Analog by Night

OK, maybe embedding a youtube link is a cheap waste of an otherwise meaningful and upstanding BLOG, but this minute of Donal Logue is THE best thing MTV ever paid for.

So I was watching my TED Talks and Tony Robinson was up. I was quite
skeptical as to the value of his speech, and still am. I’m not quite
sure what he’s really talking about, passion, needs, fulfillment,
motivation, decisions. There are lots of numbers “six human needs” “3
things to do ____”, “the four ways of ____,” and lots of sorta blanket
statements about human nature. Oh, and every 20 seconds he asks the
audience something super general like “How many people have made a huge
mistake?” He’s quite charming to listen to, if for no other reason
than the sorta schlocky irony of listening to THE most blowhard
self-righteous motivational speaker ever. Is the charm really ironic
though? EEK!

So here’s the mysterious power: I turn it off half because I know I’m
not learning anything interesting, and therefore I’m wasting my time,
but maybe BECAUSE it’s so bad, I do feel motivated to do something
WORTH my time immediately afterwards. So if you were to ask me if I
was motivated by Tony Robbins I’d have to say yes. I feel oddly
tricked, but the truth is I’ve turned him off twice now, and
immediately gone directly into something productive? I guess a part of
it is the language too. He does talk pretty constantly about how easy
it is to make something important happen and blah blah blah. So I get
into this cycle, where I think, oh I know this, yeah I can do that, why
aren’t I doing that now oh yeah because I’m listening to some guy TALK
about it. CLICK (off).

BTW: Hearing Tony Robbins call Al Gore a Son-of-a-Bitch makes it worth it.

So I weighed in at 159.6 this morning!! Admittedly, it is morning, and I ate my last meal around 3pm yesterday, but I’m still quite proud. It’s good motivation to keep up this intense workout schedule I have. I was gonna be happy with a 160 because I’ve been hovering around 162 for some weeks now, but hey, at least for a moment I’ve busted it!! WOOHOO. So kids, that’s diet AND exercise. It fuckin’ works, even for a guy who smoked for 13 years, and quit (for the third time) nearly five weeks ago.

Here’s the new routine that is kickin’ my ass:
4 days a week of an hour or more exercise
including 7 different weight training exercises, 3 core specific ones, and 30 or 40 minutes of cardio (usually running) on alternating days.

My Goal is 155 and fit, but I’ll take fit and toned with whatever weight comes.

What direction do you see her spinning, clockwise, or counterclockwise? I originally saw it turning counter-clockwise, and could only convince myself she might be spinning a different direction if I thought of the plane differently. I imagine a clock, and I imagined the 12 being nearer or further from me, as in the clock facing the ground or the stars, and that sorta convinced me.

But then I stared at the reflection of her foot, long enough to imagine it spinning both directions. Like watching a card spin, and when I re-oriented myself so that I imagined it spinning clockwise I looked back at her whole figure, and it was different. She was now clearly spinning clockwise.

I tried it a few more times, and seemingly at will I could get her to change position.

Here’s the original post I got it from: What Kind of Brain Do You Have?

What I remember begins in da club. I was sitting down in some semi-dining area of a club and Timbaland comes over and sits down by himself near me. It’s odd that he’s by himself, but he is. I end up telling him what a big fan I am, and for some reason telling someone else who notices whats going on, that Timbaland’s album is WAY better than Kanye’s or 50 Cent’s (which I haven’t heard yet btw). We’re chatting, and munching out of a french fry boat, like you’d find in a bowling alley, or ice skating rink, and eventually the entourage of skanks start to roll in; the hangers on. And they’re NOT attractive in the least, although one makes some comment about “getting up on me.” Charming. At this point I notice that a lot of people are wearing black and white horizontally striped shirts of some variant, and I wonder If THAT’s the new style. Mimein’ and profilin’ yo…..(goes quiet).

I tell Timbaland that he’s officially made this the VIP, and he chuckles a little. Eventually he makes to leave, and the girls stay put. Timbaland just wants to be left alone sometimes too. LEAVE TIMBALAND ALONE!!!

I remember seeing an attractive red head singing on tv and thinking that she may have been one of the skanks, but I look back to where they are sitting, and am reaffirmed that it must not be.

The next part is one of those, watching TV, in-the-show, watching TV again dreams. This time though it’s another reality civil service shows, like COPS, or 911 or something.

Someone has gone to a construction site, landfill or quarry, and either jacked a giant truck or released it’s brakes and it’s gaining MASSIVE momentum rolling down this hill.

The plan to stop it is to let it collide with ANOTHER giant truck and a giant earthmover. The road slopes gently down and smoothly up at a 35% (or something) grade up. It’s a sunny day, and the grassy slopes surrounding seem to take away much of the fear of collateral damage associated with the event.

This is gonna be cool.

Somehow I catch the truck from behind before it gets too much momentum and am hanging off the tailgate as it begins to really pick up speed. There doesn’t seem to be a driver.

The truck is really moving downhill now along the road and approaching this absurd roadblock of “first responders” and giant metal heap. (I forgot to mention that because of the grade of the road, the giant earthmover has rolled over and crushed the truck, reducing the efficacy of the roadblock.)

Anyway, the truck begins to veer across the road to the left, off the road and is plowing uphill by it’s momentum! I blame myself for some reason, imagining that my puny body has shifted it’s course the same way shifting your weight changes the course of a shopping cart. Proof again that physics has inconsistent bearing in dreams. Even in the banal.

Well I’ve let go, fell off and now have to climb this steep grade in a hurry, to see what has happened to the truck as it crossed the top of this ridge.

Ok now for a quick weird fact about me and movement in dreams. I can’t ever seem to perform ANY use of force or strength. If it looks hard in the dream, it’s harder than I thought. Which makes me do Magical things to achieve power, physical power. Two events in this dream together, two techniques that I’m going to describe are techniques I’ve used MANY times to get that extra speed or lift I need. At this point, to my dreaming self, it’s no longer amazing.

Technique one: Going up. I use my hands to go up and stay aloft. Even, as in the case of this latest dream, to go up steep hillsides and such. I don’t really use my hands to claw upwards. I use them like little rocket boosters. In this dream I remember putting my back to the dirt, and making my hands into fists with my thumbs out (thumbs up) and putting the requisite focus and tension into my hands and arms. I sort of imagine this invisible energy coming out of the bottoms of my fist, like rocket exhaust, and it pushes me up! This seems like a different take on what I do most of the time, which although it is the same projected energy is more like climbing out of a pool. When you want to go up at first you raise your downward facing hands high, and pull up (think of being underwater at a pool; reaching for the ledge and pulling your whole torso above the water). Once you’re in that position, in space, the air or whatever you can either pull up with one hand again, or simply hold and you’ll be pushed up. It depends on the dream.

Technique two: Running faster. Run like an dog. Literally. Dive at the grass ahead of you, or the carpet, or something to pull on. Pull really hard and fast. Pivoting over your arms fling your legs ahead and dig in with your feet, one or two at a time depending on your skill. Pivot, push, and dive again. Repeat, gain speed. Doesn’t always feel very effective, and it sure is unnatural feeling, but it does seem to give me extra speed over the other running I seem to do, which is frustratingly slow. Slow like running in water. This technique though I’m getting better at, and usually I can outrun people this way, and it gives me a LOT of flexibility to change direction or possibly swing on things like a monkey.

As a child I could run REALLY fast by just leaning over further, I guess I thought at some point that this was progress? I realized this morning, after waking that I’ve been running like this for some time. I gotta wonder if it’s really how apes and monkey run and if I’m subconsciously tapping into some repressed instinct. Ever see the film Altered States?

Back to the dream. Well it turns out there’s a nice suburb on the other side of this fake ridge, and at the bottom of the slope the truck has tumbled to a stop, over someone’s house into their backyard or something. Me and another officer (FBI type, plain clothes with the service jacket) make it down there, and a tall lanky white guy in sweats emerges from the truck. He takes off running, and the officer closes in, but JUST can’t catch him. He’s running with his pistol out in one hand and grabbing at him with the other. I think it’s a Baretta?

I try to catch the guy and fail too. He gets away. The dream becomes a TV show, and I find myself in the kitchen of some house staring up at the TV thinking, “George Lazenby would have caught him.”