Relaxing Family Time

This past weekend Lauren and I visited my parents' place. It was relaxing and nice! I didn't get annoyed at anyone like I usually do. Everyone just seemed to have their cute little idiosyncrasies and trademark characteristics. Even my little nephew, who's always very serious and focused on his own activities, smiled at me and seemed happy to see me.

The house itself though, still seems to object to my presence. Every time I go there I get pretty bad allergies, and this time was no different. Coughing, sneezing, sniffling, the works. No one else has a problem, and I can't figure it out.

If it were the dust, then I'd expect to have a similar reaction in my own apartment. My parents used to live here too, and most of the stuff in the main area of the apartment is still theirs. Same books, same carpets, same dust. But for some reason, I'm fine here, while I can't last a day in their current house without major symptoms.

On the other hand, Kat usually comes by with many dogs. It's dogs-a-plenty when I visit, and that's not the case here. Maybe I'm just allergic to dogs. I don't know.

So I'm back home, still symptomatic, and really it's looking like the allergies have morphed into a real-live rhino virus. I've been taking vitamin C by the handful - probably 20 grams of it just this morning. I'm one of those people who believes in vitamin C.

The odd thing about today though, is all the stuff I'm scheduled to do. I've got a magazine article to finish today - and today really is the last day before it's too late. I have a therapy appointment this morning, followed immediately by a visit from josette, followed in turn by a massage with Jen, and then dinner with Lena! Starting at 9AM, I'm booked solid till evening.

So I've been trying to work on my article, but getting distracted thinking about what a nice time I had with my family, and how weird that was, and also trying to figure out how on earth I will possibly finish my writing before today's deadline. A normal person might consider flaking out on everyone, and just working all day... or maybe a normal person might decide that it's OK to miss the deadline after all... but somehow or other my intention is to not flake on anyone, and still get the article done on time. And that seems to be how it goes each month. Somehow I always get the article in on time, in spite of whatever insane schedule I've created for myself.

Oh well. At least it was fun seeing my family. No fighting, no bickering, no resentment; just enjoyment and appreciation. What a refreshing change!

Museum Of Natural History

On Sunday I met up with my friend Marah at the Museum of Natural History. She gave me a holiday gift - a little microfiber cloth to wipe my glasses. I made a joke of pretending to wipe my contact lenses while they were still in my eyes; but actually it was a very nice gift. It related to an earlier time we'd hung out with Phil and a couple of his friends on his birthday, and watched a movie on my bedroom wall. At one point the picture started to get weird, and we were all thinking this might be the end of the film for us. But Marah got out her microfiber cloth and cleaned the disk, and after that it worked fine. Everyone cheered how she saved the day. So this gift was like a reminder of shared adventure with a happy outcome.

She especially wanted to see the bio-luminescence exhibit, so we headed over there first. I didn't say anything because I didn't want to spoil it for her, but I was actually very disappointed. The exhibit was just a dark room, with small installations sprinkled throughout. Each installation had little light bulbs that would turn on and off at regular intervals; and panels of wood with text explaining some bit of trivia about a bio-luminescent creature. Some of the installations had computer screens that gave more information - but not much more.

All the information I learned in that exhibit would have fit onto a single typewritten page. When I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with Kar, they had bio-luminescent creatures swimming live through enormous tanks, and we got to watch them and see what they really looked like, and how they really behaved. And not just a few creatures, but big schools of creatures.

Actually those are not representative videos. The real thing was way more incredible. Apparently no one's posted videos on youtube that really capture what it was like.

So that was disappointing, but we also wandered around the museum for quite awhile after that. It turned out to be a favorite haunt of both of ours when we were kids. Her parents used to let her run off by herself at age five, and get lost in the museum for as long as she wanted. That's pretty much how my parents were too. Those were the days. Before the child harness and other horrors of modern parental psychosis.

So we wandered through the diorama area. That was always my favorite as a child. I could look in those little glassed worlds for hours. I used to wonder how the museum people got everything to be so real, and yet to stay so still. Right down to rushing water. For me, that museum was a place of infinite dreams.

It was a lovely hangout, and it was made even more lovely by having someone there to talk to, who had also had similar experiences as a child. It was like we were both rediscovering a lost fairy land - and thus proving it hadn't been a dream, but was real.

We even went to the downstairs cafeteria, which was almost like another visit to the Monterey Aquarium. The cafeteria itself is this giant tank, and great shoals of people swim madly with the currents, and it's always feeding time. In the seating area, families display their private home-life scenarios proudly for the viewing public. Marah and I got a pretty good table out of the way, but even so it was pretty hilarious to think of this chaos and display, right below the motionless, elegant dioramas of beautiful creatures frozen in time. I think a little piece of that cafeteria may always be with me now.

Green Day!

About a year or so ago my doctor told me to lose 30 lbs. I love the completely unselfconscious way doctors manage to say something that is already perfectly obvious, and then make no effort to actually help.

My first thought was to write some software that would create perfectly balanced lists of foods, with associated quantities, that would meet all my nutritional needs and keep me at a particular caloric intake. The way I envisioned it, I'd have a massive database of available foods, and have the software operate on my favorites. I figured this would allow me to eat the foods I loved, and still get a perfect nutrition.

So I wrote the tool, and it worked just fine. I designed plenty of ingredient lists that provided perfect nutrition for someone of my age, gender, and caloric needs.

There were various problems. For one thing, I hated it. Yes, the food was healthy, but it was sort of depressing to think of maintaining myself on that kind of food forever and ever. It was basically a lifelong commitment, if I wanted to lose the weight and keep it off.

I tried a couple of solutions. One involved an attempt to eliminate eating entirely. I would simply blend the foods into one giant drink, and get it out of the way in 5 minutes. Presto! No more mealtimes to worry about, and my nutritional needs were met better than 99.9998% of the people on the planet.

Yuck!

Eventually that system broke down, and I devised an entirely new approach. Instead of concerning myself with the ideal nutrition, I would try a calorie-counting approach. The only problem with counting calories is that it's not really possible. You just can't make good estimates of how many calories are in a piece of food. If you weigh the ingredients individually, you can do it. But for prepared foods, forget it.

But I got this great idea, that I didn't really need to calculate how many calories I was eating in a given day, if I could instead measure the result of those calories. In other words, if I just weighed myself in the mornings, I could see how the calories from the previous day had effected me.

It wasn't a perfect measurement. There would be more water or less water, stuff in the bowels, and whatnot. But if I didn't worry about the day-to-day accuracy so much, and only thought about the accuracy of the measurement on average, then in fact it was dead on target!

I also realized that this was fine, because it was not the day-to-day accuracy, but only the average accuracy, that really mattered. After all, I didn't care about losing weight on any particular day, I only cared about losing weight over time. If I had a system that averaged out to dead accuracy, that was good enough!

So, this was a much easier proposition. Unlike calories, my weight was easy to calculate, and I already had the device that would do it.

I also got the great idea that the 180 lbs recommended by the doctor was really just a meaningless number. There was no way for me to get there immediately; so it made no sense to try for it. All I really cared about was being on a trajectory of weight-loss; in other words I just wanted to lose some amount - any amount - relative to what I'd weighed in the most recent past.

So I set up a constantly moving target, very close to my actual weight. The target would go down at a rate of speed that was healthy and realistic. I started it off at 1 lb per week.

So my initial target was essentially the same as my actual weight. And every week, my target went down by 1 lb. Meanwhile, every morning I'd weigh myself, and thus indirectly count calories for the previous day.

If my weight was below my target, that meant I was losing weight too rapidly; and therefore I should eat whatever I wanted for that day. Yay! No need for endless willpower!

If, on the other hand, my weight was above my target, that meant I hadn't lost enough weight the previous day, and I needed to engage in diet behavior; which for me meant lots of salads. Vegetables are notoriously low calorie.

The beautiful thing about this diet was that it operated on average. I didn't have to do impossible calculations, and I didn't even need a perfectly accurate scale. If I followed the rules, even inaccurate measurements would average out to more and more accurate results. I loved this aspect because it had the same almost magical properties that I loved so much about calculus, and about those neat scientific experiments I'd done from books when I was a kid.

So, with no thanks to my doctor, over the past year I've managed to lose very nearly the amount he recommended. As of this morning, I'm down to 183.6 lbs, a 28.2 lbs loss.

I also lost the weight very slowly, which is exactly how you're supposed to lose weight. One of the other beautiful ideas about this diet is that you can actually control how much weight you lose over time. I started off at a pound a week; then switched to a pound every 10 days. When I do get down to 180 lbs sometime this February, my plan is to switch to a pound a month. I don't know of any other diet that offers that level of ability to slow down weight loss. The other diets seem to be all about losing dangerous amounts of fat in the least amount of time possible. Bad scene. I don't want to be thin, if that means my organs will all be damaged, and I'll realize no health benefit from the weight loss.

Anyway, so this morning I was not expecting to find myself below my target. I'd had a pretty luxurious lunch with a friend yesterday, including mushroom pasta and crab dumplings, and I'd expected today to be a diet day. But no! I'd lost weight after all, and today is a non-diet day.

Lately I've been feeling more and more as though I don't need to go out and binge on delicious foods on my non-diet days. I think I may be losing my taste for overeating. This morning, for example, when I think about what I want to do with my glorious non-diet day, I find myself considering really very sensible options. I'm not sure if that's a result of habits built up from being on this diet, or not. It does seem to be happening though.

We'll see. Anyway I'm pretty pleased with all this. I love feeling like I've cracked the technology.

Gaston Lagaffe

Spending Summers in France as a kid, I got to know the Gaston Lagaffe comic strips. They've never been translated into English, but it's still possible to follow along by looking at the pictures.

Gaston works in an office as a paper-pusher, but he has absolutely no interest in that. Instead of working, he constantly engages in pet projects that are very creative, but that completely ignore the requirements of his job, or the safety of others (and himself).

I love Gaston! He's so enthusiastic about his projects, and his projects are all fascinating, over-the-top conceptions that violate cultural conformity.

And yet ultimately, he's a Frenchman. Since I was an American kid in France, it was easy for me to spot his French traits. His taste in clothes and food always seemed very French to me. He's not a rebel per se. He's just very enthusiastic about everything.

His lack of concern for safety most often manifests as putting his coworkers in immediate danger, for example, blowing up part of the building. But that aspect of his personality is also fairly directly assessed as stupidity in the strip. In one single-panel story, we see Gaston at the beach, paddling out to sea on a raft. In the foreground, one of his coworkers holds a camera, saying to another coworker, "I told him I wanted a picture of him at the horizon... and he went!"

I have about six books of Gaston, that I bought long ago on one of my visits. There are 19 in all. They can't be found on http://amazon.com, probably because they've never been translated. But they can be found on http://amazon.fr! So I recently found them and ordered the remaining ones. They're €10 each, plus shipping. So it's not exactly cheap. But I got them, and I can't wait to read them!

It's not the first time I've wanted a book that could only be ordered from Europe. When Ann Hutchinson Guest first published her Advanced Labanotation series of books, I had to go to http://amazon.co.uk to get them. I don't know why Amazon would have different items available in different countries. The UK site is especially odd, since there's no language barrier, either in the site itself or in the products they sell. But now that Google Translate will automatically convert any web page to English for me, there's even less of a reason. I just visited http://amazon.cn, with no problem. Chrome detected the language, and converted it to English almost instantaneously. Sadly, the login credentials are not always the same, from site to site. The Chinese site wanted me to set up a whole new account.

Anyway, Gaston Lagaffe is great. It brings back lots of memories from my childhood. I don't recommend spending the money for the books, unless you can read French. But if you come over for a visit, I'd be happy to show off my collection.

Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs's birthday was this past Wednesday. He would've been 72 years old. He hung himself with a belt in 1976. One of my family stories is that my dad tried to talk him out of it.

I listened to his music all the time when I was growing up. I loved his protest songs, they seemed so hard-hitting and pertinent. Songs like "The Ballad Of William Worthy" was one of his story-telling songs, where he just basically took a current news story, and told it like it was. Then, songs like "Here's To The State Of Mississippi", while not about current news stories, were just as hard-hitting and pointed.

But he also wrote songs about other things that moved him. They weren't all fiery, angry protests. When Woody Guthrie died, he wrote "Bound For Glory". And after Kennedy's assassination, he wrote "That Was The President".

He also wrote funny songs, like "Draft Dodger's Rag", "Outside Of A Small Circle Of Friends", and "Love Me I'm A Liberal", that were still political, but were more rowdy and something you might sing while holding a beer and dancing on a table.

After his first three albums though, I think it really started to get to him that Bob Dylan was so much more successful, and respected so much more as a poet than he was. But I don't think Phil Ochs really understood what poetry was all about. I think he thought of poetry as something that relied on obscure imagery and indecipherable metaphors.

So, when he started to shift his music to be more along the lines of what he considered poetic, the result seemed to be that his songs stopped making any sense. I still loved listening to them, but I didn't understand a lot of them anymore. Songs like "Crucifixion" were lovely to listen to, but that's all. They didn't speak to me on any other level. Clearly it was a song about Jesus and Christianity. But it seemed to be using too many flowery images, without clarifying what it really meant, and not even making the flowery imagery very beautiful. I much preferred his earlier songs about Christianity, such as "The Ballad Of The Carpenter" or "Canons Of Christianity", which made so much sense to me.

Another later song of his that I didn't really understand was "When In Rome" (and part 2). I could appreciate it on some level, but like "Crucifixion", a lot of the song just passed by me without registering, even after many listenings.

Not all of his songs from that period were inscrutable. I could still relate to plenty of them, and I loved songs like "The Ballad Of Joe Hill", "The War Is Over", and "Jim Dean Of Indiana".

Some of his later songs are very directly depressed and defeated. These also tend to be in line with his earliest work, clear and less flowery. Songs like "Rehearsals For Retirement" are very dark. One of these songs is the final track of his final album, which I'd never heard growing up. But years later, when I finally did hear it, I almost couldn't bear to listen to any more of his music. It was called "No More Songs". It was devastating.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he'd been able to get the right meds for his bipolar disorder, or whatever it was. I imagine him being like Dylan - still around, still making music today. Still relevant. And I imagine him having a lot to say about current events, and things like the Occupy movement. I don't think anyone in our pop-culture today ever made any sense out of the Occupy movement. But I think Phil Ochs would have been able to do it really well. He'd have been right there in Zuccotti Park, making up songs, and telling it like it was, and being a voice for a movement that ultimately never did find its own voice. Or at least, hasn't yet.

Learning To Walk

A lot has changed since my last Labanotation post.

For one thing, I've been focusing on the chapter on directional stepping. My approach is first to cover the direction symbols alone, and how they can be used to express different steps. Then in subsequent chapters, I plan to introduce new symbols that modify the direction symbols, in order to express a greater and greater variety of different steps. Eventually I'd cover the whole topic.

Unfortunately this has turned out to be a controversial decision. Direction symbols alone are able to express just a small handful of basic dance steps; and my tutor, Ilene, is concerned that dancers will be misled into thinking that Labanotation can't express any other types of steps. She insists that the only way to go, is to teach all the ways of notating steps at once.

I understand where she's coming from; but the obvious solution seems to be to just alert the reader to the fact that the direction symbols only explain a few different steps, and that additional steps will be explained in subsequent chapters. I'm not sure what else I'd need to do beyond that, to make sure people didn't get confused.

But she feels it's very important, so we argue about it.

Meanwhile, I've decided to use the Blender open source 3D animation software tool to create diagrams for my whole Labanotation text. The only problem being, Blender is hugely, insanely complicated! So I've essentially spent the past couple of weeks learning how to use Blender to place realistic human characters into still poses and animations.

Just today, I finally started to get something resembling a person taking a single step. This is the culmination of weeks of labor: a 2-second video of someone standing on a bare platform, and taking a single step forward.

What a sense of elation! As I edited the animation over several hours, I felt more and more like I really had a hold on the situation, and was really able to control exactly what this person was doing, to get her to step the way I wanted.

I've tried to learn Blender before; but it's always been so complicated, I just had no idea where to begin, or what to do, or how to approach the topic. But this time around, it's all been so obvious. Of course I would need to read such-and-such a chapter in so-and-so's book. Naturally I would need to do that, because of this-and-that type of problem I confronted, in producing a diagram for my Labanotation text!

Writing a text about Labanotation is really the ideal circumstance in which to learn Blender. Everyone should do it that way. In order to make the diagrams I need for my chapter, I'm constantly running into problems, and having to learn all sorts of Blender material in order to solve them. It's quite an immersion course. Meanwhile, since I'm writing a text about dance, or at least about something else that's about dance, I'm dealing with subtleties of human movement that I wouldn't encounter if I were just trying to make a funny animated movie. All the little details of a given movement suddenly take on an added significance, because they illustrate several paragraphs of text, in which I try to make complex notational ideas clear to a lay reader.

It's so nice also, to be totally captivated by a topic of exploration again. At the beginning of this year, I'd decided to cut out all my pursuits, and leave absolutely nothing between myself and my perceptive senses. I felt that I'd been hiding behind my enthusiasms; and I didn't want to let myself off the hook anymore. So I cut them out. It turned out to be a horrifying exploration of depression and emotional free-fall. But you know what I say - when life hands you depression and emotional free-fall, make lemonade!

Those were rough months. I really felt like I came right up against the bare metal of my existence; or nearer to it than I had in years and years. And when it was over, it took awhile for any topic of study to captivate my attention the way it had before. Of course there was still Labanotation itself; but that was less a labor of love than it was a labor of love/hate. I did it, but it was always just rough and painful, because of the controversies I created among the people I spoke to in the community, and because of my own struggle to understand the material I needed to write about.

But Blender now, has no such ambivalence attached. Not only is it incredibly fun to learn and play with, but it's going to absolutely revolutionize everything I'm doing with Labanotation. Instead of stale line drawings, poorly and laboriously done, I will now be able to illustrate all the diverse Labanotation concepts with highly accurate, rendered 3D images of people in the poses I've arranged, depicting the notation I've diagrammed. Animated videos will accompany textual explanations in ways that no other Labanotation text has ever approached. Readers coming to Labanotation for the first time will discover that the biggest problem they face will be deciding which wonderful creative choreographic idea they want to write down first.

It's quite something. I'm very much enjoying this whole process.

Home Infrastructure

Lena's friend Emily recently decided to try a career in home organization. I think she's considering trying something else now, but she's definitely very very good at home organization. I suspect she'll be good at whatever she tries.

She came over recently to continue working on my apartment. Lately that has meant the she's been going through boxes and boxes of ancient papers, and creating a filing system for me. What a nightmare. But she's just so perky and nonjudgmental about it, that I can just about manage to be in the same room while she's working on it, without panicking the whole time.

I'm not typically a panic-ridden person. But I do have longstanding difficulties cleaning up my living area, that date back to childhood, issues with my mom, and so on. In the past few years, I've been making huge leaps and bounds with keeping the place cleaner, but not to the point where I can maintain my own living space without help.

So, I have a housekeeper named Erin who comes every week; and I hired Emily to help me figure out where everything really belongs. Interestingly enough, I found both Erin and Emily through Lena. Lena seems to be really helpful in lots of ways, now that I think about it. Finding hacker spaces, finding people to help with my home, etcetera etcetera etcetera.

So Emily was here recently, and there are several parts of the apartment that have really needed some attention for a long time. For one thing, my bed is a big oaken thing with drawers on either side, and a long storage space directly under the mattress, accessible from a little door at the foot of the bed. The problem with the long storage space is that anything that goes in there, doesn't have a convenient way to come out again. The stuff at the back, in particular, is really just in there. So I've kept the whole space empty, hollow, and wasted.

Another problem has been the towel rod in the bathroom. The two little metal catches are screwed into the wall just fine; but the actual rod-holders that attach to those catches, and the rods that go between the holders, had long since fallen off and been stowed away behind the toilet. So typically, I'd just drape the towels where I could; or lately they'd just lay on the floor till I needed them again. Yes, it's humiliating. I'm a travesty. Whatever.

The bathroom in general was just not well organized. There wasn't anyplace to put anything, but there were a lot of things that needed places to be. I tend to buy soap and shampoo and toilet paper in bulk; and they'd just sit under the sink, in a pile, gradually spreading out faster than I used them up.

So, this time around, Emily suggested that I commit to solving each of those problems before she returns this Saturday.

And I did! Well, two out of three. And the third is on the way!

First, I made a trip to Home Depot and The Container Store. I took josette with me for moral support and to help carry things. We got the special hex wrench that I needed in order to fasten the towel rack back where it was supposed to be. That's all it would have taken this whole time; but it took till now for me to actually go and buy the tool.

At The Container Store, we also picked up materials to build a shelf on the inside part of the bathroom door. Another brilliant Emily idea (ABEI)! All of a sudden, the room that was too small for shelves of any kind, would now have a nearly full-sized shelf. I got the Elfa system, which is so overpriced that the company executives should really be ashamed of themselves, or at least be punished in some sort of disincentivizing way.

So, the bathroom is now turbo-powered. I installed the shelf, and it's perfect - aside from the space it takes up. And the towel rack now proudly totes two towels, and looks like it's raring for more.

The storage space under the bed is another story, but I think I've got it figured. I'm going to sew a length of rope into a bed sheet, and place the bed sheet beneath any boxes I want to store down there. That way, when I want to get access to the boxes again, I just pull the rope, the bed sheet slides out, and the boxes slide out along with it. When I want to put the boxes away again, I just put a box on the sheet, and push it in, add the next box, push it in, and so on, and they drag the bed sheet with them all the way to the far end.

But I haven't done that yet.

So yeah. Towel rack. Door shelves. Emily. The apartment gradually progresses. Someone recently came over and said, "oooh, I like this place!" Check one item off the list of things I never thought would happen.