No One Man Should Have All That Power

I've started religiously listening to the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast. The first time I heard of it was when my roommate showed me a clip from it describing the effects of DMT, dimethyltryptamine, the most potent hallucinogenic psychedelic known to man (naturally produced by the brain during the dream state and near-death experiences). I'm naturally curious about such things, so when I was looking around for stuff to listen to on the mower at work this summer, I decided to subscribe to the podcast and check out a few episodes.

Joe Rogan is famous for being the announcer for the UFC and the host of Fear Factor. He's also a standup comedian and martial artist. His podcast is about cool and interesting things like drugs, mixed martial arts, comedy, current events, government, sociopolitical stuff, metaphysical stuff, philosophical stuff, or whatever he and his guests feel like talking about. Sometimes it's just him and his comedian friends sitting around getting stoned and shooting the shit. He is a critical thinker with a way of cutting straight to the heart of an issue and exposing bullshit. It's entertaining, thought provoking, and very informative. I absolutely love it, and recommend it to anyone that sees himself or herself as a cool person with a rational view of the world. But that's not what this blog post is about.

It had been a week since the last podcast, as Joe was on vacation, and I was going crazy waiting for a new episode to listen to. I downloaded the newest episode last night, got up all stoked to listen to it on the mower this morning, and arrived at work to find my headphones out of batteries. Major buzzkill. Oh well, I had a whole morning of solitude to reflect and think my own thoughts.

One of the main things I thought about was my summer fitness project, and why I did it. To understand that, I had to go all the way back to last summer...

 I had a summer fling with a girl I knew from Shad Valley. We were pen pals. She was doing research in Calgary for the summer, and we visited each other several times before she went home to Ontario for the school year. We had a falling out over the winter, and haven't been on the best of terms ever since. I saw her again at a Shad reunion in Florida this spring, and she was polite and friendly, but stone cold to any flirting. This was very unfortunate, because it turns out she is moving to Edmonton for grad school at the U of A this fall.

My motivation for start losing weight was, plain and simple, to look good for her when I saw her again in the fall. I saw us together in pictures from Florida, and it was obvious that in addition to what went wrong between us, my body wasn't doing me any favors in the situation either. She was fit, I was fat. All I wanted to do was to look so irresistibly good that when she saw me again, she'd want to jump my bones. I wanted her to think that she was wrong to not be interested in me anymore. Looking back, whether or not we actually got back together wasn't the point. It was about proving her wrong, reframing the issue, and placing the power back with me. It wasn't about sex. It wasn't about health. It was about power.

As the summer dragged on, it became more clear that that ship has sailed. I'm a very different person this summer than last, and she and I are looking for two very different things. But I'm still working out as hard as I ever did. I wondered, why?

I am building a better body because I despise the power that beautiful girls have over me. That's the best way I can explain it. When a beautiful girl views herself as "out of my league", on a different level of physical attractiveness than me, she has license to look down on me. I'm filed away in a lower classification of man, the ones she has no attraction to. Any interaction we have from then on is not on a level playing field; she has the upper hand. I'm attracted to her, but she's not attracted to me. She holds the cards, she's in control. She has power over me. Hopefully that makes sense.

I hate being controlled. I want to be able to have interactions that are, if not completely on my own terms, at least on equal terms. I want a girl to have the same sense of social accountability to me as I have to her. Right now, if I approach a beautiful girl and she blows me off, it's no big deal to her. It's no loss to her. It's like when gross drunk 40-year-old women hit on me at the pool hall and I tell them to fuck off, it's no loss to me because I can do so much better. But if I had big shoulders, hard arms, and hip-hop abs, a girl would have no choice but to, at the very least, consider what she has to lose. I'd be given a fair chance, or even the benefit of the doubt, not just in the dating world but in the world at large. Ever notice how good looking people universally get treated better? It's the ugly truth, no pun intended.

Fitness is one of the very best things I can do to to better my life, because of the way it makes people view you and treat you differently. r/fitness is full of stories about how guys got fit and all of a sudden, got so much more respect from friends and strangers alike, men and women alike. Best of all, it's something that is completely under my control. All it takes is a little know-how, a bit of hard work, and a lot of discipline. I'm feeling more and more powerful every day.

Big Time Muscle

I've been eating healthier foods, counting calories, and working out religiously all summer. I've lost a lot of fat. Here is my summer progress album! I went from 186 pounds and 23% body fat in May to 159 pounds and 12% body fat in August.

Today was the day I officially ended my "cut" and began my "bulk". During a cut, you take in less calories than you burn, resulting in a net loss. Lifting weights during a cut makes you lose fat instead of muscle to make up the difference. During a bulk, you take in more calories than you burn, for an overall gain. Lifting weights during a bulk makes you gain muscle instead of fat to make up the difference.

This morning I had a massive hammy, cheesy, peppery omelette and a protein shake. This afternoon I had a mess of bison roast, salad, and as much milk as I wanted. Over the course of the day at work, I felt absolutely amazing. It's so great to have fuel in the tank again, after months of eating a -1000 cal/day deficit.

I plan to bulk for the next four months, then re-evaluate where I'm at. Check back for another progress album in December!

So long, I'm off to the gym to lift some heavy shit :)

Eventually We'll All Have Lost Completely Everything We've Been

Last night, I ended up drinking in the hot tub with my two younger brothers and a few of their friends. It was totally unexpected. I came home around 9pm from collecting plant samples for a university biology course this fall, expecting to kill the rest of my Saturday night watching a movie in bed or something. Instead, I walked into my room to find my brother and 2 friends drinking Burt Reynolds's, and things just sort of escalated from there.

Alcohol is a hell of a drug. For all its vices and virtues, at the very least you can usually count on it to grease the wheels and make something interesting happen. One way it does this is making people open up and talk about topics they'd normally steer clear of.

My brother's friend started talking about how she'd been asked out to the movies that night by a certain guy, but turned the guy down. She told him she had to work til 9 and had to get up in the morning, but she ended up drinking in our hot tub til all hours and felt kind of guilty about her hypocrisy. I hazarded a guess that the guy wasn't that cool, fun, or attractive, and she didn't really want to go out with him very badly in the first place.

The girls in the tub rushed to this guy's defense, all quick to say what a nice guy he is. He's such a nice guy,  you guys are being mean. My brother chimed in to tell me how right I was. He described the guy as "if someone wanted to be a Hutterite, but wasn't a Hutterite. Skinny, old farmer clothes, good manners, and totally socially inept."

I was right. This guy, by all accounts, was a real sweetheart and probably deserved a date with this girl. But the proof was in the pudding. She blew him off, was prepared to go home to bed, but came right over without hesitation when a hot tub get-together with a bunch of fun, cool, good-looking people was  presented. I brought this up, and all the guys heartily agreed with me. A huge percentage of nice guys are nice because that's the only way they can get any attention at all; they have little else going for them. But the attention that they get is rarely the kind they want. "As a guy, you're never really going to nice your way into anything", I said.

That was the line that really set one girl off. "You know Michael," she snapped indignantly, "one day, a nice guy is going to trump you in a big way, and you'll be left in the dust." At the time, I thought she was wrong but didn't want to fight about it, so I went to my classic argument-defusing line: "You know what? Maybe you're right" and moved on to something else.

I thought about it more later, and found that maybe there was an element of truth in what she said. I stand by my statement that you can't nice your way into anything with a girl, but what if there was a guy with the complete package? What if a guy came along who was confident, funny, good-looking, didn't give a fuck, and didn't take shit from anyone, but who could also pull off the flowers and cute movie dates and telling her she's pretty, without one side compromising the other? That would be one guy who could get any girl he wanted.

I used to be a nice guy in the worst way. It didn't work very well, but it's not like it didn't work at all. When it did work, it was great because it was based on genuine care and feelings. But over the past few years, I've changed and I'm not that nice guy anymore. I've become more focussed on being confident and true to myself and what I want. People say girls love jerks, and they're right, but they don't love them because they're jerks. Jerks have attractive qualities, like confidence and not taking shit from people, that nice guys often lack. Imagine if you took a jerk, and then made him not a jerk. You'd have the perfect guy.

I don't know where to go with this. Examining myself, I see that I've become a jerk in a lot of ways. Its opened up so many new opportunities with new girls, but its also burned bridges with girls I care about.   Will I ever get the balance right? Is it right to be deliberately screwing around with who I am? Am I doing this for the right reasons? What's going to happen if I continue down this path?

36 Days

I have this thing I do. I make the titles of my blog posts out of song titles or lyrics. I'll start out with an idea of what I'm going to write about, then try to think of a song that captures it.

This post is about how long it is until I go back to school. I started thinking about songs to fit the theme of a set amount of time. The first one I came up with was 36 Days, an old school Hawk Nelson song that I like to cover on voice and keyboard. I opened up iCal and counted the days one by one. It's exactly 36 days until the eve of the first day of classes. 36 Days from now, I'll be curled up in my bed in my familiar apartment dorm room, my sheets freshly washed, my class schedule on the wall, my clothes probably not yet fully unpacked. Ready to hurl myself headlong into what will hopefully be my final year of undergrad. 36 Days it is.

It's going to be a good year. I know this. I'm extremely excited, because this year is going to be unlike any year to come before it. Sure, I'll be surrounded by my apartment bros again, a group of guys who I can get down with and who have my back no matter what. Sure, I'll be free of the crushing weight of being around my family for long periods of time, able to act like a responsible and independent adult capable of making his own decisions. Sure, I'll have a better body and more motivation to improve it, due to my newfound addictions to healthy eating, and to picking things up and putting them down. But these things aren't what will truly set this year apart. This year is different because I have a goal.

I've never really had a goal in my life, I mean really had a goal. There have been times when I've set goals like "high marks" or "better social life", but those aren't all-encompassing goals by which I could govern my entire set of behaviors. I'll bet you're wondering what this goal of mine is. Here it is: I'm going to dental school, bitches.

Did that come out of nowhere? It did for me too. I was sitting down in my room one day, and Dad came in asking me if I was studying for anything this summer.
I asked if there was anything in particular he wanted me to be studying for.
He replied that I was really wandering around with my career choice. I wanted to be a doctor, but then not so much, or maybe I should study more genetics because that's kind of cool, or maybe not, or maybe I should just finish my degree and see what comes up, or maybe not, but not really doing anything. He said in 10 years, I might look back and kick myself, wishing that I had just done something and gone somewhere.
I said maybe you're right, but what should I do?
He said he never wants to tell me what to do, and supports whatever reasonable choice I make, but he recommends I be a dentist like him. He said I'd be very good at it, and I would enjoy it. It's much easier than being a doctor and you make more money.
I said something about it not being all about money.
He asked me to guess how much he pays the first year dentist that works 2 days a week at his office.
I don't know dad, how much?
$5000 a month. Not bad hey? That could be you in 5 years. Working 4 days a week, making 120 grand a year.

It was the money part that really hooked me. It was like he looked inside my head and pulled out a set of words that I'd been struggling to form, or maybe looking for permission to think. This is them, paraphrased:

"There are things you want to do with your life, right? You like traveling. You like hockey and music and concerts and wakeboarding and all that stuff. Well, there are a select few types of training that will allow you to make enough money to buy those things, and give you time to enjoy them. Dentistry has been really good to me, and I really think it would be good to you too."

This was paradigm shifting. All your life, you're told to do something you love, and you'll never work a day in your life. What a load of shit. No one is going to pay me to do the things I love. It's just not going to happen, that's not the way the real world works. The best case scenario is getting paid for something I like and that I'm good at, and using that to get the things I love. From a practical and realist worldview, dentistry is a perfect fit.

Now, I'm indescribably excited. I've got motivation to study my ass off. The GPA benchmark I've got to hit is 3.8, the median GPA of accepted dental students at U of A last year. My GPA right now is 3.7. Even if I'm not able to pull it up and get into U of A, it's more than good enough to get into a whole bunch of American schools. I'm legitimately shooting for 4.0 this year. It will take some sacrifices, but I'll be the first to admit that I slacked off for long periods these past two years in Biology. Now that I have my goal, I'll stay focussed in every class. I'll do every reading, and study my class notes for an hour or two every day. This is totally, completely doable, and I'm going to prove it.

Best of all, now that my goal has given me an exact framework of how hard I have to work at school, whatever is left over is truly my own. I can let loose on friday and saturday nights totally uninhibited by guilt or anything else. As long as I've got my goal well covered, I can fill in the cracks with whatever I want. I don't have to worry about undergrad degree requirements of independent research projects or anything like that. I can take dental prereq's, other cool shit that I like, and peace out to University of Southern California next fall. How unbelievably fucking awesome is that?!?

36 days until this all starts going down.

Boy Moves To A New Town With Optimistic Outlook

Vegreville feels much smaller than it used to.

I've been back in town for less than a week, and I'm already starting to feel cooped up. I rollerbladed around the entire town last night. It took a depressingly short time, and I didn't find anything that interested me. I don't really have any friends here. My family is starting to get on my nerves. The whole place feels empty, stalled, a sort of hyperbolic time chamber where I wait for school to start again. For the first summer since highschool graduation, living at home and working in Vegreville doesn't feel like a good fit.

Unfortunately, it's too good a deal to pass up. Mom and Dad's roof over my head, Mom and Dad's food in the fridge, all of it for free. A full-time job outdoors with an extremely generous boss, who unquestioningly gives me time off whenever I need it, and pays me probably more than he should. A part time job where half my shift is standing around twirling a whistle, and the other half is sitting in an office surfing reddit on my phone. If a guy wants to make money over the summer, this is the way to do it. I don't even know what I'd do as an alternative summer situation, as this has become the default, but you can be sure that if this keeps up, I'll be looking for next year.

In the meantime, instead of sulking about being cooped up and not having friends in town, I've undertaken a project. When I got back from Florida, I noticed something in the vacation pictures: I was fat. I was noticeably, off-puttingly fat, and I needed to do something about it.

Dad had recently lost a lot of weight using Fitbit, a pedometer that syncs to an iPhone app where you record all the food you eat and activities you do. It tracks how many calories you burn and how many you eat, and puts it all in front of you to see. I got one too, and started the 500 calorie deficit per day program.

The first few weeks were tough. I couldn't get to sleep at night. I'd lay awake, craving fatty, meaty, starchy foods. Ginger beef. Steak. Pizza. Chicken wings. Burgers. Noodles. I was hungry all day, every day, even right after meals. Despite all this, I stuck with it and out-performed my program. I got my intake down to under 1500 calories a day. Coupled with my outdoor job burning ~3000 calories a day, as well as working out for at least an hour every evening, I started to shed pounds. Fast. I lost 12 pounds in 3 weeks. The whole family got into it, and we all started working out and watching what we ate. We even put in a kick-ass brand new home gym in our basement!

As I researched more about the topic of weight loss, I quickly discovered that while running a 2000+ cal/day deficit would drop the pounds fast, it was not a healthy way to go about it. I found that the maximum daily calorie deficit for cutting body fat, without losing muscle tissue as well, is a mere 800 cal/day. Since I'd been eating dramatically less than that for the previous month or so, I now feel like I'm feasting like a king! I fill up on lean meats, fiber, yogourt, vegetables, protein shakes, etc. No more empty starches or fats, like bread, white noodles, pizza, or pop. Feels good man!

I already feel so much lighter, quicker, more confident, healthier, and stronger. I can fit into some of my old pants again. Most of all, I'm looking sexier than I have in years, and it's only been a month! At the beginning of May, I was at 23% body fat. As of today, I'm at 15.8%. My goal is to be at 10% by the beginning of July, then start building some more serious muscle.

Who knows if I'll be able to keep this up during the school year. Probably not, at least not to the same degree. But as of right now, I can't imagine going back to the way I was, and I'm only a month in! I'm excited to continue sculpting this body for the rest of my summer in this tiny town, then hit the scene in the fall with a vengeance!

A Hangover You Don't Deserve

I haven't written here in a long time, in part because I'm in university and time is at a premium, but also in part because the things in my life that need writing about are largely no longer things I can talk about publicly.

Last night, I read a reddit comment about people believing that they deserve things. They believe that if they be good and work hard, they deserve a decent job, decent house, and loving partner. That's really the Western ideal isn't it? Go to school, get a job, get married, buy what nice things you can afford, spend time with your kids, retire, find a hobby, get old, and you're done. It sounds nice. The system seems to be set up in such a way that facilitates the largest proportion of people being able to accomplish this.

I have nothing against this ideal. People value what they value. A whole lot of people value that school-job-family-stability ideal, and for good reason. It seems like a totally worthwhile thing to pursue. If nothing else, there are surely much worse things to value than safety, security, and an attractive partner.

What I have a problem with, and what I found myself agreeing with the reddit commenter on, is the very idea of deserving something. The idea that if one does good and works hard then one deserves something good in return, or if one is lazy and kind of a dick then one deserves bad outcomes, is based on the antiquated idea of an omniscient higher power that directly enforces justice on earth.

This isn't to say that I don't believe in God, or don't believe in morality, because I do. What I don't believe is that morality is directly enforced on earth in response to an individual person's actions. The concept of an afterlife in which everyone gets their just deserts is irrelevant to the point I'm trying to explain. This isn't only about morality.

For example, I don't believe that anything says a person who puts hours into his resume and sends out hundreds of copies deserves to find his dream job more than someone who sends out 10. I don't believe that the guy who goes to the gym and runs a mile every day deserves a better body and a hotter girlfriend than the guy who does 25 pushups a day. I don't believe that the guy who studies 4 hours a day deserves a better mark than the guy who studies an hour or two a week. Of course, these nice things all seem more likely to happen for the motivated guy who puts in the effort, and in most cases, they probably are. There are actions and there are predictable consequences, but there is not a universal justice that makes sure, or even should make sure, they always turn out the way they are "supposed to".

You don't deserve anything. I don't deserve anything. If you are reading this on a computer, we are two of the luckiest people on the planet to be born into a country where we not only have all our basic needs looked after practically all the time, but have a free education and affordable creature comforts. We don't deserve any of these things, nobody does. If we want more of these things, we can work for them and get them, but we still don't deserve them. Nobody deserves anything, because in this life, there is no such thing as deserving something. You can get away with stealing and hurting people, if you're good at it. You can be a caring, interesting, fit, attractive person your whole life and never fall in love. You can put 8 years of your life into a Master's degree, and have to work at Starbucks to pay the rent in your 1-bedroom apartment. You can be a lazy piece of shit, and be handed a high-paying job because you hung out with the right guy in highschool.

I didn't deserve this study break, but I took it. I'll probably suffer the consequences tomorrow, or maybe I won't. More than anyone else, I am in control of what happens to me. If I bomb my Organic Chemistry final, maybe I should have studied more. But, just as plausibly, it could be an easy test and I could do great, and it wouldn't have anything to do with how much I studied or didn't.

There are actions, and there are predictable consequences, but even if I cause something good through my actions, that doesn't mean I deserved it.

We Are Midnight

I stay up later than I should. I pay for it incrementally every morning, a grumpy groggy shell for at least a couple of hours. Why do I do this?

It's not because I'm not tired. In fact, I'm usually mentally exhausted by 11:00 pm. I've never had any trouble falling asleep at night, not since 7-year-old Michael gave up his nightlight. I have the most comfortable bed in the world, and when I finally lay my head down, I'm out in 15 minutes max. It's usually a lot less.

I think the reason I stay up is because I know that I've failed to make the most of the past day. Maybe staying up is a desperate attempt to squeeze one last little bit of meaning, fulfillment, or happiness out of this, one of my tragically few days on earth. Maybe if I stay up just a little bit longer, someone will text me or facebook me. Maybe I'll stumble on a picture that makes me laugh. Maybe I'll read a reddit post that makes me think, or consider something I've never considered before. Maybe an old friend will show up at my door, and I'll be whisked away from this lonely room on a midnight adventure.

I don't hate my life like I did once. It's probably never been better. But late at night, when my thoughts start to wander, all I see is a life that revolves around forcibly stuffing my brain with things I don't really care about.

Is this the way of the world?

"We are midnight, on a fast ride

Held a ticket in our hands for anywhere
Out of our minds, thought we could fly
As the morning comes we start to disappear."