That just doesn’t pass the common sense test. So, for that reasons and all of the others I mentioned before (and haven’t substantially changed since then) I’m out. Maybe I’ll go back and set up a band page some day, but for now, I have better things to do.

That said, it shows my “ETA” to hit my goal weight of 218 moving up to sometime around Thanksgiving. I really want to pull that even further forward and be at a solid 215 before I visit family for the holidays. And it’s not like I’ll be completely off-plan while I’m there. I’ll keep training while I’m in NC, as there’s a great gym that I use each year. This time around the approach and intensity will be quite different.

On the down side, I kind blew it on the diet this week – again, only sort of. This was the week where we were all camped out at work. That’s always a bad thing for diets – lots of food lying around everywhere. In that context I did OK, but it’s still hard to say “no” to Hawaiian Bar-B-Q when it’s sitting right next to your desk – and your boss paid for it. The adjustment back to a “normal” meal plan was not so hard this time, particularly since my focus is honed in on weight and work-out goals. This week is my BMI check, so at that point I’ll have a clearer view into how much fat I’ve lost and how much muscle I gained. That’s the real measure, as far as I’m concerned.

I really like having the visual feedback that Apex Fitness provides. The numbers certainly do not lie, and I love it. Being something of a numbers guy at the day gig probably has something to do with it. The next thing will be to track my resistance training in the same way that I’m tracking everything else. I’m past the phase of re-acquainting myself with equipment and exercises (and my trainer has taught me some new techniques that are dastardly in their effectiveness) so now it’s time to ramp it up. One goal that I set last year was to eventually be able to do a full set of bench presses at my body weight – which was to provide the dual incentive to both drop pounds and build muscle. I don’t know if that’s an attainable goal with the time frame I’ve set for reaching my goal weight, but it’s something I plan to track – and may be among the goals I set (and exceed) for 2011 if it stretches out beyond the current time line.

So I get to the lunch hour and carefully pry the sandwich out of the bag. The leafy green lettuce makes it act like an accordion and I’m careful that a minor jack-in-the-box mishap doesn’t send my lunch flopping into the table or worst yet – into my lap. Once the first bite has sunk in, I’ve got things fairly well under control. This day was a little different in that the first bite yielded a noticeable ”splack” where a small dollop of rose harissa had squeezed out of the bottom of the sandwich. A co-worker looked over and said, “Dude, your sandwich is bleeding – that’s awesome.” And right about that time the spiciness of the rose harissa hit me. Somehow I had put a lot more of the stuff onto my sandwich than I had originally estimated, not that I minded. So every drip of the magical stuff that made its way out of the back of the sandwich and onto the plate was transformed into a dipping opportunity for the business end of the meal. Yeah, it was a little fiery piece of heaven.

So now the “bleeding Dagwood” sandwich is a staple of my menu. Honestly, like so many discoveries in the kitchen, this happened nearly by accident – and is one that I wish had happened a long time ago.

Fuck you, Robert Gibbs. Fuck. You.

It’s not our fault that you suck at countering the right-wing spin machine. The administration you represent deserves EVERY loss that comes this mid-term election. Every. Loss. Have you gotten your bouquet of flowers from Boehner yet?

I’m a professional. And I’m on the left. And I didn’t vote for you, you arrogant pasty sack of shit. I voted for Barak Obama. I voted for change. You are not change. You are more of the same Washington bullshit – all of it – your false equivalences, your straw-man tactics, your spineless caving to the opposition at every opportunity, and your patently flimsy rhetoric – all of it is no better than Palin or any other right-wing hack. In fact – it’s a far sight worse, because even though she’s a crass, intellectually stunted crack-pot, Sarah Palin at least has figured out how politics works. You. Suck.

Organize Overdrive – Is this a key ring with a water bottle attached, or a water bottle with a key ring?

As some of you know, I had a previous life in martial arts. While I wasn’t in great cardio-vascular condition, I was inured to the punishment and got a rush from working on the mats. But my unhealthy lifestyle eventually caught up with me – and the beginning of the end came when I injured my shoulder for the second time. I was simply carrying too much weight around (doing more teaching than training) and landed on my shoulder in a way that put an inordinate amount of body weight on the joint as I failed to roll out properly. I had gotten fat, lazy and arrogant – and it cost me.

Even so, there are a few important lessons from those years that have recurred to me – and they helped with “getting over the hump” in this first cycle of readjustment.

Failure isn’t an option, it’s mandatory

I’ve been humbled by my own inability to do certain things in the gym that I took for granted years ago. When you can’t knock out 20 standard push-ups, and have to resort to junior push-ups (from the knees) to finish out the set – and having to break it down in front of a gym full of really fit people – can be a true test of will. I used to be able to knock out very large sets of push-ups and sit-ups when I was training for my first black belt – and I’m not going to list numbers because 1) it would be pointless bragging and 2) it doesn’t matter now. What I can do now is what I can do now. Today. And right now that number isn’t very good (and my form is atrocious). But the point is to get up and keep going – that’s something I learned in martial arts and has been re-awakened as my ego takes a righteous and worthy beating.

The point is to use a training failure as a benchmark for the next time you approach that limitation. Going right up to a failure point and then stopping means that you get to meet it at exactly the same place next time. Sometimes it’s as much a mental barrier as anything physical, and committing to driving right into that failure to get through it is the surest path to seeing it through. Once it’s behind you, there’s always the next challenge, but you have the previous challenge behind you to “gird your loins” – and that mentality has helped me here.

Breathe

It’s really easy to forget to breathe when you’re doing something that requires your full mental and physical attention, and it can cost you. I’ve nearly blacked out a few times because I forgot to breathe, and simply faded as I was pushing to get out the last few reps of a set. With all of those years of MA training under my belt, I’m a little surprised that I have to consciously remind myself to breathe during my sets. I also work really hard at getting wind in and out of my chest between sets – as the circuits that I’m on now are really taxing. If I don’t really pump the air in and out of my lungs between sets – that makes the next station that much harder, and it becomes increasingly difficult to catch up.

But that, too, has gotten better. My recovery time – not only between sets but between workouts has seen noticeable improvement. In my second week I had two training sessions two days apart, and I went from the first one right to sleep – woke up and went to work – and then crashed again to sleep through the night again after dinner. And just over a week later things are different. Today was supposed to be my off day – but I was itching to do something, so I went down to the gym in my apartment complex to do a “light” workout, as my main gym had already closed for the evening. One of the things I wanted to really focus on what proper breathing during sets – and except for doing a bit less cardio it ended up being pretty close to a real workout. The cool thing is that focussed breathing really helped me pull through – and I can tell that I’m really gravitating toward a more active day.

Situational awareness is key

OK this is a bit tongue-in-cheek – but only slightly. I have to be honest – part of joining the gym was for “the Hollywood experience”.  There are some crazy fit (and need I say crazy good-looking?) people in this town, and if you work out in a gym on Sunset Boulevard adjacent to the Arclight Theater – you get to see a lot of them. All the time. I can see the Hollywood sign from the aerobics stations in the gym, which is motivation enough – but just a few days ago I was walking out right as Magic Johnson was walking in with a small entourage for some reason or other. Say what you want about how “shallow” Hollywood can be – there are plenty of interesting things going on that can be used as motivation or to help focus the mind.

It would have been easy to hide out in the one-room gym in my apartment complex and pat myself on the back for “nibbling around the edges”, which I did for a while. But with this gym being right across the street from where I live, I felt like there was a great opportunity to not only connect with a good trainer (more on that later) but also use the environment as motivation to keep going. And it has worked. There aren’t a lot of prima donas in that place, at least that I’ve see so far. Most people get in there and bust their ass – which is inspirational in and of itself. But when there’s a ballerina on the elliptical machine in front of you wearing a body suit worthy of a Star Trek episode, that’s just icing on the cake. And quite frankly, it helps when you get a nod of acknowledgement from someone that has taken notice of you busting your ass on the Stairmaster every day.

The enemy is not “out there”

There are many meladramatic clichés about how a martial art reveals to the adherent that the true conflict is within. And it’s a cliché because it’s true. Again, the relevance to this situation is a bit thin, but for me, it’s definitely there. One of the biggest adjustments I had to make was in my eating pattern. Quite frankly, eating six small meals per day is kind of a hassle. And for a day or two I fell back into the three meal pattern – which led to eating too much of the wrong things (two boxes of Porto’s pastries in the office didn’t help). I paid for the backslide with a really tough training session and a hard day of recovery afterward. It was a quick, hard reminder of what my old pattern felt like, and I got back on track the next day. Then there were the three days of appetite adjustment that amounted to a constant cranky distraction.

So I left a message on the fridge door, even though I got past the (second) adjustment phase and have a much better handle on the meal plan now. I was kind of angry with myself when I wrote it – but now it makes me chuckle.

When the student is ready, the master appears

When I signed up at the 24 Hour Fitness I asked for a trainer that would push me, and I got it. I knew that I do much better when I have a good teacher to guide me (whether it’s music, martial arts, or anything else for that matter). They partnered me with one of their master trainers, who’s not only sharp as a tack but also one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet. He took my training into areas of focus that I would have never done on my own (the Stairmaster is just one example) and it has paid off even in this short stint. There’s a certain amount of dread going into a session, because I know that he’s going to find out exactly what I have and have not been doing since our last meeting – and he’s going to point me into some new directions that will very likely point out other glaring weaknesses in “my game”. But as with any demanding teacher, I always feel like I’ve learned something that I can take and work on in my own time – and there’s also a bit of a sense of accomplishment in realizing that I made it through intact. Aside from having someone there to both spot for you and push you beyond your limits – he’s very good about reminding me how far I’ve come in such a short time.

There are times when he walks over to me with a set of weights and I’m thinking to myself “you’ve got to be kidding me”, and yet I still manage to do much more than I would have ever guessed. It really pays to have someone with a world of experience that can size you up – and occasionally even show you that you’re capable of feats that even you never dared to imagine. It has definitely changed my perspective – and has raised my own expectations.

So now it’s 1:30 AM and I’ve wound down from my evening workout. Eventually I need to switch to morning sessions. While I enjoy the buzz from a late session I’m sure it will screw with my work schedule. I suppose that’s the next hurdle to overcome – to roll out at 6AM and get it done right out of the gate.

In ’2001′, I was blown away by the length of some of the sequences. In fact, the entire movie felt exceptionally long. It’s probably the longest 2 hours and 20 minutes I’ve ever experienced.  I suppose it’s possible that when I watched it previously it was edited “for television” but I can’t honestly remember.  I actually laughed out loud when the “INTERMISSION” card popped up with a bit of Strauss playing in the background.  Then I got up and took a break… but the thing that really surprised me was the score. I simply don’t remember that much vocal ensemble work being in the film. Again, this could go back to the edit I might have seen when I was a kid, but damn, that is some seriously smeared chorus! The last 20 minutes or so seemed like an experimental college film. I can imagine the impression it might have left with audiences when it originally screened. It’s also easy to see where Lucas, Spielberg, Scott, and Cameron got a large part of their inspiration in how to portray spaceship environments in film.

’2010′ was a more linear and more in-control film (at just over the standard two hours). Again, most of the things that surprised me were pleasant. Helen Mirren is even hotter with a Russian (Soviet) accent, and John Lithgow is totally believable as a non-wierdo/psycho character – color me surprised. The biggest disappointment of the second film was the antithesis of the first – the score. I am simply flummoxed. There are so many other things about that film that are either true to the original or thoughtfully new – and the original score for 2010 was neither. Again, I suppose it was a sign of the times to use a digital synthesizer – it was the mid-80′s after all. But the absolute lack of variety or craft in the production was disheartening. Get Don Davis to update the score, and it would probably play as well or better than any sci-fi movie of the past 25 years. As it is, the score is ten times more clunky and dated than the politics that are threaded through the dialog and story line.

After the second film was done, my friend and I ruminated on the two. They were both very enjoyable in their own right, and both had elements of timelessness while also being somewhat hopelessly dated (and not just from the titles). Seeing them back-to-back accentuated their differences from one another, and that also heightened the quaintness of seeing what filmmakers from that time thought would be believable in “looking ahead” to years that are nearly in our rear-view mirror. I consider myself a sci-fi buff, and I’m sure there are hundreds of projects whose technology completely outstrips anything I saw over the weekend – but I wonder if they’ll capture the imagination in the way that Stanley Kubrick (and ostensibly Arthur C. Clarke) did back in 1968.

Those times where I’ve made a good faith effort to get in shape were met with varying degrees of success. As with most people, the seemingly inevitable fall-back is met with confusion and disappointment. Even when hitting a “plateau” (while keeping up a high activity level) can be de-motivating, but in the end it’s because we choose to ignore changes that led to the plateau to begin with. It’s an ugly truth – but here it’s especially important to own our own failure. It’s either from dropping off on the level of physical activity, or we’re not being honest about changes in food choices. It’s simple to drop off the pounds at first – but when venturing away from the ‘straight and narrow’ path of strictly planned meals, the little lies creep in. “Oh, well – this salad is only 180 calories” (then pour on the gobs of full-fat dressing and other chunky sundries). Then, when we stop seeing the flattering results – we wonder where it all went wrong. Well, as always, it starts with personal choices and careful selection of facts that lead back to old habits – and old results. It is an ugly, ugly truth, but the only way to deal with it effectively is to be brutally honest about it.

To that end, I’ve jumped into the Apex Fitness plan with both feet, as part of my membership at 24 Hour Fitness. I’m like a lot of people that roll their eyes at the idea of calorie counting, and now I’m in full back-pedal mode on that account. And to be fair, this is a lot more than simply calorie counting. It tracks the balance of food types that you consume, and calibrates that against the burn rate through activity monitoring.  The more you know, the better – but you still have to remain vigilant. Just like the old saying “There are lies, there are damned lies, and then there are statistics” this would seem to be a place where that could apply. In their FAQ they refer to a common question on the dreaded plateau. The answer is what you’d expect – when people put in info about what they’ve eaten, it tends to be off by 20-40%. You can excuse it as a lack of experience or information – but at the end of the day it’s still a lie. And the same can be said for tracking of physical activities – a walk around the park turns into a 5-mile trek in the wilderness, uphill both ways.

Some of this is relatively easy to track. There are a lot of foods that are already listed on the site. And even putting in a recipe or a nutritional breakdown of an item is quick and easy. I don’t have a Bodybugg yet, but I have a feeling I’ll be pulling the trigger on that before the end of the month. For one – it satisfies my penchant for all things geek – and for another, it shows to be well-proven technology. (it would certainly prevent mis-logging a trip to the mailbox as a half marathon). I also really like how the site allows you to look at your personal trends over periods of time – again, this is statistics, and the value of the data is only as good as the information on which it’s based. And even though I’ve only been around this site for a few days, I can tell that it will be a useful tool for me.

Whether it will actually work over the long haul? I suppose that’s largely up to me. Aside from the testimonials of so many people that have used this approach, I’m also impressed with the way they’ve solved many of the problems from a technological perspective. I’m a technology guy, and they’ve done a lot of things that just make sense to me – and I think that will help when it comes time to really drill down and get right with the numbers to stay on track. There’s no place for calories and laziness to hide if a person’s really committed to be honest about what they’re doing and eating – and quite frankly that’s a bit scary to me. In many ways I’m way out of my comfort zone here (particularly in my workouts, where my ego has taken the biggest hit) but I have a feeling that this is exactly where I need to be.

Breakdown of nutrients taken in for one day

The positive stuff is pretty easy to explain. I’ve been walking quite a bit – mainly on the commute back and forth to work. I also made some common sense changes to my eating – mainly cutting out beer, desserts and between-meal snacking. That alone has accounted for the difference in my current baseline. But that’s what I call “accidental” improvement, and at this point I’m about focused, intentional change. And in that area, there was no mercy from my trainer.

The *one* device that I was told to fear was the Stairmaster. A co-worker raved about how it can break your will – and of course it’s the very first thing that the trainer put me on. I did a mere 10 minutes on the thing and I felt like someone had poured a 2-litre bottle of water on my head. It was the longest ten minutes that I can remember, so I’m pretty sure that it’s not only a torture device, but also a time machine too. I’ve decided that the original name for the device must have been “Soul Crusher”, but they changed it to make the thing more marketable. However, I survived – and I made it through the 20 minutes on the elliptical machine that he put me on right after. That was half of a warm-up. Tomorrow I have the honor of repeating this feat, but for an hour. Joy.

But I’m not in this to nibble around the edges. I’m not in this to make myself comfortable. I’m in this to make a real and deliberate change. So now I’m off to fill out a bunch of online forms to track food intake and my workout schedule – and will pick things up in the morning. I have a feeling that tonight I’m going to get a really good night’s sleep.

Going forward I’ll be using this blog to track some of the points (high and low) in the course of taking on a new physical training regimen.  I set goals some time ago, and while I’m not any further away from them (and in some ways I’m substantially closer), I’ve not been moving toward them with purpose. Well, that’s all about to change. I just signed up for a membership at the 24Hr Fitness that’s next to the Arclight theater here in Hollywood, and I’ll be getting on with the daily routine of – well – setting up and adhering to a daily routine.

That’s not to say that I’ll give up blogging about food and drink. I really enjoy both – and I have no plans to change that. However, it’s likely that I will be indulging with less frequency – so expect to see more info/whining about the workout to balance the notes on wine, sweet potato fries and spicy sushi.

As an interesting side note, I just read an article about how business managers are influenced by a person’s physical attributes when considering everything from hiring to promotions. And of course that’s both a tacit and sometimes overt rule here in Hollywoodland. Aside from one’s physique being a sign of general health, it also has real-world implications for a variety of more subliminally judged situations. It’s easy to discard as “glib” and “shallow” to consider that reality, but they’re actually based in long-standing patterns that a fool ignores at their own personal and professional peril. Make no mistake, I’m doing this for myself – but I’m not stupid – at least about this…

Consider this a "before" picture

The courtyard dining area at Yamashiro Restaurant

Sunset Boulevard is one of those films that one can hear more “of” than to have actually seen. Nearly everyone has heard the classic closing line – but there are a slew of others that ring a bell, either as a common cliche or as an homage in a more recent film. To be honest, I only caught bits and pieces of the original film through the years, so this is the first time seeing all the way through, frame-for-frame. For all of the kitschy turns of phrase and sometimes hokey narration, it’s a exceptionally well done film.

The aspect I enjoyed the most was the self-reflexive analysis of Hollywood, which is still true today. Even the portion of the film where Norma Desmond is “preparing for her next role” looks shockingly similar to the placebo-laden beauty treatments that are still en vogue today. The thing that struck me most directly was the use of Schwab’s Pharmacy as a recurring location. As it happens, I now live on the block that used to house Schwab’s – and that made me laugh to think that now *I* have become a cliche too.

Such as it is – the evening was thoroughly enjoyable – and to walk out of the restaurant to an expansive view of Hollywood added a nice bit of full-color punctuation to the end of the evening. Now, on with the show…