Kishi

Mm, I'll have to check those out! I've done actual hot chocolate before, and it's pretty striking stuff. I like it a lot, but my body doesn't have a high tolerance for a lot of the fats that would come along with that stuff, so it's kind of hard to work in. Also, I kind of suspect my body has a bone to pick with beans in general; coffee isn't a problem, but I experienced some significant sinus congestion for a long time that's only recently abated with the use of OTC meds, and I was eating a lot in terms of black beans and powdered peanuts. I'd like to get some allergy testing done to confirm either way. It could also be the dairy I'm taking in too, which I haven't eliminated yet because it's cheap and easy protein, but, yeah. I do like chai, though! So far so good! I'm 2 weeks into a 12-week program. We'll see how it goes. Right? It's a good nighttime drink, if nothing else. * Goal: 4/4 So far so good! Sleep hasn't evened out yet but I'm not experiencing any kind of crash or drag feelings so far which I was more afraid of. I got sent back home with a bunch of holiday food that I'm nomming through right now, but I'm also getting a lot of protein and fiber on the way so I'm not as indulgent as I might otherwise be. Could be better, could be worse. Not a whole lot to report atm, but wanted to check in, so here I am. Hope things are going well wherever you are!

Awesome! Remember, if worse comes to worse, you can always do things to make the 6s feel heavy, things like slowing down your cadence and maximizing tension in your muscles. There're more kinds of progress than just the numbers on the weights.

Yeah, for sure! Might need to watch how I space it out, too. I had to go to the office yesterday and I got this 17 oz coffee thermos/mug thing for Office Christmas and I sipped on it all up until 3 PM at which point I just downed the whole thing. That may have thrown things a bit. ;; Yes sir! I can see sounds. I can hear colors. I can feel the shape of all things that are made of beauty and wordlessness. I try to do my writing on that stuff. Hey, good to see you! Thanks, good to see you too! And yeah, I dunno if I have some kind of anxiety with caffeine or not, but I think I feel my stress in my chest a bit more when I'm drinking too much and that's kind of scary to me. Fortunately, I can do OK with Green Tea, and it does my weeb heart some good. * Goal: 3/3 So far, so good. Felt a little weird to drink decaf on Monday morning, but it was hot and bitter and comforting, and really that was all I was looking for. Sunday and Monday were spent with my folks for New Year's; I'd originally planned to go home for Christmas but that couldn't happen because Dad got COVID and gave it to Mom. There wasn't anywhere else for me to go, so I wound up spending the holiday alone. But, FWIW, the folks were sanguine about the whole thing. The way they put it when we called on Christmas Day, they said that they'd avoided getting COVID for the past 4 years and by the time they finally got it, it was a weaker version and they'd been fully vaccinated. So if they were going to get it, this was probably the best time. For my part, being along on the holiday sucked, but it was a relief to know that I didn't bring this to them. That's something I've been afraid of for the past 4 years that kind of fell to the background as everything opened up again. Training has changed some. Mr. Toes, whom I've mentioned, finally put out a BJJ-focused strength/mobility program, and I finally caved and bought into the app. It fits remarkably well with what I've been doing already, believe it or not, and I've been getting coaching from folk there on what I've been doing and what program is best for me right now and that kind of thing. I'm actually really impressed with them; originally, I set out to be a self-starter but they eventually reached out to me to help, which I didn't expect and they've been good and useful. They haven't pushed any extra products on me (which I'd heard they might try to) and they've given me recommendations to use what I have instead to do more and get more out of what I'm doing. It's a good investment so far. As to my knees, they're feeling better, although they're not as good as they're gonna get. There really hasn't been any mat time in the past few days. I wanted to maximize my time with my folks, so even though the gym was open New Year's Day (I think), I didn't go. And I didn't go Tuesday because of time with friends. And I'm not going tonight because I've got some home repair issues to do and some supplements to buy. Tomorrow? I will probably go. Need to get some writing done first, though. About done with the planning phase. All that will be left is the prose phase. I'm kind of anxious to get started. Can't wait.

Hey! Rooting for you. I dunno if you got yourself to start lifting yesterday, but if you did, I hope it turned out great! And if it didn't, well, there's always the next day.

Nice. How's it feeling? Good soreness in the right places?

My dreams are generally interesting. They're tied together by a theme of travel, which, I dunno if that's a message or what.

Feel this. I generally find that lower calorie intakes are much easier/more bearable with the use of protein. Generally, the higher the better.

Happy New Year, everyone! "Kishi! What the hell, man, you disappeared last challenge!" Details. I had a meditation goal and I basically struggled with it until I found my way back to "Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Everyday Radicals," which imposes some external structures that I find useful for consistent meditation. As a result, I've been meditating more and it's been helping me. I feel good about that. So what am I talking about as far as slowing down? Well, in the course of my ongoing research about how to care for myself, I found out about this idea of caffeine cycling. Basic idea is to lay off the caffeine a bit - lots of low-caffeine days with some high days as needed. Highlights include cutting off mid-afternoon caffeine, instituting no-caffeine days, and regularly attempting to reset the sensitivity for it rather than coming to rely on it. Because I'm finding for myself that I don't really care for the degree to which I'm coming to rely on this stuff. I think my sleep is better when I'm not using or when I use less late in the day, and I worry that it's bad for my heart long term. So, my goal is to institute the "Green Tea Protocol" listed in the linked article - 2 days of coffee, 4 days of green tea, and 1 day of rest/decaf. The trackable for this goal is a 3 PM cutoff. Not sure how far the cutoff goes - might eventually go to 2 PM, then 1, but I want to take this challenge to watch myself and see how I'm doing. If my sleep improves to a satisfactory degree, then I see no reason to go any further, but that remains to be seen. The other hope in slowing down, ironically, is that I'll be better about being here and being present for y'all rather than focusing solely on myself and my problems. I find that the caffeine causes me to hyperfocus - very useful for work and training, but very difficult for transitioning over to being here. Here's to a New Year. I have a kind of Epic Challenge in mind for the course of the year which I'll write about once I can articulate to myself what the hell it is I'm trying to accomplish.

I'm an active BJJ player. Also got a dozen years or so of kickboxing experience, minus clinching, and I'm a wee babe when it comes to MMA but I'm getting some occasional exposure to it. I'm happy to put my years to the use of anyone who wants 'em.

Okay, okay! I get that. Let's take it a step at a time. As far as exercise away from home, the best and most underrated one in my experience is just walking. Seriously. Walking burns calories without making you acutely hungry and depending on how heavy you are, it's fantastic strength work. If you're deconditioned, it'll also fix that too. And it has a low barrier for entry, too: you already got a pair of shoes, I presume, so that's that. So when away from home, try to figure out how much walking you can do without ruining your job or your trip or whatever it is you're doing and then... take those steps. See how you feel. Adjust accordingly. Food can be tricky, and I don't know that I have the best advice about this since I tend to see food as serving multiple functions. It' not just nutritive; there's also a social component to it that a lot of the fitness columnists and propagandists really don't seem to appreciate. And frankly, I don't think fast food is necessarily bad. Sometimes you just need calories and there's no sense in starving yourself if you don't have any other options. All that being said, one strategy I've been using a lot to good effect is to make a point of making a "optimal choice" after a "sub-optimal outcome." For example: let's say you've gone out to eat with friends and it was a pizza night. And you ate until full and then maybe past that point. Groovy. That's life. It happens. To control for this, the very next food choice you make should be the very best possible choice you can make in that moment. If you're craving a dessert food, maybe find a way to make a version of that dessert for yourself that'll get you back on track. (example: I'm a huge ice cream fiend, and I've found that mixing casein protein with Greek yogurt and sweetener yields a high protein, lower calorie indulgence that scratches my itch perfectly). If you remain in a social situation and can't control what dessert is done, well, that's OK too. Eat the dessert. Enjoy yourself. But once you're back on your own, the very next thing should be a high quality, nutritional breakfast, whatever that looks like for you. It can also help to eat some before going out as a means of curbing your appetite. And when dining with friends, make a point of chewing your food if you can, and stop when full. If you're worried about wasting food, see if you can store it to go. You can totally integrate it into your daily nutrition afterwards, because by the time you come back to it you should have made some more optimal choices to balance this one out and be able to return to an optimal choice after the sub-optimal outcome was forced on you. This has helped me a lot with managing my weight around my parents sending me back with truly staggering amounts of indulgent food. I hope that helps. I'm actually struggling with sleep my own self, so I don't really have any advice to offer beyond the usual "turn off your lights, turn off your screens, read a book" kind of stuff that doesn't help me much.

What stuff are you having a hard time sticking to?

Goal: 8/12 Hey, you wanna know what sitting and breathing is good for showing you? That you've got a lot of sinus congestion. I'm not sure what's causing it, since I'm not sick or showing other symptoms. I suspect food, and in particular I suspect my use of legumes for protein and fiber. I think I'm going to take those out of rotation for a month or so and see what happens. I've noticed also lately that I've been craving greens something fierce and I wonder if these are related somehow. It remains to be seen, but the shake up will be fun. Only problem is that I've been using powdered peanut butter for about ~20% or so of my protein needs and I'm going to need a replacement. I've got options, fortunately, but that low tolerance for dietary fats and cholesterol makes getting the protein from whole food sources a problem. I could do lots of chicken breast for it instead, I suppose, but man, that's no fun. Maybe start shredding chicken thighs in bulk? Might be possible. I've also got access to casein protein, which is really good stuff as far as getting a lot of protein in. One of my favorite things to do with that is to mix it with Greek yogurt. At a 10:1 ratio, it thickens the yogurt up into a very ice-creamy consistency, and I can throw dried fruit in there for something that scratches the dessert itch when needed. I can use that now with the chia pudding I used as my peanut butter vehicle; I do not know how that's gonna work, but I think it'll be interesting. Went out to BJJ last night. Didn't get submitted again, which is nice, but we worked on a lot of side control and man, my escape/reguard game from there is super weak. Always has been. Just another thing to work on, though. Not worried. Um, and, yeah. That's life for the moment.

Thanks! The hard part is that a lot of what I have to work is very weird, situational stuff that's tricky to research. Findable, of course, but I'm not there yet. Yeah, it's similar over here. Although there's a much more emergent quality to it, almost like the "meta" of a game where certain strategies prevail for a time and everyone rushes to copy them, and those strategies are countered and grow popular in time and then they're the new game in town, and then there's a new counter and it goes again. Our teachers are just as likely to say, "Here's something I've been playing with lately that works for me" as they are to say "OK, kids, here's how this technique works." And there is a lot too about how one has to personalize technique for oneself. There's some stuff that smaller people can do that I really struggle with, and there's some stuff I do that smaller people can't really do without a lot more work. Self-recording and reflection is very encouraged over here, although it's not as common as might be desirable, especially since I'm on my own and I can't really manage the kind of camera set up I'd need in order to capture the necessary data. * Goal: 7/11 Had to force myself to sit down and meditate last night, but I did it. Too many easy distractions. But I did it. Swings came and went without incident. Knees over toes training happened; actually went for the gusto and did the accompanying stretches which I thought were kind of overrated but in fact turned out to be very pleasant. I got a markedly better response than I have in a while thanks to my studying and it's really pretty exciting to be able to say that. But, uh, yeah, not much else to report. Today's a relatively quiet day. I'll be hitting the mats tonight and... we'll see what happens.

That's awesome. Glad to hear that he was found.

Well, in the interest of dreaming of a better world, I'd guess that there'd probably be a ton of localized variety. There wouldn't be any one traditional food so much as there'd be a tradition of harvest at this time of year with an emphasis on making sure that nobody went hungry. The contribution of the colonizers in this scenario is to bring along multiple methods of cooking these foods, with the result being a kind of cultural homage and exchange that blends along the emergent boundaries of the indigenous cultures. So, like, for here in NC, there'd be a difference between Lumby Thanksgiving versus Tuscarora Thanksgiving versus Cherokee Thanksgiving, with the presentations changing generally from the coast to certain parts of the piedmont to the mountains. Probably a lot of sweet potato at this time of year, which I'd be cool with. Fish out by the coast. Turkey in the mountains. Dunno what or if the piedmont would have a meat dish; I'm inclined to say hog/pork, but I don't know that the hogs we have are native to the area as they're kind of pest animal for us. I imagine a much more embedded kind of holiday, one in which the gratitude is grounded in... well, the ground, but also toward the native cultures that we were granted hospitality and allowed to stay. I don't see how we get there from here, or if there's even a there there, but maybe? One day? Who knows? Might just be a daydream, but I think it's a decent one, and building a better world is hard without that.

For sure, for sure. FWIW, I'm hopeful that if it can't be now, it'll be that way in the future.

Can't speak for all men, but for myself I kind of found that my experience of the holiday changed depending on my involvement with it. I tended toward cynicism with it as I got older, especially when I came to see Black Friday as this kind of repudiation of the celebration. ("Today, we give thanks. Tomorrow, we forget.") But as I got to a point where I started to get in the kitchen and cook with my folks and provide my own contributions - and steadfastly refused to engage with the following day - I found myself experiencing a sense of gratitude, because I have these people I'm relating to and engaging with them and joining my labor power with theirs to turn these commodities into a pleasant product. It helps that my mom loves football too, so she puts us to work to make sure she can watch the game. It's not perfect, of course. As I've learned more about the meaning of the day to our Indigenous folk, it's gotten weirder. I've got both this emotional connection to the holiday, but I'm cognitive of the myths it's built on and the ways in which our culture chooses to engage with its history. I suspect the holiday is beginning to evolve, between this acknowledgment and the increasing prevalence of "Friendsgiving" and found families taking over the ways in which we engage with the day. I'm here for it, for all that I'm very, very lucky as far as how I've got to engage from the start.

Frankly, as someone who's in the religious part, you're not missing much. Putting aside my own morbidity around the holiday, the whole thing's basically a psy-op put on to make up budget shortfalls at the end of the year as well as to nab new income streams. It'd be bad enough if it was just another capitalist enterprise doing it, but it's worse in some cases because they may be trying to rope you into a high-control social environment in which the theology is warped toward certain sociopolitical outcomes. Personally, count me out. I'd rather spend my time near the manger and with the outcasts. But FWIW, there is a strange, deep joy in me when the day itself finally comes.

Parenting time-out? Wow, I never would have thought of that. That's brilliant.

Ow, wow, that's a lot. Hope it ended yesterday and did not carry forward.

Goal: 6/10 Meditation is not happening as constantly as I'd like it to, but it's happening often enough for me to notice some changes in how I'm thinking about things and approaching them. Example: I got out on the mats Saturday and Sunday and my "No-Tap" streak got busted. Which was going to happen eventually anyway, but when they happened, I wasn't frustrated. I'd found myself thinking for a while that I needed to grade my progress on a different set of criteria anyway and when the taps happened, they were from relatively unusual places that I hadn't thought about and rather than being upset I was surprised to find that I was grateful for what happened to me. And more to the point, I found myself thinking about what the GOATs of BJJ have said before about how they would have loved more time where I am to work on the kinds of things I'm working on and I found myself thinking that, really, it's a gift to be where I am now and to have the opportunity to work without the expectations of others on me. There's another belt promotion coming up next month. Maybe I'll go. Maybe I won't. I'm pretty sanguine ATM, but I have to admit that my feelings would probably escalate a lot again if I went, and TBF I don't know that I feel like I deserve the promotion. I've been going over the "Blue Belt Requirements" and I'm surprised to find that I have a lot of them pretty well in hand, but I'm also frustrated at the idea of "studying for a test," because the only thing that gets you is the ability to pass a test. It's not actually learning anything. That surprises me too. I don't know if the meditation's caused that, but it's put me in touch with those feelings in a way that I don't know I would be if I wasn't, you know? But, yeah, I don't feel like I deserve the belt. Maybe I could go help other people play and show out, and it'd be a way to connect better with my fellow journeyfolk, but I don't know if I can do that and keep my cool at the same time. Ofc, more meditation would probably help with that, so. ¯\_( ツ )_/¯ Anyway, not much to report about the past few days. Graduated on my swings a bit so now I'm doing a couple sets at 8 kg in place of some of the 4 kg sets. Learned that I wasn't properly bracing myself this whole time, which explains a lot about my lower back issues that I've had off and on. Proper bracing has allowed me to return to swinging without pain, which is excellent, and I'm also doing some preventative morning mobility stuff which is helpful too. Gonna spoiler this next bit just because it deals with some sensitive world-topical stuff, and I don't want to force people to read if they don't want to: I'm playing around some with the Knees Over Toes stuff, trying to dial in what I think is the right dosage for me. I've been studying videos of what Mr. Toes says to do and it's interesting as not everybody does his stuff the same way and so I'm having to research a kind of "consensus view" on what he's talking about. Ofc, I could probably just suck it up and actually buy his programs and submit myself to coaching, and I kind of do want to, but I don't think I can pull the trigger on that decision just yet. Money has a funny way of tightening up super fast and I'm scared of spending more than I have to right now. But it is what it is. Today should be be a leg day, so I'mma keep dialing it in and see what happens. Oh and it's a swing day too, so that'll happen.

I'm right there with you. I like how easy it is to get out and walk with the weather being what it is, but I hate the cost of it on a grand systemic level. It's a weird space to be in. That's awesome. Great job. I'm kind of in a similar boat around sugary treat-y things. It's tough work, but it's worth doing. Wow, it's a whole vibe. Oddly cozy.

Happy Pending Birthday! Sounds like it's good times; may they roll on.

It was 70 Fahrenheit down here. In December.

Hear here. I usually get roped into making pierogi with my Sci Fi friends around this time of year, except it's not just for us, it's for their neighbors, and as someone who doesn't care about their neighbors, I find it to be a stressful, stupid time. I get paid in pierogi, which helps some, but I definitely get what you're saying as far as that kind and quantity of work being stressful.