Drip drip drip

My kitchen sink was a mess.  One day I found a bit of moisture in my recycle container and I thought that it must have been a beer that was tossed in there partly full.  That didn't entirely make sense, and something twigged in my mind, but I decided to ignore it.  The next day the bag was soaked and I discovered the whole under sink area was wet.  I ran my fingers along the pipe under the sink and then felt a sickening crunch under my fingers, and I knew it was going to be a right mess.

Pipes aren't supposed to go crunch under the lightest of touches.

For a couple of days we just put a bucket under the sink and the water blasted right into the bucket when we sent it down the drain.  It gave me a great appreciation for just how much water we use, and how much of a pain in the ass it is to get rid of wastewater by hand.  Modern plumbing is amazing, yo.

Eventually my parents came to visit and my dad, being a master of fixing all things, helped me rebuild the underside of my sink.  Normally I would say that I helped him, but he got me to do all the work while he watched and instructed.  My sink won't break again for another twenty years probably, but if it does I will know what to do about it!  It is all pretty plastic instead of copper, which is the style these days, or so my dad says.  I remember doing this sort of thing many a time when I was young, and I guess some of those lessons stuck.

Some certainly didn't, obviously, because I am a city boy now.

It amazed me to see the extent of the damage after I removed the pipe.  It was just destroyed.  I guess it was holding on, right at the very edge of total failure, and finally the water seal gave way and the entire thing fell to pieces.  It makes me appreciate the city infrastructure that is often a full 100 years old and which still manages to mostly work somehow, getting water to my home and taking it away again.

I suppose there is a lot of that in our world.  Everything around us is slowly falling apart, and when we finally notice an issue and look at it we find it is an absolute wreck, everything about it on the edge of total catastrophe.

My nipples are a terrifying thing

Today there were new signs in my building's workout room.  They said all the usual things about being quiet and not damaging stuff, but there were two new clauses tacked on at the end.  One said that everyone must wear proper shoes while using the equipment, and the other said that everyone must be properly clothed in a Tshirt or exercise clothing.  I HATE the word proper.  It can die in a fire.

My nipples are at fault.

I have been working out barefoot for almost three years now, so that isn't the thing that has prompted this new grasp at power by a bored bureaucrat.  The difference is that over the past few months I have occasionally gone shirtless while lifting in the weight room.  Normally I am alone, and sometimes I get so sticky and hot during my routine I shuck my shirt.  A few people have walked in, and while none of them have said anything, obviously somebody was extremely frightened and offended at my nipples and they complained to the authorities.

Nipples are terrifying as fuck, y'all.

Before anyone starts excusing this nonsense let us be clear:  My shirt, by the end of my routine, is soaked.  My bodily goo is getting all over everything no matter whether or not I have a shirt on.  Women often wear sports bras as their only top, and nobody is complaining on that account.  This is purely a nipple issue.

I know what will happen if I protest this.  I have been down this road before.  They will make noises about 'safety' and cluck disapprovingly about disease.  This is the standard nonsense people spew when anyone does something outside social norms, because it masquerades as concern, when in fact it is purely classist bullshit.  We don't want *those* sorts of people in our building, they think, and those undesirable types must be full of disease and filth.

It is the same whether or not I am trying to go without shoes, be polyamorous, or not wear a shirt.  People assume that because it is weird that anyone doing it must be filthy and dangerous, and they don't even bother with a cursory examination of their reasons.

But you can't fight city hall.  They can enforce any bullshit ruleset they want, and nothing I say is going to convince the condo board that my right to dress how I like is as important as other people's right to tell me how to dress.

One good thing though is that when you are replete with rage, full to the brim with fury, and consumed with a desire for righteous vengeance, doing your workout routine is easy as hell.  I tore through those reps like they were NOTHING.

Notwithstanding

Ontario is in the middle of a major controversy.  Doug Ford, newly elected premiere of Ontario, decided to push through some new legislation that greatly interferes with an ongoing election in the capital city of Toronto.  Ford decided to shrink the size of Toronto city council by roughly half and in the process redraw all the ward boundaries. 

The key here is the middle of the election bit.  We could have a perfectly reasonable discussion about how many councillors Toronto should have, and maybe those boundaries around the wards should change.  But Ford isn't leaping in to correct some massive imbalance - Toronto has about as many councillors per person as most other major cities, and the current numbers and maps were drawn with extensive consultation over many years.  This is the sort of process that should take a long time.

However, Ford isn't doing this because he wants to correct a problem.  Previously he was on city council and the other councillors stopped Ford and his crack smokin' mayor of a brother from doing all kinds of dumb stuff.  Ford is just trying to leverage his new power to punish people who annoyed him in the past.  It is honestly kind of breathtaking that he is so obvious about heinous abuses of power for personal reasons.

The recent spate of news is that a judge put a stop to this order saying it violated our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  I can't say legally how solid this is, but mucking with the election rules partway through an election certainly is terrible. 

Ford responded to this by declaring that he is using a controversial thing called the notwithstanding clause.  This clause allows the government to flat out ignore the Charter of Rights and Freedoms any time it wants.  It is a clause that has not been used because it is considered extreme and rude, pretty much, but it theory it means the government could make a law like 'No people of colour allowed' and squelch any objection by the courts.

This is a fucking disaster.  The notwithstanding clause shouldn't exist, and normalizing its usage is a terrible step to take.  Ford didn't even try to claim that this is a special case and he wouldn't use it often - he said that he would not be shy about using it again.  We are looking at a premiere who expects to be doing things against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and is happy to just ignore it.  If anything, he seems jubilant about the opportunity to do whatever the hell he wants no matter how wrong it is.

Lots of people are aghast that the tacit agreement not to use the notwithstanding nuclear option has been broken.  Everyone knew it *could* be used, but mostly they thought it wouldn't be.  How could the norms of civilized society be broken this way?

I am of two minds.  First off, all of government is a tacit agreement.  When dictators take control they are in control because people don't push back enough to stop them.  No law will suffice if people don't stand up for it.  This isn't some kind of outrageous departure because the only thing stopping the government from doing any horrible thing is protest against it by the masses, and the use of the notwithstanding clause is the same situation.  The government will do it unless we yell, a lot.

On the other hand this is a real problem.  Not just for the buffoon in charge of Ontario right now, but also for all of Canada.  Breaking that tacit agreement to not use this clause will give other premieres the idea that they can violate people's rights if they feel like it and they have a get out of jail free card.  This seems like it might encourage other forms of terrible behaviour if the pushback isn't strong enough.

It all strikes me as absurd.  Any politician actually trying to govern reasonably would just delay the new legislation until after the current election and change things calmly.  That might not be a great idea, but it wouldn't be a catastrophe.  But Ford is a destructive, foolish, selfish asshole.  He only cares about sticking it to people who he doesn't like, and he is willing to do whatever damage is required to get his petty revenge fantasies fulfilled.  And this is the guy in charge of my province for the next four years.

Anyone who is in a Conservative riding in Ontario needs to get busy and call their representative.  This is a major departure from normal standards of behaviour and there is a chance that if we riot enough we will convince some of them to back off on supporting this legislation.

80% more strongness

For the past six months or so I have been doing the same workout regimen.  In March I realized that I had been adding too much to my routine and it was really starting to cause damage so I stopped increasing weights and reps and just did the same thing over and over.  I acclimatized, and eventually it became easy, but I never got back into the pattern of constantly pushing myself to do more.  After coming back from WBC this year it hurt to get back into my routine because 10 days off caused me to lose some strength.

I have realized that the hurt and soreness I was feeling back in August as I built myself back up is something I miss.  Probably not the pain itself, but the sense of improvement, of becoming more through suffering and difficulty, has a lot of appeal. 

I decided that I need a new goal, and that goal is to increase my lifts by 80% by the end of the year.  I am not trying to increase my strength 80% in that timeframe (if that were even possible, which I doubt, it would require massive amounts of steriods); rather, I want to increase the total number of reps per day by 80%.  That should naturally lead to strength increases, but I don't know how much.

Even then 80% sounds like a ton considering I already put in 40 minutes a day of lifting.  However, the first thing I am doing is going up from doing a three day routine where I do 1 hour of lifting for 2 days then rest the third day, to just lifting every single day for an hour.  That is a flat 50% increase, so I will only need to raise my actual reps by 20% over current values in order to achieve an overall 80% increase.  Hopefully by next summer I can get up to a full 100% increase over the previous year.

Over the past couple weeks I have put this No Rest Ever theory to the test and it has actually been a lot easier than I ever expected.  I even find that the individual sessions are easier than before for some reason.  It sure eats up a lot of my time but my body seems perfectly capable of sustaining this level of output.  I am feeling that background pain in my muscles though, which tells me I am getting closer to my limits.

It seems weird but I think that low level pain is a big motivator.  If my routine is easy it hardly seems worth doing; somehow knowing that I am really going to the maximum makes putting in the time feel worthwhile.  It isn't how strong I am - because honestly, my life is barely any different - but rather the process of improvement and the struggle therein that is the thing I want.

Time to get HUGE!

Like a shoe

This past summer I had my first experience of having sex with a male.  I had big plans for a blog post after the experiment, figuring I could talk about how much or how little the label bisexual applied to me now.  How bi am I? seemed like an appropriate title.

The answer to the question is:  Basically not at all.

Afterwards I described the experience as being similar to having had sex with a shoe.  I don't personally eroticize shoes at all, they are just an object, and this was similar.  It wasn't horrifying or bad, and no internalized homophobia manifested.  It just didn't do it for me.

This should not be read as though anything said male partners did was wrong.  Honestly the experience for me had little to do with what they did, because the physical sensations were perfectly good and expected.  I don't think of them as objects in other ways, but as far as sex with me goes, the magic thing that normally happens just wasn't there, in the same way it wouldn't be there with any other thing I don't eroticize, like say my own hand.  Apparently I have a strict hierarchy of experiences:  On top is sex with females, then masturbation, then sex with males.  Masturbation is superior to sex with males because I can quit when I want and I don't need to be concerned with anyone else's needs, which is convenient, though it does sound ruthless and selfish.

It turns out that all my years of double takes at exposed cleavage and open mouthed awe at wide, curvy hips really did indicate that female bodies are the thing that launch my boat.  I wasn't really doubting that, but I figured there might be a little bit more flexibility in my orientation if I gave it a try, and now having tried it I am forced to conclude that I am really quite straight.  Heteroflexible is a reasonable term since it would be fine if I had sex with a male, but I don't see much reason to pursue that.

All of which is too bad because I really liked the idea of being bisexual.  I know it is hard for lots of people and there is plenty of bigotry out there, but given who I am and how my life is I expect it would be an upgrade for me.  Turns out, that ain't happening.

I am glad to have given this a try though.  Learning is fun!

One odd consequence of this is that I cannot legally donate blood in Canada now.  Men who have had sex with men are banned from doing that.  That rule goes away after one year, presuming I stop having sex with men completely.  It is perfectly safe though if I have lots of sex with lots of women... or so goes the theory.  I haven't ever donated blood anyway, (which I should have done, really) but this ruleset is still troubling to me.

Five figures of steps

People really want to get their 10,000 steps in.  My father in law has a fitbit and aims to get his 10k a day, Wendy has her phone tracking her steps, and lots of other people I know do the same.  Of course there is nothing magical at all about 10,000 steps.  People have all kinds of different needs and capabilities and there is no reason at all to assume that 10,000 is somehow the 'correct' amount of exercise.  10,000 is just a thing because it is a big round number and we humans really like those.

I read an article talking about this, and it managed to really miss the point.  The article pointed out correctly that there isn't any hard medical science suggesting that 10,000 is the optimal number of steps for health.  But was anyone really thinking that?  With all the confounding factors going into it it seems blatantly clear to me that 10,000 is just a convenient round number that happens to be attainable for a normal person with an interest in walking.  1,000 is clearly trivial for most people, and 100,000 is near impossible, so 10,000 it is.

Here is the trick.  Sure, there isn't any medical evidence that 10,000 is correct.  But if you stop there you are missing something big.  There is plenty of evidence to suggest that walking is good for you, that people stick to walking regimens if they have clear goals and can treat it like a game, and that one major barrier to sticking to walking regimens is consistency.  10,000 isn't some magical thing that comes from physiology, it is a magical thing that comes from psychology.

We aren't doing 10,000 steps for medical reasons, we are doing it because fitbits and step trackers and big round numbers help us keep to a healthy routine.  We are using brain hacks to get ourselves to do things we know we should do.

That is a good thing!

And by we, I don't mean me, because I don't walk that much, and I don't track my steps.  If I need more exercise I go to the gym and lift more and harder, because I like tracking those numbers a lot more.  Doing 28 pushup sets or 30 pushup sets isn't something medicine has an opinion on, but I use the numbers to motivate me to healthy behaviour.

Our society so often seems to get caught up in which exercise is perfect, and what exactly we can do to sculpt our bodies just the way we want.  We shouldn't be bothering.  The trick is to find something to get yourself moving that you will enjoy and stick to.  The details of the exercise are unimportant, all you need to do is do something, and keep doing it.