Why not be not constantly available? If people know that you’ll return their phone call when you can, they’re more likely to leave a message, then leave you alone until you call back. It comes down to expectations, both yours and others. On your side, if you expect to get an instant notification of each and every email/text/tweet/FB status update/etc – you can. Nobody will think any less of you, unless you check them at the dinner table, in the coffee line, while staggering in front of me when I’m riding my bike, but I digress – And if your friends and family have come to expect instant reactions from you when they reach out, same answer.

Now, here’s the seemingly heretical idea – you can change those expectations. Shut off your pocket e-leash every once in a while. The first time will be the hardest, you may develop the shakes (where your thigh feels like your phone is vibrating against it, even though you left the phone itself at home). Take the dogs for a walk, and pay attention to the dogs. Notice the birds that scurry out of the way when they see you coming. See if you can find the woodpecker you keep hearing on that one corner. Say Hi to a neighbor. Then try leaving it home while you run errands one Saturday. Not the whole day, I’m all about starting with baby steps, hence starting with just a walk and working up from there. Eventually, aim for a full weekend. Call it a Digital Sabbatical and don’t open the computer either. You’ll be amazed how much more rested and ready to tackle the week you’ll be come Monday.

I know a guy who’s put an auto responder on his email that alerts people to the fact that he only checks it twice a day, when he gets to his desk around 9 am, and just before leaving the office at 5.30. His voicemail however says that he will respond ASAP if he happens to miss your call. He set his cell phone so it doesn’t accept text messages, he finds them impersonal. What does this guy do for a living? COO of a tech company.

So, bottom line – No, I don’t think it’s the technologies fault. Technology is a tool that we each choose to use, or not to use, to our advantage. If you choose to carry a smart phone, it’s up to you to know when the appropriate times are to answer it’s notifications and when the best times are to just turn it off. Even the most persistant devices come with a power button, it’s up to each of us to learn how and when to use them.

You thought food was for pleasure, rather than for fuel. Food is fuel for the human body, and that’s the bottom line. That’s not to say you cannot and should not enjoy delicious food all the time. It’s an issue of perspective, and until you adopt the perspective of food being fuel, you will always have eating troubles.

The above quote comes from this article:
25 Reasons Why You’re Still Not Losing Weight

My first comment, go read that article. I’ll wait.

Done, Great let’s move forward. This item on Jon’s list caught my attention because it’s one of the biggest hurdles I’ve personally had to overcome on my path to Rebalanced health. I’ve always been a stress eater. When the going got tough, or I was feeling a depressive episode coming on, I ran to food. Being genetically predisposed to depression (and as I now know having massive amino deficiencies) this was a common occurence throughout my childhood, college years and into full adulthood. In fact, it’s still something I struggle with, but feel I finally have under a modicum of control. What did it take to get this lifelong issue under control? It took doing a full about-face in how I view food.

What I mean is this – rather than looking at food as my comfort source, my security blanky; I had to start seeing food as the fuel that got me through the day and powered my brain so I could tackle the issues I was facing head on instead of drowning them in a pint of ice cream. It took seeing the results of amino supplementation – and we’re talking 2 days of taking 2 different aminos and I was feeling like a completely different person – for the reality to sink it: food was fuel for mind AND body. That’s it. Fuel.

Here’s the kicker – just because food is fuel and nothing more does NOT mean you have to treat each meal like a stop at the gas station, pull in, fuel up, hit the road. You can and should still enjoy eating, just realize that what you’re doing is fueling up, and adjust what you’re eating accordingly.

Nobody can tell me that a big steaming bowl of mixed greens (usually something like kale, chard, cauliflower greens, etc…) cooked in coconut oil with garlic and ginger and topped with thinly sliced flank steak or skin on chicken breast isn’t tasty and well worth savoring.

Now, instead of the bowl of Cheerios and soy milk (yes, seriously, for the better part of college this is what I started every day with), or granola with the same soy milk (most of my 20′s – early 30′s), I start the day with 3 eggs scrambled in butter, bacon, and whatever greens are around stir fried in the bacon grease. And you know what, I’m not hungry for HOURS, have enough mental prowess to tackle whatever, and have enough energy to ride to work and cover miles every day hoofing computers around for my clients, then ride home and do my 20 minute workout in the driveway.

Astute readers will note correctly that I am no longer doing the computer hoofing, as of the first week in May I went back on the unemployed list (except that being a contractor means no Unemployment), however I am halfway through my internship hours and thus just weeks away from being able to start working as a personal trainer/fitness coach. And I go into this world knowing that I’m fueling my mind and body for whatever the day can throw at me, and loving every meal of it!

Nobody ever played toward a goal, everybody works towards them. Riding should never be work.

This is a more or less direct quote from Grant Petersen’s talk last Friday at Freerange Cycles. If you ride a bike and don’t know who Grant is, you should. I don’t want to use up my word count in this piece on background, so I’ll just say this: If the idea of riding to the store in spandex and clipless pedals strikes you as a bit silly, you need to read more of Grants stuff. He’s all about “unracing” biking and getting more people onto saddles, in jeans if that’s your thing.

Now, back to that direct-ish quote. Grant was in town on his mini book tour, his book Just Ride came out recently and since Freerange is one of a small number of Rivendell dealers, there he was. Somewhere in the middle of his talk, he was talking about riding ultra long endurance type races and made the comment that if that’s your thing, great, but for the rest of us setting goals like that is unreasonable as they require an uneven distribution of fun vs work. Having a goal like riding 1000 miles across California has the feeling of being quite a lot of work, while a goal like riding every day can be loads of fun.

Especially if you ride to the park for a game of ultimate.

If you had seen me commuting this winter in my rolled up khakis and backpacking softshell gloves…you’d understand why Grants approach appeals to me. I ride for several reasons, none of which involve getting somewhere quickly. I ride for transportation. I ride to work. I ride to the store, to the farmers market, and to the library. I ride for the sake of riding at times too, even then I wear loose shorts and sandals…I don’t own any spandex. I ride a bike that’s called an “All-rounder”, meaning it’s intended for whatever you throw at it. If I want to do a weekend tour, I’m good to go. If I want to ride around town running errands, yup, that works too.

I don’t really know where to take this little ramble, so I’ll end with this, riding bikes is fun. It’s a great way to get around Seattle that comes with the added bonus of thumbing your nose at all the cars stuck in traffic as you whizz past. Just watch for potholes and opening car doors and you’ll be fine. Riding is available to everyone and should be marketed as such. Unracing will take some time and a concerted effort on each of our parts. We have to commit to riding in everyday clothes, riding safely, and riding with a smile.

I can make that commitment, can you?

This has been a long, drawn out process for me – starting before I moved to Israel back in ’09. I don’t want to launch into a dietstyle diatribe (tell me that doesn’t sound like the best band name ever) right now, so I’ll just cover a couple of biggies then move on to the actual topic of the day. I stopped eating grains. Yes, all of them. Not just wheat, and no, I don’t eat “gluten-free” products. Here are the broad strokes: I eat food. If your great grandparents would recognize it as food, I probably eat it. I don’t eat things that come in shiny packaging with health claims on the front and extensive ingredient lists on the back.

I’m not on a diet. I changed my relationship with food.

Now, I don’t think I’ve worn 34″ pants since middle school. Yes, seriously. and let’s just say I wasn’t 6’0″ yet. This is part of why this is such a big deal, I’m having to get used to a new body. And I’m not done loosing yet, still have the belly flab to burn off, which might well take me to a 32″x32″ or **GASP** a 30″x32″ which I’m pretty sure would make a red dwarf appear and swallow Earth. I mean, let’s get serious, me, with a longer inseam than waist???

OK, now I’ve lost what I was actually going to write about today. So let’s settle for a brief update since I see that once again I’ve neglected to tidy up my dusty corner of the web. I’ve started interning at a great little gym in Wallingford with a trainer whose focus is similar to mine (you guessed it, to be covered in a later post), and I’ve relented and taken another IT contract to help hold me over until I finish the internship hours. It’s only until the middle of the month, and the pay is astronomical compared to what I’m used to. The catch, because we all knew there was one, is that it’s 30 miles north of here in Everett. The astute reader will notice the issue here…I’ll give you a minute to think on it…figure it out?

I don’t own a car.

Never fear, the agency was so desperate they agreed to let me drive the rental they had for the actual job (I’m deploying Windows 7 computers to remote offices) from home every day. Here’s the part I didn’t share with them, after all this was a sacrifice for them, I don’t have a car partly because I despise driving. There I said it. Whew. The paycheck is lovely but I’ll be happy when next week is over.

That’s about all the update I can come up with right now, after next week I should have more information on when I’ll be able to start working as a trainer and when I’ll be taking clients, since I know You’re all chomping at the bit for a chance to work with the formerly fat IT Monkey.

Anyone who came come up with a personal trainer business name that works “IT Monkey” into it gets bonus points…

What I found was a trainer training program that involved class time, practical learning time, as well as an internship. That sounded about right, I tend to learn best by doing, so the practical and internship were perfect. And I was looking to be able to start working asap, so the 9 week time frame sounded great. This left me with one unescapable fact, I was going to have to rejoin the IT Monkey world for at least as long as it took to complete this class and internship. Summoning all of the internal fortitude I’ve developed over the years (snicker), and honed more recently in my meditation practice and more simple outlook on life in general…I called some of the recruiters I had worked with in the past and filled them in.

As though a sign from…elsewhere, rather than launch another year-long saga of a job hunt, within a week I had an interview and another week later I was starting a new contract. And when that one expired, they found me another one to start immediately after new years. And that pretty much brings us to today, that last contract ended just over a week ago (the details don’t matter, we’ll just say it was mutual) and I just this week got word that I passed my certification tests! That means all I have left before I can call myself a Certified Personal Trainer is a 30 hour internship.

In under a year, the time it would have taken to have those prerequisite classes taken care of and be ready to START the degree program, I am now weeks away from being able to embark on this new career…and life. So when I say Don’t Overdo It, this is what I mean: I was ready to spend 10′s of thousands of dollars (putting me in debt for years to come) for a degree so I could start working in the health and wellness realm. Instead, I invested several hundred I already had saved and a series of Saturdays to get a certification that will allow me to do the same thing. No, it’s not the same as a BS degree (that’s Bachelor of Science, not the other BS), but it is enough to get me started in this field and out of IT Monkeyhood. So as far as I’m concerned, functionally, it’s the same thing.

Next up will be a brief rundown of my views on exercise and how I plan on training my future clients to have fun and get/stay healthy. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s early Friday morning and I have gyms to call about that internship…and a weekend full of slacklining and Pedaler’s Fair fun to plan!

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

- Theodore Roosevelt

This is one of those things I need constant reminding of, at work, at home, in conversations. I need to strengthen my “Stop” filter. This is the filter that he one that should tell me not to dominate the conversation. The one that tells me to let someone else own the solution to a problem that’s in their area and instead focus on what I’m there to do. The one that tells me to just slow down every once in a while. The one that reminds me that I have enough pairs of pants and don’t need that pair that’s only good for one activity. The one that reminds me to use what I have on hand, and if I can’t make it happen with that, does it need to happen? If it needs to happen, than what is the minimum I’ll need to accomplish it?

You know, things like that.

This is a particularly relevant topic right now as I find myself at a bit of a crossroads – again. As you’ll hopefully remember, I’ve been trying (desperately at times, I’m not ashamed to admit) to get out of the IT Monkey role for some time now. Back at the end of 2010 I got the idea to head back to school for a degree that would tie in with my Anthropology BA and that would allow me to continue helping people, just in a slightly more relevant way than by fixing their computers. After much research and early mornings scouring the interwebs, I found a BS program right here in the NW that would solve all my problems. Or that’s how it felt at the time. I went over to the college to collect more information and plan my attack. Then, Summer of 2011 I started attending classes at Seattle Central Community College to take care of the prerequisite classes I never took the first time ’round.

I’m editing this story for a couple of reasons, first to keep this post around my 600 word mark and second because I feel like I’ve already covered most of it before so this is just a rehash. Anyway, as summer quarter was wrapping up and I was just getting over the feeling of being so wildly out of place as a 35 year old college student, a rude reality hit – there was no way I was going to be able to fund this little adventure. I’ll spare the details, suffice it to say I did more hours of research and made numerous phone calls in a desperate attempt to secure funding, to no avail.

By this point I had been back in Seattle for nearly 18 months, had worked a grand total of 3 months, been in classes all summer and was faced with having to go back to a job hunt that had failed me for nearly a year already. The past me would have taken it in the chin and given up on the career shift part of this and just gone back to work, but the new me had very little interest in becoming a 40-something, unhappy, underemployed IT Monkey so I set to work.

By now you’re probably wondering how I got this far away from the quote I started this post with, and all I’ll say is that I’m coming back to that. In the interest of keeping it to 600 words (arbitrary, I know, but effective) I’m going to break this little saga into multiple parts. Consider this the end of part 1, part 2 will follow shortly.

It doesn’t make sense from a purely functional standpoint, there’s no reason I won’t be able to find work as a 30-something former fat IT guy who wants to help others escape the fate of the diseases of modernity (ominously named Syndrome X). That statement of fact doesn’t stop the torrent of What If’s – What if I can’t finish loosing my own weight before I start interviewing? What if no gyms want that 30-something formerly Fat IT Guy? What if I make the rounds of community centers and nobody wants to run functional fitness seminars? What if I DO find someplace to run seminars and I can’t come up with a syllabus? What if…what if…what if…

I stumbled onto a couple of quotes the other day that actually fit quite nicely with this topic, they’re from Roo Mullligan and appeared in a guest essay at Tiny Buddha:

My point in telling you all this is that life happens regardless of our plans. When we strive and struggle to constantly be somewhere better or further along, we miss out on what we have now.

And she finishes the essay with this:

What does it mean for you to live your best life, right now, and who do you want to be in five years?

These two ideas – living your best life right now and reframing “where do you see yourself in 5 years” as “Who do you want to be in 5 years” struck a nerve. With all my soul searching, life direction changing, and overall questioning of life, the universe, and everything…I haven’t even thought about who I am and compare that to who I want to be.

These two things seem intricately interwoven. Who I am right now plays into what I’m doing and experiencing at this moment, not what I think I want to be doing down the road; especially not knowing where that road might be leading. and who I want to be in 5 years is a much better way of looking to the future than where I want to be or what I want to be doing. If I know what sort of person I want to be, and I know how what I do is tied to who I am, it follows that knowing who I want to be will help me figure out what I should be doing – both now and in the future. Going forward – instead of “What If?” I need to ask myself, “who will this make me?” or “how will this affect me?” I stand a much better chance of getting a productive answer than asking “What If?” and by definition not liking what I hear.

This reframes “What if no gyms want that 30-something formerly Fat IT Guy?” as “what kind of person will I be if I don’t get a job in the health field?” Or, “if I spend one more year working in IT, how will that affect who I am?” Are you seeing these as the much more productive questions that I see them as? It changes the perspective from negative to positive, from passive to active. And active positives sound a heck of a lot more useful than passive negatives.

I don’t know the science behind it, and don’t frankly care to – what I know is that this explains part of why I feel like hell after arriving someplace by car, plane, etc. It’s like jetlag on steroids, my brain just can’t process that I was someplace else and am now where I am…If I take an hour long car ride, my physical self is now, let’s say 50 miles from where it started it’s journey, meanwhile my brain is just 3 miles from home. Talk about cognitive disonance. And once you stop moving so fast and let your brain catch up, it has to start processing a whole new data set as instantaneously as you just went from 50 mph back down to 3. It’s like hard rebooting your brain without warning yourself.

Now, imagine if you had walked or ridden your bike that same distance. You’d arrive a bit later, yes. You would also arrive refreshed and alert, your brain having been stimulated the whole trip by all the information passing you by at a human speed instead of having tuned out because it just couldn’t keep up. And a stimulated brain is a happy brain while a tuned out brain is a groggy, grumpy brain.

All this goes a long way toward explaining why I love bike commuting so much. I arrive at work refreshed and ready to tackle the day instead of grumpy because some tool cut me off in traffic. And on the way home I get to decompress and let the stresses of the day be wiped away while I ride and look at the view, or hear the birds singing (yes, there’s the occasional car horn too, I never said it was perfect). And all this was a convoluted way of announcing that for the contract I start today (oops, did I not get into the fact that I had to leave my last contract suddenly and that my agency has already found me a new one? Follow me on twitter for those sort of updates would ya) I will not be able to bike commute as regularly as previously. My last two gigs were ~3 miles from home in the South Lake Union area, this one is in downtown Bellevue. That’s across a decidedly bike-unfriendly freeway bridge from here for those of you not familiar with Seattle. I’ll be able to bus, which is one step better than having to have a car. And as soon as I map out a decent route, I’ll be able to bus over and ride home, it looks to be about 12 miles. I know, I could ride both ways, and I probably will eventually, however until I know my new boss and whether or not there’s a shower in the building…I’m going to stick with NOT showing up sweaty.

Now you know all about why I prefer human powered transport, you know that I have a new job starting today, and you know that I prefer to meet someone before I show up sweaty and greasy. This public service announcement was brought to you by…oh nevermind.

Is it the anonymity inherently provided by internet forums? Or the sense that once you put something out into the eather, it can’t come back to bite you (even though, technically speaking, it can)?

The flip side of this is what about those of us who don’t comment anonymously? Personally, if I care enough to comment on what someone else says, I want to take credit for my thoughts to allow others to respond, or to allow the original author to know whose opinion they’re reading. I guess the bigger question really is, How can we manage what others are saying about us. This is the question that came up the other day when I was talking with a plumber who was dealing with a single bad review on Yelp smearing his decades old sterling reputation. He really has no recourse against this person, who was only unhappy that they wouldn’t take on his project due to cost and complexity – they did leave him with a list of full service contractors who would be able to tackle his job and who had similar reps. Apparently this wasn’t enough, so one frustrated person with a bone to pick is still causing this company problems 6 months later.

This is especially poignant as I begin to look into starting up two separate businesses in the coming months/years. Not only will I have to build a client base in person and online…but I’m going to have to worry about protecting myself from the kind of nefarious commenters and irrationally irate almost-clients that give me pause already. Both of these business ideas (settle down, I’ll get into details as soon as I know what any of them are) involve working one on one or in groups with people, real people. They also both involve marketing both hard copy and online. That means I’m going to have to monitor my reputation x2.

I like to think the best of people from the start, that way everybody starts out level and has to work to earn my distrust. Don’t do anything egregious and we’re all good. This generally serves me well, the one exception being certain work environments where I’ve come to be much more jaded from the start due to too many bad experiences. This is something I’m working on, but in the meantime…so it goes.

Got sidetracked there, let’s get back to the whole digital self thing. If you’re like me and you don’t partake in trolling expeditions, or frequent the comment sections of news sites, or even have an account on Facebook…what can you do to protect your online reputation? Honestly I have no idea. I was hoping that the act of writing this out, reading through it, and editing it down would cause something to float to the surface. No luck so I’ll leave it up to both of you (aiming high, I know) – what do you do to guard your online self? Or are you like me and really never thought about it until something specific brought it to the fore?

afterward: I really need to work on my editing – so please pardon my rambling writing style for the time being until I can brush up on the required editing skills. Thanks.

…has everything to do with my deep-seated resentment that we’ve arranged modern American life in such a way that all but forces you to own something you probably can’t afford.

This is a quote from an essay dealing with being car free in Cleveland. I’m not claiming that it’s as hard in Seattle, but it’s no field day either. This is a stupid expensive city to live in, and if you’re trying to do it all AND make car payments, it can be the proverbial fools errand. I make decent money as an IT contractor. I pay very low rent (room and board) and still don’t have enough left at the end of the month for gas, insurance, maintenance, and loan payments. I would much rather get a nicer cut of meat for dinner, or splurge for a nicer backpack. Or for that matter, charge up my Orca card for the odd time I need to bus.

There are studies coming out daily it seems – saying that Millennials aren’t driving in the same numbers as previous generations. The percentage of 16 year olds who get their licenses is also going down. What I’m not seeing is anyone looking at the rest of us and the number of people giving up driving later in life for whatever reason. I’m definitely not a Millennial. I think I technically fall in-between generation X and the no name gappers that came before Gen-Y or Millennials. I “came of age” in the 90′s, got my license just like all my middle class cohorts and got a cheap car. I then proceeded to go through 9 cars in my adult life, until moving abroad in ’09. I didn’t have a car while I was away because I was living in a city with European style – in other words really very good – public transit…and a reputation for some of the worst drivers anywhere, but that’s for a different post.

Then I was forced to come back to Seattle to find work and proceeded to launch a nearly year long job hunt. So no car was forthcoming. By this time I really had no interest in driving anymore anyway, I had a bike, lost some weight and was generally enjoying getting around on my own power. Then I found work and choose to get a nicer bike rather than take on a car loan. Add to all this that having a car just encourages most people to go out more often since it’s so easy, which in turn leads to the accumulation of more STUFF (and you know how I feel about that).

I know one day I will have to get a car again, not by choice, but since I’m looking at moving and beginning to work for myself, which will most likely require working out of several different locations each day – it’s just inevitable. I also plan on building a tiny house on wheels, so I’ll need some way to move that around as well…

Don’t know if I really had a point with this one, just wanted to ramble about being car free/car light since I do occasionally borrow the family Honda to run errands if they’re farther afield or to take the herd of dogs out for a romp at the HUGE dog park over in Redmond…but you get the idea. Bottom line – I think the car is about as outmoded a model of transportation as you can get, and with the price of oil going only one direction it’s time more people realized this and saw driving as the luxury it is. If that means finding other ways to get around, or staying closer to home – Great! That can only mean good things for local economies. And if it means people actually moving from the far-flung burbs back into the city – even better, the burbs were never sustainable in the first place.