Training Like an Athlete

I recently lost a bit of weight. Apparently, it was very noticeable to people who hadn't seen me in a long time. Many people asked how I did it, and a few were worried for my health and safety. They needn't worry.

Over the last several months, I have successfully whipped myself into the best shape of my life. It was no small feat. It has taken a lot of discipline, a change of lifestyle, and a concern for health and fitness that outweighs the desire to be lazy and unproductive. I am happy with the improved results, but I still do not think I am finished.

I adopted the mindset that I was in training for something really important. I'm not sure what that is at this point, it could just be the rest of my life. That's pretty important, I suppose. If I want to live a while longer, I will have to be able to be healthy and fit, so I can do all the things I want to do.

When in training, the mental challenge is what you have to overcome. Physicality can be worked at, but the self-discipline and mental stamina is what keeps you going and keeps you moving. If you force yourself into it mentally, your body will follow through physically.

And when you think you've gotten to the end of your exercise, you have to push yourself farther if you want to excel. If you eventually want to perform like an athlete, you have to train like one.

That attitude translates to more than just exercise. If you want to be a great writer, you've got to work on it. You've got to hone your skills, you've got to trim your proverbial fat, you've got to discipline yourself, and practice everyday. It's the same way if you want to be a great musician, firefighter, tax attorney, or museum curator.

If your labor is your passion, if it is what you love to do, than you have to treat it as a reward to yourself. If you set small goals for yourself, things that you can accomplish on a day-by-day basis, you'll set yourself up for small rewards along the way. Think of it this way, "If I run 5 miles and eat really healthy today, I can have a bowl of ice cream tomorrow." The memory of that ice cream is what keeps you running the five miles. You know how good it tastes, so that's why you want to keep running.

That's just an example. No, you can't eat a bowl of ice cream everyday.

But there will be days when you can eat more ice cream than normal. Just as soon as you finish that novel you've always wanted to write.

Everybody else out there is training harder than you right now. If you want to be a player in the game, if you even want to be drafted, you've got to train like you belong in the game. Then, once the game gets going, you have to train even harder. Athletes don't ease their way into the playoffs, and if you want to make it to the Super Bowl, well then you'd better be ready to play when the coach calls your number.

Training is a continual process, and one should not get discouraged when one encounters failure. Failure should motivate you to do better, to train harder. The Super Bowl is within reach. Athletes do it. What makes you any different?

If you want to make it to the Super Bowl of Football, the Super Bowl of Gingerbread Houses, the Super Bowl of Super Bowl parties, or the Super Bowl of glassblowing, you have a chance. Go for it.

Find what you love to do. Love it. Then do it.

Barack of Fire

This fall American politics was something to be marveled at as the Presidential race grew tighter and drew closer to election day. I found myself not only paying attention, but actually kind of liking one of the candidates.

Never before did I have such an interest in the Presidential election. I have always thought it was important, though I barely paid attention. This year, though, it was different. I was actually kind of excited. I regularly watched the news and tried to make myself aware of each of the candidates and the coverage surrounding them. It was like watching a sporting event. Somehow, I became engrossed, and less interested in other things.

On Election Day, I voted as did millions of other Americans.
That night I watched the coverage on the TV eagerly anticipating the outcome.

As the votes were tallied and the states got colored in on the map, it resembled a basketball game or a football game, each team getting closer to the magic number as time was expiring.


I heard people outside my window shrilling with enthusiasm before I heard the networks declare Obama the victor. Brooklyn went berserk. The neighborhood was boisterous as their candidate secured the election. I went to the rooftop with my roommates to try to get a feel for the atmosphere. Other people were on rooftops. People in apartments and in the street were yelling and screaming. Cars blared their horns as they drove down Bedford Avenue. I added to the ruckus by banging a kitchen pot with a spoon (the poor man's noisemaker) along with some standard hootin' and hollerin'.

What surprised me more than the near landslide victory of Obama over McCain was the reaction from the neighborhood and the immediate celebration and the effervescence that it seemed to create. It was rowdier than when the Giants won the Super Bowl. Fireworks continued well into the morning hours, delaying my sleep.

Then when the concession and victory speeches were made, I was not only impressed by what each of the candidates had to say, I was moved. I couldn't believe how swept up I had become in this movement. I surprised myself.

I suppose, though, it has more to do with the candidate I was rooting for than my own personal stake in politics, which is only slight.

Barack Obama was a different kind of candidate than had ever run for President before. He was new and exciting. He was eloquent, articulate, sensible, steadfast, and informed. He is the kind of person, at least to me, that not only do I not mind listening to him, I'm also kind of interested in what he has to say.

What he did in the campaign and in the election was to make the process not only tolerable, but interesting. It wasn't the same old bread and butter the American people have been fed every four years. It was encouraging and inviting and yet mind-bogglingly simple. The outcome had to be different.

No matter how you feel about Obama, the one thing that can be said about him is that he certainly draws a crowd. We have been looking for someone like him in politics for a very long time. Too often the public has condemned its politicians as opponents instead of friends. Every election came down to the argument of who was the lesser of two evils. After such a long period of time where the politicians in Washington have done their best to exercise their power and alienate the American people, it was about time when we had somebody at the forefront who could unite us again. We are, after all, the United States of America.

Obama is a man who, like many public figures before him, has the wherewithall and the fortitude to rally people behind him responsibly and move us forward to accomplish things that are ideally American, and to follow through until completion. This is the kind of leadership that America needs now, that every country needs all the time.

His victory signals a new kind of political landscape in the U.S. Not everything is going to be fixed or even helped, and certainly not right away. It does not mean we are on easy street now, and it certainly does not mean he is not worthy of being wary of. A large portion of the country will be concerned with the things he has to say and with his transition and progress into the position of President. We all should be. It is our right as Americans.

No matter what you have to say about Obama's character, his track record, his strengths or weaknesses, what he has done as a Presidential candidate has brought us together, the majority of us anyway. Those with a clear head will listen to what he has to say despite how they voted, and go along with what they think is in the best interest of the country. Even though we are all different, Obama appeals to us as a leader.

America has changed. We are changing continuously. We are finding new ways to voice our opinions, to accomplish our goals, to communicate with each other, and to advance as a country. We are strong. We are different than most nations. We are colorful and thoughtful. We are black, white, gay, straight, old, young, and a million other things. But when inauguration day comes, and every day following, we all know the words to "America, the Beautiful."

Man vs. Nature

For centuries, mankind has struggled to find its place in the natural world. The human race has persistently been searching for balance with nature, and has never really found it.

Human beings are the one species that has evolved to a point beyond any other creature on earth, in that we have the ability to fiddle with nature. Mankind has moved beyond the instinctual and naturalistic behaviors that control other animals on the Earth. Man has invented industry and technology and has used its intelligence to progress further than what animals can do. Consequently, we have changed the entire direction of the world in our wake.

We created society. We built cities. We created agriculture. We organized, we explored, we conquered. No other species covers the earth like we do. We changed everything to how we wanted it. First, we lived in the dwellings and took the paths that nature provided us. Then, when they proved insufficient, we created our own dwellings and paths. We built streets, buildings, canals, bridges. We grew, we progressed.

Humans really took over the earth. We did what we wanted. We killed what we had to. We demolished what was necessary to get out of the way. We cleared a path for our own way of life.

But while we've lived our own way of life, separated from the natural way of things, we've always had to contend with nature, because no matter how much we try to separate ourselves from it, human beings will always be a part of it. Humankind has always kind of struggled with that, in my opinion.

There has never been one consensus of the way to live on this earth and still be one with the earth. We were more concerned with living with people. We created government, infrastructure, religion, capitalism, while always having free thought. And so we have things like litter, pollution, holes in ozone layers, smog, and recycling. There have always been people who have had no concern for what kind of problems, if any, we as a human race created and passed on to our creator, Mother Earth. And there have long been people who were very in touch with nature, and spoke out against the evils of treating Mother Earth like a doormat.

Gradually, these people's voices were heard. PSA's were made to demonstrate to the public audience the effects of litter and pollution and the disregard for the "correct" treatment of the earth. The naysayers have always said "nay" and at the same time, more and more people jumped on the "treehugger" bandwagon and promoted their agenda of education, conservation, and prevention of natural disaster.

In the twenty-first century, the battle between man and nature has heightened to extremes, and it seems, or at least we're being told now, that the situation is dire, and that direct action has to be taken immediately in order to prevent a catastrophic future. A certain Presidential candidate released a film detailing the drastic measures human beings' war against nature has taken. It won an Oscar.

The battle of man vs. nature can be seen anywhere. One of my favorite examples is the simple image of a weed or a small plant popping up in the cracks in a sidewalk. Even though man has put a sidewalk over the ground, nature has no intention of altering its course, and when it seizes an opportunity to bust through, it does.

A person can take whatever side he or she wants in the battle of man vs. nature. In the case of the weed in the sidewalk, a person may take the side that the weed is exactly that, a weed, and does not belong. This person might take the next measure to kill the weed and remove it from said sidewalk. On the other hand, as in my case, a person might root for the weed, exclaiming, "Go, little plant, go! Don't let a little bit of cement stop you!"

In going outside yesterday, I stumbled upon a rather unusual sight. It was an image, in my mind that perfectly captured the endless struggle that is man vs. nature. There was a city fire hydrant that had apparently been leaking and spraying water out into the street for several hours or days. It had obviously been leaking for quite a while, because, in the bitter cold that recently descended upon the city of New York, the leaky hydrant's emission has frozen and created an icicle almost an entire city block long.

Pictured here, the ice mass forms around the fire hydrant immediately, then stretches along the sidewalk downhill to the corner and across the street to the next block. Upon discovering massive ice cube, I found it very amusing. What was more amusing, though, was that after checking in on it later, I noticed the city sanitation department had driven by and thrown a bunch of sand on top of it.

Rather than send the fire deparment out to attend to the hydrant, and fix the leak, the city of New York apparently decided that all that was necessary was just to throw some sand on it.



No matter which side of the man vs. nature argument you take, there is one common thread that should tie everything together. That thread is efficiency.

When we decide as a society that we want to become efficient, all people will benefit from it in the long run. Nobody loses when we are all efficient (except those who benefit from making the rest of us inefficient, i.e. gas companies, car companies that power their cars by fossil fuels, and banks that loan out Monopoly money). When we run our cities, businesses, and homes in ways to educate consumers, to waste less, conserve more, and reuse what we can, we will all end up saving ourselves time, money, energy, and space.

It starts with the individual and the individual mindset. There has to be a conscious decision made. "What day am I going to switch to compact flourescent light bulbs? Tomorrow? Next week?"
"What day am I going to stop wasting energy? Tomorrow? Next week?"
"What day am I going to stop wasting my life? Tomorrow? Next week?"

Why not stop wasting right now? And start being efficient as soon as you finish reading this sentence?

What do you have to lose?

Exactly.

Eventually, we will streamline the way society functions. We'll make less mistakes, and we'll leave less mess behind to clean up. We will develop ways to find balance with nature. We'll use natural sources of energy, like the sun, the wind, and moving water.

The battle of man vs. nature is a long, hard-fought one. But if we keep going the way we're going, we're going to find that we are going to lose. It will only be when we team up and find a balance with nature that we will be able take on the challenges of everyday life, and we will better prepare ourselves for the next great challenge: an alien invasion.

We all know it's going to happen eventually. We might as well get all the mileage we can out of our great planet before some locust society comes swooping in and takes it out from under us.

New Year, New Focus

I've always been different. I knew when I was younger. I just felt different than the rest of the kids.

I embraced it. I learned to love being different, and I made it a point to stand out from the crowd. When other people were conforming, I did everything in my power to go the other way. It wasn't that I was disagreeable or contrary, I just enjoyed being different.

And so I grew up that way, and it has stuck with me. I'm always trying to take the path that not many have ventured down before, I'm trying to do things differently than the people who came before me and definitively from the people around me.

I think, so far, I've done a pretty good job of standing out from the crowd, but last week I received definite proof. I was on my way back to New York, driving to the airport, when I received a phone call from my sister. That seems pretty ordinary, I know, but she called after just being in my presence an hour earlier. She could have asked me then what she was about to ask me now, but she didn't. For whatever reason, she waited to ask me a very important, singular question, and made a special phone call just for it.

You know your life is taking a different shape than most other people's when you get asked this question, "Do you have any need for a hula skirt?...I'm cleaning out my closet, and I found one, but I don't need it. Do you want it?"

For most other people in this world, I would say this is an unusual question, it was being directed towards a Polynesian woman, or even to a woman, in general. But for a 24-year-old male to be asked this question by his younger sister is a little absurd. At least it would be for anyone else. But for me, I've come to accept that this is completely normal.

It led me to wonder what kind of life I had been leading to be receiving this question at such an odd time. As the circumstances would have it, I was traveling to my destination with my sister's boyfriend's family, and I was doing my best to make that situation as comfortable as possible. If that weren't bizarre enough to begin with, I now have to field a phone call in which the only information being exchanged is whether or not I am in need of a second-hand hula skirt.

How bizarre, indeed.

The funny part is, I actually had to think about it. Hmmm, could I use a hula skirt? You never know when one could come in handy.

It wouldn't be so out of the ordinary for me to own a hula skirt, as I have at one point in my life owned a coconut bra.

Why?

Because my life permitted me the opportunity of owning a coconut bra with little or no cost to me, so I seized it. Furthermore, it was very entertaining.

But now the task at hand was to determine how urgent my need was for a hula skirt. Do I want my sister's hula skirt or not? She's wasting minutes here.

I opted for the negative. I figured, it would be too much hassle for her to send the hula skirt to me via mail, seeing as I had already left home. Plus, if I really needed a hula skirt when I got back to New York, chances are I would be able to find one pretty quickly and at short notice. As one might imagine, costume shops are plentiful in New York City. They are proportionate to the number of characters that roam the streets, which is quite a large number.

After I answered my sister, I asked her if there was any other reason for which she had called. "No, that's it," she said. And we hung up.

I have not determined what turns and choices I have made in my life that led me to such a ridiculous exchange of conversation, but it seems that my life has had a course set for it. It is defined, first of all, by having a tight group of people who all love each other and share ideas, have similar thought processes and look out for one another (i.e. my family: God bless my sister for thinking of my interests before she threw out that hula skirt). Secondly, it's about having a sense of humor about the things that happen in your life, be they happy, sad, traumatic, funny, or ridiculous, and being able to get through them. Thirdly, and most importantly, it's about being able to share that with others; either through writing about it or storytelling, or just sharing of time and energy to pass on those good feelings to others.

I have a massive backlog of ideas, themes, stories, and other things that I have been keeping track of for the past several years. My focus for this year is to bring all my ideas forward and have them be heard and known by other people, more than any of my years past. That is my goal for this year.

Happy New Year! May 2009 be pleasant to you and bring you many happy memories.