Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Hmmm, I haven't seemed to post today. Outside of the everyday-work that I always do, I started a painting based on a picture of Martyna (no specific reason other than I liked the original picture) to get back into practice on something less abstract or simplistic.

OK, it totally mortifies me to post pictures like this, so I really appreciate people not saying mean stuff. I know I'm in bad shape, but I'm working to change that… To try and track how I'm doing I've been taking pictures regularly — at the beginning, after a month at the gym, and in this entry, about two months at the gym. A lot of the changes you can't see because they're transformations of layers of fat into layers of muscle. I'm pretty happy so far. I really hope that people understand that if I can do it after so much inactivity and sloth corroding me, you can do it too.

It's funny, I know I'm writing about stuff that most people did when they were in highschool or younger, but other than judo my physical activity at that age was all farmwork… So I'm pretty much totally unfamiliar with what's inside a gym… Today I used a speed bag for the first time in my life which was a lot of fun. Other than that, we've been doing more coordination work, and I've been trying to really focus on controlling my motions precisely, which is also helping me understand how and why I compensate for my knee in a lot of actions.

Oh, and the curse of the stairs in this house finally caught up to me, and like Jon not long after we moved in, I took a tumble and feel like I broke my toe as well! Hahaha, not a big deal… I was hanging up some paintings and slipped while I was doing it. But it's good to get those paintings on the wall, because having a stack of paintings leaning up against my bookshelf was depressing.

Oh yeah, and I guess BMEfest 2005 (Mexico) was on the Discovery Channel today… As far as I can tell the show didn't air here in Canada — if anyone was able to record/capture it, drop me a line because I'd love to see it. Aparently there is some funny footage of me sunburned in a big straw hat or something…

Ack, I am so tired. So I'll just ramble for a while before I drag my bones to the gym… I really have to get at this microdermal interview. It's completed, I just have to edit it into a usable form and lay it up.

So these days everything is labelled “no peanuts”, and most schools are “nut free zones” because so many kids have severe, life threatening allergies to nuts (and many other things). I have no allergies personally — I don't even respond to poison ivy — and even bugs don't bite me. I also suspect I've drank more urine and feces than nearly anyone reading this (spring runoff made our wells very gross), and I think that helped immeasurably. Not that I go out looking for cow patties to chew on, but the fact is that we're designed/evolved to live in filth, and people who choose to alienate themselves from filth ultimately alienate themselves from life.

I've mentioned numerous times that if you look at the biomass that makes up a “human”, the vast majority of what you'll find is non-human (we're basically a human “framework” with a multitude of microbial symbiotic life filling in the gaps). I've also mentioned that humans and microbes co-evolved (whether you believe this was an active or a passive process), including our immune system which depends deeply on the planet's microbial life being stable. I've also mentioned that plastics in the environment (which don't break down, and mimic hormones when exposed to animal life) are dramatically changing our (which includes our human and non-human portions) development — for example, I just read a story saying that testosterone levels were down by half or something (as well as sperm counts, semen volume, and more).

So anyway, this pollution and a ton of other changes we keep making to our environment and lifestyles have destabilized our immune systems to the point where a significant percentage of people are being born with radically out-of-tune defence systems that keep misfiring. The part that disturbs me most though is how much it's affecting other planetary stabilization systems as well — for example, food can not be preserved in root cellars (and elsewhere) as effectively as it could in the past. What would have kept for a winter season a hundred years ago now keeps for a month. I'm sure that many people have noticed this on a smaller scale just noting how differently vegetables and fruits keep in comparison to how they did a couple decades ago.

Our distribution systems these days are so good that we've replaced the concept of local production combined with storage with the concept of international production combined with shipping… In order to make these systems more and more efficient, less and less “buffer” is kept in place, so things move quickly from production to consumption, without a whole lot in the middle — and we've completely de-prioritized produce which keeps well, because it doesn't affect the selling price (if anything, something that looks good in the store but then rots a day later is what our disposible-culture corporations want to preferentially breed for). Which means that if something goes wrong, there's no food savings account to fall back on… And I'm not sure that we can switch to local production fast enough to adjust if we lose the ability to transport things so cheaply (assuming we can figure out the storage issues).

But I guess the good news is that if things fall apart, most people will die off pretty quickly.

Oh yeah, and Nefarious bit a kid really hard at school yesterday… I figure if she doesn't stop, and gets expelled, I can move way up north and let her grow up feral without any guilt, right? As I understand it, the solution to biting is living with wolves for a while, because they're good about biting each other when they play, but without generally hurting each other.