Polyphasic Sleep and Better Thinking

And just like that, P90X is on the chopping block.

Sure, I can be a revolvatory sort, but then again, sometimes the Universe speaks just as suddenly as people do.  Anyway, here's where I'm at:

1. Something in the last few days/workouts hurt my knee *significantly*.  It wasn't anything I did (i.e. I didn't feel it get hurt), but yesterday I was sore and this morning I can barely walk.  That means I missed Monday taiji!  NOT GOOD!  The point of the extra workouts is so that I can do MORE taiji, not less.  I think I got spoiled by Chen Taiji being so incredibly difficult legs-wise, but never hurting my knees, because it does so much building and strengthening of the supportive musculature too.  Figures that the X Men don't have that magic formula.  ;)
2. My attempt to substitute today's suggested workout with Stretch "X" failed due to a corruption in one of the files I created from the DVDs so I could play them on my media player.  Not it's fault, but still annoying, and will make it so that I either have to workout tonight or miss today entirely (whch might have happened anyway; I was going to try the Stretching workout, but it may or may not have been OK by my knee.)
3. I like the Lots of Workout, but having done a little more looking, I know for a fact that I can get it in less time, for less calories and with less sleep.  Today I'm really feeling the cost in time of all this, and really tempted to switch to a (say) 20-minute every-morning workout that will help keep me in great shape and let me have my sleep schedule back!
4. Looking at my activities, this is also feeling like too MUCH workout…I'm having trouble doing this AND Taiji, this AND underwater hockey, etc.  I'm used to normally having a store of energy I can burn for certain high-octane activities, but since P90X has me burning it every day, I find myself cancelling (or not cancelling, and then sleeping a ton) way more often than I'd like.  I don't want to miss the fun stuff just so I can do my daily shuffle, yo.
5. Plus, let's be honest, it's not like I'm *enjoying* the XTREEEM rhetoric or constant exhortations by pumped-up white males to "Bring it".  ::wince::

I need to think on it more.  What it comes down to is the usual conundrum:  I'd like to keep the Pros and kill the Cons.  Hm, how about a shorter list to look at later, then?

PROS:

• Awesome workout overall; definitely working all the muscles
• I like the workout-first-thing-in-the-am thing
• Doing P90X has a Cool Factor socially
• The "programness" of it helps keep one doing it

CONS:

• Takes too much time
• Requires too much sleep (at least so far), and an annoying (but not awful) amount of calories
• DVDs are annoying, both in content and format
• Something about it is too hard on my knees, not sure what
• Heavy use of Yoga
• Forums and such are useless; I find most of the people who do this stuff irritating ;)
   

Just stumbled on Andrew Moore's excellent photos of Detroit…these are a great example of how photos of real places in crisis can be artistic without being exploitative.  Kudos to Andrew for finding the beauty here without covering up the grotesque, and for facing the grotesque without letting it tell the whole story. 

Or maybe I just like them because they're well-done and so many of them are familiar.  (The moss-covered floor, one of my favorites, is apparently Model T HQ.  There, I have not been.)

I thought this made for a nice quick "Oh!  Huh" kind of moment — not that the points below can't be argued (haha what fun are things that can't be argued, right?) but it is fun to think about in that light.  (Here's the full pdf, which I found on Google in a moment of undirected curiosity.)  And if you're really fascinated, the Google and Wikipedia searches on related topics are fun too.  Happy Saturday!

Today's a day for titles pulled out of random things the TV is saying in the background.  Underneath that information-rich skin, though, it's just the three-week P90X update — sorry if that's disappointing.  ;)

So.  When I lost weight using the 6x 200-calorie meals / day "Polyphasic Diet", it took about 5 weeks to really start showing.  It was pretty easy to maintain by that point, but whew, I remember about three weeks in thinking, "This is just impossible."

And tomorrow will be the last day of week 3 of P90X.  Next week I'll be 1/3 through, but the chunks go [(3 identical weeks + 1 different week) x 3], so it does feel like the end of this week is accomplishing something. 

But of course, it's still week three.  I don't really see much difference*, and man, I'm missing the time and effort this is all costing.

Fortunately, many things have taught me not to quit at week three, probably most of all polyphasic sleep itself, which is really easy to quit at about week 3 if you're not careful…The early exhaustion can be gotten through with guts alone, but the following couple weeks of time and effort to work it into one's lifestyle fully are, I would argue, sometimes even more exhausting than zombie-mode.

*It's not that I see no difference — actually my arms and stomach are minimally, but noticeably, tighter, and my shoulders and legs are definitely on the muscliest side of normal for me.  But it's not really a motivating difference.

I had prepared a bit for this, though that preparation came in the form of just plugging along, in a sense.  But I've made sure to let my days of success (which has been all but a few of them) accumulate weight that lends more legitimacy to my fitness as an ongoing enterprise, deserving of effort and investment**.  As such, my awesome workout clothes (all sale items, thank goodness) should be here any day, and my giant box of awesome Builder's Bars got here yesterday.  I'm also perfecting chocolate milk — improvements include a few trials of protein powder and an upgrade (definitely upgrade) to soymilk.  These little advances function not just for making things easier as they go forward, but also as gifts — achievement rewards, to the MMO-acquainted — to help motivate me forward.

**I would like to make it less of an effort and investment than it is now, don't get me wrong.  But changing takes a lot of effort itself, and once you've gotten past that part, you can work on making things more efficient.  I'm still holding out hope that I can try getting my polyphasic schedule back during the remaining 9 weeks of P90X, but if not, I'll focus on finding a maintenance workout to follow P90X with that takes less time and isn't so intense that I can't go back to Everyman.  (Yeah, going back to Everyman is not optional; I miss it crazy bad.)

The diet goes well too, though hitting the protein/carb balance they want for the first three weeks (50%/20%) is haaaarrrd, and there've definitely been days that I was off by a bit.  Having too many carbs vs. protein will make the "slimming down" part go slower (or possibly just not work I guess, though I should be/probably am losing fat just from burning extra calories and building muscle too — and I had minimal extra fat anyway), but that's not my biggest worry.  I like being on the thin side, sure, but I'm also old enough now to not care so much — I've shaken off the ad industry's insistence that thin is (and only is) beautiful, thank goodness.  I do find health beautiful, but I can feel totally gorgeous with a little plump on me, no problem.  (And personally speaking, I dig curvy women — I'm too small to be a proper one myself, but healthily plump hourglassy women are my favorites to look at for sure.)

Also, slipping in a totally unrelated thing at the end…I've written some new verses to an old song, and am considering the rather typical YouTubeing of myself singing a song.  Interesting idea?  Or just stupid?  Your opinions matter, Internet, even if only to this one lowly IP address!

Peaceful yet Interesting Times,

PD

So, if I haven't said so already, it's a hard, hard thing to ask yourself to slide right out of bed, exercise to the point of panting sweat-dripping exhaustion for 1 – 1.5 hours, leap in and out of the shower, guzzle a recovery drink and run to work, every single day (except the weekends when you can be slower about the shower). 

I'm actually amazed at how not-hard it can be, how automatic the habit becomes and how I can actually roll out of bed and be starting up the video before I've really had a chance to second-guess.

But that doesn't negate how hard it can be, either.  Especially when I think about my 4am mornings, with time for coffee and breakfast and writing and a nap and heck, if there was a clothing emergency I had time to do a whole load of laundry!  MAN I miss my 4ams.

But this is good, too.  Getting some good exercise first thing in the a.m. makes for a spectacular day in a lot of ways.  And it's working — I feel a bit stronger already!  But though I got through the first 2 weeks without missing a day, this week that hardness caught up with me some.

Some of it is other exercise.  I have kungfu on Monday mornings and it's pretty brutal.  The first two weeks, I did both workouts back-to-back, and I survived it, but was barely functional the rest of the day, really.  This week I skipped Monday's P90X workout to just do kungfu.  (For one thing, I was still significantly sore from the day before, and was a little worried about hurting myself!)

Part of it is the stupid being a girl thing.  OK, ok, I shouldn't deride Nature for her miraculous processes, but getting handed a whole week once a month when you get to feel sub-par, tired, achy and gross is hardly a gift from the recipient's end, miracle though it may be to an objective observer.  "Ugggh I feel tired, achy and gross" does not marry well with "Up! Run! Exercise! Then go fast fast fast to work!".  I missed half of yesterday to that, to feeling just too icky to pull it all off, so I did half of the scheduled morning workout and left a little more time for the shower.

And part of it is just life getting too uppity on you.  Today I still feel gross, and moreover I really wanted more sleep than I got — I hit snooze enough times without thinking about it that I would have had to really hustle to pull this morning off…but I was ready to.  Until I walked to my workout area and my foot went splish, and I realized that my entire workout space is literally festooned with cat vomit.  Cat vomit which is on a hard floor (thank goodness I put my mat away yesterday!), so I can either clean it up later when it's dried a bit, or slop through now, while it's soaking and stinky. 

Hmm.  Tired, achy, gross morning.  Even more short on time than usual.  And…cat vomit.  Lots and lots of cat vomit.

Nope!  Turns out that's my limit.  I'm making head-plans to get my workout tonight instead, but I have no idea if that'll work, so for the moment I'm figuring I'll have skipped a day.  Crap!

New quote added to the Random Quotes scroller:

"Seven Deadly Sins:
Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Politics without principle
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice."  – Mahatma Gandhi

I like this more complete formulation of a "sin"…as a Catholic child I was basically taught that single words ("wealth", "pleasure", etc.) were "bad", without any reference to why or how or what could bring them into balance so they could be good.

Gandhi makes the excellent point that a thing or condition like Wealth or Knowledge can be good or bad, depending on whether it's in balance.

I might even add some others:

Cursing without grammar
Gifts without gratitude
Work without goals
Help without sympathy

…Can you think of any?

A relationship is not a personality merger.  I'm glad for the things [boyfriend] chooses to share with me (and I'd leave him if he never shared anything), but I know it's always his choice.  The access I have to his life is a privilege, not a right.  I trust that he isn't hiding anything from me that would seriously affect me, but all I can do is trust–I cannot enforce. That's not a relationship any more.  It's a Panopticon.

-  Pervocracy, in one of their brilliant slice-and-dicings of Cosmo magazine.

Putting this here because a) I read this blog religiously now and you might want to too (IF YOU WANT good honest NSFW/sex talk), and b) this is something I've wanted to say about a hundred times while I've been married, and watched other married couples circle the drain…It sucks that it's against the expectations you were raised with, but no, neither of you gets to own the other.  You agree to trust each other, and you're free to leave if you stop trusting — but that's all.  Sorry, Disney/Hollywood/Cosmo/Good Housekeeping/etc.; it's a lot simpler and less glamorous than it looks…but on the flipside, it's also stone cold awesome when it works.  ;)

(Day 10.)  So besides the mad exercise, it's also week 2 of the Mad High-Protein Diet now.  That's going pretty well…I'm sure I'm overshooting the carbs a little, and I should be eating more vegetables (always), but so far so good.

Points:

• A small glass of chocolate milk is a surprisingly satisfying breakfast.  It's my recovery/after workout drink (I've talked about that already), but since I work out first thing in the a.m. and then go to work, I usually don't eat again until lunch, and surprisingly I'm experiencing less before-lunch hunger doing that than I was eating two pieces of toast (granted, earlier in the a.m., but without the exercise).  Odd, but nifty.
• I'm getting sick of tuna.  And I like tuna!
• I am, however, becoming a big fan of turkey jerky.  And I like Trader Joe's chocolate-flavored protein powder too, though combined with my third-grade-jealousy-worthy recovery/breakfast drinks, I'm starting to feel like I live on chocolate milk.  (And meat.)  I may switch to soy-or-something-else milk for one of them to reduce my dairy intake, but since my body is generally dairy-friendly and those two glasses of milk are all I get on this diet, that may be fine the way it is too.
• This is not a diet for vegetarians.  I mean, I'm sure it's possible, but it's hard enough for me and I've always been heavy on the carnivore side.  I think vegetarians couldn't eat anything but protein powder??  OK, but they'd do a better job getting more vegetables than I do, granted.
• I'm using the Dots for calorie-counting, but I figured out how to make them a little less conspicuous:  Bracelet Dots!  They generally stick around a day or two, so there's a sort of half-faded bracelet of them when they go all the way.  (1 dot = 100 kcal, by the way.  The pic was taken of the first set, when I got the idea, so you can't really see the bracelet effect, but it's working nicely.)  I'm aiming for 1800 cal/day to support the workouts; I usually hit between 1600 and 1800.  It feels like a lot, since my usual is 1400, but then again, it's a lot of exercise too.  ;)

Farming Detroit

Detroit public school teacher and urban farmer Paul Weertz with his working 50 year-old Ford tractor in the back of his house on Farnsworth Street

Thus begins an article over at MAKE, titled MAKE | Farming Detroit.

I read the whole thing — it's a good article, and I recommend it.  But there's a slant on it, a slant familiar to me, that I'd like to take a second and highlight for everyone.  For background, I was not a "Farmer", but I volunteered with several of the groups working to green and farm Detroit's land — some of the people mentioned in this article I know tangentially, and one of these groups is one I worked with for a little while.

My main point here is that sustainable living and intra-community support networks are awesome things.  They are not, however, cures for the things that are wrong with Detroit.  Those things that are wrong may (on my pessimistic days I say "will probably") kill off any viable farming/greening efforts if not addressed — and articles like this get just a little too excited about The Hippy Revolution Again to pay enough attention to the real challenges and the lack of things being done to address them.

This article doesn't skip over those things entirely, but it does bury them in a long litany of (what feels to me like) naive utopianness.  And like many Midwesterners, I prefer honesty and level-headedness to excitement, even when it's a lot less fun.

I’ve seen terrible urban ghettos in my time, but nothing prepared me for the shock of driving through Detroit neighborhoods where so many houses were crumbling, boarded up or missing altogether. In the midst of that depressing landscape I met Paul Weertz, who lives alone in the Farnsworth neighborhood,

the author (one John Kalish) begins.  Problem One:  Detroit is way emptier than advertised.  It's not, as it's referred to later in the article, "[the only] city where this is possible" — because it's not, in many ways, a city anymore.  To outsiders who've lived in bustling cities before, it seems almost rural, or like it's all suburb except for the smallish downtown.  It has a bit more than half a million people spread out over a pretty huge area (138 square miles, for the city proper).  It has shrinking neighborhoods separated by hundreds of acres of empty (fallow, paved, or burned/polluted) land, and even downtown, abandoned skyscrapers separating clusters of buildings that seem to come alive at certain days and times (the casino districts being the most noticable), leaving the streets scary in their wake.  There are entire neighborhoods giving in to lush forest (which I completely admit is kind of awesome; I hope whoever rebuilds leaves some, or a lot, of it).  That doesn't mean that agriculture can't happen here, but it does mean that it's not quite urban agriculture.  There are, as one interviewee notes, no stores nearby "except liquor stores".  There is one major farmer's market, and it supplies more restaurants than people.  Gardening here requires a new definition and very different tactics from actual city gardening, and people trying to port their Urban Gardening knowledge over to Detroit are going, I think, to meet trouble.

“I farm about ten acres in the city,” Weertz tells me. “Alfalfa’s my thing. I bale about a thousand bales a year.” Some of that alfalfa is used to feed animals at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for pregnant and parenting young women. Weertz started an agriculture curriculum at the school and worked there for 20 years but now it’s a private charter school and this year he’s going to have to work elsewhere in Detroit’s public school system.

…

It’s hard to fathom, but apparently one of Leadley’s neighbors considers Rising Pheasant Farms an eyesore. “Culturally, I don’t understand that. There’s flowers!” the 28 year-old mom says in disbelief.

…

Rising Pheasant has applications in to purchase two of the lots it farms on. Leadley says it’s an eight-month process that “apparently has to be approved by everyone in Detroit.”

Advocates of urban agriculture in Detroit were dismayed by a recent decision to sell two city-owned lots to a doggy daycare operation known as Canine to Five so it can expand. The lots have been used as a community garden in Detroit’s Cass Corridor. The Birdtown garden is slated to be uprooted in September, having decided against relocating.

There are 60,000 vacant city-owned lots and a relatively small percentage of them have farms or gardens, some of which are in a precarious legal state. “The city could, literally, at any time come in and say, ‘We’re going to develop these lots and you’re going to have to move.’”

No, that's outdated info, and I'm going to break up my own article to address it:  The Catherine Ferguson Academy was shut down, and it's a heartbreaking and enraging story., The article linked there does a good job explaining all the reasons why closing this school was a vilely stupid thing to do, but I guess the short list is sexism, racism, classism, cruelty, anti-democratic methods, corruption, and in-any-good-society-this-would-be-illegal-ness. 

But putting that aside I guess, it leads us to Problem number two: The City is NOT in favor.  The government in Detroit considers these people basically squatters, and will absolutely give their land to a paying customer at the first opportunity.  Why?  Because "urban" farming is not part of Detroit's plans to save itself, except in the case that it generates the right kind of positive press, which it usually doesn't.  All of Detroit's ideas for fixing Detroit have to do with getting major manufacturers to come back, or barring that, other big-money investors who can do something about the dozens of couple-hundred-thousand-square-foot abandoned factories and oh yeah, hire the locals, who are over 80% black and mostly the products of the kind of institutionalized racism that settled Detroit in the first place and ran it for a century:  Give blacks cheap neighborhoods and put them to work in the factories.  Unemployment in the city is now over 50%, and it's probably only the low density of population left actually living there (and the care of the DPD, who've played this game before) that keeps it from turning into riots (so far).  Oh, and that one neighbor of Ms. Leadley's?  She's pretty typical — I met a ton of her when I was helping with similar farms and gardens.  She's stayed in this ungodly place because it's her home, and she wants it back — back to nice lawns and two cars per driveway and neighbors on the porches — not communes of dirty white kids selling food she's never heard of.  When the City comes in and bulldozes another of their gardens (and the Cass Corridor Co-Op's garden was epic; I was angry as hell to see it go too), she'll be right behind them, asking when one of the factories will open again.

“I take this whole growing food for my neighbors and friends and other people in the city very seriously. And I’m going to eat this stuff, too,” he says when asked if he has his soil tested for lead, arsenic and other contaminants. The EPA has a limit of 400 parts per million of lead in soil but the Greening of Detroit group suggests a 200 parts per million limit

Yikes, note that he didn't say "Yes, I am getting it tested."  This is the only mention of it in this article, and wow is that glossing over a major issue:  Problem number three:  Pollution.  Think about it:  Detroit has been the dirty industrial corner of the U.S. since the Industrial Revolution, and due to its dependency on major manufacturers and its generally powerless population, has gotten the smallest share of all the cleanup-projects too.  One of my favorite kinds of garden-projects in Detroit were the "decontamination gardens", which meant filling fields with sunflowers and different kinds of mushrooms and weeds that would, over time, leech the poison out of the dirt.  (Sadly no-one could use hemp, even the non-psychotropic kind.)  These projects often involved walling off large chunks of playgrounds that children were actively using, by the way — they were in neighborhoods, not at actual factory sites, where it's both not enough and too dangerous.  When I got pregnant, I had to quit helping at an elementary school garden, because just standing on soil with that kind of lead concentration was dangerous.

Don't get me wrong:  Michigan has some of the most beautiful and viable land in the country, if not the world; it's a paradisiacal peninsula on a stunningly large body of fresh water, and the amazingly diverse forests and bountiful groundwater should be the state's pride and joy, and certainly not overlooked.  But the fact that they have been overlooked, especially in the City, for a century, and that big corporations have been and are still allowed to run wild when it comes to polluting Detroit, cannot simply be erased by suddenly wanting to put all that great land to good use again.  The DNR issues warnings every year updating citizens on how many fish it's safe to eat per month out of the Great Lakes…those big, big lakes that, while they border Detroit, also border all the nice clean woodlands up north.  And this is food grown right in the ground in D-town?  No offense, gardener guy, but I wouldn't eat anything you handed me without seeing a soil test first.

There are also mentions in the article of some of the Fundies, which depending on your point of view are a problem in themselves — a lot of the attempts to "rejuvenate Detroit" are coming from missionary-types, who in my opinion are the ambulance-chasers of social decline…but I will go ahead and omit that rant from here.  ;)

It’s a welcome bit of cheer in a section of Detroit [Brightmoor] where good houses get stripped by metal scavengers if left unattended for three days.

Back in the Farnsworth neighborhood, where drug dealers and gangs are as resilient as weeds…

Uh, yeah.  Imprecisely stated on John's part (Brightmoor, which although it has next to no Arabic population got the nickname "Little Afghanistan" for other, apt, reasons; the houses-stripped-in-days thing, though, is true everywhere in Detroit, and even well into the suburbs now) — but definitely not on my list of things to gloss over:  Crime and violence was a problem in Detroit before everyone lost their jobs.  I've lived in Detroit twice…the first time I was a teenager and though I got mugged and harassed at times, it was worth the cheap rent and anyway, kind of exciting if you grew up in a boring dingy suburb like I did.  The second time was after I had my daughter, and we lasted there two months before making a calculated decision to give up the nice big house we'd rented and flee, broke, to a basement apartment where we weren't constantly fending off violence or thievery.  And this was not in a terrible part of town, and also in 2005. 

Sometimes people say, "Oh, but almost everybody has left, so it's safer!"  No, honey.  Everybody who could leave has left, and the ones who are still there are extremely (in degree as well as percentage of the total population) desperate.  Crime is not an urban phenomenon (it IS a poverty-driven one though), but arguably in Detroit you have the downsides of both urban and rural crime:  A thriving gang / drug-running culture, and no neighbors to hear you scream or notice when your house is being broken into or stripped.  If you sound white (or even better, tell them on the phone that you are — I wish I was kidding) the cops will eventually come in Detroit, but given the circumstances they're stuck in too, I wouldn't expect much help.  And while I admire everyone who's trying to make my hometown a better place, I also look at those babies in your arms and think, Hell no, not in a million years.  Let the fucking town burn if it has to, but get your kids somewhere safe.

Southeast Michigan will always be my home, and there's a ton that I love about it…but the City at the center of it has been sick for a long time, and I don't think I believe that any superficial cure is going to work anymore.  I would give a lot to see vibrant communities take hold in Detroit and turn it around…but most of the projects people are getting breathless over now, small farms and art co-ops, are too superficial to succeed on their own, without the support of the City and surrounding suburbs and State governments — who are unlikely to give it. 

Detroit's problems are infrastructure-level and serious; it has, in city terms, bone cancer.  It was built on racism and economic inequality and fed on pollution and corporate greed, and that diet for a hundred years has rotted it from the inside out; what we're seeing now are problems dating back decades, bleeding to the surface. 

I love the land–I love Michigan–and I love small businesses and earnest make-the-world-better projects, I really do.  But so far these are all happening in a place that's still corrupt as all hell, a now bedridden city being tube-fed by the same ruling class the same greed-and-inequality crap it's been eating since day one.  And maybe you can, in fact, garden your way out of such a situation — I would be 100% thrilled to find out that that's true.  I'm just irritated at the media (Internet included of course) for failing to give real airtime and credence to the deep and serious problems in Detroit, and sometimes it seems like the "Oo! People are FARMING there!" articles are, in a way, minimizing the bigger picture.

Detroit needs so much more than missionaries or bohemians or farmers.  It needs iconoclasts; it needs revolutionaries…sometimes I look at it and think that it may be too sick, already, to survive their surgeries.  But I really hope not.