Getting back into running

I'm restarting all sorts of things these last few weeks. I spent the winter bulking up to drive my lifting, but now that it's getting nice out again I've started running again.

Just like with lifting, I'm not a particularly good runner. My best 5k time was 26:55 and that was two years and 25lb ago. Last year I ran three races and finished between 28 and 30 minutes on all of them.

But even so, I like running. Usually I don't waste my time doing things I'm bad at, but running is different than, say, darts or first person shooters. I can 'sprint' for a couple of blocks and walk for a couple of blocks and still have fun because I get to go fast for a little bit. Or I can plod along for most of a mile and feel good because I did manage to catch and pass someone walking their dog.

And in a way, that might be part of why I like running. Most everything else I do I have to work for, whether it's hitting a PR squat, or banging out a chapter, or even beating a videogame. Doing poorly at any of those things hurts in one way or another. But it's okay to suck at running; the worst that can happen is I end up going for a walk instead.

And so I'll head out again today in my funny toe shoes and cat-scratched shorts and just have fun looking at the trees and feeling the sun and breathing the crisp spring air.

Starting over

Once again I've been neglecting my dark little corner of the internet, but I'm going to try to change that. Updates should be more frequent for the immediate future thanks to science.

Recently I've been spending my time editing some of my old short stories. These were some of the first posts here, and if you've read them you'll agree that they needed it. I'll re-up A Father and a Daughter "soon", because it'll be a few months before I get around to doing the formatting for Kindle, and I'd rather be read than paid anyway.

The other shorts haven't been as kind to me. They were good five years ago, but like F&D, they need complete rewrites to match my standards now. So rather than beat my head against a format I'm not all that great with anyway, I've spent the last week outlining a rewrite of one of my training novels. This particular one got rejected by some 65 agents and publishers when I originally wrote it, but back then I thought editing was a luxury.

So hopefully I'll be pushing a new novel out by early summer. I'll talk about some of the rewrite process on Monday. We're looking at a weekend at Starved Rock ahead, so I'll check in again next week.

Onward...

A Solstice rant

So here's something.




A little background first. I grew up in a very religious household and went to the Church of the Nazarene for my entire childhood into highschool. I started questioning things around age 17, considered myself a Christian until 21, and it took until I was 23 before I could comfortably identify as a Humanist. I've lived around people like our commenter here for most of my life. I know the arguments, I know the tactics, I know the type.

It's the winter solstice today, which is the basis for damn near every winter holiday, including Christmas. I was debating whether or not to do a post relating to it, but I think this rant will have to suffice.

Here's my problem with our Facebook commentator above: A comment that on its face appears to be helpful, kind, and caring is in fact ignorant, hateful, and full of malice. And this type of comment is so typical that the commenter may not even realize what she's saying.

Let's break it down:

My pastor just had a great explanation for this...

This is not an original insight by our friend that she's about to go into. I know this because I used the same tactic on people when I was growing up. She's a messenger, you see. This isn't what she thinks, this is just what she was told. The effect is that any counter argument you have cannot be had with her. You'd have to go talk to her pastor. She can preach, but you can't argue. The Bible citations that follow use the same tactic.

"God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes." Ecclesiates 7:29. He says that humans are inately bad, evil, sinful, and children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3)

One of my biggest problems with the faith is summed up here. But I'll skip that argument until another time. Just keep this passage in mind.

However, Jesus came to change our sinful nature and give us a new heart (2 Cor. 5:17). We can trust Him because he is the ultimate source of love, truth, goodness

Here we go. You have a number of mutually contradictory assumptions here. I'm going to argue from the Christian mythology here, because those are the rules we're playing by today.

IF humans are inherently evil, AND IF Jesus is the ultimate source of good, THEN all humans born before Jesus were inherently evil, sinful, and wrathful.

This means one of three things:

In Christian mythology, that means the entire 4000 years of humanity before Jesus was filled with nothing but evil and sin. This is true in spite of the countless examples of virtue and love in the Old Testament. Every human born before Jesus, every hero in the OT, is condemned to hell for eternity.
OR
Humans can be good only through Jesus, or, prior to him, the Holy Spirit. So every human who does not follow Jesus, even those who openly reject him, is either entirely evil, or is only capable of love and kindness because of a God they do not follow. This appears to make following God irrelevant, as God manifests whether we want him to or not.
OR
Humans are capable of love and kindness independent of God and Jesus. Humans are not inherently evil. Therefore there is no need for humans to be saved, which undermines the central tenant of the religion.

Knowing this has made me realize how special it is when people really do care and show us goodness/kindness. :-)

This 'knowledge' is as real to this person as the screen you're reading this on. Maybe moreso. I cannot emphasize enough how deeply these beliefs run to people who have never been wholeheartedly religious.

And that's what makes this whole thing so insidious. Our friend doesn't realize that she's telling the original poster (who is spiritual/agnostic at best) that he's going to hell. She doesn't realize that she's calling him an evil, hateful person. She doesn't realize that she's telling him that none of the good things he does aren't because he's a good person. Only the bad things he does are wholly his own. Someone else gets credit for all of the good in his life, and all of the good he brings to other people's lives.

And she and others like her get away with saying this like this because they really are trying to help. And that comes through in her presentation. It's a nice thing to say, as long as you don't think about what isn't said.

So I'd like to respond with my own cited advice, from a different story.

My girlfriend just had a great explanation for this...
The Younger Children of Illuvatar woke with the first rising of the Sun and communed with the Elves, but the lies of the Dark King brought ruin to their race (17 SIL). Bummer, right? But the blood of Numenor carried the light of Manwae through the ages to give us strength (1 ALK). We can trust the descendants of the Line of Kings because they are the ultimate source of courage, virtue, and righteousness. Knowing this has made me realize how special it is when people stand up for what they believe in.

Fall is the best season of all the seasons

Fall replaced summer as my favorite season right around the time I went to college. Summers were hot, boring, and filled with days painting fences at the local high school. Autumns were cool, exciting, and filled with days learning cool shit and hanging out with friends. I don't work as a groundskeeper anymore, and there aren't any month-long reunions planned, but fall is still the best season.

Because fall is when school starts, fall is a great time to really hunker down and get things done. Just because you're not in school is no reason to let that classical conditioning lapse. Fall is a time for change, a time to get things started. You've got 6 months of long nights ahead of you, and no excuses that the weather is too nice to be productive.

Now, finally, we get to eat fall food. Some people say that 6 months of nothing but apples in the produce section is boring. Those people are communists. What's that, summer? Hamburgers? Boom, beef stew. Watermelon? Hot chocolate. What you got? Margaritas? Double IPAs. Chicken wings? Bitch, football Sundays INVENTED chicken wings. Get out of here.

And it's the return of robe and sweatshirt weather. There's something to be said for going shirtless in the summer, but there are not many things better than wrapping up on the couch in a robe, or taking a walk through some crunchy leaves with a lady who holds your hand inside your hoodie pocket.

As I mentioned earlier, we also get football season. Even though the Bears are schizophrenic, football season is still the best single sporting event of the year. Sorry, Olympics. Sorry, March Madness. Sorry, Lord Stanley. Y'ain't got nothin' on the highs and lows, the drama and the rivalries of the 20 weeks leading up to the Super Bowl.

But maybe the best part of fall is how it lends itself to the appreciation of now. Fall is a fleeting season. On one end it gets crowded by Indian summers, and on the other it gets crowded by Thanksgiving snowfalls. The leaves stay colorful on the trees for a week, maybe two. If you aren't paying attention to fall, you may miss it. It's a subtle season, and the more you are aware of your self and your surroundings, the more you'll enjoy it. So take the time. Sleep with the window open even if it's a little cold. Take a walk in a forest preserve, and don't worry about the trails. Have some coffee on the porch when you can see the steam coming off the cup. Read with a blanket.

Fall is here, and the weeks roll onward...

Harnessing anger

I spend a lot of time being angry and not a lot of time showing it. When I write, or when I want to write, I get rather emotional, and the productive, healthy way to work through that is to write. I pace, I talk to myself, I yell at my computer, I act out the things that I'm describing, etc. I do it and then I can return to being a normal human being and function as if I wasn't constantly imagining spaceships flying around the room while wizards fight on the table.

But when I can't write when I want to write, I get angry. And since I spend about 60% of my waking life either at work or doing work-related things, I get angry a lot. Not in the petulant, "Baww, I is bored and so I wish I could do stories," kind of way. Rather in the "My life is ticking away while I sit here and read an email debate about the number of characters that should be allowed in a software field and holy fuck no one fucking cares and I'm dying while I sit here and my brain capacity is slowly withering from neglect and routine and AAAAAAAAAA LET ME DO SOMETHING THAT MATTERS."

You could say that stories about wizards and spaceships don't matter. My reply to that is if you can't see how a story matters more than a software field, please tell me where your soul is buried because it's DEAD and you're pissing on the dreams you had when you were a kid but are too scared and apathetic to recognize what you've lost.

Also, fuck you. You'll be fat by 30 and will surround yourself with shiny objects that you think give you self worth.

So I sit at work and seethe. Like the saying goes, I like my job just barely more than I like being homeless. I could quit, but I can see little benefit to swapping mindless tedium that I'm familiar with for mindless tedium that I have to pay attention to. All that does is overwrites a little more of my brain with nonsense, and makes me a little more tired when I come home. Maybe I'd even start to get satisfaction out of my day job, which saps the need to find it in writing, so I'll try a little less and write a little less, and before I know it I'm 40 and looking forward to painting my new deck on the 2 weeks of vacation I get a year.

Hell no. I LIKE being angry at work. Keeps me focused. I just can't SHOW it. I have to laugh at the small talk jokes, and I have to pretend to care about component version numbers. And every once in a while I put on some music and remind myself that the alternative to being angry is being complacent. Complacency is stagnation; stagnation is death.

Fuck that. Onward.

If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.

Entropy is a son of a bitch. If you're like most people, you get about two decades, give or take a few years, when you're 'growing up.' Physically, mentally, and financially, your first 16-24 years are a rather steady progression of acquiring more physical, mental, financial, and legal capacity. Then right around your early to mid twenties, entropy catches up like the asshole it is.

All of a sudden all of that progression you've enjoyed reverses. You're up to your ears in debt so you get a job that you're likely woefully overqualified for, yet still have to sink 8-12 hours of your day into. You stop walking places, you spend what money you have on shitty food because you're too tired to cook, and you forget what a gym looks like. You suddenly have no time because of your professional and social obligations. You rack up bills for your car, your home, your entertainment, and suddenly you have no money.

Call it what you want, but I call it decay. Entropy grabs you and doesn’t let go.

It's fucking RARE to see someone at 30 who is in as good shape as they were in college, much less better shape.

It's RARE to see someone at 30 writing poetry or doing art for fun, and in college you can't walk to the next building without tripping over a circle of kids doing both at the same time.

You get $20 in college and you're set for a week; a few years later that won't even buy your Starbucks and takeout for the day.

You're getting older, slower, more set in your ways, less introspective, and are taking on more obligations every single day. And all of that holistic natural progression you took for granted your first two decades comes to a screeching halt.

If you're not getting better, you're getting worse.

If you're over the age of 25, your base metabolism will never be any hotter than it is right now. You think it's hard to lose weight now? You think sitting on your ass for the next few years while your body withers from atrophy is going to make it easier?

If you're over the age of 25, your creative mental processes will never be more acute than they are right now. And you're going to wait until you're retired to write a book? Sure, if your book is just a bucket for you to regurgitate everything you've read into.

If you're over the age of 25, it will never be easier to change your bad habits than it is right now. You've smoked for 5 years and quitting is hard? Try it after 10. You lose your temper with your spouse? Try dealing with a kid.

Time is not on our sides, friends. Every time you put your personal development on hold for any length of time, for whatever reason, you slip a little further. You will not have more time later to get your shit together. You're fighting the current at this point, and doing nothing for one day means you have two days of work to get back to where you were.

Start paddling.
Onward...

Hooooo shitcakes

It has been one hell of a month. After a long running list of disputes with our now-former landlord, including a week-long episode without air conditioning during a heat wave, we moved out and are now renting a condo. I know the guy who owns it, and he just so happened to be remodeling it right around the end of June, which was when we needed to move out.

Excellent; the deal is Girlfriend packs, which I hate, and I move everything, which she hates. But after recruiting some friends, renting the truck, etc., we find that when we arrive on July 1, the place is gutted save for one room.

We cram all of our stuff into this room, and after a lively series of discussions with our new landlord, we shuttle ourselves off to a hotel using some prorated rent dollars and Girlfriend's connections in the travel industry.

As it happens, last week was my vacation week. I intended to get things unpacked and then tuck myself away for some writing, and I managed to get one of the two. Girlfriend stayed at her parents house for a few days, and so I wrote for a solid 4 days from about 10am till 9pm. Made some good progress, and was in pretty good spirits when we checked out on Sunday.

Ha ha! There are contractors all over the place on Monday. Still here today, in fact, and I'd be shocked if they aren't here tomorrow. The bed is down, and my computer is set up, but that's about it. Everything will be amazing when they're done, but it's not the most conducive environment for getting work done.

However, if all goes well I'll have this weekend to put some final touches on Battlesongs of Hope before I send it off to Lucky Bat Books for formatting and covers. And hopefully I'll see this thing published by the end of August.

Onward...

On being lazy and relaxing

Wow, this has been another rough week for drafting. This week and last just have not amounted to much and I'm not sure why. I'm just not seeing things very clearly in my mind, which is a pretty sharp reversal from most of April. Maybe it's a delayed reaction to day-job stress? Things have lightened up these last couple of weeks and maybe it's made me relax? I don't know.

Although now that I say that, it seems true. I've been slack on my workouts these last couple of weeks as well; today was just the second lifting day in as many weeks, and I've been running once. Not good when I have a 5k scheduled next Sunday.

And I wouldn't be surprised if all of this is tied together. Things relax at work after a couple months of pressure, and that triggers my natural laziness. I relax on my workouts, I relax on my writing, I start thinking that I've earned to some rest and enjoyment during the week.

Which is bullshit. I haven't earned shit, and I need to remember that. Getting the timeline started on Battlesongs doesn't count for accomplishments. That's going to happen no matter what, and the only thing treating the publishing process like it means anything will accomplish is making sure I make mistakes. Best case scenario, Battlesongs gets me halfway to the goal. So with BSoH on autopilot, the most important thing right now is getting Nomad's drafted. I'm still on schedule to finish by the end of the year, but I'm starting to run out of wiggle room.

The good news today is I set a new PR on 5x3 overhead press, and would have gotten a PR in 5x1 deadlifts if I hadn't let my grip relax on rep 3, which threw off my form and made it so I couldn't pull the last two reps.

I'm starting to notice a pattern here.

It's most obvious on squats. At the bottom of the squat, something in my brain at least tells me that the easiest way out of this rather uncomfortable position is to relax my hamstrings and lower back and drive up with my quads. And it would be, if not for the fact that doing so will tear up my ASIS tendons and get crushed like an accordion when I run out of gas halfway up. We call that a "bad thing".

The lesson I have to learn, that I already know, that I have to actually fucking respect is that I am lazy by nature, and if I want to be of any use to anyone, I cannot relax. Weekdays are for work. I am supposed to get up, go to work, come home, work out, write 800 words, make lunch for tomorrow, and go to sleep. That's it. That's what my days should be like.

No sitting around for a half hour looking at email before I start lifting. No reading forums before I start writing. One thing to the next, as efficiently as possible, and no rationalizing deviations from the schedule. No cutting myself a break because of a hard day at work, no blowing off workouts because it's raining/cold, no taking it easy because I did well the day before.

If it was easy, everyone would do it.

I give myself more than enough slack already. My Fridays and Saturdays are completely free, at least until Girlfriend schedules things, and later this year I plan on spending all day on Sundays watching football. My word count quotas for Nomad's are a fucking joke compared to what I did for Battlesongs. And if I can't handle a workload this light, maybe I need to tighten things up so I don't get a chance to relax.

Tighten things up, get mad, and get ON this shit.

...and why I want to win

I played a game in college called Warcraft 3. Produced by Blizzard, it came out before World of Warcraft did, and is a real time strategy game rather than a role playing game. The appeal of Warcraft 3 to me was not the mechanics of it, or the unit control, or even the strategy. The appeal was the online ladder system .

I was good at Warcraft 3 because the ladder was an immediate, objective metric of my worth in the game. When I won I felt elated and egotistical; when I lost I felt hurt and insulted. I studied the matched I played; I studied the matches other people played; I spent time in class and before bed imagining new strategies and tactics. As a result of three years of heavy playing, I eventually was ranked in the top 100 players in the Americas and qualified for the World Cyber Games regional tournament.

All of which now means precisely shit. The game is dying, I haven't played since 2005, and none of the accomplishments I spent so much time earning mean anything outside the scope of that specific video game.

So was that time wasted? Would I be a better person, however you wish to define that, if instead I had spent that time writing fiction and working towards my dream of being an author? I contest it wasn't, and I wouldn't be, because of the things that game taught me.
The foremost of which is that I like winning. I was never athletic and was a theatre kid in high school, so WC3 was my first taste at competition that I had a chance at winning. And I frickin love it. The competition itself is secondary, I want to win, and if I don't win, I want to get better so I can. A vice to some, and in some situations, knowing that I love to win makes it easy to motivate myself in areas that aren't video games.

I want to win at writing a book. Not writing a book means I lose, so I wrote a book.

I want to win at getting published. Not getting published means I lose, so I'm busting my ass to get published.

I want to win at being in shape. Being in bad shape means I lose, so I work out four days a week and eat right.

There's no room for idleness if you want to win. There's no room for not feeling like it, or rationalization; those are just excuses if you want to win. Don't want to write? Fine, all that means is you're losing. If that stings, do something about it so you can win. Some people give themselves pep talks, I call myself a loser.

Playing WC3 also taught me that not everyone wants to win. Some people just want to play. These people get more enjoyment out of the game and competition than they do out of the result. They play 'for fun,' without thinking of improvements or optimal strategies. As a result, they drift. Their innate talent takes them to a certain level, and there they stay, whether that's at level 5 or 10 or 20, they always play the hand they were dealt. Beyond video games, these are the people who are perfectly content to plug away at a decent job for however long they're needed, and have nice safe hobbies in their free time, whether that's watching TV or going for walks or reading. They're content with where they are, because they're just here to have fun. Alternatively, they may feel empty or directionless, and seek to find meaning outside of the game, through religion or family.

Other people wanted to win, but only if they were playing 'fair,' which is defined by some arbitrary set of rules that exists only in their own mind. I never cheated, meaning I never used a hack or otherwise modified the game in any way to give myself an advantage. But I played dirty, and that agitated people who thought a noble loss was better than a backstabbing win. These players wanted to improve, but only if they could stay within their mental construct of fairness. Beyond video games, these people want to be objectively successful, but they want to do it inside an existing framework. They want to be managers, executives, owners. If they hit a ceiling, they exhaust themselves pushing against it before complaining about how the system is unfair, never thinking to remove themselves from the system. They may be bitter and angry if they cannot succeed, but if they do, they feel morally justified and righteous, because they succeeded the 'right' way.

Me, though, I just want to win. I want use all the tactics, use all the strategies. If I'm good, it's because I want to be. If I fail, it's because I picked the wrong strategy and didn't pull it off properly. Try something different next time. I plan on winning this game, and I'm going to have a blast when I do.

Losing the only game that matters...

Today I woke up at 6:30 so I could shower and eat before I went to work a job I don't hate. About 11 hours later, I came home $200 richer. I need that money to pay rent, feed myself, keep the lights and internet on, and pay expenses on my car and student loans. These are the obligations I've chosen to take on, and my current arangement lets me afford these things and have a little left over to save and go out once a week or so. As far as real life money and possessions are concerned, it's a nice situation.

But if this were a game, I'd be losing.

The rules of the game are simple. The only resource worth mentioning is time, because it's something everyone has, but everyone has a finite amount. In the interest of fairness, we'll give everyone the same 24 hours, rather than worrying about years, which can vary from person to person. The object of the the game is to aquire as much time as possible, because time is necessary for all other activities. And because time cannot be created, it can only be consumed, the mechanic by which this works is to devide time into two categories: obligation time and free time. The more free time a player has, the greater control they have over their life.

I spend 11 hours a day preparing for work, commuting to and from work, and sitting at my desk at my job. I sleep seven hours a day, which is two hours fewer than I'd like. Making and eating food takes another 1.5 to 2 hours a day, and random chores like hygene take another hour. That leaves me with a little more than 3 hours a day for non-necessary persuits, as defined by the obligations I've chosen. That's 12.5% of my day that's free to use as I see fit. 20.5 hours spent on obligaitons to aquire 3.5 hours of free time.

Put another way, I tolerate seven hours of obligation to live one hour of life. I'm getting shafted on this trade, and I'm losing this game.

Which is how it should be, according to conventional thinking. People who win the game are always outside the mainstream, whether they win by being insanely rich, like an A list actor, by minimizing their obligations, like a wandering hippie, or by finding a way to meet their obligations in their free time, like an artist or entrepeneur. But most people don't win the game. A great many people have a fullfulling, enjoyable time losing the game, but they still lose.
I want to win. I want to flip that trade, and I want to do it sooner rather than later. You can have fun playing the game, or you can have fun winning the game, and I'm going to play to win.