wriggly-puppy-20-somethings - just sort of goofy and playful and self-absorbed, but not badly so.
It is really cute how young adults can stil generate significant emotional reactions to everyday events. At 44, I'm almost completely dead inside.
Maybe this belongs on the other thread.
I haven't finished a workout without major modifications.
I'm sure they told you this, but this is totally normal and cool. The Rx'd (unmodified) workouts are designed to be hard for elite, world-class athletes, so the whole point is to scale.
It seems to be a thing where you can expect to be somewhat sore, forever.
I guess, depending on "somewhat sore"? But not really, while pushing yourself will lead to some soreness, I don't think most folks are significantly sore all the time. I'm not. You really will get more fluidity with the movements over time. Same for post-workout logginess. Take more days off at the beginning.
Do you need to ask for "no puke" modifications on the workout?
You may also need more sleep to support recovery, if that is possible. I'd suggest massages, but it doesn't seem like they do much for you.
What the heck does "loggy" mean? "Logginess"?
Do you all mean logy?
I've just started a weekly round of modest weight training and I'm finding that the day after I might as well just plan on functioning at 1/2 capacity. The soreness kind of makes me feel macho but there's an accompanying lethargy I could do without.
I plan on giving Crossfit at the local place with a PT on site, but that's going to wait until I'm feeling a bit more on top of the whole exercise thing.
The modifications are more significant than I expected, I guess. (Which is fine, I still want to stick with it.)
I thought it would just be "Use lighter weights!" but it's really that I just can't even finish the damn workout unless it's shortened.
I figured it was a combo of "groggy" and "loopy."
I'd suggest massages, but it doesn't seem like they do much for you.
I kind of enjoy being anti-massage, because it fits with my general skepticism towards all things hocus-pocus. But perhaps I could ease off and give it a try.
I'm still in good shape to finish my first half marathon in four weeks, but that doesn't involve any medicine balls so it isn't hip.
Marathons are super-hip! It's the half that's laming you out.
Loggy is listed as a variant of logy in Webster's. Please do not criticize my choice of dictionary; I had it open for work.
I don't think my nipples could take 26 miles of being rubbed by my shirt.
it fits with my general skepticism towards all things hocus-pocus
Are you assuming that all massage is hippy-dippy with scented oils and soothing music and shit like that? 'Cause it's really not.
10: Massage is totally not hocus-pocus. Working the muscle liberates the midichlorians or some shit. I read a paper about it that made a lot more sense than this comment. It really does have an underlying biological non-placebo effect.
Today's workout was 5 sets of 5 overhead squats at near your max weight (which I still suck abysmally at given flexibility issues, but at least am over 100 pounds; the first time I tried with a 35 pound bar, 1 1/2 years ago, I literally fell over onto my back). Then a simple and easy seeming 4 rounds of 20 pullups, 30 pushups, 40 situps, and 50 air-squats.
I figured the latter part would be no problem but for some reason it killed me -- about 5-10 too many reps of each exercise. I had to stop after 3 rounds to get to work on time; on the third set, getting those last five pushups probably took me a full 5 minutes since my arms just collapsed.
So, shortening the workouts happens. At least at my place, the only people who get through all of the workouts totally unmodified are competitors who should do OK at the Crossfit Games.
15: No, I'm assuming that what is taught in massage schools isn't based on science coming out of peer-reviewed journals.
Ok, Halford, I have another question: we never do the WOD that's posted online. Sometimes they do have the girls names, so I assume we're doing real Crossfit workouts, but it's not synchronized with everyone else.
(Today: Do the following 8 times: farmer's walks, 20 box jumps, then 10 barbell-jump-to-lunge position things.)
I guess the question is "What's up with that?"
18: Huh. Usually, I'm right with you on suspicion of hippy-dippy bad-science yeah-right-what's-the-physical-mechanism stuff. But massage is fairly obvious: you grossly manipulate a sore muscle, and then people report feeling better. There's nothing obscure about how it could possibly have any effect, like there is for real hocus-pocus.
I don't know what the state of the research is, but I wouldn't call people silly for icing an injury even if they didn't know anything about the mechanism, if you see what I mean.
Almost all the gyms do their own programming, not just following the main site. Every gym should do this, since the programming should reflect something about the gym itself, the instructors, and the clientele. Your place will rotate in the benchmark workouts, including the girls, so you'll get a sense of what your times are in those.
10 barbell-jump-to-lunge position things
Not sure what this is. Jerks? Or jumping with a barbell into a full lunge? If the latter, I don't think I've ever done that.
I don't see the point of being anti-massage. It's like being anti-stretching.
18: Neither is cross-fit. But massage isn't homeopathy. Rubbing a sore muscle will make it relax and feel better. There's no hocus-pocus there, any more than taking a crap will make a constipated bowel feel better.
But massage is fairly obvious: you grossly manipulate a sore muscle, and then people report feeling better.
I guess I'm suspicious because the when I've asked, people often admit that they feel better that day, but then the next day they feel the same as they did, pre-massage.
Perhaps that's the extent of the benefit, but it's not generally sold as the equivalent of taking two tylenol.
Stretching is boring but if I don't do it, I have all kinds of troubles.
23: Yeah, I think they were called jerks.
No, I'm assuming that what is taught in massage schools isn't based on science coming out of peer-reviewed journals.
But people can pass on best practices that are truly effective without knowing the science of why that is.
pwned by LB, I see.
I do believe there is probably some nugget of good to a massage. But it gets packaged and marketed, and people seem to rely on it, in ways that constantly set off my bullshit detector.
There's no hocus-pocus there, any more than taking a crap will make a constipated bowel feel better.
Magic is all around us.
Well, it's probably peer-reviewed in the sense that other massage schools would endorse it.
I've never noticed any benefit from stretching. On the other hand, my range of motion is godawful on most dimensions. I've been trying to do that mobility workout of the day thing Halford linked, and I am so horrifically pathetic I disgust myself.
I can't come close to squatting with my heels on the ground -- my feet just don't flex enough, so I can't get my weight far enough forward to stay up. The only way I can do it is grabbing something in front of me.
But people can pass on best practices that are truly effective without knowing the science of why that is.
I'm not claiming the masseuse needs to understand the underlying science. Just that the curriculum has developed over time, without much concern for peer-reviewed studies. Or that's my skepticism, anyway.
My suspicion is that the curriculum at massage school is 75% shaped by forces that I wouldn't give much credibility.
34: http://mtabc.wordpress.com/journals/
18: Neither is a lot of what's taught in medical schools.Granted that's not a great example as medicine does in fact indulge in a certain amount of hocus-pictures, but at any rate RCTs aren't the only way to make discoveries.
Oops, that was supposed to be http://www.ijtmb.org/index.php/ijtmb
37: Do you personally trust what is published in "The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine"?
There was also one that had "evidenced-based" in its title, but it's getting lumped in with journals that are pretty suspect.
20 pullups, 30 pushups, 40 situps, and 50 air-squats.
The first element in this series seems an order of magnitude harder than the others, strength-wise (though the whole thing would certainly obliterate me cardio-wise). We're talking dead-hang pullups?
Also, lots and lots of sports medicine journals cover massage.
geez, everything moves too fast around here.
42: I think they're really big on kipping pullups. I still couldn't come close to doing it, but for someone who can do some deadhang pullups, it might not be that far out of reach.
What about chiropractors? I'm actually much more suspicious of them than I am of massage therapists.
42: Agreed. I don't think I could do 2 pullups.
Kipping, not dead-hang. I personally still can't do 20 kipping pullups unbroken, but there are lots and lots and lots of people who can. Anyhow, that was definitely the hardest part.
My sense of chiropractors is that they're conceptually fucked up, but often practically helpful. I wouldn't go to one because I've heard bad stories about injuries and I'm offended by goofy worldviews, but I know lots of people who say they get useful pain relief from a chiropractor.
But massage doesn't have that kind of nutty theory under it -- it might often have no theory, or some kind of vague woowoo which might as well be no theory, but not intense pseudoscience.
I'm enjoying being oppositional about massage, here, but I don't actually feel as anywhere near as strongly as I'm coming across. Whatever floats people's boats is fine by me.
There are extreme subvariants of massage -- like rolfing -- that I could understand being suspicious about. And there may be some massage schools that are dippier than others. But there really is something scientifically-tested and peer-reviewed called therapeutic massage which is an integrated part of modern medical practice.
massage doesn't have that kind of nutty theory under it
Some branches of it do (reflexology, for example).
The therapeutic massage places are easy to find. They are the ones where nobody tries to make sure that you aren't a cop.
Basically,
1. I don't seem to store tension in my muscles the way other people describe
2. I don't really like being touched in that context,
so I'm not a good fit for getting a massage. And then it's fun to apply my experience to everyone who kids themselves about these "knots" in their "backs".
Oh, true about reflexology and I suppose rolfing but I don't know what rolfing is at all. But you know what I mean -- the pseudoscience doesn't cover the whole field of massage.
Man, lots of massages would be one of the first things to go on the agenda if I had a lot more money and free time. Those are nice. I don't know about serious health benefits, but just really, really, pleasant.
Oh shit. I just went on what I have been using as my run for the past few weeks, which I thought was like not quite 5km, and I was like, damn I am so fast these days! So I Google Mapped it and it's like 3.5 km. I am not fast.
Why does everyone kid themselves about finding massages so pleasant?
I've had a few very good massages here, but I find them a bit anxiety-producing because release of tension makes me have feelings. It's the feelings I'm uncomfortable with.
I don't think I could even begin to do anything that one has to do for Crossfit.
I don't seem to store tension in my muscles the way other people describe
FWIW, in my case it's not "stor[ing] tension", it's my muscles tensing up to protect my body from further injury. And I've measured the range of motion I have before and after massage, so I know for a fact that it's doing something.
I'm pretty close to team heebie on this one. Given a choice between an hour of massage and an hour to sit and read a book, I'd go with the book, even if feeling sore or physically uncomfortable.
It reminds me of the thread about the joy of taking a long soak in the bathtub. I am just not on that page, so there's probably something wrong with you.
63: huh. Whereas I'd take an hour of massage over almost any other activity, even if I *wasn't* feeling sore or uncomfortable.
54: I don't seem to store tension in my muscles the way other people describe
If this is the case, then it seems to me you really wouldn't need to stretch ever, either. Is that true?
55: Rolfing is based on the idea of manually separating bound-up connective tissue in the muscles to something-something reduce the interference with something-something. Skeptics consider it basically to be paying for torture, and about all science has worked out about it to date is that it isn't obviously harmful.
(As for chiropractic, the strong variant that claimed everything could be cured with spinal manipulation seems to be dying out. Far as i know, the milder variant that claims spinal manipulation can be useful for some purposes, in combination ith mainstream medicine, is relatively well-reputed by this point.)
am just not on that page, so there's probably something wrong with you.
After your True Story in the OP, I don't think you can make this claim.
If this is the case, then it seems to me you really wouldn't need to stretch ever, either. Is that true?
Yeah, basically. I stretch my quads before playing soccer, because kicking the ball really far, cold, is a pretty big jerk on your quad and I've pulled them doing that. I have to stretch my lower back when I wake up, by doing the knee-to-opposite-shoulder thing, because otherwise it aches.
I do think stretching feels good, but aside from those occasions I've never identified a clear pay-off in my life.
Oh, also I stretch my groin before soccer.
It's not like I know, but I'd guess that the benefits of massage for range of motion might be more robustly established than for mental stress relief. Ie, it feels good at the time but has no demonstrable effect the next day on stress, but you can move your hips further the next day.
We only need to massage Shakira to learn the truth.
Anyhow, I'll bet 68.2 won't be true in 6 months, if you keep up CF.
Over four minutes and nothing to (in response to!) 69?
Also, I know that I am playing the role of a tiresome CF evangelist here, but 61 is not true. Can you use elastic bands to help pull yourself over a bar? Can you do pushups on your knees? Can you do 1/2 a situp? Can you squat down while holding onto a pole? If so, you could have done a scaled version of today's workout.
Between your attitudes toward massages, hot baths, and long movies, I think you may just have a hard time sitting still, heebie. I recommend heavy-duty sedatives.
73: I'd need a massage and/or groin stretch to be able to stoop low enough to pick the fruit.
69: She stretches it by dangling low-hanging fruit.
use elastic bands to help pull yourself over a bar
I cannot even imagine what this would mean or how I would know if I could do it.
My theory on stretching has always been this: you know how if you stretch bubble-gum, it resists and then goes super-stringy?
My theory goes that my muscles are thick enough that they don't easily pull and go super-stringy, whereas someone more naturally flexible also has muscles that are more likely to get pulled.
Of course, avoiding pulled muscles isn't the only reason to stretch regularly - there's also maintaining and improving what flexibility you've got. But that was the main reason I was never terribly worried about it.
Can you squat down while holding onto a pole?
This makes me think I don't really understand what CF is for.
I've read a number of things recently saying that pre-exercise stretching is bogus. These things say that, instead, you should warm up (light jogging, exercise bike, whatever) before serious exercise. Post-exercise stretching is supposed to be useful (for reasons similar to massage, I think), and I imagine that stretching specific muscle groups that are known to be trouble (like Heebie's quads, I guess) is smart. But the kind of stretching most of us learned in HS - 20 minutes of toe-touching and the like - is counterproductive unless you've warmed up first, and is mostly purposeless if you have warmed up.
68: Hmmm. That kinda makes me wonder if your description of being sore to excruciatingly sore over the last two weeks might be connected. I know that when I used to work out -- which I should really start doing again, since my plan to go back in time and swap bodies with Carl Weathers isn't working out -- the initial period of adjustment after a break was often way worse and more painful if I wasn't assiduous about stretching. And I never did anything nearly as intense as CrossFit.
80: for fishermen who don't own folding chairs, I guess.
You basically tie a big rubber band to the bar, put one foot in it, and use the rubber band to assist you with the pullup motion. As you get stronger, the rubber band gets thinner and thinner until you can get rid of it altogether and, voila, unassisted pullups.
mmmmm . . . massages, hot baths, and long movies--sounds awesome! Seriously, these are all great things. I think everyone commenting on this thread sounds very active and probably needs a nap. In college, my best friend and I would have a "lazython"--the first person to exert themselves or do anything productive lost. I kicked ass at lazython until I had kids. Now, I'm off to take a long bath and watch Lawrence of Arabia.
Taking into account that what JRoth says in 81 is true. I remember learning post-exercise stretching in HS, actually, but maybe I'm distorting in retrospect.
I don't really stretch before I run, but I do start off a bit slow for the first few blocks. I like running because no one yells at me, I can do it completely alone, and I don't need any equipment. If I cared about looking better, I would probably invest my energy in some more organized activity. Mostly, I run to manage my anxiety, about which I apparently refuse to do anything else.
85 to 78. To 80, it's for creating better and more functional strippers, what else is exercise for?
On stretching, what I've hear is that for serious athletes it can be mildly counterproductive to stretch before exercising. For most people who are sitting in chairs all day, that's one of the main times you have a chance to stretch at all, so the net effect is positive.
81: It may be that the pre-run stretches that I've found essential are just warm-ups. But I hvae found that more stretching (as in stretching three times a day whether or not I run) has increased the amount of running I can do before I hit pain.
90 was from before I read 89.2, but seems to fit.
Massage doesn't only have to be about knots and tension. It can address all sort of aches and pains. I had chronic hip pain which is now gone thanks to work my massage therapist (who's more rigorously trained than many) did on my IT band. She's happy to explain the science of what she's doing and what recent research supports one thing versus another.
There's nothing soothing about her massages; it's more like physical therapy except that she does all the work. I don't always feel entirely better the next day, but I do after she's worked on something for a couple of sessions.
Also, there are no whale sounds. We usually talk the whole time about books and politics and dysfunctional family dynamics.
I don't store tension in my back or shoulders either, so while having those parts massaged is pleasant enough, it never feels much therapeutic. Every time I've gotten a professional massage, I've told them to focus on my hands and feet, which are pretty much always sore.
I'm getting a massage tonight! If I ever When I manage to find a new job, which will inevitably pay much less, I'm going to have to figure out what I'm willing to give up to still afford massages.
I think there are good chiropractors but kooks too. They're kind of notorious for overcharging workmen's comp insurance.
I want to try Alexander technique which is mostly for actors but seems like it could be good for general health too.
Between your attitudes toward massages, hot baths, and long movies, I think you may just have a hard time sitting still, heebie. I recommend heavy-duty sedatives.
Apo understands me.
I was always skeeved out by professional massages because a particularly loutish friend of mine was going to massage parlors to get a rubdown with a "happy ending." But that's probably a different end of the industry from the whale-sounds-and-Enya-toxins-releasing kind of massage.
Those Enya toxins will fuck you up.
Oh, and I've never understood the hate that chiropractors germ, because I always just assumed they were for people with bad backs. I've come to understand that they have or had some sort of grandiose claims, but the basic claim that a misaligned spine would have broader effects seems utterly unassailable to me. A few years ago AB was having severe neck pains, and went to a normal-seeming chiro, and it helped. Me, I just crack my back and neck in ways that alarm bystanders.
92: I had a massage like that. The therapist said that training had gone downhill somewhat and massage had become more of a retail product. It used to be a good living. She now tells young people to become physical therapists and then look into massage courses on the side.
97: So, you knew there was a difference between professional massage, health club massage, and skeevy massage parlors that give "happy endings," but were skeeved anyway? Or you didn't know then, but know now?
I always wanted Enya to release a hard-edged, aggressively punk album so that she could call it Enya Face! Sadly, she has not intuited my desires.
Enya Face! would have to be a hip-hop album.
Get Some o' This Enya could be a punk album, though.
99: They've also been big in persuading people not to vaccinate.
the basic claim that a misaligned spine would have broader effects seems utterly unassailable to me
I would be happy to assail this claim at some point. I have the sense that chiropractic at this point is not entirely hooey, but yes: eminently assailable.
96: Give it a few more years and a couple more kids, and you won't even need the sedatives.
I'm pretty comfortable on the chiropractic theory being hooey in detail. Subluxations impinging on your spinal nerves? If your theory has a vocabulary not used by anyone who doesn't agree with your conclusions, I'm looking at you sidewise.
Misaligned spine having broader effects in terms of muscle pain is perfectly plausible, and lots of chiropractors seem to do people good by cracking their backs and necks. But the theory, which goes way beyond muscle pain, is still hooey.
Cracking my knuckles feels pretty good, but I wouldn't claim it has health benefits. Is what chiropractors do qualitatively different?
I know that I am playing the role of a tiresome exercise heretic here - or, to be less dramatic than "heretic", I could simply say "grump", and I can't argue with that. But W. Breeze and Megan have previously encouraged exercise to the point of vomiting, and now here's Heebie saying she enjoys that too. I'm probably not going to be persuaded to try that. It's probably not for everyone, but if you like it, fair enough. Different strokes for different folks. Maybe that's a relevant dividing line between personality types: if you enjoy throwing up as a result of exercise or not. If you don't, no need to bother too much with gym memberships or buy exercise furniture. There are plenty of less intense ways to stay in shape.
We can add a third category for people who enjoy throwing up as a result of substance abuse.
As for massages, I've never noticed knots in muscles in myself or other people as far as I can remember, but it seems non-controversial to me that massages help at least a bit with sore muscles, even if only by heat therapy.
Plus they feel good. I'm not saying I'd pay hundreds of dollars an hour for them or bother with oils with specific scents, but it just feels nice to have someone working on my muscles like that. Maybe that's something else people differ on, though. Are there people for whom the tactile sensation of a moderate massage is unpleasant?
(I am wrong -- non-chiropractors do use the word subluxation. They just don't use it for everything chiropractors do.)
A chiropractor managed to fix my kid's ear infections in a way that a doctor, with her fancy-schmancy anti-biotics, was unable to do. The "manipulate the ear so the infected stuff drains from the ear canal" theory turned out to be pretty effective.
Unfortunately, the doctor wouldn't provide a referral to the chiropractor, so insurance wouldn't cover the cost.
If your theory has a vocabulary not used by anyone who doesn't agree with your conclusions about a phenomenon that is invisible to all forms of medical imaging and which had its origins as, essentially, mystical prophecy.
Has Megan encouraged exercising till you puke? I think I'd remember that, and it sounds out of character. But, as noted just above, I could be wrong.
From the OP, you grumpasaurus:
I would not recommend it to someone unless they basically like intense exercise and feeling beat and sore.
Heavily-subsidized massages are one of the best perks of this job (I probably go every six weeks or so, could increase that a bit if I wanted without running into scheduling difficulties). I do feel like it's helped some tension and pain issues.
Years and years ago I went to a panel/presentation at a con about massage. Besides picking up a tiny bit of vocabulary and technique, I recall that the massage therapist spent a lot of time talking smack about chiropractic woo-woo. Probably different woo-woo types do this to one another all the time, but he was definitely coming at it from the position that his stuff was well-grounded, and their stuff wasn't. He did concede that if you practice any kind of body work you'll possibly trip over something helpful, even if your theories for why it works are crap.
107: I'm looking at you sidewise.
Sounds like a classic vertebral subluxation symptom to me.
I do get really weird episodes of branchial neuralgia when I'm stressed or writing a lot. It can be a horrible, excruciating pain. It's the only thing I'll take drugs for.
115: I know someone who just started working at Apple. No massages that I've heard about, but they did send the ergonomic team within the first few days to measure her and outfit her with the proper desk & accoutrements. Imagine being proactive and trying to not have people wreck their spines! Maybe this is a standard thing at BigCorp or at least BigGroovyCorp; I do find it admirable. [Insert obvious reference to working conditions at Foxconn.]
I'll give up this week's lunch break to insert the reference for you.
115: Probably different woo-woo types do this to one another all the time,
But again, therapeutic massage just isn't one of the woo-woo types. It's a regular branch of boring old scientific peer-reviewed medicine.
[Insert obvious reference to working conditions at Foxconn.]
That the other companies who do business with FoxConn (et al) are probably shittier than Apple to their US employees, too?
(So, increasingly, is chiropractic within a limited horizon. The debate now is over why it works rather than whether it works, and to what extent people should or shouldn't stop flailing against its older and loonier vitalist / anti-vaccination variants.)
113
Has Megan encouraged exercising till you puke? I think I'd remember that, and it sounds out of character. But, as noted just above, I could be wrong.
W. Breeze suggested hill repeats here, adding "At some point you might puke if you're lucky." Later in that thread, Megan added, "Cyrus, I'm not telling you to run, indoors or out, because god knows I never would... For me, at least, there's a warm floaty feeling after a session as intense as hill repeats, and a general feeling that all's right with the world."
So, now that I reread it, no, she didn't recommend the puking part specifically.
My theory on stretching has always been this: you know how if you stretch bubble-gum, it resists and then goes super-stringy?
You found this in one of those fancypants peer-reviewed journals, right?
Maybe this is a standard thing at BigCorp or at least BigGroovyCorp; I do find it admirable.
When I worked at Ya/hoo!, they had an ergonomic staff and would shell out for whatever adjustments your workstation required, as long as you took a 2-hour ergonomics class first. I'd expect the same at any other company of similar size in the industry.
At some point you might puke if you're lucky.
Because nothing satisfies your hunger like a post-workout vomlet.
Nobody has ever been much concerned about my ergonomics. I think that disability payments would count as indirect costs and therefore be off-budget for the people who buy me equipment. However, they did let me snag a standing desk from the surplus pile.
Are there people for whom the tactile sensation of a moderate massage is unpleasant?
Yes, possibly. But if pleasant, still just boring? And I'd be trying to shut out the sensation enough to get lost in thought, so what's the point?
Are there people for whom the tactile sensation of a moderate massage is unpleasant?
That's me, in most cases. I have to be feeling quite relaxed already to enjoy having my permanently knotted (does so exist, heebie, does so!) shoulders rubbed. I also don't like being intimately touched by strangers (hugs, social pats on the shoulder, etc, all good!) - paradoxically, this makes me more tense than I was before the massage. That being said, I think massage is really valuable for most people.
123: Holy shit! Someone reads what I write! Let it be known henceforth that statement was written tongue in cheek. I do not endorse puking. It's bad for your teeth and a waste of good stomach contents.
Heebie and Parenthetical need to stop oppressing their inner monkey.
Maybe I'll get a massage when the semester is over and liveblog it.
131: Oh, I like having my head petted and other social grooming things by people I'm close to. Just not shoulder massages.
Unrelated: does any of you wonderful people have knowledge of the existence of any evaluation of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) Provider Incentive Payment (PIP) program?
I only really like grooming when I'm paying for it. I don't like to be patted or hand-held or picked at by people I actually know.
Somebody get those nits off of Parenthetical.
I would be happy to assail this claim at some point.
There's roughly a million examples of athletes who perform through injuries in one part of their bodies doing harm to other parts due to compensation - pitch with a bad knee, end up fucking up your elbow. Is this hooey, or somehow completely different?
No one's disputing that things can go wrong with your spine, I don't think. Just that chiropractors are doing anything about it.
I'd think I wouldn't like massage, because I'm generally very annoyed by people I'm not either related to or having sex with touching me -- getting my hair cut, for example, makes me twitchy and tense. But massages don't set that off for some reason.
139: I'd even believe that lots of chiropractors are doing effective, useful things. Just that their theoretical apparatus for explaining what they're doing is screwy.
Maybe this is a standard thing at BigCorp or at least BigGroovyCorp
I think it is (ergonomics). The standing desks are popular enough that they're backordered at this point. I'm feeling a certain amount of peer pressure about them, as people next to me have them and it's odd for me to always be looking up at them when we're talking.
either related to or having sex with
Or both!
I like most hugs, and shaking hands (a lot, esp if firm). And sometimes a good solid grab of a shoulder can be nicely affirming. Grooming, though, is a nightmare. While paying for it, I feel like I can conceive of it as being worked on, like a car. I don't enjoy having my toenails done as a physical experience, and I go through waves of dread during a massage, but it's worth it to feel like my toes are pretty, my circulation is stimulated, and my back is not about to start chewing on nerves.
I'd even believe that lots of chiropractors are doing effective, useful things.
I went to a chiropractor when I was massively pregnant with Hawaiian Punch - like nearly my due date - on recommendation from my doula.
Her technique was to put her hands in position, and then abruptly shove down in a really jerky, jarring manner. And then rearrange you, and do another, etc. I'm assuming this is standard but I don't really know.
Anyway, I cannot possibly believe that that technique does anyone any good, unless you're literally popping someone's joint back into the socket.
Like someone said above, it's not like cracking your knuckles has any therapeutic benefit.
Buck hasn't gone to one much since we've been together, but did when we were first dating, and claimed it helped backpain a lot.
Heebie, you can get a foam roller and replicate some of the benefits of a massage in about ten minutes of post-workout rolling. I've found that it helps reduce recovery time and next day soreness for me.
I've noticed anecdotally that there seems to be a correlation between inflexibility and running speed. All the runners in my running group are faster than me, but we do yoga and circuit training I am in a much better position to complete the activities.
I've seen research on the same connection. I, personally, am a counterexample, being both stiff and slow.
No one's disputing that things can go wrong with your spine, I don't think.
I read the comment as offering to directly dispute this. Or at least, to dispute that anything short of a herniated disk would represent a health concern.
148: I care only because I am so bad at endurance cardio.
I read the comment as offering to directly dispute this. Or at least, to dispute that anything short of a herniated disk would represent a health concern.
Really I was just offering to look up a bunch of crap about how "vertebral subluxations" are imaginary, and that there is no particular evidence that these imaginary things have any broader health impacts. If I'm remembering right, I could dig up some stuff about how the "misalignments" that chiropractors often claim to see are actually perfectly natural (and healthy) anatomical features, and that the benefits from chiropractic are basically fully overlapping with the benefits from general body work, with maybe a little non-overlapping placebo affect.
But it's not information I have at my fingertips, so I think assigning any strong claims one way or the other to me would probably be premature.
Also, I can't go google the aforementioned right now because I have stats homework to do.
I see. I have not the tiniest bit of interest in claims about vertebral subluxations. I take it as a given that such things are nonsense. The only claim I'm interested in defending, or even discussing, really, is that it's actually possible to have your spine out of whack, that this could cause muscle groupings outside your back to compensate, and that this would be bad.
I suppose it's possible that no one without an acute spinal injury actually has a back injury.
the benefits from chiropractic are basically fully overlapping with the benefits from general body work
I have no idea what "general body work" means in this context. Hammering out dents? Buffing out scratches? Bondo in the rusty areas?
I have no idea what "general body work" means in this context.
I'm understanding Sifu to be saying that any benefits of chiropractic could be understood as a style of massage/assisted stretching -- it's not doing anything particularly spine-related outside the fact that everything's connected to everything else.
I thought everyone at this point pretty much understood that chiropracty could be a pretty effective form of massage/assisted stretching and maybe general health advice, and that nobody took the theory of same seriously or thought it could seriously solve broader medical problems (obviously, excepting hardcore alternative medicine types, but a lot of other people go to chiropractors).
When I was having crippling back pain a few years ago, I saw some old Chinese dude who ran an illegal Chinese medicine clinic out of his daughter's apartment in Alhambra. It was just massage/stretching, but it really did seem to help a lot immediately.
I think there's a real continuum between hardcore alternative medicine types and ordinary people who just don't devote all their mental energy to being assholes about charlatans the way Sifu does or I do, and chiropractic is well placed to sort-of sucker ordinary people: it's got a sober, sciency name, and sciency sounding vocabulary, and nothing terribly woo-woo in the trappings. I do think that chiropractors can help people and relieve pain with the backcracking, but I really don't like that they're not explicitly disassociated from the nonsense -- people giving themselves authority through pseudoscience creep me out.
re: 33
Regularly stretching is one of the least hocus-pocusy things, I think. I have good lower body flexibility and really poor upper body flexibility, but if I really concentrate on the latter for a few weeks, most of my sitting at a desk all day aches and pains disappear. There's lots of exercises, too, where you can't do them with good technique without decent flexibility, and having good dynamic (as well as passive) flexibility really helps both in terms of performance and injury prevention.
re: comments above on stretching
A lot of people stretch wrongly, like doing lots of relaxed passive stretching before a workout, which is a good way to injure yourself. There's sports-science trials that show that excessive passive stretching before exercise decreases performance and increases the likelihood of injury. Most people also don't do dynamic stretching, which is functionally really useful. There's lots of good thorough books on stretching and the physiology behind it. Passive stretching after a workout is great, though.
The general pattern is something like: gentle joint mobilisations, then a general warmup, then some more sport specific warmups, then maybe dynamic stretching, then dynamic stretching more closely related to the functional movements of the sport in question, then train hard, then gradually decrease intensity and begin to cool down, then passive stretching. Maybe a bit of PNF stuff.
I want to know why there are like five places where I could get reiki done in this town but not one psychoanalyst.
What's dynamic stretching? I feel like I'm going to get sent to DynamicWOD.com.
A while ago I saw an osteopath for back problems [thoracic spine issues], and while I don't buy any of the 'woo' stuff, the advice was straightforward and practical in terms of some good simple stretches and mobilisation exercises, and the massage and bendy/pressy/twisty stuff gave real relief from the discomfort.
159: Why do you think there are like five places where you could get reiki done in this town but not one psychoanalyst?
MobilityWOD has dynamic stretching. MOBILITYWOD.
Are osteopaths woo? I thought they were science-based, just with a more holistic approach than allopaths. In the US, they're legally doctors, just like allopaths.
I have also been present for no fewer than three conversations among tenured and tenure-track professors about hiring multi-faith exorcists to help get rid of ghosts in their houses. I thought it was a joke the first time, and then everyone looked at me like I'm an asshole and also an idiot. Actual quotation: "How can you be an adult and not believe in ghosts? There's just too much evidence that they are real! We all feel them!"
164: At this point, not even a little woo. The head of emergent pulmonary care at the hospital at which I was born (which is a perfectly fine hospital in a wealthy area) is a DO. These days, they describe themselves as just having done 2 more years of school. Obviously, that's silly, because it is easier to get into osteopathy school than med school -- but chest surgeons aren't, you know, cracking your bones first.
re: 160
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_stretching
I bet you already do some of it as part of your warmup. Soccer warmups often incorporate dynamic stretches, and it's nothing amazingly new. You'll see pro soccer players doing that sort of stuff all the time. Cariocas, leg swings, high knee lifts, body twisting type movements, etc. There's more kick-focused stuff - basically leg swings front and back, to the side, crescents, and so on. Increasing the range of motion until you get closer to maximum.
My ex wife seriously, affirmatively believed in ghosts. WTF.
My impression is that Reiki may be about as evidence based as psychoanalysis (Freudian or Lacanian, I'm not talking about talk therapy generally, which is great), but I'll let Tweety weigh in.
People believe things. I've talked about a very smart, grounded woman I knew in law school who did Tarot card readings and believed in astrology. I take a hate-the-sin, respect-the-sinner approach: I'm not going to believe any of that shit myself, but I figure everyone gets a couple of areas of insane irrationality before I think ill of them.
re: 164
I think there's still some stuff that's not entirely orthodox in their conceptual underpinnings, but yeah, not that woo. The place I used to go was associated with Oxford uni, and was an accredited degree course affiliated with the local hospitals.
|| Whee! "Slack Motherfucker" just came up in the shuffle.|>
171: God, that was a great time to be living in Chapel Hill.
re: 169
I used to know a really sharp philosopher, not someone well-known but good enough to get her doctorate from a really good place and get into a tenure track position, who also went in for tarot and horoscopes and all that stuff. She straight up admitted it was absurd, but she still did it.
Believing in ghosts isn't any weirder than believing in gods.
But W. Breeze and Megan have previously encouraged exercise to the point of vomiting
I didn't remember saying that, and don't think it generally. I am relieved that someone checked TFA and found that I encourage exercise to the point of euphoria. I can stand behind that.
171, 172: Seeing Superchunk live is one of the few positive musical memories I have from college.
Analysis is useful for some people. There's no magic to it, or belief in spirits. I get almost nothing out of regular talk therapy, other than one more person whose opinions become increasingly irrelevant to my life over time. But analysis did good things for me.
I have known a few people who have a pet silly belief, like that a horoscope isn't always wrong, or that every now and then a fortune cookie message says something weirdly appropriate. But never before have I encountered such a community of educated adult people in which it is taken for granted that ghosts surround us and can be cleansed from your home by an exorcism performed by a "native american priest" two thousand miles away over the phone. It's worth paying good money to make sure they get the job done. Everyone nods.
I asked what tribe, but it turns out it doesn't matter.
It is possible that you are surrounded by total morons.
154: OK, sure, fine. That's basically all I ever thought chiropractors did. As I said way up above, I was very surprised to learn from the internet that they tend towards woo. I can't get myself worked up about that.
177: If it's functioning as an opportunity to display status and multi-cultural awareness, they may "believe" in ghosts the way some people "believe" in Feng Shui, e.g. it's something people are affecting to believe in order to fit into a current trend in yuppiedom.
Osteopaths are totally legit even if they do learn about spinal manipulation. My parents PCP is a D.O., but he did his residency at a Harvard teaching hospital with a bunch of M.D.s. He seems pretty awesome. Really decent human being in addition to being smart.
182: Weird! I never thought of fashionable yuppies as vaguely multi-culti superstitious, but now I wonder if in five years everyone's going to be, like, so over exorcisms.
Analysis has evolved. It incorporates a lot of attachment theory and child development research now. I won't pretend to be sane, but I'd probably be dead without it.
like five places where I could get reiki done
The best massage therapist I have ever had, who I used to see semi-regularly, also does reiki. He did some once as part of one of my visits, and I did not get it at all. You're pressing lightly on my face in different spots. Okay? Is something supposed to happen?
My impression is that Reiki may be about as evidence based as psychoanalysis (Freudian or Lacanian, I'm not talking about talk therapy generally, which is great), but I'll let Tweety weigh in.
Heh. I know very little about Reiki, and not a hell of a lot about evidence-based psychoanalysis, except that there are those who would definitely scoff at the very phrase. On the other hand, there are the hilarious (-ly awesome) adventures in creative neuroscience discussed here, so hey, who knows.
177: My sister had a coworker who really believed in ghosts and asked my sister about her beliefs on the subject. My sister tried to be evasive, but the woman got really angry. Everyone here thought that that was pretty wacko though.
187: there are people at Columbia doing research on psychoanalysis, and MGH has a talk therapy research program which is in psychodynamic therapy.
I don't think my nipples could take 26 miles of being rubbed by my shirt.
Way late, but you are aware of Bodyglide, aren't you?
I pretty much endorse 169 all the way (174 too). I do get a twinge of judgement when I learn that about someone, but then I let it pass.
I have said before (maybe recently? if so, sorry) that I was annoyed in general when my mom died and people said the inevitable things suggesting that she wasn't just dead and gone, and I was borderline shocked when AB said something along those lines (mostly because she has zero history of supernatural belief; she was raised outside any religion). When I stopped being a devout Catholic, I assumed that I'd slide into some mild form of paganism (I always felt very connected to God through nature), but instead I went over almost instantly into a pretty hardcore (but not preachy) atheism.
That said, I recognize that I hold lots of ethical beliefs and preferences that aren't really sustainable in the absence of some sort of supernatural plane. Or maybe they are; I really can't be bothered to read up on the philosophy. I'm happy to stick with Do The Right Thing as an ethos, and pretty comfortable with how I define it (I define it rigorously enough to fall short of it, which seems like enough of a standard).
MGH has a talk therapy research program which is in psychodynamic therapy
The entire research program? I knew grad school was hard, but I didn't think *everyone* who went ended up in therapy!
you are aware of Bodyglide, aren't you?
The orgy thread is a couple down, NPH.
I'm happy to stick with Do The Right Thing as an ethos
Do you make a habit of throwing trash cans through pizza parlor windows?
1When CA was presented with the info that pretty much meant that our dog needed to be put down soonish, he went into the tail spin of the ethics professor, trying to determine if poor old Vanka had a real interest in waking up the next morning. The very well meaning, but ultimately clueless, staff kept coming into the room (he sat there for hours) trying to explain the Rainbow Bridge to him. This was . . . counterproductive.
185 sounds right to me.
My sense of analysis in general - totally pulled out of my ass - is that a good number of people will benefit simply from paying someone else to be a good, empathetic listener. Furthermore, it seems to me that such listeners would be better at their jobs the more they follow research trends in psychological development, so that they can separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of what they listen to (that is, that statement A is something everybody thinks/feels, but statement B points to something significant).
I'm sure there are people who would bleed over the line between psychoanalysis and therapy (or whatever the relevant divide is), but I strongly suspect it's just a spectrum. Probably a spectrum with more BS on one side, but a spectrum nonetheless.
184: It's admittedly a curious choice for that kind of superstition, which usually manifests with some kind of East or South Asian natural philosophy. But it's the Native American shaman exorcists doing things long-distance that make me think that's what might be going on. (I come from an extended family with some pretty strong beliefs in ghosts and exorcisms and I doubt any of them would accept having it done by anyone other than a pastor or a Catholic priest, and certainly not over the phone.)
191: And she really meant it in terms of as a presence, not just in your memories? I think Lee believes in at least the potential existence of ghosts, but she also often says, "I wish my parents could see Mara. I know this is what they wanted for my life." I've asked whether she does think dead people are watching us, which I'd assumed she would, but she's unsure. (She does believe that God wouldn't have let us move into this house if we weren't going to be able to afford to keep it, which is sort of a fascinating belief though it also has obvious emergency coping components.)
trying to explain the Rainbow Bridge to him
Holy shit, I'd forgotten about that! There was no question about putting our dog down (she was going to die within hours regardless), but when I picked up the ashes, they came with some bullshit about the Rainbow Bridge, and I was so filled with rage that they were foisting that feelgood crap on people who were legitimately grieving.
I love reading about psychoanalysis and hearing about people in it. I've got a dear friend doing it, and it's absolutely un-fucking-believable how the quality of her decision-making has utterly transformed over the course of the past six months or so.
We used the same therapist years ago, in graduate school, the one that I feel was totally god-like and helped me mountains, but that wasn't as effective with her. But the psychoanalysis has been amazing.
And she really meant it in terms of as a presence, not just in your memories?
I'm pretty sure it was in terms of Iris, who was conceived within weeks of my mom's death (this was already planned, not some creepy compensation), and the intended sense was that my mom was out there somewhere, aware of Iris (whose middle name is a version of my mom's first name).
And I was just like, no, no she isn't. That would be nice, but she just isn't.
Rather, that's what I was like inside. On the outside, I didn't want to get into it.
The counselor Lee and I are seeing made us do enneagram worksheets. I'm choosing to believe this is fine because everyone uses metaphors to govern their lives and I like being explicit about that, but really it only feels okay because she's not otherwise woo-woo. My last good counselor was an exreme evanglical Christian and I never saw any white people there besides me, so I figure whatver works is fine.
I never thought of fashionable yuppies as vaguely multi-culti superstitious, but now I wonder if in five years everyone's going to be, like, so over exorcisms.
Would it be wrong to mention BM here*? My sister, with whom I've always been very close, shades into all sorts of things, spiritual and otherwise, that just leave me uncomprehending. I have enough sense of her spiritual beliefs to know that I don't want to know anything more about them.
* I know that it's not inherently spiritual/superstitious - that for many, it's just the world's most awesome party/rave - but I see a pretty direct line between it and "fashionable yuppies ... vaguely multi-culti superstitious"
trying to explain the Rainbow Bridge to him
Now I have "Immigrant Song" stuck in my head, and am trying to figure out what Norse myths have to do with putting pets down.
202: Ah, that makes sense. It's interewting (for me) to see how kids get mixed up in all of that grieving, and probably even more when you have a biological connction to the child. Both my grandfathers died between the time we started the adoption process and the time Mara arrived, and I know Lee likes to think about how they would have responded to her and my parents do too, but it doesn't have the same sort of cosmic pull for me.
I don't believe in astrology in the sense of it having any sort of predictive power. But, even if it's complete nonsense, a full-on birth chart with all the houses and planets and angles and the rest is fabulously byzantine. Working out what everything is supposed to mean can be as entertainingly complicated as a game of Civilization (if that sort of thing holds any appeal for you), where you haven't actually built anything real there either. If you look at it as a puzzle rather than an oracular life guide, it's essentially laying down general story elements and trends based on dice rolls and card flips all over a big board of life themes and then composing the story that fits them together. And either you enjoy that sort of literary device or you don't.
I roll my eyes at New Agey and God-based stuff as much as the next guy, but in a way that's not terribly far removed from thinking that Picasso was stupid because people don't look anything like that.
206: are you just trying to bait me?
"We come from the land of ice and snow, where the ex-cats play and the dead dogs go"
206: I think Burning Man is mostly an exercise in surrealism and (for some) hedonism. I've actually seen surprisingly few people talk about it as a "spiritual" experience. But I'm sure there's some overlap in the demographics.
209.last is right.
212: I am willing to bet these folks would disagree with you.
I respect religions, and suspect that my suspicion of ill-defined multi-culti spirit stuff comes from my assumption that it's basically a racist appropriation of things white yups are afraid make brown people seem more "deep" than they are. Putting images of random Hindu deities in your house because you like heard that this one is really good at helping everyone digest their food after a big meal or whatever, hee hee.
I roll my eyes at New Agey and God-based stuff as much as the next guy, but in a way that's not terribly far removed from thinking that Picasso was stupid because people don't look anything like that.
I actually can't make sense of this statement, unless you're saying that they're actually inventing modern art, (which isn't the same as being angry. Or maybe it is.)
213: Can I just go ahead and assume that link is NSFW?
213: Can I just go ahead and assume that link is NSFW?
As you can see, this is a very important question to me.
From some "research" I did the last time osteopathy came up here, roughly 10% of the medical doctors in this country have DOs. Several large schools, Michigan St. and Oklahoma St. are Schools of Osteopathy and the number is greater than 20% in both of those states.
The roots of osteopathy and chiropractic are in late 19th century medical quackery but have evolved to varying degrees (unlike homeopathy which remains mired in insanity) . And a lot of "regular" medicine was not that much better at the time.
216: Just that there are a lot of different ways of looking at and interpreting the world. Some are very specific and some are very impressionistic. And some don't make much sense outside of their specific context. We all have a heuristic we're most comfortable with, but all of them have questions they're poorly suited to address.
195, 200: I had to look that up on wikipedia because I'd never heard of it. It makes me long for the days when we buried our dog in the backyard. To be fair to the official pet-burying crowd, it is possible the dog would have wanted somebody with training to have checked her vital signs before we buried her.
"The dog said, 'Hey! I'm not dead yet!' but we thought it was a trick."
220: Okay, so BM can also be a Seussian voyage of discovery, fair enough. Not particularly "spiritual" though, nevertheless.
225: In this case, it was perfectly clear. I'm talking of the dog behind the veil of ignorance not knowing how she'd die.
Just last night my roommate and I were discussing whether he should hang out a shingle as an exorcist. I will advise him that it's a trend.
Clearly pet exorcist is the way to go.
"If you made a German Shepard wear a sweater, he's going to haunt you."
||
Man, the Zimmerman thing just got a whole bunch weirder.
|>
Weird enough to start a war with Germany?
"I turned to Sean Hannity because of his sophisticated taste in art."
Obligatory Viking kitten link.
Speaking of psychoanalysis, try this one on for size:
Last night I had an extremely explicit sexual dream about Another Woman. Like, among the 2 or 3 most explicit dreams I can ever recall having. Porn scene explicit.
But here's the thing: this woman means nothing to me. That is, she's just somebody I knew in HS, never thought of sexually at the time, am FB friends with now, but never actually interact with and have nothing in common with. She wouldn't be in my top 100 of women to sleep with, given a free pass or whatever. I'm not feeling especially horny or deprived or anything of late. So where the hell did this come from?
206: Would it be wrong to mention BM here*?
I took "BM" to be body modification, and was puzzled when Sifu felt baited by this.
Way upthread by now: On the advisability of stretching as a warm-up rather than a warm-down (81, 158 and others), I was surprised when I started physical therapy several years ago that the P.T. had me start on the elliptical, and the bike, then move to various weight/resistance training things, then move to crunches, stretching, leg lifts and so on. It makes sense now, but went against the order of things I'd previously, if vaguely, learned. As a result, though, I'm mildly critical when I see people stretching before running, then running, and then utterly stop moving once the running is done. So wrong!
210: Actually no. I did think of you, but no.
236: You should probably assume you have a dream like that about every woman you've ever met but that you remembered this one because a loud noise woke you at the wrong time.
239: oh. Well, anyhoo, no, it isn't like that.
I've asked whether she does think dead people are watching us ...
I don't think they're somewhere out there as conscious entities but I sometimes talk to them anyway. It's a way to frame and focus; I do better thinking when I have a specific listener in mind.
IMX some irrational stuff can be comforting even when I know full well it's irrational. The DE's miniature faux-Viking funeral was one such for me, and I still like seeing that tiny ship every morning.
237.1, 238: I thought about clarifying that.
To the rest, I have no way of measuring exactly how much BM is about spiritual content to my sister and SIL; I just know that it's non-zero, and it strains my sympathy. It's very much of a piece with a lot of the weird conglomeration of hippie-counterculture-techie that her/their life is.
228: If he wants a job, I know of several houses here in town that need doing.
Well, anyhoo, no, it isn't like that.
For you. I assure you that you don't speak for my sister and SIL.
They wouldn't say anything like, "BM is like church for us," but they do say lots of woo-ish stuff about the experience that positively skeeves me out.
I'm not sure how seriously to take 240. It's certainly a tidy and amusing explanation.
236: I have these all the time. Nothing to worry about. Random ridiculously porny dream about some dude I wasn't even friends with or at all attracted to in high school. Sometimes it changes the way I think about people, but since it's usually for the nice, I can't think it's a bad thing. Definitely, it doesn't mean anything, other than that you probably, like I do, need to be having more frequent and/or satisfying intercourse.
I mean, people have very deeply emotional experiences out there, and there's a thing called the temple that gets built and burned every year that people will cover with messages, generally to people who've died within the year. But that said, it's pretty explicitly ritual divorced from belief, so talking about it as "spirituality" is I think missing something.
IMX some irrational stuff can be comforting even when I know full well it's irrational.
I don't disagree with this. I think that, to some extent, it's just a matter of how literal people want their metaphors to be. For some, it needs to be an actual literal belief in the proximity of dead spirits; for others, a literal belief in those spirits existing in a spiritual plane where they can witness our lives and hear our imprecations; for still others, it's just a vague sense of presence; and at the greatest level of abstraction, it's simply being able to, on some level, address yourself to the absent ("This is for you, X").
My best self would be less judgmental about it all, but there it is.
||
222, 242 inspired trolling
思遣 為便乃不知者 片椀之底曾吾者 恋成尓家類 注土椀之中
(Need the character set. I was going to just drop that in, cause it's pretty and pert near untranslatable.)
"As one who knows no art to send off feeling
within the depths of an unclosed vessel
I have come to yearn."
maiden Awatame to Ōtomo no Yakamochi, written on the inside of a pot, Man'yōshū, ~775
plus!
Patterns of writing inevitably arise along other patterns. The heavens clear, pending configurations. People feel, grasping brushes. On this basis, Eight Trigrams, Tao-te Ching, Odes, Elegies, moving through the middle, signed on paper....Kukai, roughly CE 810
"The heavens clear, pending configurations. People feel, grasping brushes." ...I love this
(Lamarre, Uncovering Heian Japan)
|>
247: Yeah, so I figured. Mostly it stood out because it's so rare for me (or rare that I recall anyway), and such a random person. The last time I can recall it happening it was very much someone unsurprising. I don't really recall any times previous - for whatever reason, I've almost never had very sexual dreams.
Anyhoo.
Experiment time. Get your wife to wake you at random moments and ask you who you are thinking about having sex with.
I think I might have figured out who posted 236.
The woo-woo people I know who are into native tribal stuff think mostly in terms of the ancestors (not exactly the same as ghosts), and tend to take moral/ethical lessons from these thoughts. I don't particularly fault any of it: we 21st century rational types often think in terms of future generations, and tipping one's hat to past generations is fair enough.
As Apo observes in 174, it's not much more far-flung than believing in god(s).
Love that this site is still up:
http://hyperreal.org/raves/spirit/technoshamanism.html
253: Uh oh. Can we send LB back to the break room with her smartphone?
There's no question that Burning Man is a spiritual experience for many people. It presents the opportunity for encounters in extreme emotional, physical, and social conditions, facilitated by climate, terrain, radical self-expression, drugs, sleep deprivation, and art. I don't think there's any particular metaphysics common to it, but spirituality is more than metaphysics.
If you approach spirituality from the Picasso angle of 209, it makes perfect sense. You can connect the dots to "fashionable multi-culti stuff" if you want, but you can do that with stand mixers too for as much value. This is America, people believe weird shit without going to church.
I'm dissatisfied with the word "spirituality" as used to refer to "deep" or intense or profound experiences, but I don't know of a better word. For a long time after I quit believing in a deity or anything supernatural, I didn't have many experiences that required the term. In the past several years I have, and I engage in what I squeamishly refer to as a "spiritual practice." I don't have any metaphysical beliefs that come out of this, but I find the vocabulary of spirituality is the best available vocabulary to talk about this kind of stuff (even though many people who use the vocabulary are talking about stuff that doesn't resonate with me, and most people who use the vocabulary are also committed to some set of beliefs or other that I find useless or worse).
I have gotten to be friends with our local multifaith leader here, and I find her argument convincing that it is her job to help people, whether they have a "religion" or not, to experience and talk about moments of an interaction with the world that exceeds the empirical, and I, as a student of poetry, am down with that. What I am not down with is the exoticist appropriation of icons, symbols, and rituals in order to express whatever you had in mind. Fine, study the wisdom of other religious traditions than yours. Use what is helpful to you as a practice. Just don't go around spouting "Native American" or "African" nonsense because you can't be bothered to learn anything about specific religious traditions.
You hippies want a spiritual experience? Go to church.
I'm assuredly misrepresenting the poor man with the foregoing: during the brief time our lives overlapped he was mild to the point of passivity and, in his youth, he was a pretty enthusiastic amateur violinist and jazz pianist back when "jazz" meant "smoking the reefer."
I think of my vegetarianism as a kind of spiritual practice. It's not strictly ethical (nor environmental or health-based); though it incorporates my ethical misgivings about eating animals, I don't feel strongly that it's entirely wrong to do so. (I have my suspicions, but that's not where abstaining comes from.) Maybe that's just, in the words of the great philosophers, pussied-out ethics, but it makes sense to me to put it in a category called spiritual.
258: that is an interesting take, in that there are real (like, as empirically verified as you please) phenomena that are historically associated with practice that implies religion or at least spirituality, that are both very healthy and helpful and also not intrinsically linked to those concepts (that is, religion and spirituality) as they've generally been defined. I would even argue that talking (per AWB's friend) about a world that exceeds the empirical is needlessly restricting things; you can be as straight-up an empiricist as you please as still gain benefit from, say, meditation, or mindfulness that might in other contexts be described as spirituality.
This blog is probably the worst place on earth (well, one of them) for a discussion of anything religious/spiritual.
Ummmm, reading comprehension? On EARTH, heebie. Where do you think Hell is located? Oh psych you don't know, atheist.
Oddly, the commenter we know as "bob" is just a cover for well-known Catholic theologian Hans Küng.
You could always try to discuss religion at PZ Myers' blog. That would be fun something.
What's wrong with empiricism?
We should all pick an obscure video on YouTube and have a discussion about religion or how vegetarianism for ethical reasons is pretty obviously just deluded veganism.
I read, think, and (occasionally) write about the issues in 258/264 a lot.
I recommend most of what Ton Clark has to say on his site.
Googling related to this thread has introduced me to two ridiculous tumblrs (the second of which has awesome photos of a 1970s, trailer-tugged tiny house):
http://that-which-is-sacred.tumblr.com/
http://earth-age.blogspot.com/
273: The Ton Clark stuff seems roughly up my alley. I haven't looked at anything there closely yet, but I probably recognize a fellow traveler when I see one.
OT: I cannot be the only consumer of middlebrow media overwhelmed by the free advertising that various outlets are providing that new HBO series. Seriously, New Yorker? You've been rubbish since Charles Addams died but wasn't there a civil war or massacre to comment on this week?
The one by the Tiny Furniture director? They've totally made me want to see it, and I've never seen anything she's done.
The daughter of the drummer from Bad Company is in it, and that's good enough for me.
And I thought Tiny Furniture was pretty good, but kinda ripped off this movie which was better.
276: I think I'm just oversensitive to the 21st century "let's turn this trifling specimen of entertainment into spinach" sales pitch.
277: [Secret devil sign.]
My daughter has her advanced reike trining last week. The people she does it to -- with -- seem to get something out of it. She's certainly getting a lot from the woo-woo that comes with yoga.
It's either the second or third installment of John Nichols' New Mexico trilogy that does a great job sending up the embrace of other people's woo woo. I wouldn't be surprised if I'd suggested you folks give the second and third books a read. (I presume everyone has read the first book. Don't tell me if you haven't, I don't want the illusion dashed.)
I don't believe in ghosts, really I don't, but somehow I get the feeling that southeastern Pennsylvania is overrun with them. Something about the topography. I have told you all that I met a woman I knew from a past life -- and I definitely do not believe in reincarnation.
263: Last night I had another bad dream about cruelty (by me) to animals last night. This time I was dragging a Canada Goose along by its neck, which I then tried, unsuccessfully, to wring. I had to leave it silently squawking and obviously injured, but still conscious. And then, today, I almost ate some meat, but I remembered the dream and did not. Sorry, Halford, the dreams don't want me to be a caveman for some reason.
And did I mention that this was just last night that I had the dream? The time in between yesterday and today?
In a literal sense, I don't believe in ghosts but do believe that carbon monoxide can have wacky effects. In a literary sense, ghosts are totally great.
Now that things have been safely derailed, I must admit I'm not really clear what 265 means.
281: Cruelty toward dinosaurs is a holdover from our caveman days.
One by one their seats were emptied,
One by one they went away;
Here the circle has been broken--
Will it be complete one day?
My mom has creepy ghost stories about the house she grew up in (which house was built on top of the canonical Indian burial ground). Like one about this music box which was reportedly damaged beyond repair, according to a jeweler, and yet one night when my grandma was sad, it began to play, as if to comfort her.
I more or less don't know if I believe this event really happened and leave it at that.
Living in an old house and knowing there have been so many families here before us makes me satisfied, though not quite in a ghosty way. Being a parent has similarly pushed me to some feelings I don't know how to express without a lot of stretching.
I'm also now facebook friends with one of Mara's aunts, which means I'm sort of out as an atheist since that information is out there, but I haven't explicitly said so yet. I really need to deal with that soon, and also need to get back into the habit of taking her to church. Sigh.
I had a client rep who was a shaman, and used to show up in DC unexpectedly on his way from one gathering of indigenous holy men to another. Siberia, Australia, southern Africa, all over the Americas -- he had a wide network -- we'd have him to the house for dinner, and he had some pretty good stories.
The old lady who smoked herself to death in my house was not only an astrologer, but also ladened the house with various angel ornaments. When my sister, who had helped get rid of a lot of the junk in the house prior to moving in, lived with us, I used to ventriloquize the former occupant moaning "Do not disturb my angels!"
That was pretty amusing.
If you've had enough of 'the blood of the lamb,'
Then join in the grand industrial band.
If, for a change, you would have eggs and ham,
Then come, do your share, like a man!
291: Not like in a professional capacity. You know, just to be funny.
293: Ah, yes. I'm familiar with said maneuver. But for a moment I had high hopes for your forthcoming Unfoggdecahedron TED talk about ventriloquism.
You know what creeps me out about professional ventriloquists, besides everything? The way that when they do move their lips, it's totally out of synch with the noises they're making.
This thread has moved on, but back when I was a runner, I remember being taught/coached that you shouldn't stretch first, but instead jog/take it easy for a few minutes until warmed up, then stretch a bit, then run. But when I think about how practices actually went in high school, I don't remember us following that rule. So maybe I read it in a running magazine or something.
295: From the comments:
This is in extreme bad taste! It mocks Catholicism, and promotes hatred! You would NEVER do this with Islam or Judaism.
It would be so great to take this person to a John Waters film festival.
I was having what I thought were knee problems during the early parts of my runs. I talked to a friend who's in PT school, and she said it was actually my lower quads hurting and suggested some pre-run stretches. Viola, no more "knee" pain.
Also, I think there might be - based on someone I know - a homeopathy-chiropractics-anti-vaccination axis.
Speaking of woo, I'm pretty close to one of the sons in this family. He's a great person. After trying a bunch of other career paths, he's now in the family business. I love him dearly but do not envy him.
300: Yeah, they're all over my Facebook, sadly. Thankfully, I have no actual Republican friends, just anti-vaxers. Sigh.
302: Isn't it neat that, whenever someone writes an all-encompassing tract that lays out the fundamental truths at the heart of our existence, they always forget a couple, which can then be released as later works in the series?
When I visit my alienist, I page through the ads in the back of the waiting room yoga magazines, and muse that there are indeed still suckers born every minute.
This way to the egress!
*Note: I'm sure these fellows are nice enough in person, kind to children & small animals, etc. etc. I'm only jealous that I don't have a hustle that foolproof. Oh well.
whenever someone writes an all-encompassing tract that lays out the fundamental truths at the heart of our existence
I thought the Graeber discussion was finally over.
You've got to add a couple of layers of woo to the fundamental principles for a book to sell! In this family's case, it's the ethnic heritage and a genuinely creepy grandma that act as guarantors. My friend in that family is really a good person, though I maintain my doubts about everyone else. I was recently the beta reader on his first book, which was an odd experience.
177:
a pet silly belief, like that a horoscope isn't always wrong, or that every now and then a fortune cookie message says something weirdly appropriate.
If you believe that horoscopes are always wrong, or that a fortune cookie message never says something weirdly appropriate, then you ascribe to them more intelligence than I do.
Hey, I followed some of Halford's evangelizing and heebie's experimentation here and am considering trying Crossfit. There's a gym about two miles from my house.
I just wanted to ask some questions.
The reason I would do this is because all the things I currently do for exercise (running, biking, yoga, low-weight hi rep weightlifting, swimming sort of though I'm a beginner), at least the way that I do them, emphasize trying to build endurance over explosive power. Very occasionally I go to the climbing gym, but that requires another person and feels pretty hard to coordinate a lot of the time. I'd like to be someone who had more short burst cardio capacity and also more short burst strength. Is my perception right that Crossfit would emphasize this kind of thing?
I'd also really like to do something that emphasized more back and upper body strength. My poor quads do so much. I'd like to be able to do a pullup. I don't want to do a bunch of lunges. My legs are already tired. Is there a strong upper body emphasis in Crossfit.
It would bother me if someone characterized me as someone who wasn't willing to push herself -- I'm really in very different physical condition than I was five years ago and that didn't happen without any expenditure of effort. It's not a big deal at all to me to run five miles, bike ten, and take an hour long weightlifting class in a day. But I worked up to that and I like to feel that I can pace my growth, and I'm keeping things at a level where exercise feels pleasant and natural to me. I don't want to puke. Am I going to dislike the Crossfit environment?
Can I take just one Crossfit class a week? I was thinking if I could get into a rhythm where I went climbing once, to weightlifting once, and Crossfit once during a week that would be nicely varied strength training.
308: Yeah, Crossfit will definitely help with short-burst effort. (Actually, I'll be interested to hear how Crossfit affects heebie's soccer game. Part of the reason I'm considering doing Crossfit/HIT is specifically to improve my game fitness.)
You'll also gain more upper-body strength, but Crossfit doesn't have a specific emphasis on it. Insofar as it does have an emphasis, it's very much on whole-body/"general" fitness rather than any one particular area.
Crossfit seems nice. The paleo diet is probably a cult.
309: I didn't do crossfit, but was doing a fair bit of sprints/interval work interleaved with ordinary distance running and the difference in my [sport of choice] was astounding.
I really should try more fartleking before the half marathon.
You can fartlek in the new woonerf in Market Square.
Absolute yes to the explosive power thing. You will not be forced to do anything until you puke. I'd def go more than once a week; see what you think about the weight training at CF vs what youre doing now, based on your description CF should get you much stronger. Lift heavy!
Am I going to dislike the Crossfit environment?
No one dislikes the CrossFit environment. Everyone loves CrossFit. The CrossFit environment makes exercise so much fun that after two sessions of it you will find yourself absent-mindedly juggling chairs. Find out what I have gained from Scientology CrossFit.
Seriously, if you're already saying that "It's not a big deal at all to me to run five miles, bike ten, and take an hour long weightlifting class in a day," I can easily believe that you'd like CrossFit. And I can't find any reason that you couldn't do just one workout a week if you wanted. If you can't find a gym that doesn't offer a reasonable price for that, or with an environment that actually does seem inhospitable to that routine for some weird reason, then, hell, you could always just do the workouts of the day online.
It's not a big deal at all to me to run five miles, bike ten, and take an hour long weightlifting class in a day.
I am, again, having the feeling of, "where do you people get the time?" Like Heebie my challenge is not only scheduling time for a workout (which I'm moderately good, but not great at) but dealing with the fact that I'm a little brain-dead for most of the day afterwards (I have one day a week when I have a morning workout scheduled, which I'm good about doing but it always surprises me how long the effect lasts -- I feel noticeably better physically for most of the day, and I also feel like I lose about 30% of my mental focus for the rest of the day).
All of which is really to say, "congratulations" to everybody who's keeping up a good routine. Exercise is good. I've been skimping on exercise lately (but, hopefully, work should start requiring less attention any-day-now) and I miss it it. It's worth making the effort to have scheduled workout days, because it is worth the time (I say to myself) it's just hard to make the time if you don't have it set aside.
huh, both fartlek and woonerf are real words.
||
A car that regularly park on campus has a bumper sticker that says "Real men love Jesus." What do people think of the ethics and advisability of replacing it with a sticker that says "I question the masculinity of people of different religions."
The problem is that the bumper sticker slogan needs a quantifier. Does he mean "All real men love Jesus"? (Hillel, Shlomo--you guys are a bunch of pussies.) Or does he mean "Only real men love Jesus"? (Susan, Betty--your faith is inferior to mine.) Maybe he just means "Some real men love Jesus," which is not as offensive, but still a little passive aggressive ("Well some real men love Jesus. I don't know what's going on with the rest of you slackers.")
|>
314: I can't really afford to take a 15 dollar class more than once a week; that's why I asked whether it would be okay to go just once. (I could only afford to climb once a week if I got a membership.) Weightlifting just costs me the $25-a-semester school gym fee. I mean, I could afford it if I never went to yoga, but that seems like a terrible idea to me.
311: I have trouble imagining myself getting motivated to do sprints in an unstructured environment. Even intervals seems kind of unlikely, although maybe more likely now that I have a fancy running app that I could program cues for an interval workout into.
Thanks for answering my questions!
316: She has the time because she doesn't post here anymore.
317.2 reminds me of the mid-90s when the White Sox started selling tshirts that read "Real men wear black." Immediately the parody version was everywhere: "Real men are black."
If you can only afford to go 1 time/wk and have free access to a gym, you could prob do that and once you have some basic skills and/or scaling options down do CF workouts for free from the main site or your local CF affiliate's programming.
317.2: I saw a bumper sticker this morning that was too far away for me to read all the text, but definitely had the tagline SUPPORT THE CENTRAL GOVERNMENT OF MAURITANIA. It looked like an 80-ish white man driving. He may have loved Jesus, even, I suppose.
316: Yes, it's not enough that Unfogged makes me feel so stupid and ignorant?
317: My understanding of that slogan is that it is saying that this is the one case in which it is ok for a real man to love another man.
317
What do people think of the ethics and advisability of replacing it with a sticker that says "I question the masculinity of people of different religions."
I totally approve. highly ethical and advisable.
I mean, if you want to hedge your bets, then just put said note next to the original bumper sticker with tape. Still gets the message across, can't possibly do any harm. But a real man would get actual bumper stickers printed and put one directly over the previous sticker.
316: the biking is my commute; it's faster than the bus. For the running, when I'm behaving the way I want to be, I'm up at 6:15, out by 7, back by 8, so in an ideal world I can be at work by 9, although it rarely works out that way. The weightlifting class I go to is at 7:30, after the work day. I don't have the experience at all that exercising hurts my focus or concentration -- it's the opposite -- or that having done hard mental work makes me too tired for exercise.
That said, I do spend a chunk of time exercising that I could be using on other things. I'm partly justifying it by the fact that I need it to regulate my emotions, and having more time but feeing worse wouldn't make it easier to get work done.
But a real man would get actual bumper stickers printed and put one directly over the previous sticker.
A real man can convey a whole manifesto with a single careless ding to the door of the car parked adjacent.
I need it to regulate my emotions
I get all wanting-to-stab-people if I don't run or take a very long walk every could of days.
"SUPPORT THE CENTRAL GOVERNMENT OF MAURITANIA"
That phrase gets zero hits on google.
I read up on Mauritania on wikipedia, and now I'm wondering if this bumper sticker is meant to support or oppose the 2008 military coup.
328: I know! i googled it as soon as I got home and found nothing. It was weird.
I don't have the experience at all ... that having done hard mental work makes me too tired for exercise.
That still seems strange to me. I believe you, but it's just so different from my own experience.
I mean, to take an example which seems obvious to me, one of the ways in which I know that I've gone from "tired" to "exhausted" is that I start walking into the edge of doorways more often. So I know that fatigue affects my proprioception. But, more generally, I find that mental fatigue makes it harder to really engage my body.
*shrug* I really believe that every body is different. There's a lot of overlap and a it isn't that difficult to share advice, but it's still true that different bodies will respond differently to the same thing, and that different people can have a very different experience.
Hey Mineshaft, write me a job description! I need to hire someone for a small Access project. It's a pretty simple job, one I could do myself but far less efficiently than someone more experienced. I need something super user-friendly with intuitive Excel interfaces. Are there standard terms to help describe what I need? Good ways to write it narrowly enough to weed out some of the chaff? (My metaphors, let me mix them for you.)
I'm planning to post the job to the UT website to exploit help out a student and, more important, to require a faculty recommendation which I'm hoping will be more helpful than putting it on craigslist and getting replies from anyone who's ever turned on a computer.
Also, I assume accreditation for something like this is a joke, yes?
(If anyone here is interested or knows someone, feel free to email me at mypseud at geemail. My preference is to hire someone local that I can meet in person, but I'm open to other possibilities.)
I learned something about exercise today!
If you have new-ish barefoot-ish running shoes, and you wear them without socks, even if they are intended to be worn without socks, maybe don't go so far, lest you end up with silver dollar-sized blisters!
Good to know, huh?
Way to use a dated numismatic reference.
SUPPORT THE DENTAL PAVEMENT OF MORE LABIA.
333: I strive to maximize seignorage in all my comments.
On the advice of some old guy at a shoe store, I got new shoes with just giant heels. My ten mile run was painless, either because of those new shoes or because 5 miles of it was on dirt or because all my stretching has paid off.
Let's all pretend I said something vaguely sympathetic in 333.
I'll just limp wincing around the lab and hope somebody notices.
I got new shoes with just giant heels.
Blahniks or Louboutins?
315: I just took a look at the CF place near me, the one that Halford mentioned. It's much more relaxed than the stereotype would have it. People were doing the same things but at their own paces and with due regard for their weak points.
The staff was checking for bad forms inviting injuries but not being OCD about pinkies in or pinkies out. The demographic is indeed around 20 to 35 and I'd probably be the oldest around if I got into it. That's not a bad thing, I don't have to feel competitive with any twenty-something stunt people.
I wasn't turned off; I'll go back to observe a few other classes and then make a decision. That's actually kinda a glowing endorsement considering my general "Fuck off and die!" approach to anything even vaguely annoying these days.
337: Any damn fool can be uncivilized.
On the advice of some old guy at a shoe store, I got new shoes with just giant heels.
How do you strap them on?
317: The most charitable meaning would be that men who say they are Christians or live Jesus but don't actually experience tender feelings like love are not real men.
Reading this anti-carnivore article over lunch, I wondered if one of you single people might be persuaded to conduct an experiment to verify the following:
Fruits and vegetables buzz at a high frequency. I have this habit of eating red peppers in public like they're apples, and let me tell you, it drives women wild with desire. When I eat a grapefruit, they circle around me like they're prehistoric men and I'm the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
(Article written by a woman.)
but not being OCD about pinkies in or pinkies out. The
Aw man. That is my favorite part. I hope you find a comfortable fit there.