I’m not one for public retrospectives on my blog, as I keep the most sentimental and introspective of material private. 2009 however, despite all the woes and worries that the political climate has spawned this year, was a year to remember. This was the year that my online and offline lives converged. I have to admit it: it was all thanks to my joining Twitter back in March.

Before then, I was wary of attending blogger meetups. We learned about people based on what they were writing, a few email conversations and not much else. Maintaining a steady line of communication amongst locals was not easy, given that most bloggers in my area of interest—politics—live far apart. We also tend to look within ourselves, our at the world from within our windows. My participation in Twitter broke me out of my shell. So, a few highlights:

A springtime bus trip to NYC with my best friend, his sister and his girlfriend. For fear of attracting the worst of theives and muggers, I suggested against bringing our DSLRs. Bringing pocket cameras in their stead was the biggest regret of the trip.

May brought WordCamp Mid-Atlantic, which was the first conference I attended. Organized by Aaron Brazell, the event gave me a chance to meet long-time online friend Stephan Segraves, and WordPress lead developer Mark Jaquith.

I also went to a number of local meetups organized through Twitter. Some of them in Baltimore, and I’ve gone to monthly meetups in Columbia, MD. The last big event of the year was TEDx MidAtlantic (recap).

The year in news is marred with a general sense of dissatisfaction. It’s led to a general sentiment of “good riddance to bad rubbish,” and in that respect, I agree. However, the past year was one of great personal growth and challenges for me. It was not one to forget.

Updates to run through the day.

[1020]: I’ve been around since the early days of the Movable Type vs. WordPress conflict, and having listened to Anil Dash speak today about ongoing evolution in SixApart’s operations makes me feel like I’ve grown up as a blogger. My best takeaway from the talk is his emphasis on convergence of networks. He spoke about the closed nature of Facebook, for example, and how networks need to evolve in a more open manner. Two words: “Ice melts.”

[1359]: Had a great lunch with a panel of nine guys, lively discussion. I spent a lot of time listening. I’ve hung out at the atrium area and bouncing off ideas with people more than listened to the talks.

[0020]: Just got home from the event. I decided to stay unplugged and just rock the place. Recap tomorrow.

I turn twenty-nine this year, and as quickly as 2008 flew by, I know this year will, too. I have no progeny, and as of now I have not what is typically called a career. Then again how is a career defined? A post by John A. Cohen has me thinking about how it is perceived and defined by others. In his post he reveals his choice to enter law school despite being an “artist at heart,” to summarize. I think I’ve encountered enough vapid pop-culture psychobabble to differentiate a job from a career. The bit about a job being something that merely pays the bills and provides no fulfillment, tends to stand out. It is oversimplistic, though. The people, legendary but not mythical, that we hear about working two jobs to support their children, for example, may gain fulfillment from the fact that the children they brought into the world are fed and surviving. For some, survival is fulfillment. For others, those who have gone past survival, fulfillment means something else.

I do not have the heart of an artist, and my skills are above-average at best when it comes to my craft. I am a fiery debater and a passionate arguer, but I am a logician and a scientist from as long as I can remember. I find beauty in an elegantly simple explanation for an observation. As for passion, I have always been wary of the its very nature. While it drives us to do intensity, it can consume us as well.

I have done much pondering about what I want to do, or try to do. Right now I work in medical equipment sales, a job that allows me to afford my lifestyle, and pay off the debt that I incurred during my idiot phase. I am aware of my contribution to society as a result of my work for this company. The gadgets I offer save lives and prevent health crises. The nature of sales as an interpersonal dynamic between buyer and seller is quite close to that of teacher and student. The key in growing a business is establishing a lasting relationship with a buyer, which is the case especially in a manufacturing business. The problem face by retailers (resellers) like myself is that customer loyalty is a more challenging goal.

I mention this because higher education as a career choice has increased its appeal. It reflects my personal strengths and abilities, and I am able to meet the needs of personal advancement and the very human need to make a mark on society. Higher ed usually requires research, and, with a few changes in lifestyle, it is also an economical choice. Best of all, I like it.

Over the past few weeks I’ve gradually scaled back my on-and-off-and-on-again smoking habit. I’ve picked up Nicorette and using it like dip, to the tune of about six to ten a day. Withdrawal is a complete bitch: the drug itself isn’t that hard to deal with, rather, it’s the experience of having a smooth cloud of smoke just go down my throat, with the full knowledge that my lungs are on the line.

That said, I’ve been breathing easier, my stamina is coming back during exercise, and I’m expectorating in fair amounts. “It’s all in the road to recovery,” I am told. The past few days, though, I was plagued by the scratchy feeling in the back of my throat that I can’t swallow away nor cough up. Like anything else, it got worse before it got better, but better it did. Today I coughed it up.

I felt it in my mouth; it was almost solid. I walked slowly to the bathroom sink to spit this awful thing out, and I did have a passing thought. Sometimes some things we have to deal with in life have to get really bad before we get rid of them, that is, if they get started in the first place. Credit card debt, addictions, toxic relationships, once we get into it, it’s like that throat loogie that was harder to remove at the beginning that when it was time for it to go, so to speak.

And if there were yet one more benefit to getting on a quit-smoking program, it’s that epiphanies can be found from coughing up phlegm.

Until my arrival in the United States, Thanksgiving day was a mere footnote in whatever I had learned about what would be my new home. There was some history, some common practices, but for the most part, the holiday itself was a foreign event. Besides, Filipinos usually appreciate what they have and each other during Christmas.

That said, the Holiday has grown on me. We usually skip the Herculean tasks of food preparation on this day. For the third year in a row we’ve gone to Buddy’s in Annapolis for a Thanksgiving buffet that has everything I want to eat, and then some. Ours is a family of home-cooked meals and believe me, a roast turkey and sides is not our idea of a “special meal.”

This Holiday is a celebration of bounty, an appreciation of what we’ve got, what we deign to have, and of who we have in our lives. It is a celebration of capitalism, a celebration of Charity, of friendship and a respite from a constant parade of cats, even. In celebrating this and more, we prepare for a new year swiftly on the approach.

To make it all quite short: I appreciate my life. All of it. The drama, the joy, the pain, the fellowship and the loneliness, the good and the bad. I am glad I am alive, and I am happy for my life.

A moment of Zen today while going through my reading list while being on hold on the phone while, you know, working: The key to pattern recognition is knowing which apparent patterns to reject because the pattern doesn’t really make sense.

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.

It’s June and my spring cleaning is far from over. Aside from having given away the clothes I can no longer fit into (I beefed up a lot since January), and throwing away crap that I know I will never use (say, a 250-watt computer power supply), I have a few other things to get done before I execute the next steps in what I want to do with myself. In no particular order:

• Perform the ultimate judge-jury-executioner event on my photo collection. Since I shoot in RAW + JPEG, I have three choices for each picture: lose both, lose RAW, or keep both.
• Scout old, old backups for music and pictures I have not consolidated into my current documents and bring them all back home.
• Make drafts for service agreements and go through them with a fine-toothed comb.
• Take pictures of certain keepsakes from years and years ago, then, throw them out.
• Write a review for the latest I received from Regnery Publishing: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, which I got last week.

Winnowing my photo collection will take the longest time, but I think that book review will probably get top billing.

Well, I turn twenty-eight on Tuesday and I took off for a long weekend. I won’t be back to work until Wednesday. I’m really not going anywhere far. Logistic and financial shortcomings have prevented me from spending even a night away from my home, but I think I would really, really enjoy the time off.

Is this medium called blogging something that I have somewhat outgrown? I’ve been giving it a lot of thought lately and I have been prone to writing mini-treatises instead of your typical blog posts. I won’t even try to explain why I write the way I do; suffice to say that in this medium, at times I feel a tad left out. The typical intro-blockquote-comment format—wash, rinse and repeat as many times necessary to prove a point—doesn’t seem to do much for me. For me it’s a case of been there, done that. I’ve been blogging for the better part of five years now, and I think I should have license to wax nostalgic now and again.

As an online writer I have grown to return to my roots of writing offline. My posts have grown lengthier, their scope, broader. I miss writing academic papers, especially now that I am not required to do so (and haven’t been for seven years). I’m far too familiar with the rules of attribution and quotation, of clear editing and paraphrasing. Herein lies my true nostalgia: it is far too easy to simply copy and paste and prepend and append with comments a passage one finds interesting. “What he said” is merely an approximate view into the mind of the quoter. Indeed, there are only so many ways one can paraphrase another, but the effort placed within, the words chosen by the writer is a window into their understanding of the work they are citing.

Such an act takes risk: to have one writer accuse mischaracterization of the person doing the quoting can be definitely embarassing, if not damaging. But isn’t it, too, a window into the way the quoted party writes? I suppose the motivation to blockquote may lean more towards a desire to keep the reader within the confines of one’s own writing (or lack thereof) but how presumptuous can we be about our readers’ habits? There are readers who will take in a paraphrasing, others who will take in a direct quote, and others who will follow a link and go back to the post that led them there. We just can’t know for sure. What I do know is that I see more into a writer’s mind who does their best to sum up a text than to merely post a direct quote. Isn’t that the need that social bookmarking sites try to meet?

When a valued friend of mine from years ago told me that I will never be the same after I work a particular job, I believed him. The fundamentals of our identities are fixed harder than what most jobs can change about us, but every job that we do, every step that we take in our lives, changes us ever so slightly.

When I worked an overnight job doing data entry, I was able to get a glimpse into the diagnostics business, and how it works. When I worked at Best Buy for sixteen months, I learned a lot, too. And when I worked
at the cadaver lab for five long months, I finally felt to fulfillment exactly what my friend, almost ten years prior, told me.

I have done some gruesome things, all legal, all ethical, all within the requirements of the work. In the months that I was there I barely blogged anything because I did not want to reveal graphic details of what I did. Some procedures were far more excruciating—for the person dissecting, obviously, as dead people don’t feel pain—than others.

All together the job gave me a glimpse into the business of the dead, and I have no ill will towards the work. I do know it wasn’t for me. The non-profit for which I worked was, at its greatest, not opportunistic towards the loss of a loved one, which is far more than what I can say to your standard funeral home, with their fabulous caskets and marble urns. The job also gave me an intense look into the heart of anatomy and physiology, one that I was unable to have in my years in college. Since I had no human cadaver dissections back then, having done so was something for the books. My books, at least.

Just how many people out there can do the things I have done? Dieners, forensics professionals, med students and other tissue bank staff not included? How many people can say that they can dismember a corpse into six sections in as little as 30 minutes? And just how many people can say that they have done this day in, day out for the majority of their professional lifespan? I know I can’t say yes to that last one. I found an out, and took it.

It’s been a few months since I started new work. Like I have written before, I am able to use my talents better here; I am cast in a role for which I am appropriate. The words of my old friend still stay with me, though. I will never be the same. And when it’s time for something different, I’m sure this job will have changed me in ways of which I wouldn’t even be aware until I’ve moved on.

I suppose that’s life, or some part of it, ya?