Body Flux
Changing my exercise regimen yet again. I suppose at some point I have to recognize that part of the fun of exercising is mixing it up, making changes. Part of me would just like to do the same thing all the time, forever and ever, actually. I definitely have a facet of my personality that embraces habit to the nth degree. But I think it's important for me to see exercise as something that I enjoy for various reasons, something that I enjoy for the long-term effects (i.e. health), but also because of the intrinsic joy it can bring (i.e. the good feelings during a workout). Another facet of enjoying exercise can be the planning/listmaking/goalsetting/goal achieving involved.

My goal has never been to 'loose weight'. From the outset that just seemed like the wrong sort of goal to set; it buys into the various unhealthy attitudes about the body that I want to avoid. Which is not to say that the goals I do have (to feel healthier, to be healthier, to enjoy my body more, to feel more attractive--this is not an exhaustive list!) can't be tied to 'losing weight'--but they can't be directly tied to it, and, in some cases, may be antithetical to it (i.e. I want to gain muscle mass, and gaining mass tends to mean gaining weight!).

The Way Things Have Shaped Up
For the first 8 or 9 months of my exercise changes, while I resisted the goal of 'losing weight', I embraced some effects that aren't unrelated to losing weight. Mostly I loved that my waistline was getting smaller. More holes in the ol' belt, and that felt good. It felt good for other reasons--I can breathe more easily, I'm more comfortable sitting at a desk for extended periods (though I fidget more now, I think, as a kind of weird exercise) and the like. I also was obviously losing fat in various parts of my body. My arms were showing more definition, my face was losing some of its fullness, my shoulders look more taut. My legs, which have always been sort of the region of my body that I was most happy with, became even more muscular and showed even more definition. My chest was getting slightly more definition, too, and losing a bit of fat.

And then recently I recognized how much time I was spending exercising, and started to feel a little bit strange about it--there were other things I wanted to do. Part of this is finally seeing light at the end of the breakup tunnel: When I first started exercising, part of the whole thing was to give myself something healthy to do, to keep my body and mind more occupied, so that I didn't dwell on the sadness as much. Now that I'm less sad, my interests are multiplying again, and exercising must be factored in among them more than it had to be before. So I compromised, decided to cut down on cardio a bit, do a little bit less on the weights, but keep the number of times a week I did things the same. I wasn't sure what effect this would have, as my body is just in a general state of flux all the time these days, what with changes in mood, diet and exercise.

Part of the effect is that I ended up just doing less exercising. Which isn't a bad thing necessarily. But then, my appetite began to grow again. Exercising, for me, seems to be the best sort of appetite suppressant, and more than that, it focuses me on eating more healthy--I tend to crave better stuff when I'm exercising, presumably because my body needs that stuff more when it's getting worked. So, combine less exercise and more eating, and what do you get? It's a pretty easy equation--the changes in my body began to slow, and my waist actually grew a little bit.

But even these changes aren't that simple. The whole time, I've been building muscle mass--and part of that has been in my abdomen. At least part of the gain in my waist has to do with this, I think. I've reached a point now where losing fat off my belly doesn't mean that my torso will get smaller--it might stay the same or even get bigger. And it will take a looooong time for definition to show in my abdomen, if it does at all. Different people carry most of their fat in different places, and that's where I carry mine. In fact, there's a way in which it might actually be unhealthy for my belly to lose enough fat to show much definition--it might mean that the rest of my body has less fat than it needs to have. And what I'm after is mainly health, so it's something to keep in mind.

Changes in the Making
So I do want to balance the various things I want to do in life, but I've come to realize something that is sort of suprising to me. I like exercising. At first I thought that maybe I was just trying to fool myself--the days where I decide to walk my bike up the hill after exercising for an hour and a half seemed to be evidence that I don't really like exercising: If I did like it, wouldn't I just do it all the time, whenever I can? And of course that's silly, and I'm srtarting to understand that the walking up the hill time simply reflects that I'm not as healthy as I'd like to be, and also reflects that there are different times to do different things. It does not mean, and I'm trying to keep this in mind, that my 'default' is to not be active. I'm figuring out that I don't think I really have a default, or that it can be changed through effort.

And keeping all that in mind changes how I decide to weigh (pun intended) my various options as far as what I like to do with my day. That is, for the first time in my life, really, I recognize that, sometimes, I want to exercise just as much if not more than I want to, say, read a book. Exercise is a priority. More importantly, I want it to be a priority. Which isn't to say that it's always the top priority--it clearly isn't, and I don't want it to be. But it's up there. And that's new for me.

Either/Or, and Identity
The either/or fallacy always creeps in here, and I begin to think that if I become more athletic, that I have to become less, say, academic. And there's some truth in that, in a way--if I were to always exercise instead of reading (which is infinitely rhetorical, because that would never happen, then it may be the case that things shift that significantly. But that's either/or thinking, and it doesn't match up with reality very well. In fact, if I increase exercise a bit, I may actually end up doing more reading. This is because these aren't my only two options--and that exercising more might actually cut out some other options. I'm less likely to sit and watch a movie, for instance, when I've been more active. I'm more likely to read, or to play guitar, etc.

And the thing is: I can be both a thinker and athletic (to various degrees!). Why is it that I have to keep reminding myself of that? The nonexistent dichotomies have grown some deep roots, that's for sure.
Filed under:Health and Philosophy

Personal Responsibility
It's always difficult to know what to do when you hear somebody who you consider an ally to your cause using arguments that you would call bullshit on if offered by those in an opposing camp. If this happens in a small circle of friends, no problem, because usually you can point out the possible problem without people thinking you are trying to undermine their point--friends know that you may very well agree with their point and just not like how they got there.

But in larger social and political situations, it's tougher. You might explicitly state that you agree with the conclusion and not with how it was arrived at, but it still might, to some people, undermine the point.

An example is happening over on Feministe right now--in my mind, people are oversimplifying personal responsibility regarding rape in a way that they wouldn't want to oversimplify personal responsibility when it comes to, say, the number of female CEO's of big corporations (pointing to the glass ceiling) or to the skewed number of not-white people caught up in the US justice system (pointing to the racism). I took some time to formulate a position in a comment there--check it out if you're interested, because I think it's an interesting discussion (with or without my comment!).


Filed under:Feminism and Philosophy

Personal Responsibility or, The Ex-Libertarian
Had an interesting conversation with my neighbor the other day. I haven't talked to the guy very much, but it had been pointed out to me in the past that he's a die-hard libertarian. Now, knowing that isn't enough to size the guy up, really, because there are lots of different flavors of libertarian. Still, I knew it would be an interesting conversation to a point, if things got down to politics at all. Which, of course, they always do.

He's an interesting guy, actually--a study in blind spots and apparent contradictions--though I may have been projecting. He is a really devout libertarian, to the point that he is angry that his taxes help pay for the public education of other peoples' children and such. He believes in getting rid of all gun laws. That sort of thing. And yet, he was for a very long time a member of the machinists' union, a strong union. Presumably he gained quite a bit from being part of that union (in a good way, to me...but to him? hard to tell).

We argued for a while about particulars, but then I tried to delve into his underlying conception of reality. For him, he repeated again and again, it all comes down to individual, personal responsibility. When I tried to get him to elaborate on that, of course, it was difficult for him to say why he believed that, and what it meant, exactly. But he did think it means that, no matter what situation you are born into, it's your responsibility to create your life, and nobody else's.

It's tough to argue agains positions that are this (in my mind) incoherent. Or at least it's tough to know where to start. I talked a lot about it being a black-or-white fallacy to think that responsibility (whatever we decide it means, exactly) for an act is either all mine or all "the world's". I wasn't able to get it across to him--when I talked about the way we are connected, he said that I was suffering from guilt about what I owed people. He might be right, as far as that goes, but that isn't the whole picture, by far.

Later on, I realized that I should have brought out my old staple I use against uber-libertarians when they go into the hyper-individuality shpeil: What about family? Parents, brothers, sisters and kids make poor libertarians, in part because of the often explicity connectedness that they find in their lives. But I also thought about this:

The idea of a person being completely, utterly responsible for everything that happens to her doesn't even make sense, logically. This is what I wished I had asked him:
--Are you responsible for everything you do?
A: Yep.
--Then you are responsible for what you do to other people?
A: Yep.
--So if you smack somebody else upside the head, who is responsible?

Now, he might respond that he was responsible for doing it and the other guy was responsible for getting hit--but I think that's dodgy, of course. The more clear answer (I think) is that both are responsible, to varying degrees, and those degrees might change depending on how we frame the situation (i.e. if I am goading him on to hit me, maybe I'm more responsible). The point being that it just doesn't make sense, in a world full of other agents, that I am the only one responsible, all the time, for whatever happens to me--because then the same can't be said for any agents that interact with other agents.

I'm really sure that would have convinced him. He would have said, "Oh, yeah, that makes more sense than the fact-avoiding bs that I'm spouting!"

Or not.

Still, Linus gets it:

Filed under:Comics as Life, Philosophy and
Politics

Absurdity and Therapy

I've hunted and hunted for the exact quote, but I've lost my "The Myth of Sisyphus" book, so I'll just paraphrase Camus. (I mean, what's the point of being an existentialist philosopher if you don't have people misquoting and oversimplifying your points, really?) He notes that it isn't people that are absurd, or the world that is absurd, but our relationship to the world that is absurd.

I'm sure Camus had some deep reasons for thinking this (if he did!), but for me it comes down to this: Sometimes it just feels like a crazy fucking world, and sometimes I feel like a crazy fucking person, and sometimes those feelings are spot on.

On the other hand: I've been thinking about therapy and about how people are trying to be very supportive about it, but they are sort of shy to talk about it, are supporting me (I think) because they think they ought to, but it's sort of like telling people that you've finally stopped drinking when you're an alchoholic. They want to be supportive, but they don't quite know what to say. "Good job!" doesn't quite fit the bill, because wouldn't it have been better to not have been an alchoholic (or a person in need of therapy) in the first place? Sure, people in need of therapy may not be like alchoholics in important ways, but the feelings I've gotten from people make the analogy hold, for me, to a certain degree.

But the thing is this: This is a crazy world sometimes, and it would be sort of strange if some of us (?) didn't just freak out sometimes about it. For instance, I'm reading a book on Rwanda right now, and that stuff is just freaking crazy. In a way, of course, it's not--there is a good causal history leading up to the massacres of the 90's. If Belgium, France and others had behaved differently, if the Rwandans themselves had built a different culture, if lots of other things had gone differently, perhaps that massacre woudln't happen. But that massacres happen is also in some way just really, really strange, and should cause some important, strong reactions in people. Reading about terrible wrongs done in the name of [whatever] makes me anxious. It both helps me understand the world better and at the same time makes things just seem absurd. To be slightly trite: It's no freaking wonder that I get depressed and don't clean my house sometimes.

Point being, it would be crazy to not be crazy sometimes, given the person I am, and the world that I live in.

Clean
Which brings me to another, related, point. Made a good connection in therapy the other day--my therapist, upon hearing about my worries of becoming the shut-in-packrat that my uncle (who died a few years back) had become, and hearing about my fear of rejection by people in the world in general right now brought on (in part) by my feelings of rejection that I'm still feeling from The Breakup(tm), pointed out that maybe part of the reason I make my home pseudo-inhabitible at times, and maybe the reason I'm doing it more now, is that I want to push people away on some level.

Ding!Ding!Ding!We have a winner!

One reason I haven't bought a couch, for instance, is that I'm sorta poor--but another reason is that it isn't a priority because it's not a priority to get people to come over to my house; and that's not a priority, in part, because I'm afraid to invite people deeper into my life.

It's keen/obvious/in-my-blindspot little insights like that which will probably keep me going to therapy for as long as I can afford it.

Filed under:Philosophy and Therapy

Opinions and Arguments

For the relatively brief time that I was a student teacher and a teaching assistant, I began to recognize a recurring theme in discussions. It's possible that this theme came up more often because these classes were generally philosophy classes, but I also notice this trend in just discussing stuff with people in non-academic-only life.

The recurring theme is this: People have opinions. They 'have a right' to these opinions. You can discuss varying opinions with people, but at some point, because they have a right to the opinions, and you to yours, you have to either agree with them or 'agree to disagree'.

I think this view of things stems from good intentions. Among these intentions is this: To allow people to put forth opinions that may be unpopoular, or counterintuitive, or simply things we don't like. This allowance is closely linked, probably, to our surface feelings about the first amendment--as long as you're not yelling fire in a crowded moviehouse, you have a right to say what your opinion is, even if it is unpopular. Perhaps even especially if it's unpopular. Even if it is completely wrong. I want people to be able to put forward their opinions, even and espeically if I disagree with them prima facie, because I tend to think that figuring things out almost always requires other people's brains, as well as my own. There are matters of perspective, and blind spots, and all sorts of reasons why, in general, more opinions=good. The thing is that this generalization doesn't hold universally, for all opinions at all times. Some opinions are better than others, for various reasons that I hope to begin to explore.

So, this comes up in classes a lot, especially in critical thinking classes when you get people to start talking/debating/arguing issues that they feel strongly about. Discussing abortion rights in a class that isn't all pro-choice is sort of a 'classic' example--eventually the discussion hits a wall of sorts, and one side (or both) will say, "Well, that's your opinion. I have a different opinion." The thing is, while this statement is true on the face of it, the implication is often that 'this is where discussion must end'.

But It's Opinions All the Way Down
But of course, anything one says (if it's a declarative of some sort, at least) is an opinion. But that fact in itself doesn't mean that every opinion counts, or that every opinion carries as much weight as every other opinion. Absurd examples illustrate this pretty clearly--if somebody came up to you and told you that they were actually really you and you were, unfortunately, some sort of weird doppleganger, likely you would hold that, while this is their opinion, that they are wrong. Or perhaps an even more absurd example: Somebody comes up to you and tells you that they are invisible (when you can clearly see them). It's their opinion and they are welcome to it, but presumably these opinions, while not valueless (if you had all the time in the world and the inclination, you might actually persue their views to find out if they have any merit), probably aren't worth persuing.

Now some types of opinions are sort of self-justifiable, or at least seem so on the surface of things--opinions which relate to things that only the person uttering them has any real access to the justifications for. If I say "I hate onions," that is not only my opinion (if I'm telling the truth), but also, there are few ways that anybody could argue with me on that point. Somebody could conceivably point out that, well, I eat onions every day. In fact, I'm eating one right now. And every time they've seen me, they've seen me eating an onion. So when I say that "I hate onions," there seems to be a disconnect between what I'm saying and what I do. But aside from a case where there is obviously some sort of conflict between what I'm saying and what I'm doing, there are no other real bases from which somebody might argue with me about my opinion about what I like. In cases of what I like, I am pretty much the sole arbiter of truth.

Opinion and Truth Come Connected to Lotsa Stuff
But in most cases of opinion, no individual is the sole arbiter of truth. Who/what is the arbiter of truth may be a complex question, but all that I want to consider right now is the person who says, "Well, that's your opinion" as a way of blocking the road to further inquiry. That something is an opinion alone doesn't mean that it can't be contested...if that were the case, then almost no discussions would be worth the trouble.

Opinions are connected up with the rest of the world, and as such, one can endorse or question them to the degree that one thinks there is evidence that they are connected up in the world correctly. (There are more technical ways of describing this--the correspondence theory of truth, for instance--but I am trying to talk here in more sort of everyday language, attempting to get to the heart of how we think about opinions.) In short, my opinions can be wrong or right. Which is not to say that claiming that they are wrong or right doesn't have some possible/probably complications--if, for instance, you take Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions seriously in any way, then getting to truth may be more complex than some people want it to be. But that things can get messy isn't to say that we can't get to right and wrong at all, or that opinions are somehow sacred just because they are opinions or the like. Sure, I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe--but just because I believe it, or just because you believe it, doesn't mean that one of us (or both of us!) can't be wrong.

Our opinions do often have serious effects on the world--they certainly shape what we do in the world; but even espousing our opinion can have quite an effect on the world. Even acting on our opinions without explicitly stating them can have great effects--people watch what we do, and their actions may change according to what we do.

My main point is this: That sometimes when people say, "But that's just your opinion!" they are wanting you to give them more evidence for why you think what you say is true. Sometimes, however, they are using that to draw a line about what may be talked about, demarcating a space where all opinion is holy, and unassailable, and always true 'for you'. I don't really think that such a space exists.

Of course, things get very much more complex very quickly regarding this stuff. While I believe that some opinions should carry more weight than others, when discussing why I think this, it gets messy fast. Usually I think about context and evidence, but these two concepts are messy themselves. In the context of, say, an argument with a loved one about the relationship, it may be the case that how people are feeling is more important than the facts of how they came to feel that way. If I believe I'm sad because I'm not getting enough lovin', even if it would be clear to an outside observer that I'm getting LOTS of lovin', that fact doesn't matter as much (possibly) as how I'm feeling. Evidence is even more complex--because lots of different people have lots of different sorts of things they will count as evidence, and things they won't. Still, even if we have to discuss context and evidence in the midst of another sort of discussion, I think this is a valuable sort of thing to talk about--and infinitely more valuable (to me!) than cutting things short and saying "Well, that's just your opinion."


Filed under:General and Philosophy

Irony: Thinking Insessantly About Whether I Think Too Much

K asked me recently in a comment whether I sometimes wonder if I think to much.

Short Answer: Yep.

Long Answer:
And then, because of the inherent irony in asking the question, really--should I just answer off the cuff, like in a rorschach test, or should I think about my answer? Another possible irony: The answers to this question (to me) are so intricate and lengthy that even writing an answer to it is going to take some time.

Whenever I have something I want to think about that is sort of a huge subject, I try to find a 'hook' into it. A way of beginning to think about it. There are even so many hooks regarding this that it's hard to begin. I think, though, given my recent state(s) of mind and my interest in friendship and love at the moment, that my hook will be this:

You're not the first one to ask, k. ;)

That is to say, here is a general pattern that I sometimes see with friends and lovers who tend to not stay friends and lovers (or even acquaintences who go through the process relatively quickly):
1. Meet Jeff.
2. Find yourself intrigued by some of the conceptual connections he makes, the way he tries to consciously live his life, and the interesting conversations you can have with him.
3. Spend a period of time being interested in him for these reasons.
4. (Optional--mostly optioned by ex-lovers) Slowly start to realize that you think that he's full of shit.
5. Start to become annoyed by the fact that all that stuff you liked about him, it just keeps going, without much of a break.
6. Find yourself wanting him to shut up, turn all that stuff off for just a little while, for Christ's sake.
7. Recognize that he rarely does shut up/stop that stuff, and that you can't take it any longer.
8. Ask him "do you ever think you think too much?"
9. Burn that bridge.
10. Tell him (implicitly or explicitly, depending on how close you were) you still want to be friends 'someday', but that you need a break from him.
11. Burn that bridge and don't look back.

Some of the steps get mixed around, and some of my friends (and at least one lover) didn't go through all of the stages (erm, otherwise I wouldn't have any friends, right? I mean, I'm close to that, but not quite there), but I've had it happen enough times that when somebody asks me this question, I have to make a concerted effort to not get defensive.

On the other hand, if it's been asked of me that many times, seems to me that it's probably a perfectly appropriate question. Recently (months ago) there was some mutual attraction between me and a new-ish friend of mine. We hung out a few times, and there was definitely some chemistry and we had some great conversations. At one point I brought up something she had said, and was somewhat critical of it--to me, I was critical in the sense that I wondered if she knew/thought that what she had said was sort of cruel and, well, shallow in the way that I thought it might have been. Her initial response to me: "Don't drag me into your navel-gazing bullshit." A few days later, she apologized, told me that I had (unknowingly) pushed a button of hers, and that she didn't really think of me that way.

But here's the thing: I recognize that it's irritating, that it may sometimes be self-serving, that obsessing about concepts can even be harmful--and even mean, really. I recognize that it sometimes is navel-gazing, in the negative sense of the term. I try to not obsess. I try to not ask questions that really are a way of thrusting my opinion on the world. I try to read people's reactions to my questions such that I don't keep pressing when they are tired of the tack I'm taking. But I am not always successful in these attempts, so I do get people saying things like this to me:

"Just have a beer, Jeff, and shutup."
"What is this, a fucking therapy session?"
"You're just a difficult person to be friends with."

And I don't think that these questions and comments are completely inappropriate. Something I like in some of my friends is that they'll help break me out of little recursive fits of thinking I get into. On the other hand, there are only a handful of people who will/want to go the distance with me conceptually, and, as it turns out, these are pretty much my closest friends (this isn't true to a person, but it's generally true). In fact, some of my favorite people (my favorite prof from SFSU and Lex come to mind) have more intellectual stamina for conceptual analysis than I have, so I can understand that different people have different amounts of interest/patience in doing lots of conceptual analysis, because sometimes I get tired of it, too.

That all said, I think the implication that people sometimes make (not necessarily K, by the way) when they ask this is that thinking is mutually exclusive from doing. That there is a clear line between 'thinking about life' and 'living life'. I understand the impetus for this implication. Clearly there are times when it would be better for me to just have a beer, or have a good cry; times when it's good for me to just shut up. There are even times when I wish the little conceptual-analysis voices in my head would go bowling or something and give me some peace. At the same time, I think it's important to acknowledge that thinking is a kind of doing. And I don't just mean that in a surface-y definitional sense. I also mean it in this sense: Thinking about things almost always affects how one does things. This is one of the main reasons for doing some thinking...it may seem like navel-gazing for me to ask myself questions constantly, but if the answers make a difference in my life, then I think it's worth doing.

Another aspect of the whole thinking-as-doing-something thing is that I just enjoy thinking about stuff, by myself or with others. Not all the time, and not about everything, but often and with a fairly wide scope. It's just a visceral pleasure for me, a good deal of the time. And, if it's not hurting anybody else, that's a fairly good reason to keep doing it. I also value lots of other things that don't have much to do with conceptual analysis--biking, guitar, sex--and I recognize that a balance is desireable (and sometimes when people ask, "Do you think too much?" this balance is exactly what they are referring to); I just don't like to oppose 'thinking' with 'living life'. I see the former as a necessary, desirable part of the latter.

Filed under:
General, Philosophy and Therapy.

Closet Buddhist

I've been told several times by 'practicing Buddhists' that I'm something of a closet Buddhist. I've read just a smattering of Buddhist stuff, and I can begin to see why people might see me that way from what I've read. Just like a good deal of religious (and, erm, even more non-religious) texts/beliefs, there is a lot to be gleaned from various Buddhist ways of thinking. I don't mean to dabble in a superficial way and think that I've come out with some great truths, but dabbling does provide me some insight, in the way that, say, reading some Nietzsche (but probably not understanding in a terribly deep way) can provide some insights.

I stumbled across an interview with Sharon Salzberg, who has written some books on the subject of faith in general--from but it seems not completely limited by her own Buddhist perspective. One of the things she said struck me as particularly meaningful to my present situation, as well as a strong sense of empathy that I got when I read somthing k recently talked about in her blog.

Sharon Salzberg notes that suffering, rather than being something that only separates us from others (when I feel suffering, sometimes I also feel some added alienation, even if I'm suffering from alienation in the first place, for instance), but that it's something that actually binds us together in some sense, something we all have in common. We all have suffered, in various ways. There is a strange sort of comfort to be had from that, I think, along the lines of a sort of shadow of 'we're all in this together' sort of thinking. I have always thought that people who respond to somebody's pain with "everybody feels that way, everybody goes through pain" were sort of missing the point--but now I'm thinking that I was missing the point. The point of reminding somebody who's suffering that others feel that way too isn't like saying "buck up, little camper!"--it's a reminder that at a fundamental level our experiences do converge, and that they do converge can be very important.

In my current case, that others have felt/will feel the way I do right now (i.e. anxious, sad, unloved, alienated and the like) points to the fact that it's part of living, part of what it means to be alive and a person. Why does that comfort me?

Not sure. But it does.