Yesterday started off well with a free lunch at Lunch 2.0. After dinner I received an email from a college friend pointing me to a job that looks like a great for me. We planned to discuss it further over beer but realized that he was leaving town on Saturday and I was leaving town on Sunday. Fortunately, we turned out to be five minutes from each other at the time of email exchange and were talking over beer ten minutes later. I haven’t been this excited about a job in a long time, particularly one that matches my skill set so well.
I left in an incredibly good mood. While stopped in traffic I texted a friend to tell them the meeting went well, only see flashing lights in my rear view mirror. “Seriously? I’m getting pulled over for texting?” I thought. Actually, it turned out that I had run a stop sign – apparently I was in such a good mood and so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t even see it.
“Did you know that you just rolled right through a stop sign?” the police officer asked me. I wasn’t sure what to say. I remembered the advice from the videos in Why You Should Never Talk to the Cops but didn’t feel completely comfortable telling the officer that I was going to plead the fifth. In the end, I just stared confusedly for about fifteen seconds until he said, “ok,” and walked back to his cruiser.
Waiting in my car for the next ten minutes, I ran through all my options for fighting the ticket. Did I have any kind of plausible defense? But even with a ticket, I was still in a great mood, and when the officer came back to tell me he was letting me off with a warning, my day got even better.
A free lunch, an exciting job opportunity, an escaped traffic ticket, and a few other long time personal goals achieved all in one day. Very very satisfying.
It’s been a few years since my last position as a professional writer, but I’m at it again. I’m freelancing for Guidespot.com, writing snarky guides to help get their website up and going. My first: Seven Worst Places to Break Up in Seattle.
I’ve fallen a bit behind on this blog. It’s sad, because there’s so much interesting stuff going on that I’d really like to record for posterity. But I’m applying for jobs now, so I feel like I need to be much more restrained about what I say.
I also just got back from my sister’s wedding in Maryland, which was fantastic. I doubt I’ll ever attend another wedding with sumo suits at the reception.
With regards to the sleep diet, I just cut down to 6.5 hours a night. I’m at the very beginning of the adjustment period, so I still feel pretty groggy in the morning, but not as bad as I would expect. Considering that I needed 8-8.5 every night as of just a few months ago, I consider this a successful experiment so far. If it ended right now, I think I would go back to 8 hours a night, but I’m going to push a little further and see what happens.
In other interesting news, I have moved away from sneakers as my main footwear and am now wearing Vibram’s Five Fingers almost everywhere:
The original motivation came from the article You Walk Wrong in NY Magazine. The author interviews a number of podiatrists who hypothesize that many of today’s foot and knee ailments stem from the fact that the thick padded soles of today’s shoes cause us to adopt a walking style very different from the gait our bodies evolved for over tens of thousands of years. The theory sounded reasonable to me, and as I’ve been dealing with running-induced knee injuries for the past 7 years, I thought I’d try out a more minimalist shoe to see if changing my running and walking form would help. (My roommate Craig has started doing the same thing, though he decided to pay somewhat more to get shoes that don’t make him look like a weirdo.)
What I didn’t anticipate was how incredibly satisfying I find it to be able to feel the ground through the shoes’ thin soles. Imagine you’d worn gloves for 25 years straight and now finally got to take them off and actually touch things. That’s how happy my feet feel.
I’ve always been irritated by some friends’ abilities to get by on 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night while I routinely need 8 or 9. I always assumed it was something I couldn’t do anything about, but the Sleepwarrior website claims there’s a little bit of evidence that you can train your body to get by on less sleep. They site an old study in which participants reduced their sleep hours by 30 minutes a night every few weeks. Eventually some subjects managed to get by on 4.5 hours of sleep.
The amazing thing is that, even a year after the study ended, all study participants were still sleeping 1-2 hours less a night than before the study!
So as of Monday, I will be sleeping no more than 7.5 hours a night for the next few weeks. The Sleepwarrior site also suggests waking up at the same time every day in order to train your body to release the “wake up” hormones at the same time each day, making it easier to drag yourself out of bed. I’ve always been really bad about this (morning workouts made it almost impossible) so I’ll be implementing this suggestion as well. 12:30 am to 8 am will be my standardized sleep schedule until the middle of September.
The one question is what do I do if I go to bed later on the weekend? Do I sleep in to get my 7.5 or wake up at 8 to keep my body clock? I’m leaning toward forcing myself out of bed in the morning, then taking a nap in the afternoon. I’ll log my ongoing experiences here.
A few days ago, in the bronze medal taekwondo match at the Olympics, a disgruntled athlete attacked the referee. Upset about a penalty (taking too much time for an injury), Angel Matos is now banned for life from the sport for kicking the referee in the head and punching another official who came to hold him back.
What I find notable about this isn’t that some athlete lost his temper. I just want to point out the following:
1) The injury occurred because taekwondo teaches you to kick with the top of your foot. The top of your foot has all sorts of little, easily broken bones in it and is just a stupid thing to kick someone with. Sure enough, Matos’ injury came because he kicked his opponent in the knee and hurt his own foot. Styles that actually teach you to kick in a practical way strike with the shin.
2) Matos, an olympic caliber tae kwon do black belt, sucker-kicked a referee (not even another athlete) in the head and didn’t even knock him down. He punched an official in the gut and barely even slowed him down. Seriously, for someone who’s supposed to be an elite fighter, I would expect a lot more.
Anyone enrolling their kids in tae kwon do (or really any martial art without a heavy emphasis on sparring) thinking they’re learning self-defense should watch this video and think twice.
