Why does a muscle get big when you flex it? Because it's contracting. I knew that. So what, exactly, is the muscle contracting? Now I know that too . . . because this book is awesome.
Mark Rippetoe's books, Starting Strength, and Practical Programming are the two best books I've read on the fitness to date. As a CSCS (requires either a kinesthetic or medical degree) and olympic strength coach, he has the background, and his way of explaining things is technical, thorough, and understandable.
This is how they've changed my approach to designing workouts: they're no longer about working out. They're about disrupting homeostasis with stressors that are enough to cause the body to adapt in the appropriate way. I like it. He starts from there.
The books are available on Google Books if you're interested. I'm also going to post they way I've been working out to coincide with boxing if anyone is interested. It's pretty applicable to anyone wanting to start getting in shape.
My God, isn't music incredible? The way classical turns into a string of pearls, the way you hear the soul of the artist in a good pop song, the way motown sings the harmonic structure of jazz, and Boyz II Men sound like Giant Steps. The way the harmonic structure of jazz has so many twists, turns, surprises, a way of syncopating it all like nothing else? My god. And no, that's not meant in vain.
We were sitting in the hammock, talking, tonight. You would say something, and I'd think, in turn, in song. So I said them. "Have you heard Where the Angels Sleep? By Bebo Norman? Or Running to Stand Still? That's by U2." That's how I thought. And then we listened, and they did something, they went off the way music usually can.
There's a gift God gave us in music. What a gift it is to get to play a part in it. By playing, by singing, by listening, by moving; by cranking it, by getting it to make you shake, by massaging all those quiet passages . . .
It's amazing what pop can do over such simple chord structures; or the way gospel, soul, and blues can turn the textual fidelity of classical music on its head with all of its extravagance and variation in the melody, the color of tone, it's long runs and licks.
The harmonies from central africa send shivers up and down and up and down my spine each and every time, and you know what they do? Those guys think the boys deserve a little fun, so they move the melody to the tenors and get the sopranos to sing the sixths. Altos get the root, and basses get whatever color's left missing. It's incredible.
This year I've wanted to be B.B. King. Brad Paisley. The girl in Sugarland. Hayley Williams from Paramore. Snoop Dogg. George Winston and every member of U2. Doug Young, Larry Carlton, and Tommy Emmanuel. A male Keyshia Cole with John Mayer backing Male Keyshia me on guitar. But when I drove home listening to Lauryn Hill sing Tell Him, as unfamiliar as it was, I wanted to raise my hand.
It's this, I thought. This is what takes me to God.
Traveling never really seems to work out the way you expect.
Last year, for instance. It was advertised as a luxury townhouse, but my uncle Stan went through each and every cupboard looking for the source of what he swore was the smell of fish lingering in the air.
"Judy, I'm telling you, it's fish. There are fish somewhere in this condo. I smell fish."
"Oh Stanley, would you sit down? Nobody else smells them."
"Judy, if I sit down, they're going to be in the next door I would've opened."
This year it was the door locks. Our door locks turned only a quarter of the way, stopping at 2, 5, 7, and 10 o'clock, so using the restroom was never without the thumbprint of anxiety over whether the door was, or was in fact not, open.
I am definitely feeling the withdrawals, writes my sister. Shouldn't I be in a kayak and not at my desk reading inclusionary housing plans? This year we hiked a sand trail in the coast redwoods, took a tour of the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, kayaked on the ocean, slept on the beach, saw Larry Carlton at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, sailed on a catamaran, and had generally great times with family.
Rick also invited me over to hang out while he worked at his bench for an hour or two, Trish came over for a night with Ashley, and the family finally conceded that The Brewery just isn't all that good.
I loved our coastal week as usual, and also as usual, I'm feeling completely guilty for wishing I could simply live in Santa Cruz, build guitars, and work on a boat. You know, kingdom work!
Men's Health Fall Guide to Style. Just what I wanted.
I'm flipping through, wondering if the Perry Ellis briefs could help me do chin ups from tree branches in public, too---or if the glossy crimson colored sleeveless parka could work for me. And where to do I buy the Abraham Lincoln jacket, anyway?
Then it came. A sweater that grabbed my attention, not for the ridiculous staging, but because it just looked good. The description called it the "Pringle of Scotland argyle sweater," but according to the internet, it's no where the be found.
Just as well. I don't exactly have $600 to drop on a black and white cashmere sweater.
We're in Santa Cruz for the week, but my strat project will be all ready for finish when we get home. Trying to replicate this finish job is going to be hard, but I'm looking forward to trying. In the meantime, finishing the artwork for the headstock was really fun!
Woah---whirlwind!
Will I ever finish the story of the passive aggressive master teacher from "heaven"? Not at this rate.
Today: rewired an amp to match the schematic of a vintage (1964) Vox AC30. Otherwise known as the amp played by The Edge.
Tomorrow: Michelle explores an amazingly cool field between Calvin Crest and Fresno Dome (with me) to satisfy my desire to follow it around the curve to the end . . . and I explore a fantastically creepy silo to satisfy her desire to see what it's like inside the old stomping ground of a satanic cult.
Yesterday: Roasted Dave Dack during his going away party in about two complete sentences. These things are terrifying. After you've been consecutively funny twice, people expect you to do it again. More than that, they expect you to take them to a different place. A place of laughing at something they never would've imagined on their own. So it's on you. And the whole time you're thinking, Damnit, why'd I have to be the one to get stuck with dry humor?
And the day before that: James Lyons was married. Relatives made me the impromptu DJ, armed with a foreign computer and a playlist populated with descriptive song names like, "Track 01," "Track 02." James and Diran are two of the most intelligent, creative, thoughtful, non-fronting people I know. They could both have doctorates in fine art (one of them does) and still manage to make my rinky dink projects sound like the most incredible things going.
4,500 people have watched me play guitar and sniff on YouTube, including one hater. That's a lot of people. I was once a month on the news, and 80,000 people watched that, but for some reason it doesn't make me feel nearly as out there as 4,500 via YouTube (including my hater).
This thing made me unexpectedly mad; then I realized two things.
1) Other YouTubers were rushing to my defense and sending me private messages to direct me to their comments to him.
2) After watching his video's (including his cover of the same song), my personal Simon Cowell can't be older than 15. Suddenly he was cute.
I've been working through a vocal program, but whenever I figure out how to sing in tune, I don't think I'll be able to do it quite like Marc Broussard (1:30 in is my favorite section).
My master teacher and I were getting along great until she asked about my afterlife. There she was everyday, just this woman who'd somehow figured out how to wear sandals that matched her sundress every day. It was like 50 years hadn't touched her skin and ever-present smile.
The first time it went like this:
Her: What kind of music do you like?
Me: Um, gosh. I like a lot. It's probably pretty rare if I haven't had a week with some kind of soul or R&B, though.
Her: Ah. I just listen to Christian, she said, paused . . . and smiled.
Somehow I deleted this while I was finishing it. Completed version up soon.
I love new adventures. It's just always been one of my things, and some of my favorite memories are firmly in the middle of them. These pictures are from my first time out on a non-row boat this past saturday. It was a blast. (huge thanks to Dave and Melody for putting it together). I'll post more once I go through them more.
Who doesn't want to student teach from 7:30 to 1:00 without a break today?
Ooo, ooo! *I* don't!
It's weird to play a song to you camera! My bet is that someone will say, "Dude, it's by Tom Petty" within the first five comments.
Odds are also on your side (thank God) that you won't ever get the news from your doctor that you have only months left to live. But you know what he may very well tell you? That you need a new hip. Nobody ever says "live it up because someday you might need a new hip" but it's the truth.
- John Mayer
Nothing compares to the boxing class I took tonight. Any of the workouts I've done? None.
I've lunged. Done things on steps. Jumped over and on 24" tall boxes. Hoped to God for 3 minutes of jogging with the treadmill elevated to 15 to be over. And none of it compares to boxing. The gazillion variations of pushups and lunges? None.
It started out easily enough. 15 minutes of abs followed by 10 minutes on legs. Trevor was calling out the moves. "50 crunches! Right leg over left knee, touch it with your elbow 30 times! One! Now bicycles! 1! 2! 3! Woo! Lunges! And high step! High step! There you go!"
At that point I was doing OK. "Yeah," I thought, "I'm not quite dead." Actually, I was kind of pleased to be keeping up.
Trevor kept walking to my spot to offer classic trainer encouragements.
"Yeah! That's it! Keep going!"
Shave the goatie, bleach his hair, and the guy's Tony Little.
We finally moved to the punching bag.
"Jab, jab, right! Jab, jab, right! Cross! Left hook and uppercut!"
I had the jab going, and the right cross was really fun, but uppercut? How the heck are you supposed to do that to a bag?
But Trevor came to the rescue.
"That's it," he said before I'd had to chance to do anything. "Just like that!" He leaned in towards the bag. "Up!" Poof-swish. "Up!" Poof-swish.
"You get in real close, and pop! Get in there with the knuckles!"
His voice got lower. "In here, it's, ah! ah! Right there with the knuckles." His eyes kept glowing towards the bag.
And then Trevor quieted himself down even more. "In here, bam, bam." Punching the mid-section of the bag.
He hunched in even closer to it with a new, humorless expression. "But out there?" Phoof! He swung hard.
"Nail him in the crotch . . . a couple shots to the crotch."
I looked at the bag, wiped some sweat, and critically realized I've never really prepared myself with some kind of response for this situation. Trevor gave it another shot to the crotch, gazed a bit more, and finally drifted back down the aisle.
I remember finding Michael Kenna one afternoon during some surfing and just sitting here wondering if any of his prints are made available sub $2,000. My favorite galleries are Hokkaido, Japan 2007, and China, 2006-2008, but they're all pretty breathtaking.
Who doesn't want something to call their summer?
Like, I don't know when it started, but suddenly we were in the back of that truck watching sugar pines blur just over our heads on the 4th of July (and how did we even get that truck?), and that? That was summer. That was that summer, at least.
Like, "When I said that summer, what I really meant was...I needed something to name that."
Watching the ocean.
Seeing you get married.
Frank McCourt.
Mark Rippetoe's books, Starting Strength, and Practical Programming are the two best books I've read on the fitness to date. As a CSCS (requires either a kinesthetic or medical degree) and olympic strength coach, he has the background, and his way of explaining things is technical, thorough, and understandable.
This is how they've changed my approach to designing workouts: they're no longer about working out. They're about disrupting homeostasis with stressors that are enough to cause the body to adapt in the appropriate way. I like it. He starts from there.
The books are available on Google Books if you're interested. I'm also going to post they way I've been working out to coincide with boxing if anyone is interested. It's pretty applicable to anyone wanting to start getting in shape.
Wednesday, August 20
My God, isn't music incredible? The way classical turns into a string of pearls, the way you hear the soul of the artist in a good pop song, the way motown sings the harmonic structure of jazz, and Boyz II Men sound like Giant Steps. The way the harmonic structure of jazz has so many twists, turns, surprises, a way of syncopating it all like nothing else? My god. And no, that's not meant in vain.
We were sitting in the hammock, talking, tonight. You would say something, and I'd think, in turn, in song. So I said them. "Have you heard Where the Angels Sleep? By Bebo Norman? Or Running to Stand Still? That's by U2." That's how I thought. And then we listened, and they did something, they went off the way music usually can.
There's a gift God gave us in music. What a gift it is to get to play a part in it. By playing, by singing, by listening, by moving; by cranking it, by getting it to make you shake, by massaging all those quiet passages . . .
It's amazing what pop can do over such simple chord structures; or the way gospel, soul, and blues can turn the textual fidelity of classical music on its head with all of its extravagance and variation in the melody, the color of tone, it's long runs and licks.
The harmonies from central africa send shivers up and down and up and down my spine each and every time, and you know what they do? Those guys think the boys deserve a little fun, so they move the melody to the tenors and get the sopranos to sing the sixths. Altos get the root, and basses get whatever color's left missing. It's incredible.
This year I've wanted to be B.B. King. Brad Paisley. The girl in Sugarland. Hayley Williams from Paramore. Snoop Dogg. George Winston and every member of U2. Doug Young, Larry Carlton, and Tommy Emmanuel. A male Keyshia Cole with John Mayer backing Male Keyshia me on guitar. But when I drove home listening to Lauryn Hill sing Tell Him, as unfamiliar as it was, I wanted to raise my hand.
It's this, I thought. This is what takes me to God.
Saturday, August 16
Traveling never really seems to work out the way you expect. Last year, for instance. It was advertised as a luxury townhouse, but my uncle Stan went through each and every cupboard looking for the source of what he swore was the smell of fish lingering in the air.
"Judy, I'm telling you, it's fish. There are fish somewhere in this condo. I smell fish."
"Oh Stanley, would you sit down? Nobody else smells them."
"Judy, if I sit down, they're going to be in the next door I would've opened."
This year it was the door locks. Our door locks turned only a quarter of the way, stopping at 2, 5, 7, and 10 o'clock, so using the restroom was never without the thumbprint of anxiety over whether the door was, or was in fact not, open.
I am definitely feeling the withdrawals, writes my sister. Shouldn't I be in a kayak and not at my desk reading inclusionary housing plans? This year we hiked a sand trail in the coast redwoods, took a tour of the Santa Cruz Guitar Company, kayaked on the ocean, slept on the beach, saw Larry Carlton at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center, sailed on a catamaran, and had generally great times with family.Rick also invited me over to hang out while he worked at his bench for an hour or two, Trish came over for a night with Ashley, and the family finally conceded that The Brewery just isn't all that good.
I loved our coastal week as usual, and also as usual, I'm feeling completely guilty for wishing I could simply live in Santa Cruz, build guitars, and work on a boat. You know, kingdom work!
Wednesday, August 13
Men's Health Fall Guide to Style. Just what I wanted.
I'm flipping through, wondering if the Perry Ellis briefs could help me do chin ups from tree branches in public, too---or if the glossy crimson colored sleeveless parka could work for me. And where to do I buy the Abraham Lincoln jacket, anyway?
Then it came. A sweater that grabbed my attention, not for the ridiculous staging, but because it just looked good. The description called it the "Pringle of Scotland argyle sweater," but according to the internet, it's no where the be found.
Just as well. I don't exactly have $600 to drop on a black and white cashmere sweater.
Monday, August 11
We're in Santa Cruz for the week, but my strat project will be all ready for finish when we get home. Trying to replicate this finish job is going to be hard, but I'm looking forward to trying. In the meantime, finishing the artwork for the headstock was really fun!
Monday, August 4
Woah---whirlwind!
Will I ever finish the story of the passive aggressive master teacher from "heaven"? Not at this rate.
Today: rewired an amp to match the schematic of a vintage (1964) Vox AC30. Otherwise known as the amp played by The Edge.
Tomorrow: Michelle explores an amazingly cool field between Calvin Crest and Fresno Dome (with me) to satisfy my desire to follow it around the curve to the end . . . and I explore a fantastically creepy silo to satisfy her desire to see what it's like inside the old stomping ground of a satanic cult.
Yesterday: Roasted Dave Dack during his going away party in about two complete sentences. These things are terrifying. After you've been consecutively funny twice, people expect you to do it again. More than that, they expect you to take them to a different place. A place of laughing at something they never would've imagined on their own. So it's on you. And the whole time you're thinking, Damnit, why'd I have to be the one to get stuck with dry humor?
And the day before that: James Lyons was married. Relatives made me the impromptu DJ, armed with a foreign computer and a playlist populated with descriptive song names like, "Track 01," "Track 02." James and Diran are two of the most intelligent, creative, thoughtful, non-fronting people I know. They could both have doctorates in fine art (one of them does) and still manage to make my rinky dink projects sound like the most incredible things going.
4,500 people have watched me play guitar and sniff on YouTube, including one hater. That's a lot of people. I was once a month on the news, and 80,000 people watched that, but for some reason it doesn't make me feel nearly as out there as 4,500 via YouTube (including my hater).
This thing made me unexpectedly mad; then I realized two things.
1) Other YouTubers were rushing to my defense and sending me private messages to direct me to their comments to him.
2) After watching his video's (including his cover of the same song), my personal Simon Cowell can't be older than 15. Suddenly he was cute.
I've been working through a vocal program, but whenever I figure out how to sing in tune, I don't think I'll be able to do it quite like Marc Broussard (1:30 in is my favorite section).
Monday, July 28
My master teacher and I were getting along great until she asked about my afterlife. There she was everyday, just this woman who'd somehow figured out how to wear sandals that matched her sundress every day. It was like 50 years hadn't touched her skin and ever-present smile.
The first time it went like this:
Her: What kind of music do you like?
Me: Um, gosh. I like a lot. It's probably pretty rare if I haven't had a week with some kind of soul or R&B, though.
Her: Ah. I just listen to Christian, she said, paused . . . and smiled.
Somehow I deleted this while I was finishing it. Completed version up soon.
Tuesday, July 15
I love new adventures. It's just always been one of my things, and some of my favorite memories are firmly in the middle of them. These pictures are from my first time out on a non-row boat this past saturday. It was a blast. (huge thanks to Dave and Melody for putting it together). I'll post more once I go through them more.
Monday, July 14
Who doesn't want to student teach from 7:30 to 1:00 without a break today?
Ooo, ooo! *I* don't!
Thursday, July 10
It's weird to play a song to you camera! My bet is that someone will say, "Dude, it's by Tom Petty" within the first five comments.
Thursday, July 3
The DVD is finally out . . . and so are all my local stores.
It's a funny time to be alive right now, in that I'm not quite sure we're celebrating like we should. I don't mean the "Hand me your keys, Dan! " celebrating. I mean the very innate act of celebration; human appreciation. Group reveling. A general sense of "This is my tribe and this is our fellowship. " Like a concert.Odds are also on your side (thank God) that you won't ever get the news from your doctor that you have only months left to live. But you know what he may very well tell you? That you need a new hip. Nobody ever says "live it up because someday you might need a new hip" but it's the truth.
- John Mayer
Tuesday, July 1
Nothing compares to the boxing class I took tonight. Any of the workouts I've done? None.
I've lunged. Done things on steps. Jumped over and on 24" tall boxes. Hoped to God for 3 minutes of jogging with the treadmill elevated to 15 to be over. And none of it compares to boxing. The gazillion variations of pushups and lunges? None.
It started out easily enough. 15 minutes of abs followed by 10 minutes on legs. Trevor was calling out the moves. "50 crunches! Right leg over left knee, touch it with your elbow 30 times! One! Now bicycles! 1! 2! 3! Woo! Lunges! And high step! High step! There you go!"
At that point I was doing OK. "Yeah," I thought, "I'm not quite dead." Actually, I was kind of pleased to be keeping up.
Trevor kept walking to my spot to offer classic trainer encouragements.
"Yeah! That's it! Keep going!"
Shave the goatie, bleach his hair, and the guy's Tony Little.
We finally moved to the punching bag.
"Jab, jab, right! Jab, jab, right! Cross! Left hook and uppercut!"
I had the jab going, and the right cross was really fun, but uppercut? How the heck are you supposed to do that to a bag?
But Trevor came to the rescue.
"That's it," he said before I'd had to chance to do anything. "Just like that!" He leaned in towards the bag. "Up!" Poof-swish. "Up!" Poof-swish.
"You get in real close, and pop! Get in there with the knuckles!"
His voice got lower. "In here, it's, ah! ah! Right there with the knuckles." His eyes kept glowing towards the bag.
And then Trevor quieted himself down even more. "In here, bam, bam." Punching the mid-section of the bag.
He hunched in even closer to it with a new, humorless expression. "But out there?" Phoof! He swung hard.
"Nail him in the crotch . . . a couple shots to the crotch."
I looked at the bag, wiped some sweat, and critically realized I've never really prepared myself with some kind of response for this situation. Trevor gave it another shot to the crotch, gazed a bit more, and finally drifted back down the aisle.
Monday, June 30
I remember finding Michael Kenna one afternoon during some surfing and just sitting here wondering if any of his prints are made available sub $2,000. My favorite galleries are Hokkaido, Japan 2007, and China, 2006-2008, but they're all pretty breathtaking.
Saturday, June 28
Who doesn't want something to call their summer?
Like, I don't know when it started, but suddenly we were in the back of that truck watching sugar pines blur just over our heads on the 4th of July (and how did we even get that truck?), and that? That was summer. That was that summer, at least.
Like, "When I said that summer, what I really meant was...I needed something to name that."
Watching the ocean.
Seeing you get married.
Frank McCourt.
Saturday, June 21
