chromatic scale of 12 notes followed with patterns of intervals, chords, chord progressions, phrases, etc. This grounding of theory gives our puny human brains the amazing ability to repeat complex melodies verbatim when truncating these sounds to this limited scheme.

Given that we aggressively chunk language into concepts during routine conversation, we can safely move beyond thinking or even reading in words (subvocalization). Speak to communicate. Read to comprehend. Think to explore. The expression in words is not the thought, but how we communicate the thought. The organization of the thought in our minds will depend its relationship to the other thoughts in our minds. Given the physical structure of neurons, this makes sense.

Since we don't think in words to begin with, don't limit yourself to thinking only in words. Think also in diagrams and animations (the right video games can be tremendously good for the brain). Think in terms of other senses.

"We have a big-ass gym."

She was courteous, beautiful, and professional. I managed to avoid laughing; I couldn't, however, suppress a big-ass smile at the Beijing Kerry Hotel receptionist's suddenly-familiar phrasing while describing the hotel's other amenities. She's correct: "big-ass" appropriately describes the size of their gym. I didn't have the heart to explain her moment of incongruity.

This receptionist speaks good English. She's probably heard that Americans are informal by Chinese standards. I'm probably not the first person she's described the gym to this way. Previous patrons also probably stifled a laugh and most of a smile, but their eyes likely lit up. She may have marked this response as a moment of rapport. She might also just think that American businessmen really like their gyms.

We arrived at the hotel at around 9:30pm Beijing time. I fumbled around for a tip for the bellhop, who I tried to refuse. I would have carried my own bags but I wanted to accept the tea they offered me at the front desk. After fumbling for some time with RMB that all seemed exactly the wrong denominations, I settled on a $5 bill. I flipped through the TV channels for a few minutes to see if I could pick out any characters or syllables, then set an alarm and went to bed.

The hotel was luxurious. Major chords were the elevator chimes. Do-not-disturb signs are operated by a switch instead of a placard hung on the door. I discovered this when a note informed me I had left the do-not-disturb signal on, preventing the servicing of my room. There were a lot of switches on the wall.

The room's toilets were push-button operated for flushing, bidet-ing, and drying. There were even buttons for raising and lowering the seat. The thought, unbidden, arrived in my mind as "and here we are in America, raising our own seats like chumps!"

I wasn't able to find an alarm clock in the room, so I installed an alarm clock app on my laptop instead. The bathroom mirror had a built-in digital clock. My stay was at the height of luxury, and not what I expect is the normal standard of living in most of China. Or most of America, for that matter.

Base ten is an obstacle to international harmony.

A rough approximation of the dollar cost of an item in Beijing would be to divide it by six. This should be much easier than it is, but for the brutish choice our species has made to use ten as the base for international commerce.

The philistine critics among are surely waggling their manual digits in support of this accident of biology enshrined beyond its post. Let me parry their defiance of common sense with a solution for counting to twelve on one's fingers. If you refuse to grant arguments beyond this seeming convenience, this should prove a switch to twelve at least yields no ground as far as the mathematically illiterate are concerned:

(not my video)

Now for the sophisticates among you, I submit to you these grand properties of twelve as a base: We enjoy the convenience in our digital (that is, base-ten lives) of dividing easily by 2, and 5. The astute among you will see that the dozenal revolution is asking us to sacrifice convenient division by 5, but hear me! The rewards are great, for in return, we receive easy division by 3 and 4.

Division is easiest for the proper divisors of the radix.
For ten, this means 2 and 5.
For twelve, this means 2, 3, 4, and 6.

In base twelve we replace the convenience of division by 5 with the convenience of division by 6 and introduce convenient division by 3 and 4 as well.

In the meantime, dividing everything by 6 was a bit of an inconvenience while in China. I'm still withholding my support of the metric system until it switches from base ten to base twelve.

Windburnt on the Great Wall

My Saturday in Beijing, 8 of us hired a tour guide. We went to the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, a jade factory, a copper-something-pretty-stuff factory, a silk factory, and a tea place.

The advice people gave me about visiting China (wear masks and avoid pickpockets) was not very necessary. The pollution was noticeable but not apocalyptic. People on the street seemed to wear them more for warmth than for health. Avoiding pickpockets at the Forbidden City was trivial, as the bitterly cold weather meant we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We were told this was Beijing's coldest winter in 30 years, and that Saturday when we were outside playing tourist was supposed to be the coldest day. I didn't pack gloves, but I did, thankfully, pack a ski mask. I got a pair of North Fakes^TM gloves for ¥20 ($3) on the street that did an okay job for the rest of the day.

The tour guide gave us a lot of facts about the Forbidden City. He wanted us to guess how many rooms there were in the Forbidden City (9,999. Nine is a lucky number). With the same enthusiasm, he asked us to guess how many concubines the emperor would have. The Forbidden City is a very large moated area. Concubines would live just outside the walls. Houses that were aligned with the north/south axis of the city would bring good luck to the inhabitants, and concubines would live there. After several large concubine count guesses from the group and Kevin (our guide) responding "more" or "less," I offered, "Zero! The emperor loved his wife very much."

I got pretty windburnt on the Great Wall. Although the temperature was colder there than it was at the Forbidden City, we were at a section that was pretty much just stairs straight up the mountain. My FitBit said I had something like 275 floors for the day (and 20,000 steps). Two others and I reached the top. The other five didn't get quite so high and patiently sipped coffee, awaiting our return. I noticed the coffee shop advertised an "American Latte." I imagine that was to properly set expectations for Italian tourists. The Great Wall had a great amount of graffiti on it. I was embarrassed to see English graffiti, even though it was alongside Chinese, Russian, and several other languages. It's just not classy. Graffiti your own country, filthy tourists! The mountains near the Great Wall rise more steeply than the Cascades. The Wall was a great way to climb up and get a good view of the surroundings. It also made the pollution situation clear. The temperatures were just a few degrees above zero (booger-freezing) and the humidity was maybe 10-20%, but towards the city it still looked foggy and slightly yellowish. That is smog, and it's sad. One of our Beijing contacts told us most masks are placebos and thinks within about 20 years they should be able to clean it up. I hope he's right and I agree with him. On the plus side, I made it up the Great Wall without breaking a sweat.

Digital life inside the Great Firewall

My week in Beijing was a week without my smart phone, a week without Facebook, a week without texts, and a week without Gmail; so, in spite of the pollution and the anarchy of their dog-eat-dog rules of the road, my trip to Beijing was very relaxing.

I was able to send email through my work laptop, so I used that to send daily messages to keep my mom from worrying too much.

The Beijing locals seem to be well-connected. WeChat in China seems to be about as pervasive as Facebook here.

While it was comfortable to return to my friends, family, and language, I did not relish the reintroduction of Facebook.

The "welcome home" from my News Feed. I missed you too, America.

My week without social media reminded me of when I took a break from a toxic relationship. That feeling of weight off my shoulders...it clarified everything. The relationship was over. It's not supposed to be that comfortable to be without something that's supposed to be so important. So, Facebook News Feed: I don't need to scroll through you any more. You're not a positive presence in my life. You are a machine that is designed to keep mankind scrolling, clicking, and commenting for as long as possible. You're a time-waster. Freedom is sweet.