Don't throw the LSD.

#TheStruggle

"Context."

Get it together, Sarah.

"It's a Myyyysteryyyy. Woooooooooh!"

Training - “I’ll do the best I can do today with whatever is going on.”

10/5 - press, chins, dips, face pulls, pushdowns

10/4 - shadowbox, stretch

10/3 - squats, leg raise, lunge

9/30 - bench, chins, pushups

How a 330 lb High School Dropout Lost 140 and Turned His Life Around | Nerd Fitness: "I used to say, “Oh, I’ll start again tomorrow. So, I may as well just eat my face off today.” I did that for literally years. I’m not kidding. YEARS. Every day! I mean, it’s basically insanity. Doing the same thing and expecting different results. It’s like I lived the same day every day in some ways like Groundhog Day. I even made several different NF accounts over the years because I’d ‘want to start fresh’. It’s basically like deleting your saved game and starting over and expecting that somehow you’ll make it further the next time because you wished you were a chaotic neutral dwarf, not a chaotic neutral Halfling. Changing your mindset and attitude is hard. Now I think, “I’ll do the best I can do today with whatever is going on.” If I go out drinking at eat a little too much, I might gain a 1/4th to ½ pound of actual fat. But I know it’ll come off in a week. I don’t define myself by my mistakes, but my success. And I let myself be human."

Seven Years Primal: Healthier, Stronger, and Wiser Than Ever | Mark's Daily Apple: "Testosterone is a hell of a drug. You’ve been deficient in it your entire life. Your inability to grow a beard is not genetic. I’m sorry to say your serum levels are within the upper limit of normalcy for women. Your crippling social anxiety is not because you are a nerd per se, but because you lack the necessary hormones for confident social behavior. Now, you are going to have to be very careful with this. As with any hormone, prolonged deficiency leads to increased sensitivity. When you start eating like an alpha hunter, and training like an alpha hunter, the androgens will blow you away. Painting your face with your own blood during a deadlift workout may seem like a great idea, and it is pretty inspired, but perhaps not advisable in the company gym. Recognize your hormones and don’t let them master you. Indeed, by controlling your hormones, you control your reaction to events, which is as good as controlling reality itself, and true sorcery."

Can't imagine why no one takes the media seriously anymore.

Or political correctness, for that matter.

"...the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are “alone together.” You are where your attention is."

Andrew Sullivan: My Distraction Sickness — and Yours: "By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. Every hour I spent online was not spent in the physical world. Every minute I was engrossed in a virtual interaction I was not involved in a human encounter. Every second absorbed in some trivia was a second less for any form of reflection, or calm, or spirituality. “Multitasking” was a mirage. This was a zero-sum question. I either lived as a voice online or I lived as a human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time...

We all understand the joys of our always-wired world — the connections, the validations, the laughs, the porn, the info. I don’t want to deny any of them here. But we are only beginning to get our minds around the costs, if we are even prepared to accept that there are costs. For the subtle snare of this new technology is that it lulls us into the belief that there are no downsides. It’s all just more of everything. Online life is simply layered on top of offline life. We can meet in person and text beforehand. We can eat together while checking our feeds. We can transform life into what the writer Sherry Turkle refers to as “life-mix.” But of course, as I had discovered in my blogging years, the family that is eating together while simultaneously on their phones is not actually together. They are, in Turkle’s formulation, “alone together.” You are where your attention is. If you’re watching a football game with your son while also texting a friend, you’re not fully with your child — and he knows it. Truly being with another person means being experientially with them, picking up countless tiny signals from the eyes and voice and body language and context, and reacting, often unconsciously, to every nuance. These are our deepest social skills, which have been honed through the aeons. They are what make us distinctively human...

Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety. In an essay on contemplation, the Christian writer Alan Jacobs recently commended the comedian Louis C.K. for withholding smartphones from his children. On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained why: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”"

"Funny business, this living."

I, too, simultaneously have strong opinions yet "don't really know what I am anymore."  

Alton Brown, Showman of Food TV, Pulls Back the Curtain - The New York Times: "Although Mr. Brown often assumes he is the weakest link in any chain, he holds strong opinions. A question about why he makes barbecued potato chips by smoking potato slices over wood chips on the stove when they sell perfectly good barbecue chips at the store propels him into a monologue on the state of hospitality in America. “I’m going to make you these chips,” he said. “You’re going to eat them and say, ‘Thank you.’ The time we spent together making them is a valuable piece of the hospitality equation. The taking in that equation is even more important than the giving. But here in this country, we have decided to replace ‘thank you’ a great deal with ‘I can’t eat that.’” 

 When he’s on a roll like this, it’s best to let him keep going. “Unless you have a medical bracelet that says celiac, shut up and eat the food,” he said. “We want to be so special. We not only want to be special for our cooking, we want to be special for our eating. There are times when vegetarians should shut up and eat the pork chop.” Still, for all his forcefulness and clarity on any number of topics, Mr. Brown seems to be seeking clarity on matters more internal. “I’m not where I thought would be at this point in my life,” he said, “but I’m wiser by a long shot.” Still, he said, taking another sip of sangria, “I don’t really know what I am anymore.” Then he got up off the porch swing and headed back to his kitchen. “Funny business,” he said, “this living.”"

"Junk food is engineered to be addictive."

motiveweight:

"There are now 55 declared no-go zones in Sweden."

  "It's a little more hostile than I had anticipated...  To be honest we hadn't anticipated such intense aggression."  

You don't say?  Mass migration from a disparate culture into an overburdened and overtaxed state.  What could go wrong?

"You don't need to hurt us."

You are not, in fact, a wolf.

Look, if you're not hurting anybody, have at it.  But trying to mainstream and normalize these ideas or pretending this isn't some odd little niche that - no, is never going to widely lauded, accepted or not thought strange - just ignores vast swaths of reality and human behavior.