Author Archives: Admin

shedding habits

Shedding habits is a habit I’ve picked up in the last decade.  Things that I thought I could never do without have so far been fairly easy to give up.  It all started about 7 years ago with soft drinks.

Whenever we have some big holiday the local supermarkets and retail stores put out their food specials.  They lower prices on things that they know that everyone will buy and will stock extra supplies to avoid running out.

Soft drinks are the first thing that they stock up on and advertise.  Seeing the low, low prices reminded me of when I was in high school and working at the local grocery.  It was 4th of July weekend and the local grocery had put out 6 packs of soft drinks for 50 cents.  For reasons I can’t really fathom my family and I decided to build “a tower of soft drinks”.  we bought day and night till we created an 8 foot tall tower of soft drinks.  Who knows how many sodas that was.  I think we had sodas on hand till September.

How could I give up a habit so deeply ingrained?  Soda drinks, particularly cola drinks were an integral part of my life for years. Upwards of 5 or 6 sodas per day.  With meals, by themselves, morning, noon, and night.  Warm or cold, bubbly or flat, didn’t matter.

Yet I did it.  One lent season about 7 years ago I decided to give up sodas for lent and never looked back.  I feared I would get withdrawals or that my willpower would falter but the days went by surprisingly fast and after lent I just kept going and never looked back.  So it was with many other habits I had picked up over time.

I count myself lucky and don’t for a moment imagine that it’s this easy for other folks.  I suspect that for many people these habits have a deeper psychological root that can’t so easily be removed.

On the one hand I’m not really sorry that I developed these habits.  I think it has helped to broaden my perspective and that kicking these habits has helped me understand people who have to kick addictions and bad habits, if even just a little.  On the other hand I do think I could have spent my time, money, and health in better ways.

Maybe those were the price I had to pay to gain perspective.

 

forced discipline

Way back when I started on my long winding path towards fitness I knew that I had no clue as to how I should proceed.  I knew I felt bad all the time.  That was a start but as far as anything else I hadn’t a clue.  I did some online research and concluded that my feet would be the primary instruments of weight loss.  But how far should I walk or run or jog?  Again not a clue.

So I determined that I needed a pedometer.  A simple little device that counts your steps.  A very basic tool.  I found a very cheaply made pedometer at a dollar store and clipped it on.  I wasn’t expecting much.  Just to get an idea of how much distance I covered in a day.  The results were startling.

I had no idea that I was that sedentary.  In the course of a day I didn’t even cover a mile!  The health guidelines I looked up online said I should cover at least 5 if not 6 miles per day.  The cheap little pedometer inspired radical changes in my behavior and diet.

When I got more into fitness I bought a pedometer watch to track my heart rate, distance, and steps taken.  I found it somewhat useful though limiting.

Years later I got a new smartphone with a fitness app.  Since most smartphones now have accelerometers and access to location devices, they can be used for fitness applications.  As it’s also a phone and a web device I found it pretty much irresistible not to carry it on my runs.  In the last year I have been using it to keep up with my general health trends.

You see, that’s what I need more than anything.  It has been suggested to me that I get devices like the Fitbit bracelet to more accurately track my workouts but I see that as overkill and potentially harmful.

I don’t really need or want to track every calorie I burn or eat.  I think that causes people to obsess on the tiny details and not focus on the overall health program.  What helps me more is to know that my health trends are generally going in the “right” direction and I find that it motivates you just enough without becoming a smothering presence in the back of my mind.

I really believe that with this that I can achieve my goals in time.  I may not do it in the smallest amount of time but I will get there.

these days

I thought that you were supposed to take it easy as you got older.  It seems that I am busier than ever these days.  Where did I ever find the time to relax in the old days?

But relaxing is still vital to my life in general.  I’ve noticed how much worse my performance is if I have been pushing myself hard all week-long.  I get more apathetic and slouchy towards Thursday and by Friday I am “out of gas”.  Of course it’s on those days that someone calls up with half an hour till quitting time with some vital project or who needs answers “now”.

que sera, sera” what will be, will be.  What a lovely attitude.  I wish I still had the luxury of embracing it but honestly if I let up for a moment, things immediately seem to totter on the edge of total collapse.  I don’t dare let up for a second, and that’s not me using hyperbole or trying to self-aggrandize my role in my life.  Believe me, I’ve tried to let up a couple of times this year and had near catastrophic results.

The little bit of free time at the end of the day and the free time I have on the weekends is golden and I must use it for all that it’s worth.  I may come off a little bit boastful on social media “I’m doing this, I’m doing that” but it’s really not.

Happy moments are far and few in between these days.  When you think about it, you have a choice whether or not to embrace the happy moments of your life. I have to grab and enjoy each and every one.  Unlike happy moments, sad moments are usually not optional.  They will impose themselves on you whether you want them to or not.

These days I have to make the most of what I have.

 

 

appalled

I was watching my Facebook feed the other night out of the corner of my eye while I was doing other things on the computer.  People were reacting to the Ferguson news.

Last weekend police in Ferguson Missouri shot and killed an unarmed black teenager and the local community erupted in protests and then riots as the police department used heavy-handed tactics to deal with the problem.  Tactics that included restricting the airspace over the area, hiding the officer’s name from the public, arresting city officials and media personnel in the area and using large amounts of tear gas canisters and rubber bullets on the protesters.

One poster on Facebook commented in part “How can this be taking place?”

How?  How has it not is more to the point.  The equipment, the laws, and the attitudes for such overuse of state force have been slowly accumulated across the local, state, and federal levels for the last 30 or so years.  Training manuals, courses, and equipment now emphasize the use of force over discussion for all new police trainees.

Police training now emphasizes that the officer should do everything up to and including the use of deadly force to protect himself in any situation that he feels unsafe in.  Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 there have been more than 5000 civilians killed in the US by police forces.  This is roughly the same number of casualties that the US armed forces took during the same time during the occupation of Iraq.  In addition just for the year 2010 there were recorded more than 4800 instance of police misconduct which included everything from excessive force, sexual misconduct, and theft.

Most of these incidents go unreported as police internal review boards label the majority of these incidents as justifiable actions or police departments will settle things with victims quietly out of court.  In those few cases that do end up as criminal cases the conviction rate for police officers is about half that of the general public.

The thing is that this is not a new phenomena that sprung up overnight.  This has been building up slowly but surely over the decades one law at a time, one incident at a time, one slip of our civil liberties at a time.  The cumulative effect is only now becoming apparent as these abuses of power are becoming more and more overt.

Those of us that wrung our hands whenever these little slips in our freedoms took place were labelled as “crack pots”, “worry warts”, etc.  I suppose we could crow about how right we were and how wrong everyone else was but seeing it all unfold as we predicted it would, I don’t feel like crowing.

market day

Although the modern supermarket is now the model of efficiency and now provides shoppers with a plethora of choices and the maximum of conveniences it lacks those elements which were once the hallmarks of the venerable market square.  The social function of gossiping, chatting, and lingering over the merchandize happens only as an after thought.  The thought that a supermarket might serve as a meeting and gathering place to discuss issues that affect the community is pretty much unheard of these days.  Today’s supermarket is all business.

The black tarred parking lot radiates heat back up as I step out of my car.  This spurs me on to cross the vast open and lifeless expanse and to enter the supermarket as quickly as possible.

The automated doors open and a blast of cold air wards against any of the summer heat entering into the store.  I grab up a little shopping basket.  I almost never use a cart as I don’t buy all that much.

Fruits and vegetables from all parts of the world.  A chance to try something exotic.  Most of these odd products ultimately end up rotting in place.  The few that do get sold go for eye-popping prices.  I grab up some lemons, limes, apples, and plums.  Broccoli and green beans.  Simple produce and not too exciting but the foundation of my diet.

The bakery.  Yummy cookies, cheesecake, pies.  All look so good.  Too bad I can’t stop.

The meat department.  Ground turkey and ground chicken.  Once just for healthy eating, now more of a necessity as beef prices go up and up.  Tilapia, bland and boring but filling.

Cottage cheese or yogurt this week?

The checkout lanes.  The same old magazines on the racks, same old candy bars.  Check the smartphone for Facebook and twitter updates.  Suddenly it’s my turn up.  It’s all a rather mechanical transaction which makes me wonder why they don’t install more self-serve checkout lanes.

Back into the car.  Although I appreciate the convenience and selection I can’t help but feel that there is something missing from the whole experience.  Something that can’t be weighed on the scales or price checked by the scanners.  The vital human element has been almost totally extruded from the market experience and going to the market is no different from going some hardware store these days.

wrung out

When August comes to Houston you can’t even get relief from the heat and humidity at 4 in the morning.  It’s pitch black and the city has had almost the entire night to cool off but once I open the door to step outside I immediately feel the stifling humidity that we’re notorious for.

More like an overwhelming sweater that covers your body than anything else.  You feel uncomfortable from the moment you step into it and you won’t feel better till you’re out of it but there’s nothing to be done but get this run done and over with.

pad, pad, pad, pad.

Your feet beat out a metronome like pace down the dark and lonely streets.  Occasionally a car may pass.  Usually it’s a paper delivery truck making the morning rounds.  Maybe it’s someone getting to work early to get ahead on their work, maybe it’s someone coming home after some personal drama.

Darkness and more darkness hides things here and there.  A night heron carefully walks round someone’s lawn and eyes me suspiciously till I pass by and am no longer a danger.  A cat lounges on the trunk of an old Chevy parked out on the street.  Just barely opening up his eyes to acknowledge my presence and then slipping back into an easy slumber.  A spider has carefully and meticulously woven an intricate lattice calculated to snare a juicy morsel.  Instead the web falls victim to some stumbling oaf that tears hours of good quality weaving and ruins an entire night’s efforts.

Once the sun rises and rules the land with an iron fist all of these characters will hide back in the shadows till night falls once again.  The streets will be even emptier of life.

I run off the street and enter the park.  The city sounds fade into the distance and the last rays of light from the street lamps fade behind me.  I plunge into total silence and darkness.  I tear through a couple more small spider webs.  Proof that no one has been here for hours at least.  In the 4th largest city in America I am alone.  Nevertheless I still get the creepy feeling that just out of my range of vision that someone is out there.

I hear a rustle and I stop breathing.  My ears straining to hear the slightest noise.  I don’t even think that my heart is beating.

nothing.

Nothing but the rhythmic patter of my footsteps.

The long road home.  A few more cars on the roads.  Big street lights lighting the way.  Not so long ago I would have been achy and tired by this point.  Now it’s all too routine.  The only outward sign of my effort is the sweat.

I don’t just sweat a little.  A virtual cascade of sweat pours off me.  The humidity again.

The last few streets.  I look up into the eastern sky.  Venus is clearly visible above the horizon.  Soon the sun will join it.  I could physically tackle another mile or two but I have to be at work soon.

I walk in the door and the coolness of the house hits me in my soaking wet clothes.  An instant chill.  I can hear the rustle of the damp cloth as I go upstairs. My knees are stiff as I bend over to untie my shoes.  Have to stretch the kinks out.

I try to take off my sticky wet clothes and they refuse to come off.  Finally I have to peel them off.  My clothes are literally soaked and dripping wet just as if I had just fallen into a pool.

I wring them out in the tub and see a cascade of sweat pour off of them.  The shower feels wonderful after all of that.

Now I am ready to take on the rest of the day.

all in

My but what a week it’s been at work.

About Thursday afternoon I reach my limit.  I barely limp into the end of the work day with nothing left in me. I get that drained tired feeling that I know all too well.

But this time it’s not the same feeling I used to get near the end of the week.  Not the “I’m tired because I’m just going through the motions” type of tired.  This time it’s tired because I’ve been doing meaningful work and seeing results.

The type of tired you get after a good solid workout.  You know you did your best and your body performed the way you expect it to.  Well this is similar but instead I did my work as best as I could and my clients responded by trusting me with new contracts.

That’s the type of tired that I want to feel.

Why can’t every week be like that?

 

rethinking copyright

My beliefs about censorship are well-known.  I oppose it in all forms.

To me, copyright laws, are another form of censorship.  In their current incarnation, copyright law has become a vehicle for protecting the exclusive rights of various multinational corporations interested only in squeezing intellectual properties for the last few cents possible before being forced to relinquish their stranglehold on these properties.

The main argument that corporations espouse is that copyright laws protect the originator of the idea and helps them protect their intellectual work from theft by those that would either take credit for the work or that would simply seek to profit off of it.

Kind of ironic given the past history of the music industry and their exploitation of musical groups or of a certain cartoon company that made most of its money from making cartoons from classic European fairy tales that have fallen out of copyright protection.

These very entities will hound copyright violators to the ends of the earth if they feel that their property has been used without paying for it.

But thinking more about this I realize that at its core that copyright protection is important to the actual originators and that though corporations are undoubtedly abusing the laws in their favor that copyright protection should exist in some form.

The writers that I know are hard-working people.  They don’t get million dollar advances for their efforts.  Indeed they have to work for every book that they sell.  Sometimes they have to give away e-versions of their books to drum up interest.

These are the people who copyright should be protecting.

Instead of making copyright a tool for the benefit and profit of large corporate entities why not make it more personal and less impersonal?  Make it more flexible.  Make sure that the rights of the originator are protected but allow others to use and borrow the idea to create new works of art.  As long as they credit and share profits with the originator, let others borrow from the idea.

Someone else may take the idea and make it even better, make it something totally different from what was originally intended.  Why not let the ideas flow.  As long as due credit is shared and the monetary details are ironed out then nothing, lawyers least of all, should stand in the way of creativity.

Conspiracies III

As we get closer to the 20th century conspiracies become harder to research or prove.  Generally the families, companies, or individuals involved take greater steps to cover their activities.  In some cases the cover ups are so complete that some conspiracies will never be able to be proven.  We start with some local history.

Texas 1836

On an unseasonably warm day in April a small band of rebels defeated the larger federal army of Mexico and by literally threatening Santa Ana at gunpoint secured a treaty making Texas into a republic.  The key man in all of this was General Sam Houston.  The former governor of Tennessee came to Texas to practice law. Some say he came at the behest of President Jackson to foment rebellion in what was then the Mexican state of Coahulia y Tejas.

The American government certainly was interested in the territory.  As early as the 1810’s they had looked the other way while private armies of American citizens had tried to takeover the state.

Houston enters the picture in about 1833.  He had spent some time in Washington DC advocating for the Cherokee tribes and he left the city after being found guilty of attacking a congressman on the street.  Some say that President Jackson used his influence to get Houston out of his predicament and encouraged him to go to Texas to stir up trouble.

While in Texas, Houston receives considerable military aid from “private” citizens in the US including not only weapons but “volunteers” from various American states.  Shades of Crimea 2014.

The US government did nothing to prevent these actions.

It is somewhat telling that upon the successful end of the revolutionary war that Houston sought the annexation of Texas into the US.  It was rejected but Houston continued working on the issue until annexation was accepted ten years later.

Washington DC 1865.

The facts that cannot be disputed are that President Lincoln attended Ford’s theater and that an assassin shot him at point-blank range from behind.  Beyond that, the motives, the plot, and even those involved are hard to prove.

John Wilkes Booth is considered almost universally to be that assassin.  Booth was possibly the greatest actor of the age.  Sometimes referred to as the “handsomest man in America”

The civil war deeply affected him.  Despite his pro-confederate leanings his family urged him not to join the confederate army, however he took every opportunity to voice his support for the South.  Soon he gathered about him a close circle of like-minded friends and offered their services to the southern cause.

This den of spies and saboteurs was not highly regarded by the confederate secret service.  Reports showed that they considered Booth and his friends to be unreliable at best.

Booth himself was somewhat erratic.  At times angrily decrying the northern government and at other times urging caution.

His first plot was not to assassinate Lincoln but to kidnap him and exchange him for 10,000 confederate prisoners.  This failed due to Lincoln changing his plans at the last-minute.

Embittered by the surrender of the South he plotted vengeance on the president.  The plan was not just to kill Lincoln but the secretaries of state, war, and the vice president leaving the government in total chaos.  He assigned his friends to carry out their parts in the plot but saved the main target for himself.

The plot began to fall apart almost immediately with everyone else missing their targets.  So it fell to Booth to carry out his part.  He shot Lincoln in the back of the head and jumped from the balcony crying “Sic Semper Tyrannis“, thus always to tyrants, the state motto of Virginia.  In the dramatic escape he broke his leg and stumbled away into the night.

Escaping on horseback he was tracked down to farmer Garret’s barn and killed as the barn was set on fire.

But many questions and theories were left behind.

Most shocking is the theory that secretary of war Edwin Stanton knew of the plot beforehand and did nothing.  It was widely known that Lincoln and Stanton did not like each other and some have speculated that Lincoln was preparing to fire Stanton.  Curiously on the night of the assassination plot Stanton changed his plans and totally avoided his would be assassin.  Did Stanton know of the plot?

Then there is the fate of Booth himself.  Booth escaped Washington with a man called James Boyd and that the autopsy of Booth afterwards showed that the dead man did not have a broken leg like Booth was reported to have.  Some speculate that the remains found in the barn were those of Boyd not Booth.

A story put out by a Tennessee lawyer called Finis Bates claims that Booth eventually escaped to Japan and returned to the US years later to finally die in Oklahoma in 1903.

Attempts to compare the DNA of the man buried in Oklahoma with living Booth relatives have been blocked by the courts

on course

Did you ever have a moment where you thought to yourself that you might want to change everything about yourself?  I used to get these all the time. I would be doing whatever it was I was doing and suddenly contemplate if what I was doing was right or even if it was worthwhile doing and where was all of this leading to?  Pretty disheartening but I had no over arching plan.

Part of the problem I think was that I did not realize the need for long-term goals to fall back on.  That is what these goals are for after all.  To give you something to look forward to during those long periods of time when you can’t see what the point is anymore.  To check your progress against a master list to see if this really is worthwhile doing.

But lets face facts.  when I was younger I did not think in the really long-term.  Unfortunately that is all too common for younger people.  But that isn’t something new or unique to my generation or even just me.  That’s been around for ages.  Those folks that have the gift of having the forethought to plan out their futures in minute detail are the ones that make it in this life.  They can put off immediate gratification for the sake of “the plan” and that’s something special in this life.

Took me a while to figure it out.  Know what I really like about all this planning?  Putting these individual parts out there and seeing how they fit together.  But equally enjoyable is actually deploying them and seeing “the plan” come together.

Things are going remarkably well if I do say so myself.  That’s when things usually fall apart, right?  Maybe they will, but that’s what the well thought through goals are for.  To prevent that from happening or to have a backup in case something happens.