The best shape of my life

Speaking of body builders, I've caught myself flexing in the mirror a few times lately.

 I have muscles now. It's very strange.

Over the past four years I've overhauled my lifestyle and now I do things like exercise and eat vegetables (actually, I always ate vegetables, but my vegetable-to-nonvegetable ratio has shifted in favour of vegetables).  This proved to be quite a useful thing to do, as I was around 98kg at the time of my cousin's wedding, but last year I got down to 75kg.  It took me over four years to do it, but I think I'm less likely to suddenly put it all back on again.

Since taking up fencing, I've decided I may as well throw my hat into the "sporty" ring at take a stab at being athletic.

As a result, I've developed a bit of muscle definition.  It's quite pleasing, I must say.  It's a lovely little buzz to be able to look in the mirror and see improvements (much better than always seeing something that needs improving).  I'm now 73kg and a respectable amount of that is muscle mass.  My "goal" is 70kg, and I suspect I might make it.

I had a weird thought the other day - I look more like myself now than I have for decades.

I've always hated photos of myself, because they never looked like me.  The version of me that I had in my head did not match the version of me I saw in the photo.

It seems like a strange thing to say, but I feel like I stopped looking like myself after the age of 9 or 10.  If you compared a photo of me at the age of six to a photo at the age of 10, you would be forgiven for thinking the older kid was the uglier, fatter, kind-of-stupid-looking cousin of the younger one.

I can see pictures of myself from when I was a little kid and think "that was me", but for the past twenty years I've looked at pictures of myself and thought "No, that can't be right - I don't feel anywhere near as stupid as that person looks..."

But for the past year or so I've actually seen myself in photos.  I've looked at recent photos and seen the grown up version of the younger kid - the one that looked like me.

And, strangely, I actually feel a bit sharper, too.  A bit more clear-headed and capable of noticing things than I have been for years.  It's like I walked into a fog when I was ten, and I've only recently walked out the other side of it.

I went for a walk on my 33rd birthday and realised that a) I'm in the best shape of my life, and b) I'm probably going to get better before I get worse.

That's a pretty good place to be.

The best shape of his life...?

Earlier in January, I was browsing through the magazines in the sports section of my local newsagent when I noticed a familiar face on the cover of Ironman.

My first thought was "Hey, Michael O'Hearn is still kicking around!"  Which was promptly followed by "What has he done to himself?"  As he was actually featured in an article, not just gracing the cover, I flicked over to see it was titled something like "The Best Shape of His Life".

2004 was the year I discovered body building.  I didn't actually take up body building (as photographic evidence will attest) - I just suddenly became aware of it as something beyond "body builders look weird".  I had developed a strong interest in 1960s Italian Sword and Sandal flicks (Hercules Unchained, Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World, that sort of thing) as well as Tarzan films, and it turns out that a lot of the actors involved in these films (well, the ones who played the leading men, at any rate) were from the American "body culture" scene.  The good old "Muscle Beach" set.

Now, these fine fellows (Steve Reeves and Gordon Scott, to name a couple of my favourites) looked pretty darn muscle-y, but they didn't look like the steroidal monstrosities I had previously associated with body building.  I investigated further, and worked out that the "look" I didn't like in body builders was actually quite recent in the world of body sculpture.  The "classic" body builders of the 50s and 60s looked quite all right, really.

At about the same time I found the short fan film World's Finest, which starred Michael O'Hearn as Superman and Clark Bartram as Batman.  I thought these two men also looked "not completely ludicrous".  They weren't covered with straining, snaking veins trying to escape skin that looked like oiled-up sandpaper.  They didn't look like (to borrow a phrase) "a condom full of walnuts".

When I knew you could still get body builders who looked like this:

I got it.

I realised that body building - or, rather, "body sculpting" - wasn't just about building bigger muscles "no matter what" and constantly pushing beyond the levels of normal human muscle mass. There was an element of "art" to it because the people involved could aim for a particular kind of physique, rather than just constantly trying to be bigger.

It was like when I realised I didn't hate all abstract art - I hated certain styles of abstract art.  Other styles were brilliant.  I don't think all body builders look like they've completely forgotten what human beings are supposed to look like, just a certain style of body builders.  Mike O'Hearn was one of the people that made me realise there were different "looks", and some weren't half bad.

Well, now he looks like this:

The pictures in the article showed a lot more "definition", as they say.  He looks... well he looks like the other guys.  The ones I didn't like.  It's like Dylan going electric.  He's sold out, man.  He's jumped on the "bigger is always better" bandwagon, when I liked him for being more balanced and refined than the other guys.

The article was all about how he's in the best shape of his life, and it doesn't matter what age you are, you can still be bigger, more cut, more ripped - kick it up another notch, find the reason to push harder and heavier...

But, dammit, I liked the shape he had ten years ago. I think he looked better when he was going for quality rather than . "Best shape of his life"? I guess that's subjective.

...if You Do...

Late last year I bought a T-Shirt that says "I'll Learn Esperanto if You Do".  I actually have three of them now, but I only bought one.  Long story.

Anyway, I bought this T-Shirt because I thought it was a fine joke.  The point of Esperanto is that we all agree to learn it for the sake of communicating with other people.  No one has to learn it - no one needs to learn it.  It's just something you choose to do, which only really works if other people choose to do it, too.

However, I recently learnt that there's a deeper level to the joke on my shirt.  When Zamenhof first published his little book trying to convince people to take up a brand-new language, he put something in it:  a form people could sign and return, promising that they would learn the language if 10 million other people agreed to learn it as well.  Right from the very beginning there was an "I'll learn it if you do" challenge built into the language.

According to Okrent, less than a thousand people sent the form back (actually, I seriously doubt the book - which was only published in Russian at the time - would have been printed in a big enough run for ten million forms to even exist...) but that's still around a thousand people who were willing to say "Sure, I'll learn it if someone else does".

And that's how Esperanto works.  That's how any constructed or planned language works - a bunch of people all agree to learn it and speak it, and - hey presto - there's a language.  Without people agreeing to speak it, it's just an academic activity.

I'm reading Arika Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages at the moment, and thoroughly enjoying it.  However, I do have one niggling complaint.  Okrent writes like an apologist who has forgotten what an apologist does.  Instead of saying: "hey, this deserves to be given some respect because it is terribly interesting", she seems to be saying "I'm only looking at this because it's quite interesting, but please don't think I personally have any connection to these people apart from scientific curiosity (I wouldn't want you to think I was weird, or anything)".

I don't know, there's just something about the way she writes that makes it seem like she's desperately hoping she can enjoy the same things the nerds enjoy without getting stuck eating lunch with the nerds every day.

Or, occasionally, it seems more like she's desperately hoping she can enjoy the same things the nerds enjoy without losing the opportunity to laugh at the nerds for enjoying such nerdy things.

There's always something vaguely sad about someone who has to qualify "I'm interested in this" with "but I'm not one of those people who are interested in this".

High Jerk Mode

I've been in a bit of a high jerk mode recently, so my apologies to everyone.

I'm thoughtless and insensitive at the best of times - something I'm not terribly proud of or happy about, but the thing about being thoughtless and insensitive is that you don't tend to notice it at the time.  It's hard to alter behaviour when you only register it sometime after it has occurred.

Generally speaking, it takes me longer than you would expect to realise that I've been thoughtless and insensitive, and by the time I realise I owe someone an apology, I also realise I owed them that apology some time ago.  Apologising for a small cut delivered two years ago seems daft, so I tend to not do it...  which just means I end up delivering dozens of cuts over the years which I never apologise for.

That makes me a jerk.  However, I also go through phases where I am not only thoughtless and insensitive, but also intolerant and snarky.  I start expecting a level of thoughtfulness from others than I'm not capable of delivering myself, and become unforgivably unforgiving when people display faults that are much like my own.

This is my "High Jerk Mode", and I realise that I become thoroughly unpleasant on multiple levels.

If it makes you feel any better, I usually can't stand being in the room with me when I'm in this mode, either.

So, as I said, my apologies to everyone.  Trying to pull my head in, but sadly I think I will still be thoughtless and insensitive - all I can really hope for is "a little less obnoxious".

Some else-where

This is the song I've been trying to remember for the past three months (huzzah to ERR for reminding me the name of the band):

Road to High Saffron

One of my favourite books of all time is one I "read" (kind of) in 2011:  Shades of Grey:  The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde.

Japser Fforde is one of my favourite authors.  I've kept up with his Thursday Next series, even though I'm pretty sure it should have stopped at book four.  I've been waiting patiently for another book in the Nursery Crimes series, although I'm beginning to think I won't get one.  I've only read the first book in the Last Dragonslayer series, but that's just because I haven't finalised my birthday list yet...

... and I loved the first book of the Shades of Grey series, and would dearly love to believe there's going to be a second (although, as I have recently noted, sometimes books are better off without sequels).

I say I "read" (kind of) the book because I haven't actually read the whole thing from start to finish.  I listened to the audiobook version one holiday and asked for the print copy for Christmas that year. When I got it, I had a few other books to read as well, so I didn't actually re-read the book, just read bits here and there to remember key lines.

So, I heard the book, more than I read it.  I still loved it.  I still love it.  It's possibly the best post-apocalyptic story I've ever read (if for no other reason than it's set so far beyond the "something that happened" that Fforde can comfortably make a post-apocalyptic story based around a guy who lied about seeing a rabbit).

I've been thinking about it in the light of the whole Hunger Games thing, recently.  There are a lot of strange similarities between the Colourtocracy and the Capitol.  Mostly, though it's the excellent world-building and way everyone is just getting on with life in this "completely normal" place, in a future that's both simpler and more complex (technologically speaking) than our present.

Plus, both books involve a game where blood will be spilled (although, in Road to High Saffron, it's just the boys v girls hockey match...)

When I have time to re-read books, I'll have to go back to that one - if only to spend some quality time in a universe where everyone knows the hex codes for colours (it could save your life) and people say things like "Munsell's hoo-haw!" when they swear.

Many died, and some survived

I just read these sentences at the beginning of an LPLP article by Humphry Tonkin (2011):

"The Holocaust had a profound effect on the Esperanto movement. Many of the
leading members of the Esperanto language community perished, and some
survived."

My first instinct was to say "well, duh."  It seems redundant to say "some survived" - after all, he didn't say *everyone* died, did he - just "many"...

But, on reflection, those are two very different tragedies which both deserve acknowledgement.

Many scientists and scholars died in the Holocaust.  So did a lot of other people, but the scientists and scholars had their ranks thinned rather considerably.  Losing your thinkers in a bloody war is a tragedy for any field of study - I think you can't look at any area of scholarship in Europe without wondering how it would have progressed if so many of the researchers, inventors and ground-breakers hadn't been stripped away.

But... some survived.  Living through the Holocaust and losing family, friends and colleagues has got to have an effect on the way you see the world.  The scientists and scholars that survived would have been altered in ways we can't even begin to imagine.  How did that alter the paths they chose, the things they studied and the conclusions they drew?

Many died, and some survived.  Both the deaths and the survivors had a profound impact on the way their fields were researched and the way the science moved forward.