Still alive. Probably going to continue the legacy of this on Twitter. Fascinating reading through it again.

On exercise

One topic I have been meaning to post about on here for months: I have been exercising four days a week, every week, with 2 exceptions (both times because of illness).

I'm not completely sure what started it, but I know a few factors.

One was my older brother (who is just about the only person who reads this blog, so hiiiii) showing up to Christmas last year more fit than I had seen him since high school. The men in my family - my father, uncle, and grandfather - all have a distinct rotundity, and I had kind of given in to the fact that I was eventually going to have an affable pudge, with a body shape like Theodore Roosevelt. Knowing that someone with my genetics and love of food could decide to turn around their physical fitness in a year was a huge source of inspiration.

A second was that my wife and I were already cutting down on sugar (and to a lesser extent, carbs in general) after watching a few documentaries on the problems of obesity in America. I haven't changed my diet quite as extensively as she has, but it still shocks me a little when I get to the checkout at the grocery store and find the shopping cart filled with fruit, veggies, protein, and dairy rather than bread, sugar, sugar, and sugar.

A third, my schedule shifted at work, and I found myself with an additional break every day. I decided to start using one break a day to work out, and I've done it every work day since then - and occasionally on weekends, too.

I was also already paying for the gym.

Perhaps the most important reason why I've continued working out for so long was the fact that I never got a chance to stop and think about how long I had been doing it before it was already a habit. Time flies so quickly when you're working my schedule that it was a month before I really thought woah, how long have I been doing this? I got to make progress before I had a chance to make excuses.

It's nice to walk into the gym, see the weights laid out on the rack, and see my progress. Ten pound free weights were a lot when I started, and now I'm using 25s and occasionally the 30s.

It's nice in daily life, too. We helped a friend move, and after a whole day of slinging boxes, I was fine the next day. Before starting to work out, a day moving would have meant I would be utterly ruined the next day. Instead? Piece of cake.

It's weird to write, think, and talk about, because I was never a "working-out" kind of guy. I went to the gym with my dad occasionally, cycled through a few martial arts for years, and did basketball camp in elementary school (including the time I got a mild concussion), but I was decided not a "sports kid." I was the "picked last" kind of guy. I was never a "cruising through town flexing at chicks" kind of guy.

Maybe that's why I don't mind it as much now. I'm not competing with anyone, just improving myself. I'm not trying to impress the ladies, just enjoying it when I pick something up and my wife looks pleasantly surprised at my arm. I don't have to become a person who works out, I just have to work out and continue being me.

Random thought 11/30/15

You can tell a lot about a culture by its highest values.

I would posit that the highest value of American culture is freedom. However, in a capitalistic, consumption-driven, plutocratic society, freedom is expressed through consumption choices. Obtaining income increases your choices, which increases your freedom. Obtaining the highest levels of income allows you access to the democratic process, allowing you to further define freedom for yourself and others.

On religion (part 1?)

Fairly recently, I was catching up with an old acquaintance from college, who we'll call Adam. Adam was a wild man when I knew him - he did every kind of drug, drank every kind of alcohol, and generally engaged in every kind of activity that I had been taught all my life to avoid. He seemed to have calmed down since that time, and we spent most of the night in pretty deep conversation.

At some point, I brought up that I was atheist, and asked why I had left Christianity.

I thought about it for a good bit, and realized I didn't have a snappy answer, because it's a pretty complicated affair.

Growing up, I went to a church of one denomination and a school primarily of another denomination. When I was a kid, this mattered very little to me - I remember having conversations in grade school with friends that being Christian is the important part; what kind of Christian was secondary. Being deeply religious, from parents that emphasized education, and from a denomination that emphasized education, I experienced growth in my faith by learning. I read the entire Bible at least a couple times in my life, memorized books of the Bible for competitive events, listened attentively in church and Sunday school, and generally applied a significant portion of my attention to it. The Bible was the Truth - learning from the Bible meant learning about the most powerful being in existence and the most fundamental laws of the universe He created.

As I got older, I understood more and more the difference between the Christianity I was taught in church and the one I was taught in school. The God I was taught in church was a lover, dedicated to move heaven and earth to redeem His chosen people; the God at school was a petty tyrant. I realized that occasionally the sermons at chapel would be direct, conscious attempts to build and knock down straw men of my own denomination. Beyond all that, the preachers were often just wrong. They didn't know the Bible that was their job to teach others about. It'd be like hearing a biology professor saying that cats and dogs weren't mammals because they have tails.

One of the most particularly enraging instances was a missionary who proudly taught savages in Africa that "real" wedding ceremonies involved a ring. He wasn't trying to make them Christian; he was trying to make them American. It reminded me of Matthew 23:15 (which was the book I was memorizing at the time):

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You traverse land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are."

So a divide began in my mind: There was what other Christians believed, and then there was what I believed, and I was going to believe the Bible. It infuriated me when Christians didn't know the Bible (still does, to tell the truth). Christians who said that dinosaurs weren't real - there are dinosaur-like creatures in the Bible! Dinosaurs should be a proof of the Bible, not a condemnation against it! Christians who were bigots - the Bible says that in Christ there is no Jew or  Gentile, no slave or free, no male and female. Christians who were obsessed with the end times and phrases like "wars and rumors of wars" - the Bible says that wars and rumors of wars mean it's not the end times yet.

But it was OK. That's what other people believed. I believed in the Bible.

At college, I fell in with a much more diverse crowd than my tiny Christian high school. D&D nerds, tech junkies, the aforementioned drug-fueled partiers (never what I did, but they were great for conversation), international students, punk-rock anarchists, and (most relevantly) Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast members and pagans.

The pagans played a fairly simple role: It had always annoyed me when Christians said things like "ghosts aren't real" or "magic isn't real" - the Bible explicitly mentions at least one ghost, and explicitly bans necromancy. Why would the Bible ban something that wasn't real? Talking with pagans was exciting and continuously stretched the boundaries of my "I believe the Bible" mantra - any of these occult topics might be real - the Bible didn't really say one way or the other.

RHPS strangely helped me grow as a person because I always strive to be appropriate for my situation. At RHPS, the appropriate, polite, expected thing to do is scream obscenities, dance wildly, and make the crudest jokes imaginable. It's a bit of the when-in-Rome idea. I could let loose because I wasn't letting lose. Dressing up like a zombie with a knife in my side, fake blood trickling down to the floor, groaning in agony was a way to win a costume contest, not a cause for concern.

Well, there's a funny thing that happens to human beings when you cram them together, make them dress differently, sing songs, and dance together: The oxytocin starts pumping. One night, belting out increasingly vulgar renditions of "Hot Patootie" and the like, I was overwhelmed with deep, deep feelings of love, peace, and connection. When I started to think about it, I'd had similar experienced before - singing hymns in church on Sunday morning.

There were a few other major events - a pastor telling me that God says to leave the love of my life, a deeply depressed friend reaching out to Christians I trusted (basically begging to know how to be saved) and being snubbed - but I'll try to cut this post a little shorter.

My wife showed me a video (related event starts at ~41:00) in which primate researchers hide a treat in an opaque box. They perform a complex series of actions, and then take the treat out of the box. They taught the complex series of actions to primates and human children; both groups perform the series of actions and get the treat.

They then put a treat in a clear box, in which it is completely obvious that the treat can be taken at any time. Only a fraction of the primates bother with the unnecessary steps, but all of the human children do. This experiment was repeated with children from cultures around the world with the same results.

This video deeply unsettled me, and I ended up walking through downtown at 3 in the morning thinking heavily. I came across a woman sitting at a red light. There were no cars coming in any direction. The roads around were straight, empty, and completely visible. The box was clear, the treat was there, and still she did the unnecessary action.

It was one of - if not the - final straw for religion for me. Religion was an unnecessary series of actions (ceremonies, guilt, singing, etc.) to obtain a treat (social order, ethics, etc.). It wasn't that religion didn't contain truth or value, it was just that you can freely reach out and take it at any time.

Maybe that'll be my snappy answer from now on.

Memories

I want to record a fond memory I have.

I went to high school in a small, private Christian school where chapel twice a week (and Bible class the remaining days) was a part of the curriculum. Being the keen sort of Christian young man I was, I both used words like "keen" to friendly derision and complained about chapel because of quality of the doctrine that was preached. Most days, I walked out angry at the appalling lack of biblical knowledge of the day's speaker.

I don't remember the speaker's name or even what they looked like, but one day, a speaker gave a pretty moving sermon about helping those around you. A focal point was young man named something like "Jerry" that mostly acted like he was fine but felt severely depressed and alienated and ended up committing suicide (if I'm remembering the story correctly - it's been 10 years). That day, I left the room in deep thought, wondering who was really hurting among my friends and fellow students.

I hardly noticed that Garrett, a friend of mine was moving towards me. Garrett was a good-ol' boy - thick accent, always goofing around, no guile, all heart. He came up, put his hands on my shoulders, and looked me dead the eyes. His face was dead serious, but I could feel the emotion pouring off him.

"Don't be a Jerry," he said, and left.

I busted out laughing.

In the moment, I was so concerned that I needed to be looking out for the people around me. The idea that I was the one someone immediately thought of was so ludicrous - combined with Garrett's complete reversal of his usual goofy demeanor - set me giggling uncontrollably.

Looking back with a little more perspective, I was actually emotionally unstable and contemplating suicide at the time, so Garrett was right, but I also probably needed the laugh.

I have enormous amount I want to say about related topics, so I'll say a good chunk of it now with little to no organization. You have been warned.

I have a terrible memory.

Well, that's not entirely true. I can remember thousands of obscure scraps of data about Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 - as well as the Bible, despite not having studied it seriously in 5ish years. Just tonight, I was cold, and I remembered that days ago I accidentally knocked a t-shirt (the one with the Venn diagram of "never" and "more" with a raven in the middle) off a coat hanger in my closet, and it landed on a suitcase being stored there. I remembered where it fell well enough to find it in total darkness at 4 a.m.

But in many other aspects, I have a terrible memory. I cannot remember state capitols. I cannot remember my parents' exact birthdays (though I know the month and plan accordingly). I cannot remember whether I should have spelled it "capitols" or "capitals." Most importantly, I have a very hard time remembering my own life.

For a specific example, take 3rd grade: I don't remember any of it. At this point, I can't even remember my teacher's name, though I couldn't recognize her by junior high. I once told this to some of my classmates, laughing "Yeah, I don't remember anything about third grade except that it was the year that Justin was here." They gave me odd stares and informed me that Justin was at our school in fourth grade.

Most of it is normal stuff. I have a hard time separating the decade of 2000-2009 from 2010+, but this seems to be a widespread cultural phenomena. I remember "The Berenstain Bears" being spelled "Berenstein," but remember it being pronounced stain; my friends have humorously informed me that this means that I am the nexus of a trans-dimensional rift in space-time, and they will use me to get back to their proper timeline.

But I digress: The point is that I often forget large swaths of my own life. My brain takes data that it deems unimportant like my old friends, favorite media, most intense feelings, and allocates it as writable space. Unlike a computer, I don't even have defragment function, so the memories I do have are scattered and hard to access without specific triggers.

This is one of the primary reasons I've been trying to blog more, and blog about some personal topics and deep memories. I don't just want to display them for others, I want to record them for myself in 10 years, 10 months, or 10 days who has completely forgotten what he believed, thought, and felt at that time.

I was looking back at my old Livejournals (always a perilous idea), and I was struck by a number of conclusions:

-I was even more deeply depressed than I realized (see Garrett story above; though part of that perception was just that I rarely felt like posting except when I was feeling emotional).
-I was much more religious than I remembered, and for longer.
-I had a seismic shift in mood when I met the lady who is now my wife, and another when I came to terms with my own atheism - but I also used Livejournal less and less thereafter.
-I wrote much more then than I give myself credit for now.
-I don't remember it that well.
-I don't have any reliable way of remembering what I didn't write about.

So the obvious conclusion was to write more.

My wife (who has been reading this over my shoulder) contends that it's not a problem of memory but perception - and my complete unawareness of my own surroundings is definitely part of it.

I didn't even get to the bizarre quasi-religious experience I had last night, but it'll have to wait for another time.

Yes, autocorrect, I meant to say "Mir," the decommissioned Russian space station, instead of "more."

Random ideas:

-A near-future world where votes are actively bought, sold, and managed by powerful vote-brokers. People don't have time or will to know issues or politicians, and would rather sell their votes off to the highest bidder. Voter "unions" band together to keep the price of votes high and maintain an appearance of integrity (i.e. each voting bloc will only take a contract with a politician who meets x% of their beliefs).

-A man who takes a deal with the devil/a necromantic force just to keep working his normal, boring job. "I have no life, man."

-Jerry Springer with Greek/Roman Gods. "You had sex with 16 different goatherds while transformed into fucking waterfowl!"

-Animal shelter that's a front for a cult of necromancers.