Two Things, I Think
It's been forever, yo. I still haven't written about Inland Empire and wrapped up my tripartite Lynchathon even though I saw like eight years ago now. Coming. It's hard to gather the energy for frivolously thought-and-reaction arty blogging when you're really tired and overworked, which is what I've been for a couple of weeks. I don't think it's just corporate, uhm, ethnocentrism, because I don't have a great opinion of everyone in the employ of the company I work for, but I do have a high opinion of the people I personally work with. I don't have a high opinion of the work done by a number of the people working for (directly or as contractor) our client. In one case I'm distrustful of motive, and in several I'm frustrated/exasperated by, essentially, the unreadiness of people who are supposed to be managing what is, let's be fair, an unwieldy situation, to manage that unwieldy situation. There's a learning curve for subject matter - I'm on that one with everyone else who hasn't directly worked in this field - but there's a learning curve for managerial competence and there's also a learning curve, I think, for business savvy, and I think our client, the government agency, which is heavily staffed by people who've never been near the top of an income-generating chain, is somewhat oblivious to (a) what it's like to go out and hustle for a dime, or to put it non-metaphorically, what it's like to need to make payroll when your client is several months behind in cutting you the damn check already, and (b) what people who have spent their lives being very good at hustling for a dime are willing to do to get a quarter.
But those weren't my "two things," so my post title has already made me a liar.
(1) A little navel-gazing blogging here: I went on a fairly restrictive, though not crazy-scary, diet last fall, and over the course of a few months dropped from (yeesh, I'm about to put the numbers down for real) 245 to 215. Then for a few months I did well at using the broader principles of the diet to eat intelligently while not depriving myself and sticking around that 215 plateau. I wasn't exercising regularly, and I wanted to lose more weight, so I told myself that in 2009 I'd resume dieting as I asymptotically approached my non-existent "goal weight"*. Instead, in 2009 I bounced back up to about 233 before restarting the diet in late April; I'm back to about 215 and taking a break for June to try and tread water, more or less, before making another concerted weight loss effort. (The highly restrictive diet isn't that restrictive - the more restrictive they are, the more bullshit they seem to be in the long run, I think; but worrying in an active way about what I'm going to eat for every meal becomes mentally exhausting. The broader principles of picking and choosing your spots and indulging here but not there are mentally easier for me, but my willpower was lax, hence the lapse.)
But the point is about psychology, and it's interesting to me that it's only by virtue of having lost weight that I really understand what I was doing when I was heavy. It's been clear that the foremost reason I became fat is because I became habituated to constantly snacking, in the afternoon and evening, before and after dinner, on various chocolate delivery mechanisms, and that this snacking was both a physical habit - I became completely accustomed to the notion that if I were sitting at a computer, one hand would be semi-regularly handling the cookie duties - and an emotional crutch, albeit a pretty poor one. I've had a few occasions in the past two weeks (remember above about the job stress?) where I had a kind of desperate anxiety-attack-by-food of the sort that regularly overtook me before, and what I noticed is not how shallow the emotional relief is - I've always seen that - but how horrible I feel physically, right afterwards. I actually articulated the thought out loud to some of my coworkers: "Oh my god, did I used to feel like this all the time?"
* Supposedly the "ideal" weight for someone of my height, if you go by Body Mass Index, is somewhere in the vicinity of 165 or 170, but I don't think this is a realistic goal for me. I'm not naturally huge, but I'm bigger-framed than that; I weighed 165 when I was 16, which was both when I reached my full height and when I would last be describable as "lanky". When I graduated from high school I was about 185, and while I was already pretty soft around the belly, I was only in the early stages of the normal late-adolescent "filling out" most guys experience, which happened in college, albeit masked by the fact that I was adding fat via my diet way faster than my body was adding muscle via natural testosterone surges. The short version of the above is that I've never had a moment where I was both fit and physically mature, so I don't know what my baseline should be. Adjusting for a slightly bigger frame and the fact that I'd ideally like to wind up a few smidges more muscular than the guy who actually falls into the middle of the BMI chart's "normal zone", I'm guessing I want to see what happens if I drop to about 200, +/- 5 lbs., and then start weightlifting for real. (Which is its own double-bind: weightlifting in and of itself increases muscle, which burns fat, so weightlifting is actually the most effective method for long-term fat loss. But, short-term, you don't build muscle without eating enough for your body to spend the energy necessary to burn it, which in practice means you'll probably gain some fat as well unless you're really, really disciplined.)
OK wow but enough about fatty's delusions of physical fitness shall we?
I do have other delusions.
(2) I realized today, while thinking about Nine Inch Nails and how I'm an idiot for never seeing them live and now they're, basically, done (though Reznor himself isn't, whatever that means going forward), and also thinking about guitars, that my delusional aspirations of instrumental capacity have been all wrong because I've been thinking that I want the same things from the guitar and the piano, albeit in different spheres. What I want from the piano, though I haven't played one in months and I'll have to start from scratch, more or less, when I eventually resume playing, because I did it all wrong for the first seventeen years...what I want from the piano is to be an interesting and personal improvising pianist, in the jazz idiom, which to me implies balancing a heavy dose of individuality and creativity with a broad grasp of jazz (and related styles') piano's history and various conduits and the chops to pull it all off, feeling comfortable in a variety of situations. I know I'll never be a physical virtuoso - if nothing else, I don't have the discipline, and I probably don't have the brute capacity either - but more than anything on the piano I want to be a player, in whatever sense that makes sense to me.
What I want from the guitar isn't, foremost, to be a player. I adore impressive guitarists, especially when they're musically impressive as well as physically impressive, but while I think it'd be awesome to have those abilities, that's not what I want most. I'm more moved, I think, by the electric guitar as (a) song delivery mechanism, and (b) electric noise generator. Playing songs and using effects to create interesting textures is what ultimately grabs me most about the electric guitar, and that's what I want to do with one. I both need and want a reasonable technical and idiomatic facility to make it work the way I want to - Billy Corgan said you need to practice until you can execute the fantasies in your head, and he made clear that for him that took more practice than Billy Joe Armstrong but less than Yngwie Malmsteen - but it really clicked for me today that as much as I think it'd be cool to be able to do what, e.g., professional sidemen and studio musicians do, let alone single-minded guitar virtuosi, I'd rather be a poor man's Kevin Shields or Billy Corgan or Trent Reznor than a homeless man's Carl Verheyen or Allan Holdsworth.
Whatever.
But those weren't my "two things," so my post title has already made me a liar.
(1) A little navel-gazing blogging here: I went on a fairly restrictive, though not crazy-scary, diet last fall, and over the course of a few months dropped from (yeesh, I'm about to put the numbers down for real) 245 to 215. Then for a few months I did well at using the broader principles of the diet to eat intelligently while not depriving myself and sticking around that 215 plateau. I wasn't exercising regularly, and I wanted to lose more weight, so I told myself that in 2009 I'd resume dieting as I asymptotically approached my non-existent "goal weight"*. Instead, in 2009 I bounced back up to about 233 before restarting the diet in late April; I'm back to about 215 and taking a break for June to try and tread water, more or less, before making another concerted weight loss effort. (The highly restrictive diet isn't that restrictive - the more restrictive they are, the more bullshit they seem to be in the long run, I think; but worrying in an active way about what I'm going to eat for every meal becomes mentally exhausting. The broader principles of picking and choosing your spots and indulging here but not there are mentally easier for me, but my willpower was lax, hence the lapse.)
But the point is about psychology, and it's interesting to me that it's only by virtue of having lost weight that I really understand what I was doing when I was heavy. It's been clear that the foremost reason I became fat is because I became habituated to constantly snacking, in the afternoon and evening, before and after dinner, on various chocolate delivery mechanisms, and that this snacking was both a physical habit - I became completely accustomed to the notion that if I were sitting at a computer, one hand would be semi-regularly handling the cookie duties - and an emotional crutch, albeit a pretty poor one. I've had a few occasions in the past two weeks (remember above about the job stress?) where I had a kind of desperate anxiety-attack-by-food of the sort that regularly overtook me before, and what I noticed is not how shallow the emotional relief is - I've always seen that - but how horrible I feel physically, right afterwards. I actually articulated the thought out loud to some of my coworkers: "Oh my god, did I used to feel like this all the time?"
* Supposedly the "ideal" weight for someone of my height, if you go by Body Mass Index, is somewhere in the vicinity of 165 or 170, but I don't think this is a realistic goal for me. I'm not naturally huge, but I'm bigger-framed than that; I weighed 165 when I was 16, which was both when I reached my full height and when I would last be describable as "lanky". When I graduated from high school I was about 185, and while I was already pretty soft around the belly, I was only in the early stages of the normal late-adolescent "filling out" most guys experience, which happened in college, albeit masked by the fact that I was adding fat via my diet way faster than my body was adding muscle via natural testosterone surges. The short version of the above is that I've never had a moment where I was both fit and physically mature, so I don't know what my baseline should be. Adjusting for a slightly bigger frame and the fact that I'd ideally like to wind up a few smidges more muscular than the guy who actually falls into the middle of the BMI chart's "normal zone", I'm guessing I want to see what happens if I drop to about 200, +/- 5 lbs., and then start weightlifting for real. (Which is its own double-bind: weightlifting in and of itself increases muscle, which burns fat, so weightlifting is actually the most effective method for long-term fat loss. But, short-term, you don't build muscle without eating enough for your body to spend the energy necessary to burn it, which in practice means you'll probably gain some fat as well unless you're really, really disciplined.)
OK wow but enough about fatty's delusions of physical fitness shall we?
I do have other delusions.
(2) I realized today, while thinking about Nine Inch Nails and how I'm an idiot for never seeing them live and now they're, basically, done (though Reznor himself isn't, whatever that means going forward), and also thinking about guitars, that my delusional aspirations of instrumental capacity have been all wrong because I've been thinking that I want the same things from the guitar and the piano, albeit in different spheres. What I want from the piano, though I haven't played one in months and I'll have to start from scratch, more or less, when I eventually resume playing, because I did it all wrong for the first seventeen years...what I want from the piano is to be an interesting and personal improvising pianist, in the jazz idiom, which to me implies balancing a heavy dose of individuality and creativity with a broad grasp of jazz (and related styles') piano's history and various conduits and the chops to pull it all off, feeling comfortable in a variety of situations. I know I'll never be a physical virtuoso - if nothing else, I don't have the discipline, and I probably don't have the brute capacity either - but more than anything on the piano I want to be a player, in whatever sense that makes sense to me.
What I want from the guitar isn't, foremost, to be a player. I adore impressive guitarists, especially when they're musically impressive as well as physically impressive, but while I think it'd be awesome to have those abilities, that's not what I want most. I'm more moved, I think, by the electric guitar as (a) song delivery mechanism, and (b) electric noise generator. Playing songs and using effects to create interesting textures is what ultimately grabs me most about the electric guitar, and that's what I want to do with one. I both need and want a reasonable technical and idiomatic facility to make it work the way I want to - Billy Corgan said you need to practice until you can execute the fantasies in your head, and he made clear that for him that took more practice than Billy Joe Armstrong but less than Yngwie Malmsteen - but it really clicked for me today that as much as I think it'd be cool to be able to do what, e.g., professional sidemen and studio musicians do, let alone single-minded guitar virtuosi, I'd rather be a poor man's Kevin Shields or Billy Corgan or Trent Reznor than a homeless man's Carl Verheyen or Allan Holdsworth.
Whatever.
posted by medrawt at
20:55
