BuJo Initiate

It’s the Ex week again, and like for the past few years now, I’ve taken it as holiday time. It has also been the habit to use the time to do practical economical household craft projects each year during this time, as sort of an advanced preparation for making winter a bit cozier. This time around is no exception. Last year, it was some carpentry to reclaim storage space; other years, it has been canning preserves. This year, I’ve minimized and simplified things even more for a multi-day project.

Over the past couple years or so, one positive habit I have been cultivating for myself is carrying

One template format I'm exploring . . .

around a pocketbook and pen. Sure, a note taking app on the phone is quite handy, but when in a pressured dash or impulse to record, capture, and recover something more instantly and accurately while it is on the tip of my brain, the pen and notebook beats the cellphone. I have been finding my old-fashioned pocketbook to be as indispensable to me as carrying my keys, wallet, and my cellphone. It has helped save me a lot of time, money, and energy, especially in spots when the phone had little to no battery power left.

I like technical innovation a lot, but honestly, only up to a certain point. We think we are doing well for ourselves by organizing our lives with apps on our phones and computers, but this is illusory on some levels. It is ultimately making us comply to a complex system that suits tech companies in finding new ways to control us with ones and zeros, and for them to glean more of our money and personal data from us. In this sense, apps can tend to cheapen the quality of your life, or they at least make the data of it more valuable to everyone except yourself. There is a point where we lose sight of being able to create a very personalized, customized, and more organic system that allows us to stage things better for our own organizational needs, our unique learning modalities, our own personal goals; one that accommodates for recording through our more private and practical eccentricities. Those ones are not for sharing, the non-bloggables: thoughts and ideas best left on a page of paper, with the privacy assured.

One of the things I regret about my formal education, from childhood on through to my early university years, in the days before academic computer use, and before the internet was available, is that I never had any teacher at any time of my life who put any effort at all on teaching me how to do the very essential and elemental thing for excelling in true higher learning. That is, really teaching me on how to organize myself with the practical skill of efficient written planning/journaling, and effective note taking. It seems absurd, but it’s true. Sure, I of course learned literacy, but only mastering merely the taking in and absorbing of information part of it. I always had substandard teachers and mentors for helping me exploit my strongest learning modalities to transpose, and express, what was going on in my head in the way I sensed it, and frame it in the best organized and condensed manner on to a page that was most memorable and comprehensive to me. My willingness to write, or “show my work”, as was always demanded of me, just wasn’t there, and from that I think I suffered greatly in such a way that I was always reticent, reluctant, reserved, made to feel embarrassed, about expressing any form of creativity at all through the written word or graphics for the longest time. I was no dullard, there was lots of thinking going on; but I was always embarrassed with my poor organizational ability of trying to sort it out on paper. Capturing thoughts through note taking was like trying to catch wriggling live fish with soapy hands. I improved a lot over the years, but my journey to get better at it has been a very independent and solitary one, and I missed the most critical of years of when what I know now would have served me better at an earlier time. I’m trying to actively compensate for that even today.

This all brings me now to making a concerted effort at learning something that encompasses serving me as a means of approaching efficient minimalism, enhancing my productivity, and being a creative pastime. Currently, I’m immersing myself in the craft of bullet journaling (or BuJo* for short)¹. Like most of my hobbies and pastimes, it is nerdy thing that is a nice blend of aesthetics that pleases the senses, and orderly precision that gets mathematical, scientific, and data oriented. What I gain from doing it is a clearer snapshot of how my mind works while figuring out goal-oriented objectives. One thing I’m noticing is that there is a great and drastic schism in the quality in my handwriting between the floodlight mind (cursive, observing and fervent collecting a vast array of thoughts instantaneously) and my spotlight mind (block printed, mindfully focusing and methodically organizing them on paper, without the pressure of time and other stressful distractions). Comparing the two is seeing my brain operating and functioning in two different levels, or existing on two entirely different worlds, for each process. I wonder if there is name for the weird psychological anomaly to describe this huge difference between each modality. Examples provided.

My manic, brain-on-fire,
"conspitated looking" as one
of my friends once called it,

cursive writing vs.

My relaxed and focused self

block printing

My goal with this pastime is to get a journal formatted and formulated with templates for the

One template I designed that I may 

use for seasonal tasks. I couldn't

 find anything like this in a stationary 

store. Custom made is the way to go!

remainder of this year and the entire coming new year. What will I do with it all? Well, to automate some plans without the actual need for technical automation; to make cybernetic changes and adjustments without the cyberspace. I’m not trying to think like a machine, but I am trying to enhance my own recording and processing of stuff in much the same way that computers do: more effort to taking a small codified, point/mark, or bit of info to record and ramming it through a formatted program or function to filter out a result. Pixilating points (or customized bullets) to track data is a simple and effective way to record progress. The gist of this being investing in time to structure a perfect (for me) format now so that I can waste very little time and material for recording stuff later. Minimal effort through simple coding that can lead to big results. There is stuff to enter that is not as simple as purely numerical, or a yes/no, true/false, 0/1,

kinds of data. Some stuff, of course, is trackable and traceable only on a spectrum, or layers of spectra, or else needs a full out verbal explanation. The modular nature of this system allows for this too. I’m most interested see what kind of artistic infographics I’ll be able to create and incorporate as well. I want to see if I can progress from being crude to making the great leap ahead of being . . . slightly less crude with my graphical talents. Most of the detailed subjects that I will be recording, and tracking, are too personal to post here. However, I will disclose the broader general reasons for this new objective:

• Shifting from Day to Night Mode – Someday, I hope not too soon yet, I will be transitioning to doing night shifts. It will be a major upheaval for my body and mind to adapt to, with phases of insomnia assured to come; my working memory being the worse off casualty due to that. Hence, I’ll have to get into the habit of writing things down more often to not lose track of things. Also, having lists of things to work through eliminates the burdensome and torturous task of having to make decisions in such a state (or suffering consequences of making bad decisions in that way, read further below).
  
• Total Schedule Reorganization - There then must be a major reorganization of my schedule for my daily activity, have a productive rhythm to my day; to conserve my energy, and my social life and relationships outside of work. 
  
• Monitoring Health – Another offshoot of switching to nights is needing to actively check myself over for signs of physical deterioration due to the odd hours and unnatural rhythm of wakefulness. Knowing and marking the ideal time to exercise, and what and when to eat during this (mal)adjustment period is critical also, since “breakfast” kind of doesn’t work (doesn’t feel right) as a meal option in mid-afternoon. Alcohol consumption periods are things to be mindfully reckoning with too. What gets measured gets mastered.
  
• Impulse Grounding – One of the things I have noticed after long bouts of insomnia is the poor ability to make sound decisions. The likelihood of acting on impulse rather than think things through rises significantly. For example, this is especially bad when I want to commit to a minimalist lifestyle, but then act on a reckless spending spree for impractical things after too little sleep. BuJo is a way to do a brain dump and check your thoughts outside yourself, with some frame of order, to analyze and weigh pros and cons. At the very least, the very act of doing this is a much cheaper alternative of using one’s time rather than falling into an impulsive habit of mindless consumption of whatever it is that one could possibly become addicted to.
  
• Cheap Hobby – It only needs: a writing instrument of your preference, and a good quality dot

  

  My entire Bullet Journaling kit.

  (or grid) paged journal for the basics. For refined line forming for edging and bordering and such, a cheap geometry set from a dollar store works. Additional lettering stencils and templates can be found cheap in an arts and craft shop, or even in a dollar store. Just engage the imagination, and that’s it. A minimalist’s dream come true! Very portable, and it doesn’t need a battery for power (except maybe just a good source of caffeine). It’s a big step upward from an adult colouring book anyway, and far more practical to use as well.
  
• Veering Away from Toxic Social/News Media – Simply substituting a bad use of time for a better, more constructive, one. I will have a genuinely more enriching time working on a means to sort my own life’s issues, and creating my own viable solutions for approaching problems and goals than thinking and believing, that during these turbulent politically charged times of the election season, that any government or other social institution, is going to be genuinely interested in doing that for me. It’s my time to opt out of indiscriminately spending too much time and attention on negative news and social media during these times of waiting for our nation’s federal election coming this October, and the bloody ridiculous circus of the still 454 remaining days of campaigning until the American election. Working on my own betterment through my journals will be a nice retreat away from all this.

The most satisfying and enriching thing about using BuJo as an analogue system of note taking and calligraphy²: purposely taking a plain word and page space and embellishing it such as to make it so strikingly elegant and distinctly vivid enough that it becomes impossible to ignore. Imagine then how much more powerful it would look when it is applied to a whole written thought or idea. Goals are made to appear to have an esteemed meaning, as truly worthy goals should. It somehow makes your own ideas and listed tasks and duties appear more alive/animated. Even the duller things on a to do list can then look like they could be integral parts of some overall grand adventure.

A potential syllabus list

with flipped open pages

to record book titles

journaling is the chance and choice to be liberally creative and expressive with stylish lettering and artwork in one’s journal, thus further stimulating and empowering one to use the entire brain; not just the analytical and logical left hemisphere. I really believe there is some weight to this as a benefit, adding artful flourishes through doodles, and calligraphy.

I’m coming closer to understanding why monks in the medieval era were charged with the tasks of illuminating pages, making copies of calligraphic manuscripts, and other such scrivenery. Apart from being just merely literate, to do such a job well very much requires and demands a deeply focused, disciplined, and meditative mind. It can be very relaxing. However, I’m certainly not a monk. The best advice I could give as a novice for starting a page template is just to dive right into it. It is 100% guaranteed that it will be imperfect at the start, making lots of mistakes in your initial formatting, lettering, and page section alignment. So, once that is all done, set it aside for a long while, have a drink or two, then come back and review it, and then be totally relentless, ruthless, and absolutely merciless with editing it, and redo it until you get the right design and style that really satisfies you. You are allowed be your own harshest critic since you are going to be the only one interacting with this material; you have no one to please but yourself by taking such a measure.

The first mess . . .

. . . then the final product. Custom made and adapted for a coding 

matrix system unique and personal to me, and again, 

it can't be found in any regular stationers shop.

I have nothing more to include with this entry, except for this last thought from a quote by the author of my guidebook:

“Each Bullet Journal becomes another volume in the story of your life. Does it represent the life you want to live? If not, then leverage the lessons you've learned to change the narrative in the next volume.”
― Ryder Carroll, The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future

*- I like Bujo because sounds more to me like some unique, Zen-based, Japanese term for some sort of work ethic discipline, like kaizen.

1. The initial resource I used was The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. I solidified the reason why I decided to undertake this; after that though, I’ve been finding a multitude of ideas for personalization on Pinterest.

2. I’m not ashamed to say, as a guy, that I love the artform of calligraphy. Before you scoff and think by default that it’s a sissy craft to do, consider this: the most instrumental class that Steve Jobs said he ever took (before he dropped out of college) which he said had been the most influential one for the inception of the Mac computer wasn’t a software programming class, wasn’t a computer science or engineering class; it was a calligraphy class. In a roundabout way, the practice of it forced him to see things differently through the elegance of design, and natural forms and ease of interface that made one want to engage with using a computer. Proper design is powerful stuff!

Abstention Project 3: March – The Carb Omissions

“The cardiologist's diet: If it tastes good, spit it out.” - Author unknown

Prelude: March was so named to honour and commemorate Mars, the Roman god of war. This month is my time to get ready for a battle ahead … and there’s nothing sweet about preparing for it … quite literally in the context of this next mission – or “omission” rather.

The main objective, the ultimate one really, is fighting to get back the runner’s form that I used to have. It was my reflection of my Bond-self: the pinnacle of the best physical shape that I feel I’ve ever been in. Not only that, it was part in parcel of becoming my best mentally as well (focus, clarity, calmness, taming anxiety, ability to sleep/being restful). I started skiing more intensively last month to strengthen my legs, loosen my joints, but most importantly, to recondition my lungs and increase their efficiency. Now I’m looking forward to start running again, and to regain that capacity for it. The problem with the month of March for this region is of course the weather being so erratically inclement and schizophrenic outside a lot of the time, and it wavers wildly into many extremes: from giant dumps of snow, harsh regressions to cold snaps some days, followed by thawing that makes icy patches; all are most unfavourable for presenting risks for wiping out and falls, and getting joint damage or worse. I can’t set myself up for any risk of internal bleeding anymore either. Before I could start running a few odd years ago, I did a lot of passive weight loss through other solutions before I even hit the trails and track, as to avoid putting extra stress on my hips and knees and risking injury before I actually started running. I thought I should pull the same trick this time around, hoping that a few extra years of age since last time won’t be a hindrance. There is the Ketogenic Diet which I could have enacted, which is super strict and forbidding for sugar and carb consumption, but that is more ideal for bodybuilders who are bulking up with muscle as well as shredding fat. It is not a great help to anyone trying to build up activity endurance. Some carbohydrates are a definite must for that unfortunately. So, the method I used for this was the Slow-Carb Diet¹. 

Of all reduction diets I tried, the Slow-Carb method worked most splendidly for me to shed off weight. I can’t remember the exact amount of mass I lost, but I did go down two pants sizes within four weeks. It was undeniable that cutting out excess sugar and carbs did the trick, with a strategically placed cheat day* to boast my metabolism to keep the momentum of it going. Cheat days also coincide with my most intense days for cardio exercise and working out with other exercise, so there is some balance struck there. To be crudely accurate, it made excess fat drop away from me like shit from a tall cow. However, the fact that I didn’t/couldn’t continue the Slow-Carb Plan just indicates that it wasn’t so easy for me to stick to and maintain. I found that giving up sugar and starch is an extremely tough action to commit to, especially when trying to be mindful of maintaining a modest food budget. While cleaning out closets back in January, I found my old notes and spreadsheet charts for the introductory fitness plan that set me on the right course before I could take off running that eventually led to me on a course to my personal physical best several years ago. Hence, along with the carb omission challenge, I’m also actively reverting to the Craig Plan to strengthen both muscle and joints. No, not the stupid Jenny Craig diet plan; I’m talking about the Daniel Craig fitness plan. All for the same reasons for when it was first executed several years ago: same height/same age motivators, minimal need for a gym or special equipment for some exercises, and minimal effective dosage advantage (see link: My Celebrity Fitness Role Model). It’s a body form that’s not too bulky, and yet not too lean, plus it just looks like good utilitarian piece of equipment that can endure, take a beating, and spring back and recover well afterward considering its particular count of years, which is really the most practical thing I should be aiming for given my recent history of health/injury issues**.

For myself, excess sugar and carbs is the most consumed, potentially addictive substance, of all my vices, even though I’m not want you’d typically call a “sweets person” compared to others. Sugar (and refined carbohydrates) is far worse than alcohol in some respects in that people of all ages have freer access to sugar and refined carbohydrates than to alcohol, and it is so pervasive and hidden in so much of our processed food that we eat it unwittingly all the time. It is why I needed more time to research and plan (with a greatly revised grocery list) for this challenge than I did with giving up alcohol last month (Abstention Project 2: February – Temperance). In terms of the count of diagnoses, excess sugar is actually the bigger culprit for so many more metabolic diseases than those caused by excess alcohol. 

Mission: A month of eliminating all refined carbohydrates from my dietary regimen. This includes sugars, (white) starches, and high glycemic index carbohydrates, which means not eating food or products containing the following ingredients:

·         All-purpose and other highly refined flours

·         Sugar (white, brown, and all forms of it in between)

·         Honey

·         Maple Syrup

·         Molasses

·         Fructose (which includes most fruits and berries)

·         Dextrose

·         Maltose

·         Sucrose 

·         Malto-dextrose

·         Lactose (Milk)

·         Pasta and noodles

·         Rice and rice flour products

·         Potatoes

·         Beets

·         Corn Products (including popcorn, cornstarch, and corn syrup)

·         Sweetened alcoholic beverages

·         Bacon, ham, and other sugar (dextrose)-cured deli meats

·         Meat Jerky

·         Gravad Lax, Imitation Crab and Lobster, and other sugar-cured fish products (also full of Sorbitol)

·         Processed snack foods, candy, and other confectionary items

·         Pop, kvass, and any other sweetened carbonated drinks (all forms, including diet sodas)

·         Anything else canned and preserved in syrups

·         Artificial sweeteners of all kinds (Aspartame, Sorbitol, etc.) 

Exceptions:

·         The Slow-Carb diet allows for some strategically placed cheat days within the program: 1 out of every seven to be exact, where you can go wild and eat anything you want, including some sugary starchy food. It actually does something to rev up the metabolism, so you burn up even more weight as a bonus. I opt to make my cheat days for Saturday, and March this year is great because it has five Saturdays in it. However, I think I’ll only exploit the privilege for only four Saturdays. I reserve March 10^th (a care-free night to spend with someone special, to celebrate her return home), March 17^th (St. Patrick’s Day, when I’d love to indulge in a pint or two of Guinness), and March 24^th (a dinner theatre night, with the chance to enjoy some birthday cake with my Mom), and of course Easter weekend is just paved with to many sugar-laden landmines to avoid.

·         The only drinkable calories I will be using for this foray is one small glass (150 mL) of unsweetened grapefruit juice, daily in the morning. Its purpose is for stimulating some helpful liver enzymes***.  

Reasons, Facts, and Figures:

·         Fact 1: Data from the dietary history (according to US statistics) has shown that humans have on average eaten 4 lbs of sugar per person per year starting in the 1700s, rising steadily in annual consumption right up until this decade, which averages about 180 lbs per person per year. That’s a 4400% increase between the amounts of 1700 and of today.

·         Fact 2: Drinking one can of pop each day for a year puts an additional 22.68 Kg (50 lbs) of consumed sugar into one’s body annually.

·         Fact 3: If the current trend in sugar/carb consumption continues, the cost for treating diabetes alone could possibly defund all our healthcare dollars by the year 2026 (only eight years from now!). 

·         Fact 4: Once a cancer cell develops, the best way to make that thing grow and spread is to feed it with a diet high in sugar.

Substitution Materials, Activities, and Alternate Behaviours:

·         Swapping out potatoes, rice, pasta, and bread with pulses and legumes (lentils and beans). Yes, there are carbs in them (complex ones though), and the protein and fibre content in them makes using them worthwhile.

·         More vegetables of all kinds, except starch-rich root vegetables.

·         Going nuts - as in real nuts (almonds, pecans, cashews, et al. – all unsalted) for snack food

·         Automate meal plans, and keep meal options limited to a just few simple selections 

·         Cache away all sugar, flour, bread, pastry to the bottom of my deep freeze; knowing that if I ever crave them, there is a lot of extra bother ahead to access them.

·         No drinking my calories (water, tea, black coffee). Drinking alcohol is permissible, but limited to weekends, more wine/less beer)

·         Most awesome tool for this project: I found a greatly discounted vegetable spiralizer to make zoodles (zucchini noodles) to substitute for my grain pasta.

Feedback Mechanisms:

·         The bathroom scale and a measuring tape

·         Looser clothing

·         Jarv Elite™ Bluetooth Smart Band Fitness Tracker

·         The My Fitness Pal App, to gain a fuller idea of carb and sugar content when I’m composing recipes at home. 

·         Improved endurance with my other exercise, and other physical activity

Progress:

·         Mar 1^st – Mar 7^th – So far, the process has been committed to. Getting up to eat breakfast in a timely manner (and one absolutely needs 30 gm of protein for the first meal of the day) was the hardest habit to change. I’ve been so sleep deprived for most of the winter, that forcing myself to commit to the task of preparing breakfast seemed to be a great strain. However, after feeling the punishment that a body goes through without doing it through a drastic drop in blood sugar, I’ve been more diligent to see it through. Headaches occurred; thankfully not to the point of migraine level. The biggest hurdle to overcome is finding food at work that isn’t contra to the plan. The super dump of snow that happened on Mar 5^th thwarted a plan to try a little outdoor running, and ironically, there was too much snow to go skiing. The trails were perfect, but the parking lot to the course I use couldn’t be accessed without a 4x4 vehicle with winter tires. The seething anger I had for that day alone probably amped up my metabolism a great deal. I compensated with my exercise through shoveling and moving the ridiculous amount of accumulated snow.

·         Mar 8^th- Mar 14^th – I kept to the plan in an orthodox manner, eating and drinking nothing with added sugar, or other carbs. My cheat day wasn’t even that much of a stray from the plan. Breakfast had just bacon and some sugar in the coffee, Lunch was Dim Sum in which I avoided the breaded and filled buns, and supper was homemade pizza(s) and some wine. As much as I could have devoured an entire one of the two I made, my appetite was shifted to other non-edible things. I did an amplified body core workout Saturday and then amped up skiing a bit for the day after, reaching a new personal record for skiing since the embolisms (emboli) occurred.

·         Mar 15^th – Mar 21^st – Measurements and fittings on the 15^th showed that I’m down by one pants’ size since the beginning of the month. There was too much thawing happening to allow for skiing. So, the plan switched over to try to run now that I shed some poundage. However, dealing with icy patches is still a treacherous affair, even without slipping and falling. After such a long lapse, my first two trials of 4km (Thursday) and then 6 km (Friday) have been harsh to say the least. My legs have been seizing up rather quickly given that there is no simple flow or continuity (like skiing has) throughout the course when given instances of being forced to react instantly to gear down the pace and breaking momentum while trying to establish better footing when switching surface to surface contact, (ice to concrete to pavement to ice, etc.). It might have been to do easier years ago, but this switching up is especially (and evidently) taxing to stubborn old muscle memory. I was very sore and cramped on St. Patrick’s Day (Mar 17^th). Thankfully it was a cheat day, and thence comes the amazing healing properties of beer. Of all the remedies (aside from proper rehydration) that ever helped me avoid brutal cramping after workouts, beer is the chief among them. It seems to go deep into my muscles and helps to nourish and loosen them up better. The sweet coaxing from my “sleep” coach helped to make me recover better too. Another thing to note about this cheat day was that I really had no strong craving for sugar itself. I thought I might really go wild, but my only carb fixes for that day was an English muffin (refined flour, probably sacrilegious to eat on an Irish holiday), Gruyere cheese shavings in an omelet (mild lactose) with bangers (mild, with dextrose), and a peach with skyr for breakfast (fructose, low lactose), rice noodles for lunch, a couple pieces of leftover pizza from last week, and two beers). I relished more in the fact that there was just an easement of not having to actively review the carb/sugar content of whatever it was that I was eating than being tuned into being really obsessed to consume anything sweet or starchy. Sunday was too beautiful to avoid a run outside; conditions were perfect. My legs were still a bit crampy, but a 5 km commitment was made. I stuck to an automated plan for the rest of the week. My pants are beginning to sag badly and are practically falling off me. I’ll have to either dye my hair and pretend to be a teenager, or tighten up the belts and drawstrings

·         Mar 22^nd – Mar 31^st – Well, the last 10-day stretch is here, sort off. The runs outside have been postponed due to another wallop from a spring snow storm. I’m relegated to use a treadmill now (I hate bloody treadmills, I need to feel myself moving through space), or compensate with more weight training. The one in my building is on the fritz again, and I’ll have to pay admission to use some other one elsewhere. I may just return to skiing if the trails aren’t slushy. I am noticing that I really don’t have a big craving for anything thought of as sugary per se as I had expected. Or it seems at least that this progressive move of being weaned from it has indeed put a waning to such cravings. But I do get hankerings for things like bread and deli meat most strongly out of all the things on the taboo list. My cheat day breakfast was an exquisite plating of English muffins layered with homemade gravad lax****, crowned with poached eggs. Sugar somehow has an inflated potency in taste for me now. When I use sugar in my coffee***** on my cheat days, the regular dosage that I used to do now seems far too intense for sweetness, and I’ve cut back my addition of sugar to my weekend coffee by two thirds. I’m also discovering things that are delights to have as snacks that are fulfilling, even decadent, which don’t necessitate carb intake. Fresh oysters (sea oysters, not prairie oysters!), for example, now that they are in season and cheap(er) and now that I’ve learned how to shuck them properly, kissed with a squeeze of lemon. I’ll have something like that over a bag of chips any day. The temperature has plummeted drastically since the last Wednesday of the month; and is expected to not get above freezing until the first week of April has passed. Running far in the cold has been brutal for the lungs for these final days of the month (-20 wind chill on Thursday afternoon’s trial), especially when they were just starting to become acclimated to warmer temperatures. Friday`s run almost resulted in a serious wipe out on ice that put a cramp in my leg. The last day of the month was a cheat day, and a great day to reunite with faces from my past that have I’ve lapsed too long with seeing. I’m thankful that my old friends are doing well and are looking healthy. Celebrating Easter was a welcome reprieve too.

Violations (Penalties): The penalty is simply just a straight up addition of mileage or exercise I needed to perform to practically rid myself of those extra consumed calories from the accidental, or incidental, intake of refined starch/sugar.

Final Words: The result for the month was a loss of 7.26 kg (16.1 lbs). I don’t believe that it was as much as that last time I did this seven years ago, but I’ll blame some aging for that. I still have a way to go to get into optimal form: by a loss of that mass, plus even a little more. April will begin just as cold and miserable as March is ending. I`ll be extending this challenge into the next month as well, barring a few vacation days early in the month where I`ll be a little more indulgent with feasting to celebrate another reunion of sorts. The worse thing to deal with was the loss of bread and noodles/pasta in my diet. I’m quite dependent on sandwiches it seems. The bonus is though that I realize that I didn’t have a lot of taboo foods around the house to begin with, and whatever I needed to sustain this challenge was minimal. On a scale of 1 to 10 though, I rank it on a high in terms of difficulty it terms of performance and commitment (8.5). I only faltered once, and it was on Good Friday, near the end of the month (I sampled some cinnamon buns). One thing that I experienced through the middle two weeks of the month was an accentuated lack of energy. I consulted with a co-worker who is also an expert on planning these types of reduction diets, and his feedback from what I shared with him was that I`ve been eating too little. Hopefully, I`ll be able to amp up the mileage and strength building throughout next month; the goal being to make a personal best for either the 5 or 10 km race for the Saskatchewan Marathon in May, sticking to the programs to make the River Run Marathon later in the summer. The greater ambition though, not linked with a formal race, is to collect bridge crossings again. This time, Saskatoon has more bridges than ever, and I have yet to map out what exactly that distance is for crossing all seven (eight later this year) pedestrian accessible bridge decks in this city.

Bibliography and Resources:

1.       Ferriss, Timothy. (2010). The 4-Hour Body. New York: Crown Archetype

*- The added advantage of this system with this one cheat day per week is that it helps banish a sense of deprivation. If I have a craving for something, all I have to do to note it on my cheat day list and save it as a possible menu idea for Saturday.

**- Daniel Craig’s own list and history of injuries he sustained just for preparing and filming for the role of James Bond is very extensive, and the timelines he had to recover from them were impressively shorter than one would expect.

***- Grapefruit juice is a notoriously powerful and tricky substance of the world of pharmaceuticals: there is a myriad of medications that contraindicate with it, even with modest consumption. One needs to be careful with it while on prescription medication.

****- Last week, I learned and discovered from my DNA test that a larger component of my genome that I thought was stemmed from heritage in the Britain Isles is actually Scandinavian (25%). The flippant joking remark I made in my last Christmas blog entry in 2017, is actually true! I learned how to make gravid lax long before I knew this about my genome, and perhaps it explains why I have a craving for such stuff once in a while.  

*****- I separate my coffee drinking activity to drinking it just black while I’m at work; using sugar and cream on days when I’m not. A personal crotchet I use to be mindful of separating business from pleasure; not related to any diet plan.

Abstention Project 1: January - The Shopping Moratorium

“If men liked shopping, they'd call it research.” - Cynthia Nelms

“A bargain is something you can't use at a price you can't resist.” - Franklin P. Jones

Prelude: The post-Christmas holiday spending hangover is a good enough excuse to allow one to commit to doing this project first. Admittedly, I don’t really dig shopping to begin with, so it’s probably the easiest and most fitting one to have for the inaugural challenge of the dozen. On January 8^th I realized that I went the whole first week of the year without doing any extra shopping beyond essentials, so I thought I’d just continue for the rest of the month. The crappy winter weather of January doesn’t inspire or motivate one in moving too far away from the comfort of home either, it becomes easier to opt not to go through any trouble to frequent any shopping centre, or anywhere else where one can spend money, and thus makes it easier take on a personal crusade of anti-consumerism. Along with the (futile) measure of trying to avoid contact and exposure to people who were stricken with colds and influenza, and trying to avoid getting sick myself, I also put myself on a push back against covetous greed and affluenza.

Mission: To spend absolutely no money on extra things apart from my regular scheduled bill payments for the month of January.

Exceptions:

·         Fuel (only enough of the estimated amount rationed out to keep my car running until the end of the month)

·         Medical/Operational emergency expenses (if need be): e.g. cold/flu remedies*, car repairs/roadside assistance, household disasters, potential vet bills.

·         Redeeming collected points for purchases from my customer loyalty cards, and only on items absent from the home and on discount offer (an arbitrary value exploited, but no actual money used)

·         Using funds that were already allotted and loaded on a reloadable credit card (less than $50, used for one single indulgence of an online ticket purchase, it doubly served as some means to reunite with someone special (even if was for just a brief while). Somethings are worth bending the rules a bit for.

Reasons, Facts, and Figures:

·         Reason 1 – Always follow the money first: if you want to get a real sense of all other possible wasteful/destructive habits you might have that you need to change. You really have to see the categorical breakdown of where and how your finances, and thus consequently, your time and energy are potentially being squandered. This is what is called the Latte Factor¹ by one author I’ve been resourcing.

·         Reason 2 – Actively avoiding shopping for everything shows you (sometimes harshly) the reality of what you tend to covet as a consumer.

·         Reason 3 – Careless wastage makes me angry; I need an exercise like this to correct any fault in contributing to it that I may have. Mindless shopping and over-consumption creates waste.

·         Personal Fact 1 – My biggest purchasing sins: (cheaper) technology, as in poorer quality computers and peripherals, the kind that goes obsolete quicker than average. The kind bought at a bargain at clearance sales, but then have hard drives that fry out quickly, or generally lack capability in terms of speed and memory. If had I invested just a couple hundred dollars more at the time to get a higher quality/capability premium PC unit, I would have had something that would have lasted me at least 80% longer, plus I would have sidestepped the need of the extra expenses of one or two more cheap-ass PCs, or other components to replace. That’s the difference between being cheap and being frugal. I noted that as I was cleaning out and sorting stuff from my closets, I shocked myself by how much of this useless junk I have still lying around, plus all the extra useless cables and cords, plus the packaging they came in. At least I’m purging it now to go get processed at a better proper recycling facility, rather than pitching it out earlier at a time when it all would have went straight to a landfill. Another wasteful excess I’m seeing in my analysis is alcohol. I purchase too much of it for someone who brews his own beer, and for someone who doesn’t drink as often any more (see next month). My least wasteful expense category: clothing. My need to buy new clothes is decidedly lower than average. This leads to the subject of trash bound fashion. Perhaps this is the better coinage of the word trashion. We should be more like Jacobim Mugatu from Zoolander and try to capitalize on it instead of wasting it.

·         Random Fact 1 – Several thousands of tons of used clothing that are being donated to aid agencies and end up getting shipped to Africa, often end up just being incinerated or buried in their landfills there. The fact that the poorest of the poor don’t even have use for this amount of retired clothing is something to make you shake your head at for this surplus of dross. If that’s not enough to piss you off about this manner and level of wastage through reckless consumption, the next point is another fact that might further put me at risk for dissuading some from ever wanting to make any other charitable donation to Africa (specifically, the Republic of Congo) . . .

·         Random Fact 2 – One of the worst cultural examples I’ve found about fucked up priorities based on affluence-oriented conspicuous consumerism: despite living in one of the poorest regions of Africa (more than 45% of them living below their nation’s poverty line), and receiving charity in donated clothing, many Congolese men spend what amounts to more than a year’s income (up to 3000 euros/around 4500 CAD) for designer fashions like Armani and Gaultier suits, and parade around like a bunch of peacock dandy boys. And it’s not something confined to a single corrupt despot in power and their cronies and lackies, but extending to any of the men there, regardless of what occupation or social status each one has, who really don’t or wouldn’t have that kind of money at their disposal to afford this. The fact that social corruption is so rampant there assures that many of these high end fashion garments are acquired by disreputable means (theft, extortion, bribery, etc.), all for the sake of putting on airs.*** This all part of cultural institution there is known as Les Sapeurs, abbreviated from the French name from  “Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes (or “the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People” in English). Spending that kind of money to pretend being some sort of aristocrats while most likely depriving their wives and kids of food and other life essentials to do so, is one of the most depraved, disgusting, and atrocious marks of pompous, self-centred arrogance there is. It may be a holdover from whatever animistic religions they may practice there, where relics, fetish and material objects and charms are highly prized. I guess it might be a move to at least have a pretty suit to be buried in, since the average male life expectancy there is only something like 47 years. Once they are dead, it is reputed that these suits can be stolen by grave robbers soon after burial before the material gets ruined by putrefaction. Coming to a close second in terms of covetous, greed-driven, stupidity and “keeping up with the Joneses” lemming march, I find examples here closer to home. I’m talking about many of the oil patch workers around AB and SK, specifically those who dumped and sank so much of their money, and abused credit, on high ticket toys and other rapidly depreciating assets that they now can’t sell and are getting repossessed, and then had nerve to complain that they were so hard done by and “suffering” when the downturn in oil prices came and job losses happened. No tears shed for them here. According to Stats Canada, Alberta is supposed to be the richest province in this confederation, and yet has the highest household debt levels out of all the provinces of the nation compared to the national average. Sadly, Saskatchewan is doing as badly over the years in following that trend and trying to keep up with Alberta it that respect since the oil boom hit.

Substitution Materials, Activities, and Alternate Behaviours:

·         Using my stash of frozen food instead of buying more groceries, thus avoiding creating and collecting more leftovers

·         Using my food allowance at work and eating at home, no need for restaurants*

·         Instead of filling hangers, drawers, and closets, I’ve been clearing them out and reclaiming some space for myself

·         Drinking only what already remains of my brewing stock and whatever was left in my liquor cabinet (which flows into the next project)

·         Other free entertainment from multiple avenues, including finding and claiming some free collectable books from the give away table in my building

·         Exercise in my reclaimed office space, and now hopefully some Nordic skiing after work if the weather can warm up

·         Investing mental energy into learning/practicing other languages

·         More research on cryptocurrencies and investing

·         Outlining and planning for more upcoming projects for the course of the remainder of the year

Feedback Mechanisms:

·         My chequebook app. It graphed out all my spending categories and gave me an honest breakdown of what my good and bad habits were. It also showed me where savings were made through this trial.

·         My count of freezer containers of leftovers emptied (17)

·         The cleared balances on my scheduled bill and credit card statements (no biggie here, that would have been done regardless of this project)

Progress: I already have had the fastidious habit of tracking all my income and expenses long before starting this project. It’s a good foundational habit to have in place, and of course continue. However, this occasion was one of the rare few times that I’ve actually seen the weight of what my own personal inefficiencies and deficits were in terms of acquiring needless excesses. Starting the year with this project was especially important, as I said, to reckon what other things I could stand to bring under control through monthlong forbearances throughout this year. All in all, after assessing all this stuff and if gender roles were reversed, the verdict is that I’d actually be someone’s heavenly ideal of a very “cheap date” when I compare what I like to do with my free time, and what it costs for me to actually do such stuff.

Violations (Stakes and Penalties): The penalty for making any unnecessary purchases – time added on to this moratorium to commit to for each needless purchase made. A full day for each one. My 31-day abstention period for shopping really culminated into 33. The two purchases I made during the month of January that didn’t qualify as an absolute necessity: a purchase of some 50/50 tickets at a sporting event. The other was an admission fee to a fitness facility, with more time used the steam room as therapy than to actually work out. Not huge purchases, both were around $10.00, but violations all the same.

Rewards and Final Words: The material prize for me for committing to and completing this was a couple of new shirts, since I rarely shop for clothing. They are certainly not Armani or Gaultier, but they are what’s practical, cool, and comfortable for me. Cleared space, and some renewed gumption to get up and move again was another bonus. Reconnecting with frugality, listing and being cognisant about more than a hundred different ways I can spend time fruitfully without dropping a dime is always good to do too. Upon seeing a botched merger with two loyalty programs here, I reclaimed all my accumulated points afterward at the grocers before things got worse. This post-trial grocery trip ended with me spending only my loyalty points plus $25.00 secured me with enough food for my home to last for more than two months if I plan on process it painstakingly and wisely**. Another thing was managing to squirrel away a little bit of extra money to place into a reasonable risk investment, I’ll see later if that really will turn out to be rewarding or not. A shaky start, but I did give myself a few grey areas, where I could have exploited more chances to rationalize and really sabotage myself. The fact that I didn’t do that to the max is a success in and of itself. I’d say that overall I did OK for this first abstention challenge. For February’s project though, there won’t be any such flexibility like that at all. Wait and see until then.

Bibliography and Resources:

1.       Bach, David. The Automatic Millionaire (Canadian Edition), 2003, Doubleday Canada

*- Which includes the natural ones, since I can’t do a lot of over the counter pharmaceuticals any more; chicken soup being one of them, and there is no other more potent decongestant remedy form of it that I know of than whatever is in Vietnamese broth. I haven’t the time to craft it, nor can I make it as perfectly or as cheaply as any one of my favourite pho joints here in town. Getting some was the one restaurant expense I could justify making; a lesser evil than a drug-form remedy with stupefying side-effects, or possible contraindications. Without it, I’m sure I would have been a big snotty mess for more than a week.

**- Cheaper yet, and for a longer duration of supply yet if I didn’t buy any meat. More on this down the road.

***- Sure, there may be more notable and visible examples of over-the-top flamboyant, materialistic, vanity-laden, and ultimately unjustifiable and unwarranted displays, and useless squandering of wealth in places like Dubai, and other wealthy regions in the oil-rich Arab world: like sports car traffic jams, building 7 star luxury hotels and super huge malls that only very few can shop in, and the competitions of who can erect the tallest phallic symbol dessert tower, but these are people who actually already provide for their families and have the excess money to throw around and to sink into such bullshit.

Multiphasic (Blessings)

The second week of this new year is approaching its end. It is the weekend of Malanka: the Orthodox(Ukrainian) New Year according to the Julian calendar. For me, it marks the official end of all mid-winter holiday feasting, at least those days that I’m familiar with, and not too soon either. There is no crueler and more brutally honest critique about how swinishly gluttonous one has been throughout the end of December/beginning of January than the discovery of how red the skin along the waistline turns, and how crushed one’s gonads feel, after trying to slip on and sport a pair of the tighter jeans that one owns in one’s wardrobe for the first time after the holiday season. It triggered a new motivator (see further below), but I digress. It’s so early, and I’m still trying to fix my bearing. This entry writing exercise has no fixed topic, and is as erratic and multiphasic as my periods of sleep have been. Throughout this second week of the year I was handed a mixed bag of blessings and curses; more of the former than the latter, thankfully.

I won’t get too specific about the curses except that they involved trying to muddle through toxic environments, which included: being almost overcome by fumes, and bracing for what I was suspecting to be a vermin infestation. Thankfully, the latter issue didn’t actually end up manifesting itself, and I could put my paranoia to rest.

My blessings were realizing that the stuff I put effort into learning a whole year ago didn’t just simply evaporate and disappear into the ether. I’ve been daring myself to use the Swedish and German I learned to read correspondence and interact with other new contacts by text. No one has reported to me yet that I’ve been too flawed or incomprehensible (or they’ve been too kind to say so). The fact that I’ve been cogent enough to remember these languages despite the lapse of their usage (and a fume-fogged mind) amazes me. The jeans issue as mentioned above, was my personal Harajuku moment (see The 4-Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss, page 38). It forced me to recollect what I did when I first primed myself to begin my journey back in the years when I became the fittest I’ve ever been. I realize that I’m actually in a better state of organization now, than when I started way back then, as I’ve been trying to reconfigure and reclaim some space in my office to set up a sensibly useful home gym. My last medical results shown that my lung tissues are now just about completely regenerated, and so I have no excuse to not get back into a regular exercise regimen. First, I must build up my core strength and joint flexibility, especially in the arm I injured back in 2016. Reclaiming and reconfiguring my space is a source of giving me some clarity of vision and purpose, nothing wrong with that, an extra motivator to reorganize other things beyond just this room.

Another bit of a blessing I guess, albeit a bewildering one for me, is for the fact that the New York Times recently listed the top 52 places in the world to visit in 2018, and strangely enough, my city, Saskatoon, was on that list. It made something like number 18 on it, and weirder still is the fact that it was the only Canadian city to appear on that list. If Saskatoon is considered to be such a gem, how bad off are the other places in Canada really? I won’t complain that it appeared in this card deck full of places on this globe that merit a visit. I guess it’s even more of an impressive accolade considering that the dominant buzzword circulating in the news for this week, to describe other places, even though it isn’t even being said outright, is “shithole” (no thanks to the grand poohbah of all idiot US presidents, Trump). Thankfully with this review, Saskatoon has managed to rise above all that. I’m just befuddled though as to the how and why it became selected. I would reckon that their research team obviously didn’t account for the winter months. They cite the Remai art gallery as an attraction; I have yet to see it myself, because I’m saving that visit for company who would genuinely appreciate it with me, so I can’t yet judge based upon that. But if I were asked now what makes Saskatoon an attractive city, I would suggest that wandering the Meewasin valley trails in the summer is the best thing you can do to figure that out for yourself, or visiting the Farmers Market, or else grabbing a coffee and enjoying it outside around the park by the Bess or by the river, or a pint in one of the pubs downtown or on Broadway. It’s quite festive during summer (to offset our all too brutal winters). It’s a bigger city that still feels like a small town, with enough people around who’ve been raised rurally, or remain connected to each other in a down-to-earth, close-knit folksy manner, who help diffuse away the pretentiousness and snobbery of something more urban and edging towards elitism, sided along with a huge multicultural blending that gets along a lot better with this sort of mix than most other places on Earth. For the most part, the people are generally approachable and friendly. The food scene is very diverse for a smaller urban centre. People from out East who come here for the first time generally express surprise at how seemingly cosmopolitan Saskatoon is, with their beliefs dashed by not finding more of a redneck culture being prominent for this place, as what is typically expected by them about Saskatchewan. One point of infamy about Saskatoon though, is its perceived high rate of crime. The city has been rated in the top ten worst Canadian cities for criminal activity for many consecutive years. I argue that Saskatoon actually isn’t that much more harsh or severe for criminal activity over most other cities in Canada. Sure, it’s higher, but not so much as to make it among the worst per capita. It’s just that with the close-knittedness of the community here, citizens here are far less likely to be complacent or dismissive when dealing with, or witnessing, suspicious activity in their neighbourhoods, and so are far more likely to report it, while people in most other larger centres tend to under report actual criminal activity. This naturally skews the crime stats on a higher rate for Saskatoon, I’d even say drastically. The shithole parts of this city (or of any city) is where people under report crime because of the sectors of the population that are intermingled in gang activity, and thus won’t squeal on each other. The police here are awesome too, both in terms of response times and availability, and dealing with most civic problems very tactfully, responsibly, and professionally no matter how trivial or severe on the spectrum. The city isn’t huge, so they can respond faster than bigger centres, and they give attention to calls that cops in larger centres wouldn’t trouble themselves to expend manpower for (and thus not recorded and accounted for in their  statistics). Naturally then, this extra availability and responsiveness of the peace officers here thus generates and facilitates more stats processed for criminal activity. In reality, I feel quite safe here in this city, as opposed to someplace like East Hastings in Vancouver. The Pareto principle also applies to crime stats where it’s figured 80% of criminal activity is done by 20% of a sector of criminals, except here in Saskatoon I’d say that it’s more like 90% of such crime is committed by 10% of the criminal population.

Throughout this week, the best blessing of all of them all was reuniting and reconnecting with someone from my past on a more soulful level. Thank you, you know who you are.