Creativity

I am of the disposition that the sphere of mental possibilities is endless.  Sometimes it seems that everything good has already been thought of, has already been created, has already said, has already been tried.

But that is so plainly false that I laugh at the notion even now that I write this.

Go ahead, spend 1 minute thinking about something that doesn't exist yet. Its hard at first but let your mind go a little bit and you'll see a whole new world of possibilities.

3 IOTD for the Price of 1

1. Use white dinner plates so that you can see your food. If it looks pretty because you spent a little extra time to get it right, you will enjoy it that much more. If you don't want to see the details and so you eat on dark blue plates you have a problem. Food can be beautiful if you allow it.


2. It is great to go to a gym and be inside it, but that is only a small step. You actually have to know what you are doing to get results unless the results you want are hours logged in a gym. I just dont understand why people would not want to learn about how to use a gym. Its fun! Working on your body is fun if you do it the right ways! If you don't agree and dread the weight room, please, PLEASE let me show you how to actually utilize a gym - I promise I can change your mind.

3. Nervous? In 5 billion years the sun will burn out and nothing you did will matter. Feel better?

Be Nice

It really makes sense to be nice.

Yes, I admit that being crude or snobby or cruel or gossipy or snide or irreverent can earn you a cheap laugh and affirming sneer-smiles of your friends who are also in on the joke. But that doesn't mean its the right way to be.

Being nice is hard sometimes (especially in comparison to how easy it is to be mean) but there are two very good reasons for it. The first is that you have your own flaws. By harping on those of others you are inviting attacks on yourself. Perhaps one reason people feel it is OK to make fun of others is that they are not in tune with their own failings; imagine you and your secret inadequacies are the brunt of joke. Secondly, being nice even though crassness would seem to fit builds a culture of trust, openness and respect. You there, the 23 year old! You may not care about those values now, but I've been to the future and you are sorely mistaken.


So the next time a good zinger pops into your head, put down the fastball and throw a complement instead.

Realizing Greatness While It Is Happening

One of the most important perceptual skills is the ability to recognize greatness while it is happening.
Comprehending beauty during its appearance, not after. Appreciating the sublime in the moment.

I notice how this is so important because the lack of this skill is something I dont like about myself when I see it. The standard story of college was I would show up to the first day of class excited, let the quarter pass me by, and then spend finals week cramming but also morning the end of what I realized was a great class. I don't think I forgo talking with professors until the end is near because I am lazy so much as I only realize how much I actually do love learning from them when they are about to be done.

With the realization that you are in the presence of greatness comes responsibility. If you are on a mediocre team, there is no reason to put in extra work outside of practice but you see that you are a part of an amazing group, then it is obvious that you should try extra hard to earn your roster spot.


The qunticential phrasing of this idea is the often heard:

"Youth is wasted on the young."

...You had the uncharted world laid out before you. All you saw was infinite possibility, and yet you took it all for granted because that was all you knew...

Oh how we cherish the idea of our past youth, kicking ourselves for not appreciating it. But if this cliche is true, shouldn't it also be true that:

"Life is wasted on the living?"

 I don't think its necessarily true that we are destined to always fail in appreciating the wonder at hand but I know that it is a constant challenge.

Hi Again, Finally Being in Their Shoes

I'm going to try to pick these up again and HOPEFULLY write about non-Ultimate things; I do enough of that as it is. I'll start with a general one:

I realize that as much as I am "learning about myself", I am constantly learning about other's "selve's". This is not the same as learning about people, but finally experiencing what they might experience and realizing that the thing they did which seemed so weird at the time is actually a very reasonable response to the situation they were in. 

More and more I am seeing all the human conditions which seemed weird before, now appear normal because I have acted them out. Whenever you just can't understand why someone is acting so strange, have some empathy - you may very well do the same if you are in their shoes.

Tragedy

Tragedy is not the conflict between right and wrong, but the conflict between two rights.

Its is a eventually painfully shattered childhood myth that if only all the wrong in the world could be defeated we'd all be fine and dandy. Woe is the man confronted by his enemy Truth when his weapon is the same.

Not Persuasive

"Well, what if everyone did that?" is not a really good reason for me to change what I'm doing: I aim to evaluate my actions in light of the real situation at hand. If EVERYONE was doing what I was doing, the situation would be radically different.


Joke of the Day: I doubt many people got the joke from 2 days ago, so let me make it clearer.
How do you turn a duck into a popular Soul and R&B singer/songwriter? Put it in the microwave until it's Bill Withers

I've Learned

If you are absolutely certain that you are right, you have probably overlooked something. If you think something is definitely one way or the other, then its probably both.



Joke of the Day: Airbrushing in women's magazines. No one looks like that! (The really funny thing is how its tragically Not A Joke.)


Jock of the Day: Me! I finished a metcon workout of 30 90lb Clean and Jerks for time in 2 minutes and 43 seconds with only one 10 second break in between rep 20 and 21 (after I hit myself in the chin with a Jerk haha) !

Nerd of the Day: Me! If I am 75 inchs tall and weigh 200lbs, then 30 reps of a 90lb Clean constitute 17413.92 joules of Work done on the bar and 18078.56 joules of Work on the mass of my body. 30 shoulder presses (same Work as a Jerk) make up 7205.76 joules of work. If I did all this Work (42698.24 joules) in 163 seconds, then I produced an average of 261.95 Watts of Power (.36 horsepower) over that 2.75 minutes.

Losing

The positive side to misplacing something is the joy you get when you find it. You didn't need something new to cheer you up, you just needed to be reminded of how important the stuff you have now is to you. I am thinking of this because I just located the laptop charger I was without for the last 3 days.

I realize that I lose and find things intentionally in 2 ways. I hide $20 bills in strange places around my room and car so that when I find them I will be shocked and feel richer.

I will also set my clocks forward 10 minutes; of course I know that I'm 10 minutes ahead for the first few days, but a month later I will have forgoten and will be plesantly early to my appointments.



Joke of the Day: How do you turn a duck into a popular Soul and R&B singer/songwriter? Put it in the microwave until it's bill withers.

Doo doo doo, do da doot du

The four right chords can make me cry.


Joke of the Day: How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Seventeen.

Jessica Alba's Secret to Beauty

...is that she drinks a glass of water as soon as she gets up each morning. Try it - couldn't hurt


Joke of the Day: Why didn't the lobster share his food? Because he's shellfish.

Interesting

If individuals would try to make out world just a little bit more interesting , we would all have a much better day to day existence. A much funner existence surely.

What am I talking about? Random acts of... interesting-ness.

Do something different.

Wear neon pink sun glasses. Complement your roommate. Make a abstract sketch or doodle and then leave it under the windshield wiper of a stranger's car. Meditate on the grass in the quad. Play the devils advocate in an argument in which you would normally argue the other way. Recommend the great Updike short story you just stumbled across. Yell. Write something crazy on the chalk board 20 minutes before the class and watch people's reactions as they come in. Humor a telemarketer. Actually smell the roses.


I can't put a precise description on my prescription besides this: Do something different, for yourself and for everyone else, just for the sake of pushing the world an inch away from it's droning normalcy.

Joke of the Day: An Irishman walks into a bar with a steering wheel in the front of his pants. The bartender says, "Whats up with that steering wheel?" and the Irishman replies, "It's driving me' nuts!"

Fuck You, Advertisers!

Speedstick Stainguard and Axe Dry Antiperspirant commercials which show people being offended by a guy's armpits make me understand what it is like to being "shamed" into buying a product. They make me partially understand the plight of a women when advertising makes her feel like her body is inadequate without a certain product (makeup, shampoo,cloths...). It is a horrible thing to be self-conscious of your own body. The $19-billion /year cosmetics industry sits jauntily on the advertiser's ability to make women feel that they need a product (many products, that is. Have you looked at the myriad of tiny creams and colors and tools in your girlfriend's bathroom drawer?) to be normal.


To those in the world of business that cultivate and then prey on this fear of one's own body - to those who turn a profit by making the masses think they cannot fit in without buying something first - I say FUCK YOU!!! You are as much the reason for the problems in our country as anything else.

Be a Man, Stand Up for Yourself

The most manly thing I have ever done to stand up for myself was at the annual UCSD Sungod Festival my sophomore year. The line-up included Third Eye Blind, my favorite band of all time. My then girlfriend and I were having some stupid fight, probably about how I wasn't paying enough attention to her, outside the gates to the concert while the day was getting late and the big names were starting to go on. I finally got so mad that I blurted out: "Third Eye Blind is my favorite band of all time; if you make me miss a second of their show because of this stupid fight I might never talk to you ever again".

She shutup and we went inside. The rest of my life, I have been (and am still) shy about asking for what I want but in that movement I was a man: I stood up for myself.




I am not advocating one-sided, pushy machismo... But Third Eye Blind only comes out of retirement to play a free show at your school once.

Caffeine is Fun

I try to limit my caffeine intake; I don't drink coffee daily. I do this not because I think coffee is bad for me, but because when I want coffee to give me a buzz, I REALLY want it to give me a buzz. By not building my caffeine tolerance with daily intake, I guarantee that I can get an amazing buzz off just a small bit. It is for the same reason I do not drink a beer with every dinner - when I drink, I want the alcohol to really hit me. Screw tolerances, I want my drugs to really work!

Humans

If you ever are feeling down about the human race, go hiking by yourself in a place where you can't see any man-made effects. There are still plenty of wide-open spaces left despite human's destructive abuses of our natural resources.

If you ever want a reality check on how fucked we are as a species, go read through the comments on any popular YouTube video. The grammar and sentence structure is terrible.

You See the Old Way Wasn't Working, So It's On Us

Those who cannot forget the past are condemned to repeat it. The problem with some methods of remembering history - history of very large events and very minor day-to-day procedure, is that it turns into a sort of worship for the way things were done in the past. Yes, there are valuable things history can teach us, but we should be aware of falling into the trap of thinking there is one best way to do something - the way it was done before. There are new possibilities all around us if we would just stop and think without the blinders of (likely embellished) collective nostalgia.

The Fosbury Flop didn't come from reading a book about high jump legends.

Why I Drive So Fast

When i think about it, it really scares me that I entrust my life and safety to all the strangers around me on the freeway. I have NO idea if they are sane, crazy, homicidal, drunk, tired, crying, putting on make up, sleepy, or plain clumsy. It is partially for this reason that I drive so fast - to get away from other drivers! I have this urge to pass, to avoid going the same pace as other cars. I figure the less time I'm on the road, the less time I am in danger! I know that when I am driving aggressively, I am focused, tuned in, and hyper-aware. When I am just cruising I am more likely to be spaced out, on the phone, or fiddling with the radio. I've got to assume the same about you: if you are doing a leisurely 65mph, Ill do my best to put you in my dust - for my own safety.



It's that, and driving fast is fun.