Musing on Getting Back in Shape

First Published: 22 January 2025

Draft One

I know that somewhere I’ve mused before about my fitness goals. Though they’ve changed over the years, I think that they’ve remained relatively static since college, or at least in the past few years. These days, my goals are primarily to gain flexibility and endurance.

In college, I would often joke about the fact that I had steadily gone from sprinting sport to more sprinting of a sport. Football, despite being nominally only a few seconds per play, ends up generally being a few minutes of sprinting back and forth until possession changes. As a person whose only real event in swimming was the fifty freestyle, those few minutes became twenty to thirty seconds¹. Then, in college, I transitioned to diving, where each three second burst of effort in a meet was surrounded by at least five to ten minutes of rest.

Through all of this, I was relatively strong. Even today, I’m fairly sure that I can, at least once, lift more than most of the people I know. There’s something to be said for focusing on strengths, but I don’t think that applies here.

For one, I have always preferred being a jack of all trades to a master of one. For the other, given that I’m already stronger than average, the number of situations where I’ll need to lift something beyond my current limits but within my theoretical limits is relatively small. By contrast, the number of times that I’ll want to rush somewhere without losing my breath, or be able to contort my body to get somewhere² is far higher. With that in mind, while working through the group fitness offerings, I prioritized cardio fitness and flexibility over strength.³ Today, I tried my first barre class.

In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure what I expected. If I force myself to come to a conclusion about what I thought we’d be doing, it was something like plies and other such movements on the barre⁴. Instead, it was, as the instructor said, a mix of plyometrics, calisthenics, and ballet. We did do a little bit on the barre, but mostly we used it for balance.⁵

I struggled with the workout a lot. I hadn’t realized quite how out of shape I am, but that was a great reminder. Somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, the fact that it was so painful and hard for me motivated me to go more regularly. I rely on my body for so much, so seeing that I’m letting it down in general is not something that I take lightly.

I still didn’t make it to yoga today, but I have hopes for tomorrow. Otherwise, I think that I was in general decent at following the flowchart. I’m not sure how much of it is a thing that I need to do in order and how much is just a “yes, this is a list of activities I need to ensure that I do at some point.” Still, I think that I’m doing better for having the organization, even if it is far from optimal. After all, the only way to improve is to start. Wherever I am right now is where I am. The only way to get closer to my goal is day by day.

An Initial Attempt to Make Macro Bread

First Published: 21 January 2025

Draft 1

As I’ve mentioned in the last few posts, I’m trying to organize my life under a few different principles. Notably, I wanted to make sure that, even though the USDA seems less than clear about their need, I get enough phytonutrients of each kind. When I looked through my diet and what I could easily add to my diet¹, I was missing aliums and purple fruit. With that in mind, I decided to try to make a bread that incorporated them.

At the store, dried figs and daikon² were the mixins that spoke to me most. Below is the recipe I vaguely followed, along with a quick back of the envelope calculation for macronutrients.

• Add approximately 500 grams of flour³ and 650 grams of water⁴ to a bowl, mix until a thick paste is formed, and add in about a tablespoon of yeast.

• Upon being allowed to rise⁵, shred approximately 250 grams of daikon⁶ and squeeze to remove moisture.

• Finely chop 250 grams of fig, and also add to the dough⁷.

• Also add 100 grams of rye flour, 100 grams of almond flour⁸, 25 grams of vital wheat gluten, 250 grams of greek yogurt to the mixture and begin to knead. I ultimately needed to add another 300 grams of flour⁹ and 10 grams of gluten to get the dough to be the appropriate level of sticky, which is to say not at all. I also added salt somewhere in there, but that was eyeballed at best.

• I oiled the ball and let double, then divided into twelve even balls of approximately 200 grams.

• I forgot about them overnight and so found them to be overproofed, so reshaped, heated oven to 350 for 30 minutes as they reproofed, and baked at 350 for 30 minutes.

How did they turn out? Honestly pretty well. I’m happy with the taste, if only because the fig comes through, but the daikon doesn’t at all. I didn’t love how sulfurous the daikon smelled while shredding or baking, though, and so might have to take steps to prevent that in the future. Chief among these, I think that I’ll try shredding into cold water that’s been doped¹⁰ with either salt or baking soda, since those seem to work for others. Other than that, I might add more of either the daikon or fig, since they’re shockingly under noticed, for being a full 45 percent of the mass of the dough.¹¹

What else went wrong? I don’t love the texture. I’m not sure if that’s due to the relatively low flour to other ratio, the overproofing, or something to do with using whole wheat flour. Regardless, I will probably try the next batch without rye, since I didn’t notice much by way of flavor from it, and it definitely does a lot to add that kind of texture. I’ll also try not to let the dough overproof, but that’s far more optimistic.

Nutrition Information as Eyeballed:

• 840 g¹² of whole wheat flour. Its bag says 100 calories, 4 grams of protein, 20 grams carbs, 3 grams fiber, and 0.5 grams fat per 28 grams.¹³ Somehow, that means I used exactly 30 servings of flour, for a total of 3000 calories, 120 grams of protein, 600 grams of carbs, 90 grams of fiber, 15 grams of fat.

• 650 grams water, which is nutritionless

• 267 grams daikon, which is 16 calories, 0.68 grams of protein, 0.1 grams of fat, 3.4 grams of carbs, and 1.6 grams of fiber per 100 grams. That means a total of 43 calories, 1.8 grams of protein, .267 grams of fat, 9 grams of carbs, and 4.3 grams of fiber total.¹⁴

• 254 grams of fig, and that’s all I’m going to be putting in here because I don’t think anyone needs me to do the math.

In total:

• 5150¹⁵ calories

• 210¹⁶ grams protein

• 85¹⁷ grams fat

• 900¹⁸ grams carbs

• 145¹⁹ grams fiber

which, assuming I split my rolls perfectly, comes out to about:

• 430 calories

• 17.5 grams of protein

• 7 grams of fat

• 75 grams of carbs

• 12 grams of fiber

In total, about 24 calories per gram of protein, well below the 40 threshold I need to average over the day. It is interesting how calorically empty daikon is, and how relatively dense fig is.

Daily reflection:

Didn’t do great about maintaining the schedule I set, but did do more than expected, all things considered.

On a Scheduled Life

First Published: 20 January 2025

Draft 1

As I mused about at the start of the year, I want to stop wasting time. The easiest way to do that, as I can see, is to see what I actually do with my time, and also to make sure that the things I want to do are on the list. I opened all the posts¹ that even vaguely referenced schedules as I prepared to write this post.

However, before that I made my actual schedule.

“How?” you might be asking, either as someone looking for insight into my mind or as someone who wants to organize their own life. It was certainly not the most time efficient method, though I think that it may have ended up as the optimal method for me.

First, I sat and intentionally did not have audio going. I know that may be obvious to many, but your brain cannot think as well or deeply or freely if you’re listening to an audiobook. From there, I started writing down my goals for the day, and that led quickly into the things that I generally want to do, and their regularity.

I traveled to a new location² and took that messy document³ and compiled it into two pages: goals for the day and my general musings. The goal for the day was nominally in linear order, but the musings were not in the slightest. My general musings had me breaking my life into:

• Things to do before work

• Things to make sure to do every day at work

• Things to do after work

• Weekly commitments

• some random musings on things I’d like to do soonish⁴

• a list of activities that I wanted to do along with an annotation for the frequency I wanted to do it and its importance to me, e.g.^5,6

  • Serenade a pigeon 6.5. This means 3 times each week I wanted to serenade a pigeon, and its importance is 6.5/10.

  • Touch grass 9. This means daily I want to touch grass, 9/10 importance.

Of course, I was not immediately able to annotate the importance of items without having the full list. More than that, though, I don’t love absolute measurement scales, and so I started with my first item, decided that it wasn’t very important, and assigned it a low score. The next item on the list seemed relatively more important, so I gave it a six. The next item was even more important, so I gave it a seven. Item 4 was in between items two and three for importance, so I gave it a 6.3, since I felt like it was closer in importance to item two than item one. I continued this through the entire list.

Now that I’m done with it, I do find it interesting that so many of my goals were in the 6 to 7 range and the 8 to 9 range, with nothing between 7 and 8, and only a single item below 6.⁷ Even if the exact values might change, it does show me that I have one goal I don’t care about⁸, one goal I care about a lot⁹, groups of goals that are very important to me¹⁰, and groups of goals that are moderately important to me.¹¹ I do keep some absolute scaling, I guess, because nothing was a 10¹², and nothing was a sub-4¹³.

I then took my annotated pieces of¹⁴ paper home and didn’t look at it until today. Before bed, however, I made a list of tasks that I wanted to accomplish today in my bedside journal.¹⁵ Upon waking up and going through parts of my morning ritual¹⁶, I sat down with the two pieces of paper and the goals from yesterday’s journaling¹⁷ and grabbed some more blank paper.

First, I wrote in large letters and a sectioned off block the nominally immovables in my schedule. That is, the things that happen at a set time. I say nominally because in that list was also when I work¹⁸ and a few things that have rough end times. Below that I made a list of all the things that I had sorted yesterday, now ranked from most to least important. The new list looked something like:

• Touch Grass [5M] [D] [NA]

• Make sure Gravity exists [1H?] [W] [3W]

That is:

• Spend at least five minutes¹⁹ touching grass each day²⁰, with no upper limit on times to do so.

• I think that it will take me around an hour²¹ to make sure gravity exists, and I want to do it once a week, but if I had empty space in my schedule, I wouldn’t want it to happen more than three times a week.

One of my big goals was making use of the fitness class access pass I bought for the semester. They break all activities into one of four categories:

• Cardio

• HIIT

• Strength

• Mind Body

I always want more cardio fitness, generally enjoy feeling stronger, and would love to be flexible and in touch with my body. As a result, I then went to the page where they listed each activity per category, e.g. for the made up category of “Fun”

• Touching Grass

• Singing Songs

• Testing Gravity

• Sleeping

• Yoga

I did my normal way of deciding between options, ranking each item in relation to the rest, and started ranking them on the page:

• Singing Songs > Touching Grass

• Singing Songs > Testing Gravity > Touching Grass

• Sleeping >> Singing Songs

• Yoga ≥ Sleeping

Which means that²² I think that I would probably enjoy yoga and sleeping the same amount, though if I had to choose I’d lean towards yoga. Sleeping is significantly preferable to singing songs. Singing songs beats out testing gravity, which beats out touching grass.

After going through each of the four categories, I made my overall ranking, which unsurprisingly was almost entirely less than or equal to signs.²³

From there, I went down and listed every single option on the calendar that the school provides, because I prefer being able to look through hand written pages, because I don’t like their layout²⁴, and because there were only a few activities that I cared about. I did make this new list still broken down into category, e.g.

• Fun (Only Yoga)²⁵

  • 715-8 M-F (runs from 7:15 to 8 AM any day of Monday through Friday)

  • 715-815 TR²⁶ (runs from 7:15 to 8:15 AM on Tuesday or Thursday)

  • 1300-1400 U²⁷ (runs from 1 to 2 pm on Sunday)

  • 1500-1550 A²⁸ (runs 3 to 3:50 PM Saturdays)

• Thinking (Where I kept both Biting and Crying)

  • 715-8 M-R B

  • 730-9 F B

  • 9-10 C

Etc. etc.

On a new page, I looked back at the group fitness goals I had²⁹. Of the four activities I compiled, I wanted to make sure to do three of them at least once a week. I then went through and tried to find a way to do that. Because of prior commitments, there was only a single time each week I could do a barre class³⁰, a single time a week I could do Zumba, and a nice yoga spot every morning before I wanted to get to work, so below the listed set of workouts with prior constraints removed, I made a list of what I wanted to do each day and when.

From there, we moved on to the actual scheduling part of my time.³¹ I started by listing the events that I wanted to do, starting with waking up. Using my time estimates, I was able to back track how early I would need to wake up in order to get each item I wanted to do before work done before going to yoga. Thankfully everything except for the 4 fit. It took some restructuring, because as I walked through the morning in my mind, I realized that I have a connection where some activities feels better to move into others. Like those logic puzzles where everything is given relative referents, I found a solution that worked, along with the quick time reminder of how long each would take.

Saturday and Sunday were the odd ones out, because neither has work, and so timing is weird. Since there’s another yoga slot later in the morning on Saturdays, I just moved the entire schedule so wakeup is at the same relative time to yoga. Sunday I set the wakeup time with the other five days of the week, but decided to go to it last.

Because my schedule diverges daily after yoga, I then went through my Monday through Friday schedule, noting the activities that I wanted to do before going home, with time stamps where relevant. On the next page, I started to plot out what I wanted to do each night, and what I also wanted to do differently each night. I also started plotting out ideas for Sunday. At this point, Monday through Friday is nominally scheduled from waking to sleeping³², and Saturday and Sunday are relatively empty. Looking at the ordered list of floating items, I was happy to se that most all of them were done, with only the weekly tasks yet to be assigned. I made a list of those items under the day I felt like they belonged, since floating items only need to be scheduled relative to the fixed items and each other if relevant.

I then made my weekly flowchart, which diverges and converges fairly often. Because routines are important, I tried my best to keep the divergent streams as similar to each other as possible. I also put literally everything I could think of as a necessary part of the schedule³³ as an example, because cognitive load is bad.

I opened another small journal and made nine lists:

• Things to do every morning (so everything I do before the divergence, with wake time removed, because I know when that is)

• Things to do every night

• Monday tasks...

Finally, two hours after beginning, I was finished with my goal of plotting my ideal life. Most of it will be as simple as following a checklist, with the only³⁴ cognitive load coming at the beginning and end of each day, where I go over my short term goals, and at the beginning and end of each week, where I do the same with slightly longer term goals.³⁵ I’m hopeful that this will work and that it will make my life better.

Now to look at all the previous times I’ve tried and failed to see if there might be any common patterns:³⁶

• My goal updates from last December, which made me realize that I was aiming for far too many tasks, and that a lot of them weren’t as important to me as they felt while sitting at a computer. That’s one reason I did the entire scheduling process by hand, because I know that I think better unplugged.

• an early musing, where I mostly just reflected on the various ways that I tracked time passing by, which hasn’t really changed³⁷

• about two years ago I said that I found that having a list of items was really helpful. Looking at the calendar of blog posts, I was indeed going through a good period of, if nothing else, getting a blog out daily. Emotional things happened which threw me off my game. Of course that’s the risk of making any human connection, and I find it worthwhile to make connections despite that fact.

• this post from a month or so later points out that, short of actively making time for something, I will often lose it.

• About two and a half years ago³⁸ I realized that making a list of people to contact with frequencies, or setting up regular reminders, at least, works really well. I fell off of it about two years from the post, which makes sense given what was going on in my life (see the aforementioned risks of connection).³⁹

• Naively, I assumed that an autopopulated list on my phone would save me. I did not like looking at it, and it was far too repetitive⁴⁰.

• A few weeks later, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about what’s important to me and how I can make time for it.⁴¹ “I think that I have the space to be able to do so, at least for now” is the relevant quote, because I was again, too optimistic in what I wanted to do. Might be good to have some sacrificial items that I can comfortably say I’ll get rid of if I’m out of spoons.⁴²

• Speaking of spoons, running out of energy is a very real thing, and many of the activities I do when low energy do not replenish me.⁴³

• In what is a weird happenstance I wrote “About eighteen months ago” about eighteen months ago. It contained the poignant quote “I find it interesting that I continually look at scheduling my life as a potential solution. Intellectually, it very well could be, but I have such an aversion to scheduling myself that I don’t know if it will be probable for me without changing something major about my life”⁴⁴. It pointed out that rest, deadlines, and timers all help me, and, as the quote points out, I resist self scheduling.

  As I mention there, the more tired I am, the more I am willing to call my own bluff and point out that any commitment to myself is only as binding as I want it to be. More than that, though, I’ve realized that I need activities to be scheduled immediately succeeding each other with no space for me to get lost. That is, if it only takes me twelve minutes to get home instead of the fifteen I scheduled, I cannot let myself go “ooh yay three free minutes to do whatever!”. Instead, I need to immediately move to my next task.

  Being early to externally timed events, though, I’m ok with my tendency to disappear time.

It’s very possible that I missed some posts there, but I don’t really care that much. I think that the important pieces for me in particular to remember about my aversion to schedules are:

• Relative times are much better than absolute times. Or, don’t set timers for things, just have a list of what follows what.

• Breaks are almost impossible for you to recover from. As the fact that you sat down for two hours and with complete focus wrote your schedule, before immediately spending the past 75 minutes writing this blog post without distractions points out, focused work for longer is better. Transitions are the killer.⁴⁵

  That might be an issue, because I do also want to get into the habit of moving each hour and drinking water often. I suppose that bathroom breaks tend not to count as a break in my mind, so as long as I’m hydrating to an hourly rate, that should work.

• There are far more things that you want to do than you have time for.

  I didn’t schedule any time for my web serial, though dropping yoga would free 6 hours a week, and Sunday should have enough free time to make for writing if I needed. I could also drop my nightly scheduled reading time, or shorten the morning silence time. I also allocated 45 minutes to blogging each night, which is almost never the time it actually takes me. Unfortunately, 5 and 90 do average out to about 45, and that does generally seem like a good amount of time for me to spend on a general post. Maybe the excess time can be put to use writing the book.

• Time without stimuli is good and healthy and necessary.

• The less mental⁴⁶ effort that a task takes, the easier it is to do.

  No, that isn’t entirely right. “The easier it is to start a task, the easier it is” reads as far more accurate to me. As the struggle with transitions implies, starting a task is really difficult for me. The more that I can tell myself the task is automatic, the more likely I am to do it.

• Finally, you need to be doing well to be doing well. Almost every time that I’ve stopped this blog in the past⁴⁷ I’ve not been doing well. I don’t really know how to fix that, except to make sure to avoid running myself ragged.

All this being said, I do hope that I am able to maintain my life when the summer, with its constant interruptions to schedules, arrives.

Daily:

• Practiced guitar? It is now on my morning list, but I have yet to do it today.

• Twice daily stretching? In addition to everything else I did yesterday, I also made my stretch list.

• Poetry? Need to get started with that again.

• Blog? A behemoth!

• Net cleaner home? I’m going to say yes, but I’m also going to spend some time right now fixing it. I do know that people say the more specific a task is the better, but I feel like right now there’s enough low hanging fruit for fixing things that I don’t really need to plan that much. I can’t wait for the time when that is no longer true and I once again find myself having to decide what to clean.⁴⁸

The End of a Series

First Published: 18 January 2025

Draft 2

After writing yesterday’s musing, a friend asked what the daily needs of each phytonutrient are. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem like an easy to answer question, since the textbook I’ve been relying on lists vitamins, not phytonutrients. It has, however, been updated in part, though tragically only for total energy expenditure. Time to see what Big Food¹ thinks that I need.

• Ooh! Equations with the actual R2 and RMSE². Apparently men tend to need 10.83 fewer calories a year after the age of 19³, regardless of physical activity. I do find it really interesting how very different the four levels of activity look for the caloric needs. Height is least important for Active men, and almost twice as important for very active men as anyone else. Weight also increases caloric needs as activity rises, which is fun. Anyways, I should apparently be shooting⁴ for between 3200 and 4200, depending on how active I am. It’s interesting how much of a jump there is between active and very active, though. That’s all from this book, so now to go through the 2006 book.

• Exercise⁵: 60 minutes daily briskly walking or jogging at 3-4 miles per hour. I don’t consider that a brisk walking pace, since it’s a 15 to 20 minute mile but.

  OOH! They go into detail about how to figure out your activity level, which is only designed for normal BMI⁶:

  • Sedentary: PAL between 1 and 1.4⁷

  • low active: 1.4 to 1.6

  • active: 1.6 to 1.9

  • very active 1.9 to 2.5⁸

  For PAL defined as the caloric intake divided by basal energy expenditure⁹ They go through a list of activities with the amount it is expected to change PAL per hour performed¹⁰. Billiards is apparently worth between 0.05 and 0.1 PAL per hour, meaning that 4 hours of billiards is almost enough to bring someone out of a sedentary life if that’s their only movement.

  Walking at the pace they mention above is worth between .13 and .22 PAL per hour¹¹

• Carbs: have done before: 130 g/day for everyone over the age of 1 who is not pregnant. Needed to prevent ketosis and keep brain happy.

• Fiber: Intake is based on caloric intake, which is kind of fun. If under one, no data exists.¹² Otherwise, 14 grams per 1000 calories consumed is the expected need, though it’s not well proven. Dietary fiber is plant matter we can’t digest, and Functional fiber is additives.

  Because we can’t measure things that aren’t absorbed, difficult to get good data. Ooh they break down the different forms of fiber by their effect. I’ll list the ones I find most interesting:

  • Guar gum can reduce blood cholesterol by 11-16 percent, along with significant reduction in glycemic response¹³

  • Oat products are more easily fermented.

  The value comes from optimal intake to prevent heart disease. 42 to 56 grams a day isn’t that hard to hit at all

• Fat, as before, pretty easy to hit

• Cholesterol: your body can make it, so don’t need to eat it. Eating any makes you more likely to have chronic heart disease, and is found in animal products.

• Protein as before, and is still broken down into the various amino acids.

• Water: 3.7 L total consumption is apparently the average for men 19 to 70. That’s not super helpful for me, and I think I should shoot higher.

• Woo Vitamins!

  • Vitamin A: 900 micrograms, and under 3000 micrograms. It’s measured in retinol activity, and one gram retinol is worth 12 grams of beta carotene or 24 grams of alpha carotene or beta cryptothanxin. Retinol is found in animal products, so the precursors are mostly needed for vegetarians. Recommended amount based on liver stores.

  • B6: 1.3 mg, under 100.¹⁴ Upper range causes neuropathy. Minimum is set by some fancy biology word. It’s about 75 percent bioavailable from a mixed diet, and comes from starchy vegetables, organ meat, non citrus fruit, and fortified cereal.

  • B12: 2.4 mg.

  • Biotin 30 ug, apparently we don’t know how the body processes it when bound to protein. Needed for carboxylation

  • Vitamin C: 90 to 2000 mg¹⁵. Only issue with too much is diarrhea, and smokers need more.

  • Carotenoids: Natural pigments, like beta carotene. Wildly, raw carrot absorption of beta carotene can be as bad as 5 percent, fruits are better, and supplements can go up to 70 percent. Steaming improves bioavailability, but prolonged cooking can make it worse. Needs to be consumed with fat for optimal intake.

  • Choline: 550 to 3500 mg. Mostly comes from membranes in foods: milk, liver, egg, peanut. Lethicin is apparently a supplement added for it.

  • D: 5 to 50 ug. Too much apparently causes too much calcium in blood

  • E: 15 to 1000 mg. Prevents free radicals, occurs in 8 forms, but plasma only maintains one. Upper limit because of hemorrhages. Vegetable oils have it, no one in America tends to be deficient unless body can’t intake. Apparently no specific metabolic roles.

  • Folate: 400 to 1000 ug. Comes from dark green vegetables, beans, legumes. Metabolizes¹⁶ nucleic and amino acids. UL defined because it can mask a B12 deficiency.

  • K: 120 ug. Blood coagulation and bone metabolism. Green vegetables¹⁷ and vegetable oils are the normal sources.

  • Niacin: 16 to 35 mg.  Too high, flushing. Comes from meat or fortification. Insufficient B6, riboflavin, or iron may increase needs. If insufficient, causes pellagra.

  • Pantothenic Acid: 5 mg. Unknown how we get it, looks like less processed food better.¹⁸

  • Riboflavin: 1.3 mg. B2¹⁹. Found in milk, bread, and²⁰ fortified foods. Needed for redox reactions. Apparently no adverse upper level effects have been found. General malaise symptoms²¹ are deficiency signs.

  • Thiamin: 1.2 mg. B1! Metabolizes carbs and branched amino acids. We get it from fortified foods and ham. Anorexia and weight loss are symptoms of not enough. Also causes beriberi.

  • Elements: It goes through: Calcium²², the bone maker, Chromium²³, which lets insulin work, Copper²⁴, for molecular oxygen reduction, Fluoride²⁵ for teeth and bone, Iodine²⁶ for the thyroid²⁷, Magnesium²⁸ shows up all over the place in enzymatic things, Iron²⁹ for hemoglobin, Manganese^30,31 helps with bone making, Molybdenum³² as a cofactor,³³, Phosphorus^34,35 in Phosphate, for bone construction, Potassium³⁶ for proper signaling, effects dependent on its anion, and it helps prevent NaCl from hurting us, Selenium³⁷ prevents oxidative stress and helps redox C, too much causes brittle hair and nails, NaCl³⁸ to keep our body like the sea, Sulfate³⁹ comes from amino acid, Zinc⁴⁰ which makes us grow, and (Arsenic, Boron, Nickel, Silicon, Vanadium)⁴¹, made a note that these elements might be needed for something, but not usually.

I do also have a new favorite quote from the day: “data were insufficient to set a UL⁴² for arsenic. Although a UL was not determined for arsenic, there is no justification fro adding it to food or supplements” Interestingly: organic arsenic is usually fine. Inorganic arsenic (arsenite III or arsenate V), by contrast, “is an established human poison”.

So, what have we learned?

Dietary science is a lot of “people who eat like this tend to do better”, and I remember seeing a thing about how the way food is presented affects absorption of nutrients. It makes me feel better that I cannot fall into the trap of living my life by evidence based practice to the detriment of my day to day living, because there truly is not a lot of evidence.⁴³ Well, this has been a fun journey. Tune in next time to see my recipe for bread⁴⁴

Draft 1

A friend, upon reading yesterday’s musing, asked a very poignant question: how much of each phytonutrient do I actually need? Using our favorite textbook, we find that the actual chemicals are not listed, instead the vitamins are.

• lycopene is apparently not essential.

• beta cryptothanxin converts to Vitamin A at a 24 to 1 efficiency, so in order to get the 900 micrograms a day I need, I need to consume 21.6 milligrams. Interestingly, ://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrient-ranking-tool/beta-carotene/all/highest/household/common/nomyfooddata tells me that carrots contain no beta cryptothanxin. One carrot does, however, contain about 6 milligrams of beta carotene, which is equivalent to half a mig⁴⁵ of Retinol⁴⁶, so two carrots a day⁴⁷ is large enough, even if I have no other sources.

• sulforaphane, isothiocyanates, and indoles

• anthocyanins

• alicin

Instead of trusting the website that told me I need pretty colors, I’m actually just going to take this time and see what nutrients the government thinks that I need daily.⁴⁸

• Vitamin A: 900 micrograms⁴⁹

• Vitamin C: 90 milligrams

• Vitamin D: insufficient research, recommendation is 5 micrograms

• Vitamin E: 15 milligrams

• Vitamin K: insufficient research, recommendation 120 micrograms

• Thiamin: 1.2 mg

• Riboflavin: 1.3 mg

• Niacin: 16 mg

• Vitamin B6: 1.3 mg⁵⁰

• Folate: 400 micrograms

• Vitamin B12: 2.4 micrograms

• Pantothenic Acid: insufficient research, recommend 5 mg

• Biotin: Insufficient research, recommend 30 micrograms

• Choline: IR⁵¹, 550 mg

• Calcium IR: 1000 mg⁵²

• Chromium⁵³: IR, 35 micrograms

• Copper: 900 ug⁵⁴

• Fluoride: IR, 4 mg

• Iodine: 150 ug

• Magnesium: 410 mg

• Manganese: IR 2.3 mg

• Molybdenum: 45 ug

• Phosphorus: 700 mg

• Selenium: 55 ug

• Zinc: 11 mg

• Potassium: IR 4.7 g⁵⁵

• Sodium: IR 1.5 g

• Chloride:⁵⁶ IR 2.3 g

• Water: IR⁵⁷, interestingly is not weight based. If I consume more than 0.7 to 1 liter per hour of it, I might get toxicity.

Welp, time to go back and see what the USDA cares enough about to write a chapter on.

Dietary Needs Mostly Concluded

First Published: 17 January 2025

Draft 2: 17 January 2025. Realized that I want to make sure I’m getting the proper micronutrients from fruits and vegetables, and wanted to start listing that

I just finished meeting with a nutritionist. In general, the advice was good, practical, and not particularly enlightening.¹ That being said, I was advised to generally eat more often, which is absolutely a good idea. I’d like to plan to start eating lunch and dinner daily, along with two snacks of peanuts and maybe a fruit. The macro breakdown in draft one shows me that’s probably doable, and so now it’s time to make sure I get my recommended plants.

• Red: lycopene containing. Examples they give² are strawberries, cranberries, raspberries, tomatoes, cherries, apples³, and red peppers.

• Orange and yellow: beta cryptothanxin⁴, which becomes Vitamin A. Yellow peppers, carrots, oranges, bananas, mango, pineapple, corn

• Green: sulforaphane, isothiocyanates, and indoles⁵. Spinach, asparagus, alfalfa sprouts, collard greens, green tea.

• Blue and purple: anthocyanins⁶. Blueberries, blackberries, concord grapes⁷, raisins, plum, fig, prune, lavender. This one might be a little harder, since the berries are generally available only in small quantities, and I don’t love any of the other options. I might need to start doing dry plums, though then I should look and see how many a day I might need.

• White and brown: allicin⁸. Onion, garlic, leeks, parsnips, mushroom

Of course, frozen fruit is an equally viable option. The site claims I should shoot for about 4.5 cups a day of fruits and veggies⁹ The book I was using for macros does not provide specific guidance, so that seems like a reasonable enough goal. Writing my shopping list for next week, then:¹⁰

• Rotisserie Chicken. Good source of protein, and I can just take chunks to work for my lunch.

• Frozen meatballs¹¹

• Hard cheese for lunches¹² Upon reflection, a soft or spreadable cheese could also be nice, because I will have bread with lunch

• Frozen cherries or strawberries or fresh cherry¹³ tomato

• Carrots

• Spinach¹⁴

• Dry plums?

• Mushroom

• Peanuts

• Whole Wheat Flour

• Vital Wheat gluten

• Seeds for bread

• Apples

My lunch each day will shoot for 30 grams of protein, and I’m hoping for it to include:

• Chicken, about 100 grams¹⁵

• Some hard cheese, probably 50 grams¹⁶

• A small loaf of a fruit¹⁷ and nut studded¹⁸ bread¹⁹

• Some form of mushroom, ideally at least? Maybe make a little pate?

• Spinach, one handful

• One apple

• Mug green tea

• Carrot

The snack container, having just been measured, is about 3.5 oz, so my snack(s) will be:

• 3.5 oz peanut²⁰

• Piece of fruit? I think that I still may need to get in a red, in which case maybe strawberries.

Here we go!

Daily Notes:

• Practiced guitar? Not yet today, generally decently though.

• Twice daily stretching? It was going well until Tuesday

• Poetry? Kind of completely stopped.

• Blog? Lost track of time last Friday, stayed out too late, lost Saturday to that²¹, lost Sunday to that, and here we are.

• Net cleaner home? I think so! I’m optimistic about going forward.

I only drew once, on Sunday, but I did manage to write and send out a letter²².

Draft 1: 17 January 2025

²³

I just finished meeting with a nutritionist!²⁴ In general, there was nothing particularly life altering about the advice she gave. I feel mixed about that, as I tend to when no easy solutions present themselves.

On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I wasn’t just failing to do the proper research or draw the correct conclusions. On the other, it’s kind of frustrating to go into a situation with a  problem and leave the situation with the same problem.

That being said, though, there were three pieces of advice that she gave which I think may become helpful for me in the coming weeks.²⁵

• Make sure to be eating every 4 hours.²⁶ I keep seeing different times for how often one should be eating, and while I know I’ve seen some data suggesting other timelines, 4 hours is a reasonable enough goal to keep.²⁷

• Break the protein up throughout the day, and in particular, make sure to eat snacks.²⁸

• Set timers to stop working and, even if I don’t eat anything, check in with myself to see if I do want to eat anything.

Other pieces of advice that I found useful, though less so:

• Make sure to count the protein in everything I eat. I tend to do this, but I do sometimes think I might forget to when I’m ball parking the total consumption.

• Don’t be afraid of premade meals. In particular, rotisserie chickens and frozen meatballs are my friend.

• More fruits and veggies is never a bad thing.

Let’s see what peanuts²⁹ are like in terms of their protein efficiency. Looks like it’s around 170³⁰ calories per ounce, and about 7 grams of protein in that same space. Converting to grams, that means I’d need about 364 grams of peanuts a day, or about 13 oz.³¹ That’s really not bad!

So, assuming that I eat two meals³², if I’m awake for 16 hours a day, I should be eating at least two snacks. I’m going to start shooting for 3-5 ounces³³ of peanuts at each of these snacks. That means I’ll be getting between 21 and 35 grams per snack, for a total of 42 to 70 grams per day. Oh, yeah ok if I can eat 10 ounces of peanuts a day, I should have no trouble finding the other 20 grams from somewhere. Looking at the price per gram of protein, it’s about 2 cents an ounce.³⁴

Since I will generally be in my office from 8:30 to 5³⁵, I can do two snacks and a lunch³⁶, which is great. Assuming that I can manage 25 grams of protein in the lunch³⁷, I only need that much again for dinner! That’s so much easier, and if I make my lunch:

• Wildly, apples are not red fruits in the sense of containing lycopene.

Dietary Needs

First Published: 17 January 2025 (because I forgot to hit post)

Draft 1: 10 January 2025

Yesterday I went through some of the different ways that I could get sufficient protein.¹ Since I’m² not going to just consume all of my protein from a single source, I do technically have an NP problem, which is a variant of the knapsack problem. However, I’m looking for solutions that do not fit neatly into the normal computational framework, if only because more or less everything I could consume is functionally continuous, and the knapsack problem is meant for discrete entries.

Chicken, fish, and cheese are all similar in that I need to be eating about a pound a day of them in order to get my nutritional needs met. That’s a fair amount of volume, if nothing else. I can’t really imagine sitting down and eating a pound of any of them in a single sitting³

However, one piece of advice a friend gave me was to speak to a dietician at my school, which is apparently free. Rather than continue to worry about all of this, I’m going to try to do that instead.

Daily:

• Practiced guitar? Not yet today

• Twice daily stretching? The five minutes at night seems so much harder than the one in the morning. Making an actual list of what I do for how long is almost certainly my best option going forward.

• Poetry? I’ve generally been doing two or so stanzas, and usually working on a different ideal each time. Yesterday I was trying for an ABBA rhyme scheme.

• Blog? Look at this right here!

• Net cleaner home?

Dietary Needs

First Published: 9 January 2025

Draft 2: 9 January 2024

My last draft really went off the rails, because I got too far into the biohacking mindset. At the base minimum, I should be consuming:

• 90 grams of protein

• 130 grams of carbohydrates

• 17 grams of linoleic acid

• 1.6 grams of alpha-linoleic acid

Below, we see that,¹ at the absolute minimum, I can meet this in a smoothie that does this relatively easily. Since the fat and carbohydrates are incredibly simple to achieve, it’s worth considering what 90 grams of protein otherwise looks like. Common ways I get protein are:

• Rice

• Pasta

• Fish

• Chicken

• Gelatin

• Beans

• Eggs

• Milk

• Cheese

• Yogurt

To get 90 grams of protein from each of these sources, I would need to consume²:

• Rice³ needs about 3.8 kilograms⁴, and has around 52 calories per gram of protein.

• Pasta⁵ needs 2 KG, and has 28.5 calories per gram

• Fish⁶ needs 500 grams, and is around 5 calories per gram⁷

• Chicken⁸ needs about 480 grams, and is about 7.7 calories per gram

• Gelatin, as mentioned below needs about 150 grams, and is about 5 calories per gram

• Beans need about 1.25 kilograms, 15.8 cal/g

• Eggs⁹ are apparently 50 grams per large egg, so the 710 grams I need is about 14 eggs,

• Milk: 2.7 kilograms of milk, about 27 cal/g

• Cheese: 404 grams, 13.5 cal/g

• Yogurt: 2.6 kilograms, about 22.3 cal/g

In the future, I’ll hopefully figure out a way to take these numbers and construct a meal plan out of them.

Daily:

• Practiced guitar? Yes

• Practiced accordion? Given up for now because only so many tasks to be added at once

• Twice daily stretching? yes

• Journal? as with accordion, given up for now

• Poetry? yes

• Blog? look!

• Net cleaner home? technically

Draft 1: 9 January 2024

First, it appears that I was wrong in yesterday’s musing. The oil requirements are just straight up grams per day, which makes my life significantly easier. In order to hit my nutrition goals, I should be consuming at a minimum:

• 90 grams of protein

• 130 grams of carbohydrates

• 17 grams of linoleic acid¹⁰

• 1.6 grams of alpha-linoleic acid¹¹

• I generally see 1500 calories as the starvation threshold.

That is very little, and in total seems to add up¹² to around 2300 calories. If I choose better oils for alpha linoleic acid¹³, that number drops to 1222 calories per day. If I price out my costs,¹⁴ to hit the minimum I need for nutrition:

• about 144 grams, or 5 ounces of gelatin, which comes out to 6.56 dollars

• 1 tablespoon of corn oil is about 14 grams, and costs about 4.5 cents, which means daily need would be around 10 cents

• Flaxseed oil is approximately as dense, one tablespoon costs 44 cents, and so the daily need is about 14 cents

• Sugar costs 80 cents per pound, and I need about a third of a pound per day, so that’s about 30 cents per day.

Total cost for the base need smoothie comes out to around 7 dollars and 10 cents.

If we swap the gelatin out for egg whites, we get a little bit of carbs, but, assuming the cost is only in protein¹⁵, we can start pricing out the price per gram of protein for different foods:

• Gelatin: 7.5 cents

• Egg White: 4.7 cents

• Whey Protein: 6.5 cents¹⁶

• Chicken breast comes out to around 4 cents per ounce

• Flour technically has protein, though incomplete, and so is being discarded¹⁷

• Generally seems like peanuts are complete, and come in at 1.9 cents, or 2.3 if I don’t want to bother shelling them myself.

• Beans also appear to contain all amino acids, and come in at 1 cent per gram as pinto beans

• Rice can come down to 1.6 cents per gram

• Lentils are around 1.4 cents

Gelatin and egg whites are both about 1.6 grams per gram of protein, whey protein is about 1.1, and pinto beans are about 5, so it does require significantly more bean consumption. It also takes me well over the minimum carb load for the day, which also saves me 30 cents in sugar. It would, however, require consuming a full pound of beans¹⁸ each day. Egg whites probably strike a good balance of volume and cost.

Now that we have gone through this, we also need to remember the whole “there is a limit of calories I can, or at least should, consume in a day.” At the 3500 calorie mark, that means everything needs to be under 40 calories per gram of protein in order to be a valid source of all protein I consume.

Also, if I do the insane thing of bulk buying gelatin, I can get it for as cheap as 40 percent the cost, bringing it down to 3 cents per gram, which is honestly kind of tempting. It does, however, require purchasing 50 pounds of gelatin, which would serve me for around half a year. It would take us down to under three dollars a day.

According to the USDA, as long as I’m spending under 10 dollars and nine cents a day, I’m doing well.

This has absolutely degraded from the initial goal of figuring out how to feed myself well, for all that it would, without a doubt, be a very easy and effective way to get myself all of the nutrients I need in a day. I do wonder if I would be able to eat enough fruit and vegetable in a day to feel satiated.

Initial Reflection on Dietary Needs

First Published: 8 January 2025

Draft 2: 8 January 2025

As I’ve mentioned in a fair number of musings, I want to be better at fueling my body. That means that I’m going to aim for a few goals:

• Macronutrients all at acceptable levels

• Unprocessed or less processed foods where possible

• More fruits and vegetables, generally aiming for dark green, red, orange, legumes, starches to be each represented.

• Easy, in mental, physical, and temporal meanings.

both lets me get some estimates and gives me the actual links to the book where the USDA lays out their explicit recommendations. Unfortunately, those PDFs do not give citations, but I will trust that the data are at least generally good. With that in mind, the goals I should be hitting:

• At least a gallon of total water per day. I generally feel like I should be drinking around that much, if I go by the whole “drink when you’re thirsty” mantra.

• An absolute floor of 130 grams of carbohydrates a day.¹

• If I trust the AMDR, which is at the very least a decent starting place, I should be getting between 45 and 65 percent of calories from carbs, 25 to 35 percent fat, and 10 to 30 protein. I can hit the thresholds of at least one of them without breaking the system, which is good.

• I should be getting around 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body mass per day, bringing us to around 90 grams of protein.

• In that, I apparently absolutely have to have: histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalinine, threonine, tryptophan, and valine. I should make sure that I have the prerequisites, or take in: arginine, cysteine, glutamine, glycine, proline, and tyrosine. daily, that means:²

  • 19 histidine

  • 30 Isoleucine

  • 62 leucine

  • 52 lysine

  • 26 methionine and cysteine (combined, I assume)

  • 51 phenylalanine and tyrosine (combined, I assume)

  • 30 threonine

  • 9 tryptophan

  • 35 valine

  Now, because I am not completely insane, I probably won’t be very much harping on all of these points, but it’s at least generally good to keep in mind. Protein makes body run, and generally there don’t seem to be side effects from too much protein or of any amino acid, so floors are almost certainly sufficient in themselves.

• Fat, unfortunately, lacks RDA, and instead only has Adequate Intake (AI). It’s broken down into Linoleic and alpha Linoleic acids, which need 17 and 1.6 g/kg/day, respectively. Apparently outside of that, there’s not evidence to suggest any other recommendations for fat, though I assume that percents are generally at least somewhat supported as normally decent for each piece. LDL is linked to increased saturated³ fat content, and LDL is generally not great. Linoleic acid is an essential fatty acid, and it produces the n-6 fatty acids. It is not immediately clear to me what it does. Alpha is also essential, produces n-3, and is needed to balance n3 and n6 acids, as well as helping structural nerves especially in the nerves and retina. AIs were set from the median in the US, because there’s no common deficit. In general, no American or Canadian is lacking in either of those fats, which is a nice, if unsurprising result.

• So, in general, fat can make up the rest of my diet, I should aim for less saturated fats, and also make sure I consume the proper fatty acids. My body can make all of them except for linoleic and alpha linoleic acids. They’re important for growth, but I am no longer a child, and so no longer really grow.

• Higher fat diets (relative to carbs) tend to be better the more sedentary the population is. Given how sedentary I am, probably good to err on the side of more fat. Athletes may need higher carb diets, especially in the short term,

• Added sugar bad.

Ok, so that’s interesting and good enough. It’s always nice to confirm that there’s a large range of completely acceptable values for every macronutrient. The micros I will assume I can hit if I get a diverse diet in, at least for now. Now comes the much harder part: generating an actual diet.

I think that having the list of colors is a thing I need to do when plotting literally any meal, and especially while shopping. I think that it’s also probably best to have as much of what I’m cooking as things that I can generally do in batches that requires minimal in person effort. The absolute ideal, is of course, something like the classic crock pot meal, which is a turn on whenever and come back to whenever, with no real time considerations other than a floor.

I know myself well enough to know that I do, legitimately, enjoy cooking when I can, and that I hate following recipes. Those two conditions make a lot of meal planning hard, as does my tendency to forget things when they’re out of sight and to fall into chaos at the slightest provocation. However!

Hope is not lost. I do know myself well enough to know that when I have a list, even if it’s vague, I can often follow along with them, especially when I have a reason to do so.⁴

I think that this may be more than a single blog post is able to have, but I will definetly try to start making vague measurements in my recipes, so that I can both recreate them and see what the health information in them is. Additionally, that can let me start experimenting with different changes to each recipe. For instance, yesterday I baked a loaf of sandwich bread where I substituted yogurt for milk and added some almond flour.

Draft 1: 8 January 2025

As I’ve mentioned a fair amount in the recent musings, I want to be better about feeding myself. There are any number of reasons for this, but if I’m being honest, it’s mostly due to the loss of my mother.⁵ With that in mind, there are some general guidelines that I’m going to try to keep in mind going forward.⁶

• Get sufficient macros in. I know that I, personally, don’t feel great when I don’t get enough protein in.⁷

• Focus on more whole grain and less processed food generally

• I often see fiber as a point that needs to be addressed. I’m not sure how true that is in my case, especially given the above item, but I’ll at least ball park it to make sure I’m there.

• The CDC that I need more potassium, likely. That’s interesting, at least.

• Saturated fats are allegedly bad, though I keep wanting to look up why that is.⁸ Looking at the Harvard link from the footnote, seems mostly like polyunsaturated fats, like corn and sunflower oil, are essential for bodily function. Other than that, more liquid at room temperature probably better, but not something to hugely stress about.

• Increase the variety and quantity of fruits and vegetables in my diet. I know that I probably don’t get enough pretty colors, especially because I tend to go through phases of a single plant.A Harvard page claims that the groups I need to hit are: dark green, red, and orange legumes, and starchy.

• Don’t be super fussy in the day to day. The goal is that this is a background process, both because I want to not spend time and energy on this, and also because literature generally says good enough is, in fact, good enough.

• Make it something that I can do easily. That can mean different things to me at different periods of my life, but I think that it’s just a good thing to keep in mind in general.

Alrighty, that’s a pretty doable set of items. With that in mind, let’s start being explicit with some numbers⁹. Thankfully, Uncle Sam has us covered with that. These days, I do unfortunately think that I am Inactive to Low Active based on their terms, though that is something I’d like to change:¹⁰

• 16 cups of water, including everything in the foods I consume. That’s one gallon, and does change when I play with numbers, so that’s fun.

• About 3500 calories a day. Oof that’s going to be fun and difficult. Of course, if I’m going for a slight deficit¹¹, that’s ok too.

• 90 grams of protein. Some quick googling suggests approx. 4 calories per gram, so 360 cals from protein¹²

• Somewhere from 75 to 135 grams of fat per day. 9 Cal/g, so 675 to 1215.¹³

• Carbs are essential for brain function, or so claims the USDA. The recommended amount is listed by the amount expected to be needed for brain function, and explicitly prevents ketosis. Because all brains are basically the same size, carbohydrate recommendations plateau at the age of 1, and remain at around 130 grams after that. However, if we look at the numbers, that doesn’t work out

I’m realizing that I’m losing the thread, so let’s restart.

Planning 2025

First Published:

Draft Two: 7 January 2025

N.B. In the interest of having single day drafts, this is the first draft up until reflection of July 2023.

I generally title posts like this a reflection, for a few reasons. Mostly, I want to use it as a way of seeing what goals I’ve had, kept, lost, and picked up. However, this musing is meant to serve a different role.

Up to this point, I’ve mostly been treating what’s changed in my life as though it’s no more a change than any other sudden shift, like studying abroad or graduating. I don’t know if even now I’ve come to terms with all of the ways that my life is forever fundamentally altered for having lost my mother. Goals that relied, in any way, shape, or form, on her direct motivation¹ need new reasons. So, even as I look back at my past to see what my goals once were, my focus today is almost entirely on the future. I am willing to discard any goal I once had that no longer serves me.²

Time to go through every reflection I’ve had.³

Back in January of 2019, I had the goal of writing a sonnet every day. I do think that forcing myself to do something creative, in both senses of the word, and analog before bed time is ultimately good for me. Much as I think this, however, I don’t love sonnet form. I’m tempted to try common verse, because I do really enjoy alternating tetrameter and triameter. However, unlike a sonnet, common verse does not have a set number of stanzas or lines. Worth considering, at least.

Three years later⁴, I wanted to blog daily⁵. I was working through the Bible in a Year that year, and had the goal of keeping up on it. I also wanted to work on working out and writing music.

Apparently that February was the only February I reflected on. Interesting that I lose focus in the springtime. More or less, the same as January, though with working on my book⁶ added in.

March has also only been reflected on once, and I misdid the naming of the url. As before, with practicing guitar added in.

In April, I wanted to finish a draft of a paper I needed to write.

June⁷ brought the idea of listing the exciting things that had happened to me in the past month. That’s probably something that’s worth bringing back? It also added the goals of accordion practice and writing short stories.

In July I wanted to be able to run a little over five miles continuously, stretch, work on an exam, and revise my book.⁸

Poems, journaling,⁹ and curricular development were my August goals of note.

September had me hoping to work on my 24 for 24 list.¹⁰

I wanted to do NaNoWriMo and fill out 24 for 24 in October.

NOTE: At this point in the musing, I realized that I’ve been looking at the goals moving forward, so generally transpose all the goals forward one time unit.

I had the insane goal in November or December of that year of writing another 50K word book.

On the start of 2023, I wanted to add daily rosaries to my list, along with working through the Catechism in a Year.

February brought no new goals.

In May of that year, I split my goals into professional, personal, and growth. In general, they were single things that I needed to accomplish, and I should not forget the value of static goals. I also wanted to get back into bagpiping, which is also a thing I miss. Wildly, I hadn’t written any public outreach talks at that point. I know that it’s something I really started in graduate school, but it’s so weird to me that I only really started to do it about 20 months ago.

June had me counting my monthly words, and split goals into finite¹¹ and growth. I wanted to get up at 6am daily, get ahead on my book, and write letters to friends. I also wanted to invite friends over to my home, because I was happy with its state.¹²

That same month, I also reflected on the reflections themselves. In that post, I introduced my concept of actually tracking my goals.¹³

In July, I wanted to be able to have friends over, which necessitated a clean home. That’s really it for changes.

August brought the goal of finishing a talk and nothing else.

September had me reflecting forwards¹⁴ on what excited me about the coming month, which seems like a good goal. I also started work on my album, which I have yet to finish.

In October I gave small snippets of explanation for why each goal was set.¹⁵

November had me commenting that the month had passed me by for reasons I should have remembered. I don’t know if I recall them right now. It’s distinctly possible that October of 2023 was when I found out about my mother’s illness. I was apparently doing well enough at prayer then that I wanted to do better than a rushed rosary.

At the dawn of last year, I kept up my tradition of five things that I was excited for in the coming year. Let’s see how I did:

• Publishing my first first author paper -> Did not do, likely because I lost most of the summer and fall

• Giving an invited lecture at a university -> I did this, but also like that was kind of already set up.

• I’m excited to grow in my relationships -> I would like to think that I’ve done so, though it certainly fell apart as the year progressed.

• I’m once again also excited to watch my little brother graduate -> It was fantastic, though bittersweet for it just being my brothers and me there.

• I’m excited to record an album -> I did not finish any of the songs, though I did share a decent recording of one of them with my mom.

I may as well also list five good things that happened to me last year that I did not list:

• Getting a new underclassman on my project. The new student has been fantastic and really revitalized me

• Learning to embroider

• Figured out where I want to end up in a career

• Got my family into a dumb marble racing show.

• Ta’d introductory astronomy

I did also want to swim a mile, learn a polka, read through all my books. I did none of those, though I was generally ok at finishing the rest of my goals.

Nothing really new in July, though that came with my acknowledgment that I more or less had given up on blogging.

At the end of last year, I made a list of more or less every goal I had at the time. I then spent some time sorting them into different categories, like finite and infinite, goals for the near and far future, etc.

So, what have I learned from going through all my reflections?

In general, I always want to blog more, stretch more, and exercise more. Most of the time I want to pray more. I have also gone through different phases for how I reflect.

Going forwards, I think that I would like to continue monthly reflections, and I would like to do a few forward looking and backwards looking experiences. Looking through the goals from my last reflection, there are some changes and some similarities from there. So, what does this mean for me?

In 2025, I am excited to:

• Have a timeline for finishing my Ph.D.¹⁶

• Once again, continue to grow in my relationships.¹⁷

• Write a song for another friend’s wedding.

• initially: Mature in my faith. It’s been a rough past few months, but I think that it will ultimately end up as a net benefit to me. It’s been great to be able to help my friends experience the best day of their lives¹⁸ and enhance it with the meager¹⁹ talents for music I possess.

• Feed myself better. I’ve gotten better and better about it, and these past few months in particular have been really good to me in this regard, if nothing else.

• Find a way to live with my grief. So far it’s been alternating repression and collapse, though it’s definitely been more of a damped wave than an amplified or static one.

Goals for this year²⁰:

• Make significant progress on writing my thesis. Regardless of the timeline, it’s always better to have written than not to have written.

• Come to terms with my grief. As mentioned above, I feel like it’s a necessary thing to do.

• Find a sustainable way to feed myself. As mentioned above, I’m making progress on it, but it’s certainly not fully there.

• Find a way to write my web novel sustainably. I miss writing it, and I really miss interacting with my friends and family about the new chapters, to say nothing of the joy I get seeing random internet strangers praise me.

• Stop wasting time. That’s not to say stop taking breaks, but there are many things that I spend time on that I don’t value, and that don’t help me grow into the person I want to be. It’s a journey for sure, but I’d at least like to feel like more of my days are being spent in service of growth.

• Get back into letter writing. This ties in really well with growing in my relationships, but also I feel like I have not been doing enough handwriting these days, and certainly not enough reflecting.

• Get back into journalling. As with blogging, it’s a use of time that I’m always grateful for.

• Learn to draw. I had that going for a little bit last year, but then the holidays came and destroyed my schedule.

• Finish the album.

• Get back into classical²¹ composition.

• Find a way to bring fitness into a routine. I’ve generally been good about at least doing a bit of stretching in the morning, but I know that I could improve on that.

• Blog daily. This goal is absolutely my white whale, but it’s still my goal

• Grow interpersonally.

• Become more comfortable with myself.

• Art. I don’t know in what ways I want to be doing art, but I know that I want non-musical art to be a part of my life.²²

• Music. In general, I want to start building proficiency in my main instruments. Well, I do want to gain proficiency in every instrument, but that’s not plausible, if only because I don’t have every instrument. These days, that’s singing, guitar, and accordion.

• Clean my life.

• Learn to draw.

• Do 26 for 26.²³

Looking more short term, what are my goals for the rest of the month?

• Music:

  • I don’t really think that this month is calling me to ensemble or classical composition.

  • Work on the album for at least an hour each Saturday, and find another half hour sometime in the week.

  • Practice guitar and accordion. I’d like to say twice daily, but at least once for both.

• Art:

  • Continue working on the embroidery project. It brings me peace to do it.

  • Work on art at least 3x a week. I have the drawing space all set up, now it’s just a matter of doing it.

• Exercise:

  • Continue/improve at stretching in the morning and evening.

  • Start going to the group fitness classes.

  • I’m going to put food in here, so do my blog post or at least a personal posting about my macro needs

• Writing:

  • Write and send at least a letter a week. Probably do that on Saturdays.

  • Journal every morning, at least five minutes.

  • Write some poetry every night.

  • Start writing my web novel again.

  • Blog daily.

• Grow in prayer

That’s a fair number of goals. How can we make this a daily and weekly check?

Daily:

• Practiced guitar?

• Practiced accordion?

• Twice daily stretching?

• Journal?

• Poetry?

• Blog?

• Net cleaner home?

Weekly:

• Embroidered?

• Drew on Monday, Saturday, Sunday?

• Group Fitness?

• Letter?

• Web Novel?

Ok, that doesn’t actually seem so bad. Saturdays seem like they’ll start to be filled with activities which lead me to growth, which is always really nice. In general I do tend to find that I spend too much time wasting away on Saturdays, since I tend not to have anything in particular scheduled to do.

Draft One: 6 January 2025

I generally title posts like this a reflection, for a few reasons. Mostly, I want to use it as a way of seeing what goals I’ve had, kept, lost, and picked up. However, this musing is meant to serve a different role.

Up to this point, I’ve mostly been treating what’s changed in my life as though it’s no more a change than any other sudden shift, like studying abroad or graduating. I don’t know if even now I’ve come to terms with all of the ways that my life is forever fundamentally altered for having lost my mother. Goals that relied, in any way, shape, or form, on her direct motivation²⁴ need new reasons. So, even as I look back at my past to see what my goals once were, my focus today is almost entirely on the future. I am willing to discard any goal I once had that no longer serves me.²⁵

Time to go through every reflection I’ve had.²⁶

Back in January of 2019, I had the goal of writing a sonnet every day. I do think that forcing myself to do something creative, in both senses of the word, and analog before bed time is ultimately good for me. Much as I think this, however, I don’t love sonnet form. I’m tempted to try common verse, because I do really enjoy alternating tetrameter and triameter. However, unlike a sonnet, common verse does not have a set number of stanzas or lines. Worth considering, at least.

Three years later²⁷, I wanted to blog daily²⁸. I was working through the Bible in a Year that year, and had the goal of keeping up on it. I also wanted to work on working out and writing music.

Apparently that February was the only February I reflected on. Interesting that I lose focus in the springtime. More or less, the same as January, though with working on my book²⁹ added in.

March has also only been reflected on once, and I misdid the naming of the url. As before, with practicing guitar added in.

In April, I wanted to finish a draft of a paper I needed to write.

June³⁰ brought the idea of listing the exciting things that had happened to me in the past month. That’s probably something that’s worth bringing back? It also added the goals of accordion practice and writing short stories.

In July I wanted to be able to run a little over five miles continuously, stretch, work on an exam, and revise my book.³¹

Poems, journaling,³² and curricular development were my August goals of note.

September had me hoping to work on my 24 for 24 list.³³

I wanted to do NaNoWriMo and fill out 24 for 24 in October.

NOTE: At this point in the musing, I realized that I’ve been looking at the goals moving forward, so generally transpose all the goals forward one time unit.

I had the insane goal in November or December of that year of writing another 50K word book.

On the start of 2023, I wanted to add daily rosaries to my list, along with working through the Catechism in a Year.

February brought no new goals.

In May of that year, I split my goals into professional, personal, and growth. In general, they were single things that I needed to accomplish, and I should not forget the value of static goals. I also wanted to get back into bagpiping, which is also a thing I miss. Wildly, I hadn’t written any public outreach talks at that point. I know that it’s something I really started in graduate school, but it’s so weird to me that I only really started to do it about 20 months ago.

June had me counting my monthly words, and split goals into finite³⁴ and growth. I wanted to get up at 6am daily, get ahead on my book, and write letters to friends. I also wanted to invite friends over to my home, because I was happy with its state.³⁵

That same month, I also reflected on the reflections themselves. In that post, I introduced my concept of actually tracking my goals.³⁶

In July, I wanted to be able to have friends over, which necessitated a clean home. That’s really it for changes.

August brought the goal of finishing a talk and nothing else.

Christmas 2024

First Published: 2025 January 6

Draft 1: 6 January 2025

I started to write this musing on Christmas morning. It was a Christmas unlike I’ve ever had before, though for almost no positive reasons. I woke up alone in my empty home, with neither tree nor any decorations.

Last Christmas¹ I mused about the different Christmas traditions my family had.² This Christmas, we abandoned most of the traditions, for a few different reasons.

We kept the pajama exchange, though it felt far less homey, given that I had to walk a few blocks in them in order to sit with my father and brothers. We kept the photo with Santa and the family selfie, though I no longer had to angle the camera far down. We kept the generally low energy vibes, though with a flavor of sorrow rather than joy underpinning it.

Having spent a year without the traditions, my family and I all agree that we do, in fact, like all the traditions we have and want to bring them back next year. Of course, there will be a gigantic hole in the midst of that³ celebration, but that is something that we’re going to have to work around. I don’t know what metaphor will end up being the most true here, whether the hole will grow smaller in time, be covered over by new threads of life experiences, or simply avoided, as a scar in the ground. Regardless, I am grateful for the past year, the coming year, and whatever time I have left on this world.

Draft 0: 25 December 2024

As much as I’m glad that last year’s musing about Christmas contained our traditions, because I have already forgotten them, reading them was very difficult. So much has changed from last year, and some of it was even my fault. We are not at home