Reading through my political blog list (though not commenting on them much) the issue of the double-nickel speed limit has been raised as a means of saving gas. I’m not a big fan of having to force people to drive slower, especially since I doubt the safety of our highways would be increased by slowing people down. The reason I say this is because there are too many folks on the road who are impatient, selfish, aggressive, and don’t respect the rules anyway.

Remember: if someone can get away with bending the rules a little bit, they will. In Maryland it’s a ticket offense to drive ten MPH over the speed limit, so you have people burning just a little more and going 70 on a 65, 60 on a 55, just to save ten seconds a mile to get to where they’re going. (Personally I draw the slow-drive line at 45, which is the sweet spot for my car and I can roll along at 1500RPM. Sadly they put stoplights on streets that slow.)

I understand, folks. Your time is valuable. In fact it is so valuable that the 5 minutes you save for every hour you drive is worth the ill will you produce on the road weaving in and out of traffic, edging people out from merge lanes, and riding someone’s rear bumper, right? Well, not everyone’s as self-important as you. People have told me that us slowpokes doing the speed limit on the right lane are a danger on the road because we force the impatient ones to have to switch lanes. I don’t think I even have to justify that with a rebuttal. I just want it to hang in the air for a second so it can sink in. In fact, let me place it in its own paragraph, with complete emphasis.

People have told me that us slowpokes doing the speed limit on the right lane are a danger on the road because we force the impatient ones to have to switch lanes.

Seriously, who is the greater danger on the road? Might I make a suggestion instead? Chill the hell out. Roll your window down in great weather, feel the wind in your face, take it easy, let the workday blow away with every second you stick your hand out the window and feel the breeze through your fingers. You can’t change the way people drive, but you can certainly change the way you react to them. It took a while, and I admit to being hypercritical (and no, I don’t mean hypocritical in this context) at times and grumbling under my breath, but I don’t let that affect the way I drive. Despite that personal quirk, this change of attitude helps a lot to prep me for my gym time after work. I am refreshed despite fifty miles of driving in rush hour traffic. And all this without the gubmint reducing my speed limit.

This is me grumbling about my previous job, where I used to dissect cadavers in the name of medical research. All those gloves and handwashing? Yes, it helped limit my risk of infection. Yes, it helped protect me against a lot of things and the only thing I would do differently is apply for that job in the first place, but seriously: I now have a patch of eczema on my right hand and that shit never ever goes away.

I have a constant reminder of the five months I spent there. Hope you all rot in hell.

Every time I return from a trip to the beach, something in me changes. For that reason, while I am very excited about them, I have held beach trips with great caution. Days after I returned from Fort Lauderdale, I quit my job. (Granted, the job was terrible: I sat at a computer typing all night, had minimal opportunity for promotion or growth and was a hyper-critical environment that had little tolerance for mistakes.) I don’t think my trip to Rehoboth Beach would count, though. That short vacation was a tad botched by a wrong choice of hotel, bad water conditions and just this feeling that it didn’t go our way. The jellyfish invasion doomed the day’s potential for swimming.

My trip to Ocean City this year feels significant. It marked a few personal milestones: it was my first vacation I spent generally alone; it was also the longest trip I took in my car, and alone, at that. It doesn’t seem like much, but the trip gave me plenty of time for introspection. I found out I like long drives, too.

The details of my trip will be written later. This post is about this site, and what I want to place here. I have written time and again about how I am tired of writing about politics, or the news. This trip to the beach has drained me of all passion for newsworthy matters of “great importance.” I am no longer inclined to comment on this year’s election, or the conflict between Russia and its neighbors, or the Olympics, or the local news. I maintain my opinionated mindset, but I am less inclined to record it here, or anywhere.

This trip to the beach has shown me the importance of verbal and intellectual triage. I was without my laptop, and I felt free from the shackles of the need to acquire as much information as I could about things that may or may not be important. This has always been the scary talent that I have, that my teachers in high school and college would always take note. I am a voracious consumer of information. My recall is remarkable. It is this talent that has gotten me through professionally, but on a personal level it is a difficult ability to manage. Some people watch the morning news while having breakfast and their morning coffee. I have spent many mornings seated in front of my computer, reading blog posts on Google Reader, blazing past posts in between bites and gulps. It was my own version of Patrick Bateman’s morning routine. It was my warm blanket, comfortable and familiar. It was my mental prison cell.

I don’t know how it clicked. I didn’t even realize that it had clicked until I came back and didn’t feel like checking the news, or my email. My life went on without me watching the world from this side of the monitor. I had spent three days living and I wasn’t about to snap back into my old ways. I realized that between work and going to the gym (which I treat with professional responsibility to my health and well-being), I don’t allot a lot of time for Everything Else. But it isn’t the amount of time left for Everything Else that counts. What is important is what falls under Everything Else.

“One life to live” somehow sank in. It must be my 28th birthday finally catching up to me: my wounds don’t heal as quickly or as flawlessly. My heart doesn’t beat as fast during workouts of the same intensity as I did two years ago. I was trundling through that period of life between youth and old age where every day and every year blend into some unremarkable amalgam of insignificant events: eat, sleep, work, bills, as the birthdays ticked on. I don’t want to live like this. There are compromises as to what gets done during the twenty four hours a day we all get, but I knew that I wanted to change what goes under Everything Else.

I think the biggest factor that affected this change of view was my sheer determination to get surfing lessons during my trip. I had scheduled them for Sunday evening but the weather ruined the water for everyone and my instructor of choice was booked Monday. I could have gone around looking for someone else but I didn’t want to do that, really. I have told this person I will learn from him. I wanted to stick to that. Instead I spent Monday bodysurfing, and I think I discovered what so many surfers already know about the allure of the sport: no single wave is the same, there is always something new, and it is an environment you can never really master. I learned to relinquish control over a large part of what would happen to me: to trust in my ability to orient myself but also to trust in the general direction of the water.

All these ramblings come down to what I want here. I have been writing online for almost six years and between jobs, personal priorities and the ever increasing population of writers, it has been difficult finding a niche. I think I’m done trying to find that niche to fit myself into. I feel so unworried about the need for significance or relevance that I feel better writing on my site now. I will write, and the readers will come.

There’s too much bullshit going about in the fitness industry. The ones at the top of this fugurative food chain are making the most money: publishers, writers, doctors, name it. When I was younger I was skinnier than Barry Oh is now, partly because I was a sickly kid who suffered for months from minor inguinal hernia that wasn’t corrected for a long time, and partly because I had no appetite (which I think tied in with the hernia thing). I think I was eleven when I learned the joys of gourmandism and my weight had been on a steady increase in the sixteen years after that. There were short periods in my life when I did get thinner, due to exercise, more than anything else.

My body still hasn’t settled into what I would call my desired fitness level. But after enough time spent reading study A and study B and news report C and hearing from fitness guru D and Gilad… I always fall back on two authors and one principle. The authors are Covert Bailey and Tom Venuto. The principle is simply calorie deficit. Over a period of time if you eat more than what your body burns, you will gain fat. If you burn a lot more than what your body eats, you will lose fat.

Where it gets a little more complex is how your body reacts to changes in dietary patterns. Some people who choose to eat less than what their body burns force their bodies into starvation mode, causing any excess calories to be stored as fat. Other people who overexercise end up destroying muscle, thus lowering their base metabolic rate. Result? Fat skinny person.

It took me a while but I kinda figured I can lose the fat around my gut and elsewhere by doing high intensity, long duration cardio (I’m doing an hour on an elliptical machine with my HR between 155-165) with a “toning routine” for weightlifting (4×12 as opposed to a bulking route of 3×8, or one set to failure). I’m losing weight, my bodyfat percentage (measured using an impedance meter) has gone down, and I’ve gained tone.

A lot of what we read in the media about fitness tends to appeal to the path of least resistance. The absurd level of contradictions in findings among studies is almost daunting to the casual reader. James Joyner, in the link above, ends his post by saying: “What none of these studies ever explain to my satisfaction is why, if obesity is essentially random, it suddenly appeared on a large scale in Western society about thirty years ago and why you don’t see random fit kids in those television reports of famine in Africa.” That’s because simple truth and simple facts don’t get grant money: our kids are eating more, we don’t cook as well, we drive too much, we watch too much TV, and we don’t want our children playing outside for fear of the latest bogeyman at the ten o’clock news so we stick ‘em in front of a Wii, or worse, any other game console, and expect them to stay fit.