27
May
2010
Five False Myths About Gender Differences
Blah, blah, blah… But say it enough times and maybe folks will start to look a the world a little differently. Can’t change something if you don’t know what’s broken.
Kameron Hurley
“Men are taught to apologize for their weaknesses, women for their strengths.”
-Lois Wyse
Archive for May, 2010
27
May
2010
One for the Road
“Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.”
- Benjamin Franklin
Ok, besides 1, 2 and 5 I’m doing pretty well!
27
May
2010
25
May
2010
18
May
2010
Food. Get Some.
Have been a crazy Mad Men fool lately. Look! Here’s a picture of some excellent food at Boulevard Haus to distract you!
Am looking forward to upcoming vacation mainly because it means I can unplug from social media pursuits for a whole three days and work on some actual fiction. I’ve got Babylon and Iron Maiden languishing out there on Dropbox.What’s the use of a mobile file management system if you never use it?
Also, boxing classes start when I get back from the Left Coast. Yeah, yeah, delay involves a sprained right finger, which involves a bad dog and a leash. Not nearly as exciting as it sounds.
Man, I’m looking forward to this vacation. Just wish it was another three or four days longer.
10
May
2010
Level Up
Switched from 5 lb weights during my morning circuit to 10 lb weights. Yes, yes, I can heft my 20 lb and 30 lb for limited exercises, but 3 minutes of strength followed by cardio followed by strength again is a liiiittle tougher. Two weeks with the 5 lbs was just enough for me to start getting bored. Now it’s 10 lbs and I felt like I was gonna die again.
Good times.
Hoping to max out at 20lbs with these (was doing 12-15 at the gym back when I was doing circuit, but at home, I only have 10′s and 20′s. So they’ll be another hefty level up here sometime in a couple weeks).
05
May
2010
In Which the World Doesn’t End
Some time back, I misplaced my flash drive at the new day job, most likely while moving my office from downstairs to up. Long searches in old office, new office, and three different possible bags I may have stowed it in turned up nothing. The last backup of the files I had on the flash drive was from November 12th, saved to my laptop.
This was deeply crappy, but not a total fail, as I had printed out recent copies of Babylon and Iron Maiden. But it did mean lack of get-up-and-go due to the fact that, you know, I was going to have to retype at least half of 100 pages worth of stuff.
Last night I was going through my old laptop one last time to see if maybe I’d created another flash drive backup before that one, and lo and behold, I found that I’d recently replaced the Babylon file in the actual Babylon subfolder in my novels folder on my hard drive. So, I hadn’t backed up the whole flash drive (most of that info doesn’t change), but I *did* back up the stuff I was working on.
I’d started backing up projects I was regularly working to my laptop on back in December, with just such a scenerio in mind (copying over the whole drive got tedious). I really miss that damn flash drive, but at least I don’t have to retype most of Babylon from scratch.
Now I need to effing get back to work on it.
Moral is, as ever: always backup.
02
May
2010
Yes, Mercenaries Die. That’s Why You’re Getting Paid So Damn Much
Watched a documentary tonight about profiteering in the Iraq war by private companies like Halliburton, Caci, Titan, Blackwater, and others. I’m always amused that the same folks protesting using tax money to provide healthcare to their neighbors didn’t raise a peep when Halliburton was charging U.S. taxpayers $100 a pop to do a load of laundry for soldiers, and whose blatant disregard for said soldiers’ health resulted in death and dismemberment of troops and civilians.
But that stuff’s old news. Halliburton and the private contractors’ abuses are a rant for a whole nother post. Don’t get me started.
In this instance, what struck me as interesting was the way they portrayed the civilian contractors as totally naive casualties of war. These folks went over there with a passionate desire to help, yes, and they felt fucked over when it turned out they were just part of a profiteering system.
BUT.
The company I worked for back in Chicago was among those called on by Halliburton and others as subcontractors in Iraq, and you know what? The package they offer you is pretty sweet. 2.5 times your base salary plus combat pay, generous vacation time, and you only had to sign a 6-12 month contract. I’d have been getting paid almost $100,000 as a project assistant/glorified admin. I gnawed hard on this and finally decided that, you know, we made the mess, we should go over there and fix it.
That was the moral piece I needed to push me over there.
But let’s be honest, folks.
It sure as fuck wasn’t moralitythat got me interested.
It was that sweet, sweet, $100,000.
The morality just made me feel better about it when I sent off my resume.
Anybody who went over to rebuild Iraq as a private contractor was doing so as a mercenary. As a mercenary, there are certain things you’re going to expect: 1) you’ll be in a lot of danger, and there’s a real possibility you’ll come back dead or maimed, 2) because of this, you’ll be paid an assload of money 3) because you’re a mercenary and are expendable, your employer really doesn’t care too terribly about your safety.
Time and again I was struck by these families’ outrage that their son/brother/husband had gone over into a war zone to make 100-120-140K driving a truck or 200-250-300K setting up water sanitation sites and being absolutely stunned that they’d been hurt/maimed/killed.
Death is a horrible, horrible thing, but if a soldier dies in a war, do we ask why the government didn’t do more to protect them? These days, perhaps we do. Why didn’t they have better armor, better intelligence, better logistics? We demand amazing things from our government and rightly so. In a perfect world the war machine would run magnificently and folks whose countries we invade wouldn’t fight back. But this is what war is. War is dirty and messy and horrifying and people die. Did we expect something different?
Maybe this is just because I’ve read and written so much about war, and because so much of my family has served in war (including the Iraq war). Maybe it’s also because when I sent in my resume for consideration as a private contractor in Iraq subcontracted to Halliburton that I was very, very clear about just what kind of shitstorm that would entail. I would likely have been one of the folks in the video decrying the abuses of Halliburton as far as waste and endangering soldiers’ lives, but I don’t know that I’d have been upset because Halliburton put me in a war zone.
Halliburton didn’t put me in a war zone.
I had a price, and Halliburton was willing to pay it.
That’s what being a mercenary is, and it’s not all candy and roses and “hey I’ll drive a trunk for 100K and come home smelling like the desert.”
Anybody who thinks they’re getting paid 100K just to drive a trunk is woefully naive of what the fuck a war zone is, and has absolutely no conception of what it’d be like to be a member of a country that’s just been invaded, no matter how right or just or patriotic the invaders feel.
Are we really all this isolated and naive? Do we all make the same sorts of moral justifications like the one I made back then, (“wellllll… we broke it, so we really should fix i”t) to make ourselves feel better about being profiteering mercenaries? You can pretty it up any way you like, but if you were to offer the same job (“drive a truck and get shot at”) to somebody for 20-40K, see just how many sign up for patriotism.
The ones who signed up for patriotism are the soldiers. You know, the ones actually getting paid the shit money to get shot at in the desert. Everybody else is a fucking mercenary.
Me included.
At the end of the day, I was not among the folks selected to go oversees. But I would have gone. For $100K to pay off all those student loans and credit card debt and come back with a fresh new start?
You’re damn right I’d risk driving a truck across a mine field for that.
01
May
2010
Fitnessery
The long winter was rough on my fitness level and my jeans size, as I’ve noted before. When I realized two months ago that I’d gone up a size over the winter, I realized it was time to get my crap together. The problem is, it’s difficult to figure out the best way to get your crap together when you’re already working out several times a week.
For me, it’s about finding the right balance of intensity and endurance. For nearly a year, I’ve been up at 5:30 in the morning doing 30 minutes of pilates and free weights, but it was just so low intensity that about all it was good for was flexibility and casual activity maintenance. I was getting about 20 minutes on the elliptical a couple nights a week, too, but this was dramatically different to my workout back in November, when I had two solid 30-40 minute workouts through my day job fitness program every week (suspended in December), plus five days a week of pilates, plus biking to work five days a week, plus another 3-4 days on the elliptical. Good weather is good for fitness.
But if my fitness level drops, my mood and energy start going wonky, and it very quickly gets tougher to fit into my existing clothes – and we all know how much I hate shopping for clothes.
When I got on the scale a couple months ago, I discovered I’d gained a whopping 18 lbs over the winter. Seriously? I thought, in just four months? Besides the money-spend on clothes shopping (I’ve long given up hating myself over weight. It’s not so much asthetic as practical anymore), the frustration, for me, was the I just didn’t feel very good. I was having more trouble controlling my blood sugar, I was more down than usual, and I just didn’t have any energy. Going to bed at 8:00 pm sounded like a fine idea some nights. Not because I did anything exhausting, but because I felt depressed.
So, even with a modicum of fitness in the mix (30 minutes in the morning and 2-3 days in the evening), I was not at my best.
By concentrating on cleaning up my diet (oh, I do love that low-carb coffee cake, but eating one a week was a little much), I easily dropped 6 lbs in a couple weeks, but without the fitness part, I was still tired all the time, with wonky sugar, and still stuck buying new jeans.
It was time to mix up my fitness routine. The new day job was great for switching up my fitness routine, so when I started there at the end of March, I started biking six miles roundtrip. With all the lights and switcheroos, it takes about 20-25 minutes to get there in the morning and again to get home at night.
But this still wasn’t cutting it.
Pilates, relaxing as it was in the morning, wasn’t the best use of my time either. The great thing about my morning routine was that – unlike my afternoon elliptical slacking – I did it every morning without fail. So I needed something in that timeslot that was going to make the best use of my time.
See, I always put off changing my workout routines as long as possible because, of course, there are a couple days of insulin adjustment involved, and highs and lows and math and needles are always annoying at 5:30 in the morning (for those interested, the magic formula was calculating 10 carbs for breakfast instead of 12 and then rounding down the number of insulin units my meter calculated for me, unless my blood sugar is below 90 during my morning test, at which point rounding up is actually better).
So I went ahead and pulled out my copy of Jillian’s 30-Day Shred and said, “OK, it’s time.”(and if you think Jillian is like some Jane Fonda “squeeze your butt while wearing a leotard” thing, think again. Her videos are the closest thing to the tough-love circuit training I was getting at the POW gym back in Chicago, with the same immediate results).
This 25 minute cardio and strength routine regularly kicked my ass when I first got it, but I’d set it aside for awhile and moved on. So Monday morning I got up at 5:20 a.m. just to make sure I had enough time in case of sugar wackiness, changed my clothes, and got started. At the end of it, I realized that all that bike riding had indeed actually been paying off, because my endurance was much better than the last time I’d done the workout.
What I love about this routine is that the fitness, energy and endurance improvements are evident pretty much immediately. On day one I was bouncing around at 6:00 a.m. ready to start the day. By day two, I noticed a marked improvement in my bike riding and on day three the workout was already a lot easier. Last night, I noticed better definition in my arms, and this morning I stepped on the scale for the weekly weigh in and found that I’d dropped 2 lbs. Not bad for 25 minutes in the morning (and another 40-50 minutes a day of bike riding, of course, but the morning workout was the only thing I changed).
I also went ahead and took another look at my diet to make sure I’m making the best use of my calories. I made the switch from almond flour to soy flour, which has half the calories and only 4 more carbs per serving (and still less than half the carbs of regular flour). It’s also cheaper, so: win!
The last big push will be to break my new daily popcorn habit at the day job. We have a popcorn machine here at work, and I regularly eat 2 cups of popcorn as a complement to my lunch. That’s an extra 200 calories a day, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize that’s 4,000 calories a month.
It’s the little things, you know? They add up.
At any rate, this week has been bursting with far more energy and alertness, much improved sugar numbers, and a noticeable toning of my legs and arms, which has gone a long way toward improving my strength on the bike, too.
I’m still looking at trying to fit in at least two more workouts per week, preferably at the boxing gym downtown. Downsizing freed up some cash for J. and I and it looks like we’ll be able to start boxing classes next month. I figure that’s another 2 hours of fitness a week, which should be about right to get me to the level I’m most comfortable at.
It’s funny, you know, because there certainly is a genetic component to how *easily* one can lose weight. For those of us with the best of the survival genes, it’s not that we *can’t* be 150 lbs (or 185 lbs, in my case. I don’t ever want to see the tail end of 170 ever again), it’s that doing so requires a lot *more* effort than most people. In fact, I don’t expect to see that wishy-washy 185 by making these changes. What I want out of this is to get me at the fitness level I’d prefer and get me back into November’s jeans.
That’s it.
And to do that will require about 1.5-2.5 hours of exercise 5-6 days a week. That’s just how fun it is to be me. And probably another reason why I get so pissed off all the time when people assume that anybody clocking in at over 200 lbs must just be lazy and sit around eating donuts all the time. This is what it takes for me, personally, to clock in at around 200 lbs. More than that requires extreme self-deprevation of the 1400 calories per day and 2-3 hours exercise 6 days a week, and you know what? That’s not the life I want to live. I love my body. I love being big and strong and scary. If I’m too hungry to throw a good right hook, what’s the point?
I’m all about practicality, people.
01
May
2010
Keep Calm and Carry On
Because in the face of Nazi invasion, this is generally the best thing you can do as a civilian.
Well, that, and join the resistance. But for those of us often overwhelmed by simple daily living, it’s not a bad mantra for life-crazy. Sometimes we get worked up over the daily grind like it *is* a Nazi invasion, and you know? Not so much.
Novels
