Harlows: Favored Indie Venue

I saw Blitzen Trapper at Harlows on Thursday night. If you like 70s bluesy/country rock, this is a band for you. The show was straight-ahead from the first song to the last, with nary a hiccup in between, just a pack of guys that really enjoy working together and who really know how to play their instruments. The three most charismatic members--Eric the pint-sized keyboard/guitar/harmonica-playing lead singer (evocative of Bob Dylan, obviously), Erik the curly redheaded and bearded bespectacled rhythm guitarist and singer, and Brian, who plays the drums, sings, and sports a serious 70s beard--are enthusiastic front men who really made the show a joy to experience. It doesn't hurt that they fucking rawk, either:



I often lament that Sacramento gets so few indie bands of medium stature. Once they are big enough to play a venue like the Memorial Auditorium (like Death Cab for Cutie-which are no longer indie anyway, I suppose), the fun of seeing them is somewhat diminished for me. Even so, I am grateful for the bands that decide to grace us with their presence, and so much the better if they choose Harlows for that purpose. Harlows has great sound and is just the right size. After seeing a few shows there in recent years, I admit that the swirly multi-colored walls and the remodeled booths provide for better mobility and views throughout the venue. Now if only they would dump those lights that always seem to swivel around directing piercing beams into my eyes, all would be perfect.

Fitness Diary

JillianMichaels.com recently re-launched with a selection of lifestyle management tools, like a food log, a fitness log and a meal planner. At first glance, I thought it was a great improvement, but I was seriously wrong.

It all blows. Why is it that these sites can't adapt to a real human's lifestyle? To complete all my logs, I would have to devote as much time as I do to working out. So instead, I am going to use my blog as a fitness log.

Maybe, as a result, I will actually lose the 20 pounds I have been trying to get rid of for two years.

Exercise:
Commute by bike to/from work
Yoga Challenge

Notes: Strain/leg cramping during Warrior III means I need to work on quad and hip strength.

Food:
Breakfast - coffee, low-cal muffin
Lunch - butter chicken, chana masala, naan, basmati rice, tandoori chicken, diet coke
Dinner - Lunchmeat (lazy!)

1 pint guinness 250

Thoughts on Fun and Fitness

I can't seem to get back into posting regularly on my blog, perhaps because I've burdened my return with too many expectations.

I've also been having a lot of fun, which used to translate into a lot of breathless retellings of my adventures but are now so numerous that I haven't the time to catalogue my many exploits (blame the rise of text messaging and the ubiquity of twitter and facebook for that). I do enjoy all the fun times a great deal, but I am missing a few things, which I will not use today's missive to dwell upon.

In the spirit of focusing on the positive, I will note that one thing I no longer lack is health and fitness, and I believe that that has contributed greatly to my improved outlook. I've made a commitment to myself to do yoga at least once a week, and I've been getting good use out of my bike. Being able to breathe freely and depend on my body is so liberating. I'm trying to take it to the next level and encountering difficulties both with my diet and workout intensity. I've recently joined jillianmichaels.com for circuit workouts and, I had hoped, easy-to-follow menus, though that is proving less the case. The workouts are great, but I can't seem to force myself to actually complete them. Since I'm 25 days from my birthday, I'm going to make a concerted effort to get serious about my workouts and my diet. I'm sitting here watching the Wimbledon men's final, which has thus far been a display of classic tennis, and I am itching to get in good enough shape to play again. I realize I say that every summer, but I feel like it's more in my reach than ever before.

One Day, One Thing

I have a to-do list on my refrigerator that I created at the beginning of 2008. It contains items like "organize all papers," "create vision board," "learn to sail," "revise resume," "redesign blog," etc.

I have done exactly none of these things in nearly 18 months. In retrospect, that seems like plenty of time to accomplish these minor project goals. This is because I failed to consider the fact that I am a compulsive socializer. Present me with an opportunity to hang out with people and there is a very high likelihood that I will take it, even if the activity does not reflect my usual interests. I used to have more synergy between hanging out and my hobbies, so at least there was time for crafts, but lately I can't even seem to pick up needles and yarn.

I think I have too much unstructured time on my hands, which is to say that I don't have enough regular obligations to make me stay focused. So instead I fill up my time with fun, but not necessarily fulfilling, activities. I think I'm going to limit my social activities after this week, which is already full. I have something to do every single night this week.

Maybe I should skip pubquiz tonight. Then again, routine is a good thing.

Bits and Bobs

I am listening to Douglas Rushkoff on On Point, a show I don't get to listen to very often since it's not on any of the NPR stations I have regular access to. Based on what I'm hearing, I think I'd like to read Rushkoff's new book, Life, but a little bit of me is jealous that I didn't write this book. It sounds like a synthesis of a lot of contemporary social critiques, like Bowling Alone, Jpod, The Omnivores Dilemma, The Corporation, Your Money or Your Life/Affluenza, Natural Capitalism and The Creative Class.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio

A few months ago I had lunch with a former coworker, from my science curriculum developer days. Said colleague is one that I enjoyed working with tremendously, and now works for one of my favorite Sacramento-based organizations. After catching up on life events, the topic turned to aging. He is about 10 years my senior, though you wouldn't know it to look at him, and we were discussing the ways in which the brain changes with age. One of the things he noted was that he can more quickly determine what is important in an analysis, whereas a younger person thinks everything is important. I think my brain is evolving in a different direction because of my fascination with and growing dependence on the internet to discover and retrieve information. I've been somewhat wedded to the idea of myself as a divergent thinker, and generally have sought to cultivate my free-associating mind. I remember that I was once a very directed thinker, and was frustrated by the plodding nature of thought I would experience. Now that I've swung in the opposite direction, I think it's time to seek a better balance. I monitor myself with fair amount of vigilance, so I feel justified in a renewed effort to restructure, once again, my thinking. Over the past months, I've felt like my brain has been less able to differentiate between important and erroneous information. I have also noticed with increasing alarm that writing does not flow from my fingers as if from on high so much as I have a quick-running editor in my head constantly checking word choice and order, causing me to back up, switch, rephrase, etc. I second-guess myself much more than I used to. In generic cognitive psychology terms, I fear that I have become the word-chain-generating automaton whose existence Noam Chomsky sought to refute when he penned the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

I think I'm out of practice. I've spent the last year being busy, and I have lost structured thinking in the process. Oddly, being under pressure does not have the effect it once did; no longer does it spur me to excellent action. My work products are as crappy as ever. The scourge of multi-tasking and the lure of instant information access has made me lazy.

In at least one domain, I know I can make significant improvements: writing. So I've challenged myself to write something with a clear structure that tackles a complex idea every single day in the month of June. I suppose I'm getting nerdy again. I'll be posting here.

Getting Posty, and Public!

I have decided to unblock my blog from public view. I accept that the Bee has no staff to offer the common courtesy of a notification before publishing our content, and I am putting my trust in the license I already added to the site. Hopefully it's not too late to re-establish myself as a decent local blogger.

I used to tell you everything

The sixth anniversary of my blog approaches. It took me some time to negotiate the ways of the burgeoning blogosphere, learning how to say what I needed without being too revealing. Over time, that became less tenable, as everyone converged on the web and it transitioned from an anonymous domain to a public square. My career changed too, and while policy and politics drove me to blogging in the first place, I started working at jobs where my politics could be a liability if directly associated with the work I do. I found that not discussing my personal life nor my politics leaves me with little to write about aside from various exploits about town, thus rendering my blog an electronic version of my eighth-grade diary.

Flexing the writing muscle

One of my goals for the month of April is to blog more. I set up my new host for my web site, postcardsfromsacramento.net, yesterday. It's not live yet, but it will hopefully be so by the end of this weekend.

The first quarter of 2009 is over, and I've made decent progress on some of my goals for the year. I began seeing a counselor at Sac State, I've been going to the gym more regularly, and I continue to try to not suck. In addition, I'm about to finish designing, and then I will subsequently commence production of, a purple bracelet, meant to help me quit complaining and stay centered inspired by A Complaint-Free World.

Given that twitter, facebook and workpapers have constituted the majority of my writing opportunities for some time now, I'm giving myself permission to fail to contstruct a good conclusion to this post. Hopefully everything gets better by the end of the next quarter.

Less talking, more blogging

I really need to start blogging again. It is a good outlet for my need to talk incessantly. I'm working on my new web site today. In the interest of expediency, I am going to use an existing template and tweak from there. This, coupled with my decision to revise my thesis for a student research competition, should make me less annoying to be around for a while.