I’m now a week into Phase 3 of the Maker’s Diet. The last post I made was during the violent throes of Phase 1 after a busy week of shows and rehearsals. Well, I survived. Phase 2 was good because I got to add in a bunch of heavier foods that made my body much happier. Still had to fight a losing battle to get enough protein though.

I haven’t measured, but I know I lost a fair amount of weight and (for me) a significant amount of body fat during the first two phases. I was very close to dropping the diet when I noticed that. As it is, I just barely landed on the side of staying on the diet.

So now I’m in the ‘final’ phase. I think the diet suggests staying on the third phase as a life-long diet, but there’s no way that’s happening for me: 1) Budget 2) I like to bake things 3) It’s annoyingly non-specific.

1) Good food is expensive. Eating at this quality level is not sustainable for this (lately sometimes literally) starving artist.

2) I like baking – this diet does not. Being gluten-free makes this interesting – but actually more healthy in the long run. What is a disallowed ‘baked good’ when certain types of bread are allowed? What about baking with certain grains that are allowed?Sorry diet, my hobby wins out on this one.

3) Going through this experience was annoying in a few specific areas. There was a lot of research and argument presented for organic food, non-commercial agriculture and ancient eating habits. However, the diet guidelines were vague to my mind. More importantly, why was each food chosen to be in a given phase?

The diet almost casually mentioned pH, insulin, and inflammation once or twice in it’s several hundred pages – which, upon an annoyance inspired study binge, proved to be the major decision factors for each food. Low glycemic, mild pH and easy to digest foods were the only ones allowed in the first phases.

Once I knew the criteria for choosing foods, I had a much easier time making dietary decisions. The book is nice, but it doesn’t list nearly enough foods under the Eat/ Don’t Eat categories, especially when I have to look out for gluten-contaminated foods as well. The book also didn’t mention anything about portion sizes or meal composition, which would have been helpful. Aside from 4 days of suggested recipes for each phase, you were up a creek.

The good thing about all this is that I ended up figuring out that an unbalanced pH level was my primary issue. I was eating a fair diversity of foods but most happened to be on one side of the pH chart. Figuring that out, I managed to organize my meals so that I got my pH back on track and have noticed my most significant improvement since then.

Anyway, the final phase is pretty open. I finally get to eat grains again, which has reintroduced my beloved quinoa – the almighty source of vegetable protein and tastiness. Planning meals is much more simple and I have enough energy now to start adding back in all the extra activities I’ve intentionally cut out for various reasons over the last month. Noticeably, one of those activities is blogging.

I think it might be fun to post up a list of dishes I’ve learned to cook over the last few weeks. I’ve gathered quite a bunch. I’ve also been beefing up my baking database, so that should be a lot of fun once I can get back to it. I’ll see about getting to that a little later…

I’m finally getting sleepy, now. Sorry if you made it this far. I basically typed myself into oblivion tonight. Any and all spelling errors are the result of internet gremlins, not me. Grammatical and syntactical errors are arbitrary and bite me.

G’night!

Look for new posts in the near future.

So, one of the many reasons I haven’t put up anything here in a while is, of course, the fact that holidays take me out of commission for a while. However, holiday recovery has been accomplished for a while now and I still haven’t put anything up.

The reason has more to do with the fact that I haven’t been able to sleep well for months. I have actually no idea why this wave of insomnia has hit, I didn’t significantly change anything about my life when this started, strangely suddenly, in September. (Just woke up in the middle of one night without any trouble going to sleep before)

September was not a good month for insomnia to start, although possibly appropriate since we were rehearsing Dracula at the time. I though it might have something to do with that project, but the insomnia has continued well after the vampires went to sleep. Since then, it’s been varying in intensity for a while. I don’t have the problem where I can’t sleep at all, I do sleep. It’s more along the lines of waking up repeatedly in the night and a general degradation of the quality and type of sleep occurring.

You can imagine that this has had a detrimental effect on concentration and energy levels. Depending on how things were going on a given week, I was not a necessarily safe person to have around the studio for a while. People got bruises to prove it. The problem eventually drove me to try medicating myself (sleeping pills) which had mixed success. For those of you who know my aversion to consuming medication, that tells you how extreme the problem got.

Sleeping pills only shut your body down, which was apparently not my problem. I also apparently don’t like shutting myself down artificially because the first few nights I took sleeping aids, I fought them off and woke myself up, which was super-creepy. I also had trouble waking up because the pills keep you down for a certain amount of time, whether your body wants to be down or not.

So, on the advice of a neuro-biologist friend of mine (cool friend to have, I say), a few days ago I switched to using melatonin, which is the chemical your brain uses to tell itself to go to sleep.

Which brings me to why I’m writing today – I have energy! A couple days of going to bed because my brain tells me to is great. It’s still hard to get out of bed in the morning, but that is starting to fade as I get further from pill-induced habit.

Yay for modern science! Now I can see if the melatonin will get me into some good sleeping habits and I can go to sleep completely drug-free. Also, now that I have energy maybe I can try to figure out why I started having this trouble in the first place.

We’ll see.

Let’s try this: I joined a local Rochester community of traceur’s this summer. “What’s a traceur?” That’s the word French-speakers use to describe a person who practices parkour (also a French word – I guess the French get to name things that Frenchmen invent.) Parkour is a bit more difficult to define than traceur (and I kinda cheated with that one, anyway). You can check out the group here: Rochester Parkour

There are several ways to define parkour. First off, it’s a non-competitive sport. It’s all about community; pushing yourself and encouraging others to increase their ability. There are flashier spin-off sports like free-running that aim for more spectacular movements, but parkour focuses on efficiency and economy of motion. Parkour is also described as training the ‘flight’ portion of our ‘fight or flight’ response. Martial arts will train you to confront someone, parkour will train you to get away, unless you’re being chased by James Bond. In which case, your best course of action is to become an iconic arch-villain and hope to be resurrected in a future movie. (See the Casino Royale opening for a traceur who did not apply the appropriate response).

Aside from escaping super-agents, parkour has been a great addition to my life. I still love to perform and move with PUSH, don’t get me wrong. There’s just something about the lack of pressure with parkour that is very freeing. Freedom is the key word, actually. I’m free to have fun with it,the movement itself is meant to provide freedom in an environment and leaping up and off a 10-ft wall is probably the next best thing to flying.

And even though that last stunt may sound kinda dangerous, the guys at group (and girls, too) are very good at controlling the safety factor. You never do anything that you aren’t comfortable with, and there’s always someone around to watch you or help you achieve a new skill.

Oh yeah, the people are pretty fascinating, too. Most of the traceurs are local college students, which probably isn’t a great surprise, but there are also a lot of locals who spend their weekends and free time training. All ages,too. It’s a pretty cool thing.

I do end up with a higher number of scrapes and bruises than I would have otherwise, but I have yet to see or hear of anyone in our group picking up any injury worse than a sprained ankle. Plus, the scrapes are just added manly/cool factor: “How’d you get that nasty scrape?” “Jumping up a 10-ft wall and then Kong-vaulting over a 5 -ft long concrete block.”

Totally worth the 3″ scratch on my arm.

All photos are courtesy of Graham Musler. They were taken this summer during one of our training sessions at Manhattan Square Park.

I’ve been busy with PUSH this year (not a bad thing) which has given me much less time to do other things. However, There will probably be a little more online activity from in a few weeks. I’ve talked to Darren about some new things I’d like to be doing with PUSH and I’ll be trying them out over the next few weeks and months. I’ll let you know more when time gets closer happen.

Another hindrance is that my computer is currently powered by a cord I literally have to hold together. It broke a few months back, was repaired but has now broken again without hope of repair. I have ordered a new one, but I’ll be surviving on the broken version for a while.

And since typing takes two hands (one of which cannot be holding my broken cord together, I need to conserve my almost depleted battery!

Signing o………………………………………………………

The only background I’ll give out is that debate tournament are usually massive affairs where hundreds of people from different schools are competing all at once. Just keep that in mind.

Oh. You should also know this is a true story (the story, not the speech), and the trophy was enormous.

Here’s my Kevin’s essay – republished without his consent – but hey, you’re getting credit Kev!

“How I Won It”

Reclining coolly in a chair at the awards ceremony Jonathan thought back about the tournament that he had just won. His mind meandered through the most thrilling parts. His wandering mind dreamt up a speech. A speech he might say if they decided his award merited a speech. What would he say in this victory speech he pondered in his mind? He’d probably explain how he had won this tournament. Yes, that would be a wonderful speech.

It would start like this. “Hello everybody, my name is Jonathan Lowery, through hard work and extreme determination I won this tournament. For the benefit of other debaters I shall give a short explanation of how I triumphed over everyone else in this debate tournament.” That was a very catchy beginning to a speech. He smiled to himself as he dreamt up the explanation of his shocking victory “I was one of many participates who entered this tournament hoping to take away the big trophy. I fought my way through four matches in the preliminaries. My tireless efforts earned me a spot in the quarterfinals.” The preliminaries had been the hardest thing to win in the entire tournament, but he knew for sure that it was in the preliminaries that he had done his best debating.

“Through my hard work and ardent arguments in the preliminaries the officials decided to give me a bye for the quarterfinals. I went straight to the semifinals.” Shear luck Jonathan thought. That’s what got him through the quarterfinals without debating. “Once I reached the semifinals my prodigious reputation gave me the edge over my opponent. That edge combined with hard work earned me a spot in the finals.” Mr. Dulaney had almost had a stroke over the semifinals. Mr. Dulaney was enraged when he discovered it was against the rules to debate someone form your own school. He vehemently debated with the officials for ages over that rule. He wanted his students to debate for a spot in the finals. Eventually, Mr. Dulaney gave up and chose Jonathan for some arbitrary reason.

“Having so effectively progressed through the preceding rounds. My opponent became faint of heart and could not face me. All I had to do was wait for his argument to fall apart.” The other finalist had simply been unable to attend since he was taking the ACT the morning of the finals. So he had progressed through three rounds of debates sitting on bench in an empty cafeteria.

The speech was so ridiculous Jonathan didn’t bother to think up a conclusion. In the end he was glad that he was not required to give a speech for his award. Though, his imaginary speech would probably be a hit at parties especially if people knew the real story. That was where his speech belonged, in party. At that party he would tell people of his amazing triumph. How he had won a tournament through loopholes and dumb luck, yet, he thought, as he received his enormous trophy that would be a funny story speech to write down sometime. It would have a catchy title like “How I Won It.”

I have a confession on this one. In a well-written paper, this section would be modified into part 3. I wrote this to help figure out my thoughts and ended up writing the links afterward. However, I’m not done writing that so you guys get the raw process.

‘Donegality’ can be described as the attempt to compress Experiences into the selected recreations within artistic enterprise. I wrote the above poem in response to standing in the midst of a large tropical storm, attempting to describe the every detail that assimilated, related and merged into that Experience. I failed. Similes and metaphors could have taken me down avenues of comparison and association. Yet, those avenues would have only circumscribed the Experience, not defined it. They would have connected many of the correct feelings, sensory perceptions, and thoughts together but they would not have done so in a way that mirrored the Experience. The Experience would have to be changed in order to be transmuted to the page.

Aside: This could be one reason the live stage maintains itself in the modern age. The stage (along with its viewing) is already an Experience of sorts. Theatre presses upon the whole human being in a way that emulates everyday experiences.

PUSH’s work “Galileo” springs to mind as a good example of donegal and contemplative merging. The piece centers around the human embodiment of the heliocentric solar model. Performers run around each other, partner with each other (analogous to mutual gravitational spins), and recreate the tugging and pulling of gravitational events with choreographed movements. These are the things that can be Contemplated as the work progresses. However, at the same time that these particular actions are taking place, the performers are also aware of a separate mode of performance, the Donegality.

In “Galileo”, every movement is defined by some form of ‘circle’ or ‘curve’, imitating the shape of planets, the curve of orbits, etc. Reaching for another performer is not accomplished in a straight line, the reach is accomplished by sweeping the arm through space only meeting the partner at the end of a curved path. For another example the performers are constantly focused on the emotional extension of their movements; meaning the projection of their emotions, along the lines of movement, into a larger, imaginative space than their physical mobility allows. Finally, there is the application of weight as the driving force of movement initiation throughout the work

Without the less obvious application of movement within the framework of the ‘contemplative’ movements “Galileo” would fail as a performance piece. The larger movements, running around each other for example, would jar if the performers simply stopped to violently grab their partner and begin spinning around their mutual center of gravity. Instead the performers slow down, arc their bodies and curve their arms through space as they transition between one movement and the next.

I also want to mention that this concept is readily apparent in studies into design concepts for the theatre. Sets, lights, costumes, sound, etc… have for years been supplying this donegal element in the theatre. A scene can be thoroughly defined by its trappings and accouterments just as easily as its dramatic content.

Yes, I know. Horrible.

There are plans to remedy this situation soon, but these are complicated by the fact that I am preparing to be out of my house all during July. Seeing as I would have to pay for this month, I’m not inclined to set it up until afterward. It’s a pain, but hey, it’s life.

I’m hoping to do some thinking/writing during the off-internet time. Hopefully I’ll get things in order so I can post them whenever I do get online.