Month: January 2015

Terrible Reviews: Activity Tracker Edition

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At some point in the past several years, trackers have gone from the stuff of spy movies and government conspiracies to the latest tech-slash-fashion-slash-fitness-slash-self-absorption craze. Being somewhat concerned with fitness, consistently fascinated by tech, not at all interested in fashion, and supremely selfish, I decided over the holidays that I might want one of these.

And I didn’t get one.

But that’s why God invented gift cards, innit? So a few days after Christmas, I had done some research with my wife looking over my shoulder, and we went and bought a Jawbone Up Move for each of us.

I’m pretty sure I hate the name. “Jawbone,” meh, whatever, that’s the name of the company, and I think they made headsets or something originally, so that gets a pass. “Up” is the name for their line of trackers (they make enough models to consider it a line now). I can’t say I endorse using an adverb as your product identity. Adjectives, sure. Speedy! Flamboyant! Hoopy! But an adverb? As an English teacher, I can’t say an adverb stands well on its own. Then there’s “Move”, which I don’t really have a problem with, as that’s what the gizmo is designed to get you to do. Plus, it’s in that authoritative imperative mood, so it sounds like an angry gym coach shouting at you to GET UP THAT ROPE COSTANZA. But you put it all together — Jawbone Up Move — and it sounds a little ridiculous. But you have to put it all together; you can’t just say “Up” or “Move” on their own because Google doesn’t know what you’re talking about, and other humans look at you funny or punch you. I’m just going to refer to it as the “JUM” herein, because that sounds a little like gum, and who doesn’t like gum?

In a world of Fitbits and Garmins and wrist straps and belt clips and skull implants and constant satellite monitoring, (you didn’t get the skull implant and satellite monitoring with your soy half caff? [I have no idea what a soy half caff is]) why the JUM? I’m not gonna lie, it was one of the cheapest options available, but it still boasts access to the Up app, which was highly favored by a slew of online reviewers, and which, after three weeks, I’m pretty fond of. What the JUM lacks in visual appeal and features it makes up for in simplicity and battery life — unlike most of these gadgets, it runs off a watch battery and doesn’t have to be plugged in every few days. Considering the veritable snakepit of little dongly things choking the drawers in our kitchen, this was no small selling point.

Look, it’s not my goal to actually review the thing, as I’m not an expert. All I really want to do is talk about my experience with it, which is equal parts insightful, amusing, and hilarious, and I imagine this experience would be more or less the same for any of these trackers.

Let’s start with insightful. The JUM perches quietly on your wrist or in your pocket or at your waistband or clipped to your earlobe or embedded in your spine (technology pending) and it counts your steps.

No, really, that’s about all it does. Like a sweatshop gnome hunched over an archaic adding machine with the tape spilling out onto the floor and his knobby knuckles hammering at the “+1” over and over again, it logs your steps throughout the day. More correctly, it counts step-like-movements, which can be gamed a little bit by swinging your arms around while you talk on the phone, for example. It also purports to track your sleep by the same metric (tracking movements while you lay in bed under the premise that you hold exceptionally still while asleep). That sounds cool, but I have my doubts about how accurate or reliable that information can be.

In short, all of this is built around the premise that 10,000 steps a day can help you lose weight and get healthier, which is probably true, because as it turns out, 10,000 steps is actually rather a lot.

But it’s more impressive than just counting, because it also syncs with your phone to track the time you took all those steps. So it can tell you, for example, that from seven-thirty AM until eight-fifteen AM, you took 300 steps as you milled around your apartment getting ready for work, from nine until five you took thirty steps as you parked your donk in your cubicle all day, and from five-after-five until five-twenty, you took seven thousand steps as you chased down and murdered your co-workers with an axe. The JUM then aggregates this data for you and pushes it at your face through these bright and cheerfully colored graphs.

So you’re left with collections of numbers and pages upon pages of graphs that describe what you were doing and when and for how long, which probably has useful implications in case you’re ever questioned about all the suddenly axe-murdered employees at your job. And that’s interesting and insightful because it allows you to pinpoint the times of day when you are active and the times of day when you could use a bit more chasing and stabbing and digging and burying to get your heart rate up.

It’s also where the JUM becomes amusing. Because, if I’m honest, I don’t need the step counter to tell me that between 5 and 9 pm I don’t move that much, or that I get a bunch of steps in every day at work without even really trying. But the amounts are amusing. Turns out I walk about 2-3 miles daily at work, most of it in a thirty foot square classroom. And while that 10,000 step goal seems lofty and hard to reach on some days, on other days (and especially on my weekend long run days) it gets shattered. I put in (checks a big orange graph with a smiley face) 16,000 steps last Saturday, which brought my daily step average up to a little over 12,000. So the app now thinks that I need a challenge and it wants me to do 13,000 steps a day. And maybe I could do it, but the app slides it my way like a high-roller palming a twenty off to the valet, like it’s no big deal.

Then there’s the sleep tracking. The JUM supposedly tells you not only how many hours you sleep, but how long it takes you to fall asleep and how many times you wake up in the night. This is well and good and cool as long as you take into account that the thing isn’t measuring your brainwaves or anything, so it doesn’t actually know you’re sleeping or not; all it knows is that you weren’t moving very much, and this it interprets as sleeping. But my wife and I have kids. Two of them, under three years old. They wake up in the night, sometimes often. (Don’t talk to me about how nonsensical the phrase “sometimes often” is. I stand by it.) As a result, when we view our sleep data, we wind up with these deep canyons of orange (wakeful activity) in between the scattered cliffs of blue (various “stages” of sleep). Like a river-carved monument to our ongoing sleep deprivation.  The amusing part is the concept that I might need the app to tell me I woke up in the night. As if the raccoon eyes and the fact that I can’t keep my head upright during the day would let me forget. (And the centripetal force from my wife’s eye-roll just literally knocked me from my chair.) (She wakes up with the kids WAY more than I do.)

Speaking of my wife, that’s where the JUM gets hilarious. We try to be health-conscious: it’s the whole reason I started running, and I think the JUM feeds that in a quantifiable and productive way. And if the aim of the product is to get people off their butts and moving their feet in an attempt to better their health, I think that’s admirable.

But now, things have taken a whole other turn. My wife and I have both hit 10,000 steps every day for almost three weeks now. That doesn’t, however, mean that we’ve each had full, active days every day. It means we’ve managed to place our feet on the floor in an alternating pattern 10,000 times every day. It’s not an uncommon sight to find my wife walking laps around the living room or the kitchen, listening to podcasts while the kids are napping or asleep. I’ve jogged in place in my pajamas next to the bed on a couple of occasions to get a final 1000 steps in. Even now, my as I type, my wife is stomping a moat into the carpet around our coffee table while my son chases her in advance of his bedtime. We’ve become walking robots. This little gizmo on our wrists has made us competitive to the point of absurdity, which I suppose means the product is working as intended, though I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel like an idiot a lot of the time.

All told, the JUM (and, by extension, probably just about every other tracker on the market) therefore falls into the category of wholly unnecessary but nonetheless delightful little devices that are now a part of my life, next to my keyless entry for the car, my smartphone, my bluetooth earpiece (say what you will, I know they’re douchey as all get-out, but I love that thing for the car and while doing chores around the house), my GPS watch, and any number of laptop peripherals. This is one of those things that if you think you’ll enjoy it, you probably will, and if you think you won’t, well, there are certainly better things to spend your money on.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I somehow have to find 3000 more steps before the bedtime my JUM has set for me at 9:57.

Infrequent Air Bubbles

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I am so tired. I’m poking my head up through the fog of exhaustion just to send a little signal that I’m okay. Or maybe that I’m not. But I’m still here. And some of the waves may be washing over my head, and maybe there’s a bit of water in my lungs, but I’m still floating, if just below the surface.

I’m a big proponent of the concept that we all have the exact same twenty-four hours in the day, and it’s just a question of what you apply those hours to. I also think I’ve been pretty good about carving out pieces of that time for my various exploits. This week, though, time has got my number.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and I think I need to invent a time machine. I only need to take a few courses in temporal engineering and discover dark matter and invent some new laws of physics. Luckily, I have a rocket scientist reading this very blog, so I have some good backup in that arena. Stay tuned. Or to be more correct, you will have already seen the fruits of my inventions by the time this post may have been written.

Then again, discretion is the better part of valor, and as much as I feel I need to press on and keep working until the work is done, maybe it wouldn’t be a horrible thing to consider a little break. However — and this is one of the things I’m maybe a little bit crazy about — I’m terrified that if I stop pushing forward, all the momentum will bleed out like a punctured waterbed.

On the one hand, part of my brain is telling me that the circumstances I’m claiming are getting the better of me are no better or worse or more demanding than at any other time over the last 8 months of this adventure I’ve been on. On the other, I feel as if the klaxons are sounding and the deckhands are scrambling for the lifeboats as the other part of my brain tells me that no, really I’m trying to do too much. The core temperature is increasing. Bubbles are rising to the surface, fewer and less frequent.

The end of the first edit is so close. Even if I’m artificially claiming that closeness, it needs to be close. I’ve been going back and forth with it so much that like bread left too long in the oven, it’s crusting over and turning black around the edges. I feel like I felt toward the end of the first draft: I’m getting sick of the work and I need a break from it. But the only way out is through, and the quicker I finish, the quicker it’s done.

On the other other hand, it’s possible that all this is simply normal mild parental exhaustion exacerbated by the fact that our 8-month old handed my wife and me a surprise sleep-deprivation treatment last night. It’s possible, in that vein, that I’m just loopy and moderately delirious and is that pink stuff oozing out of the vent? THAT’S PINK STUFF OOZING OUT OF THE VENT OMG IT’S GHOSTBUSTERS 2 COMMAND ME LORD VIGO

…

Manufactured, imagined, or actual, I think it’s fair to say there’s some stress settling in on my brain parts. I need to finish this edit.

Cold Fury

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This week’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Literary Mash-Up.

There’s no sense pretending on this one. I loved (no, let’s not even hide it, love, present tense) Frozen. So when my random selection gave me a mash-up of The Avengers and Frozen, it felt like Christmas coming around again.

I took the mash-up a little bit more literally than perhaps the challenge is meant to be taken, but I don’t care. I had more fun writing this than anything I’ve written in recent months.

Here’s Cold Fury, in 960 words.

 

 

 

Cold Fury

Get out of the ice business, they said. Market’s crashing, they said.

But what the hell was I supposed to do? I’m just an ice jockey from the sticks. No formal education, no particular skillset to speak of, outside of chopping ice, shaping it, transporting it, preserving it. Who am I kidding? It’s not like you couldn’t teach a rock troll to do what I do. The reindeer can practically do the job without me; he just can’t hold the icepick with his hooves. But that’s hardly the point.

Point is, the world is getting way too strange for somebody like me to make sense of it. I mean, one day I’m hauling a load of prime-cut crystal down from the peaks, and BANG, like magic, there’s this freak snowstorm out of nowhere. To say it’s a few months early is to overstate the obvious. Granted, weather can get weird up in the mountains, but this stuff settles in. Goes on thick, like marshmallow paste, and heavy, like reindeer dung; it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, and I might as well be dragging a sledful of sunlight in the summer behind me for all the good this ice is gonna do me. Pity, too. It’s a beautiful haul, but off it goes down the mountainside; no sense tiring out the reindeer. And I’m wondering what I’m going to do with myself for the foreseeable future when I remember there’s this shack back down the mountainside a stitch. Maybe I can ponder my troubles with a mug in my hand, away from the cackling of the jerks back in town.

I’m within sight of the shack when this guy steps out from behind a tree. Out-of-towner. Whatever he was doing out there is anybody’s guess, but I wasn’t gonna ask him. He’s got this leathery coat flapping like mad around his knees in the mountain wind, and a gleaming bald black head atop these massive, don’t-mess-with-me shoulders, and he’s staring hard at me like I stole his lunch money twenty years ago and he’s here to pay me back. Or maybe he’s just looking at me, and it’s the eyepatch that makes him look all ominous.

He tells me he needs me. That there’s this girl coming up the mountain, and she’s in trouble. That I should look out for her, help her find her sister. That he needs me to help “bring the sister in,” whatever that means. I ask him what’s in it for me, and he asks if I’ve ever wanted to be a prince. And I’m about to tell him to take a flying leap off the bluffs over there — seven hundred feet straight down. Then I stop. It’s not like I have anything better going on. Endless blizzard and all.

Looking back on it now, I don’t even know if he was real. All I know is, I turned to ask what he was gonna do for my reindeer, you know, to sweeten the deal, and when I looked back, he was gone… and behind him, in the distance, I see this girl lurching up the mountainside toward the shack. Tiny. Frail. Freezing. Then it gets worse. I follow her in, and she turns out to be gorgeous. Weird thing going on with her hair, this pale streak mixed in with all the red, but a face that’s cute like about a dozen baby reindeer and… well. I try to play it cool, but my brain is doing backflips trying to figure out how that angry eyepatch guy knew about her.

We talk. She needs a ride; I could use the money she offers me for giving her a ride. Next thing I know, it’s talking snowmen and imperial guards and a chase back down the same damn mountain we just climbed up. Oh, and her sister? Yeah, turns out she’s some sort of witch or something, and she’s all icicles and snow and eternal cold and… look, I’m not the guy to ask about everything that went down, all right? To be honest, the talking snowman gave me the screaming willies, and now he’s got his own room in the castle and he’s somehow still a snowman despite the fact that summer has come and gone six or seven times now. Ice Witch, right? Anyway. Sister and I get married, do the happily-ever-after thing, and the Snow Queen or whatever you call her rules in grace and splendor and all that good stuff. And then it hits me like an avalanche.

Eyepatch was right. I’m a prince now.

It’s too good to be true, right? Me, the ice-chucker from nowhere marries into the royal family. For years I don’t say anything — don’t look a gift reindeer in the mouth, right? — until one day I’m heading down for breakfast in the lower dining hall and I hear that voice. I go running in and see the guy, eyepatch and shiny head and all, sitting down talking with the queen. And he’s spouting all this stuff about parallel dimensions and ancient artifacts of untold power and how the world — no, the universe — needs her. Before I can even get my wife out of bed (she sleeps like a yeti, that one) the queen goes and gets on this — what can I call it? Like a boat, but made of steel, and flying, just floating over the ground like a hummingbird, if you can believe that — and leaves with the guy. And I try to explain, but my girl just goes into this… this FURY, you know?

Anyway, my wife and I rule the kingdom now while her sister, the Frost Fairy or whatever, is off fighting the evils of the universe, or something. And that’s how I became King of Arendelle.

 

 

Heeling / Healing

Pavowski8 Comments

It’s no secret that my blarg is about as focused as a toddler with ADD. I write about what occurs to me, and while that’s usually writing, occasionally I stray into the muddier waters of product and television reviews, or sometimes into the less-muddy, more-poopy waters of parenting, and still other times into the not-so-muddy-at-all but rather likely totally uninteresting waters of my personal fitness.

I can’t help but wonder if my blog might garner more views if I chose a focus and stuck to it. Then again, I phrase a doubt like that and then the Ego-Writer chimes in and reminds me that on a personal and intellectual level, I don’t really give a sharknado about my views and follows and likes and all that other crap. So what if my drivel reaches ten people, or a hundred, or a thousand? (Spoiler alert: it hasn’t.) It’s all so many droplets in the ocean, so many swirling grains of silica in a desert sandstorm.

I don’t care about views really; I care about giving vent and voice to what’s on my mind, so LindaGHill’s stream-of-consciousness prompt for this weekend is timely. It’s heal/heel, which is funny, because this week I’ve been particularly concerned with the healing of my heel.

No, really. Back in the early days of this blarg, I tweaked something in my left heel, and since then I’ve had a long road of injuries culminating in a similar but entirely different and more treatment-resistant issue with my right heel. Maybe it was my Vibrams, maybe it was the fact that I pushed up too quickly after my injury, but my feet have been fargoed for a while, and I’ve had enough of it.

Now, when I’ve had enough of feeling unproductive on my book, I can force myself to sit down and work on it. When I’ve had enough of being behind at work, I can sit down and grade until my fingers curl up like burned spiders and get caught up. When I’m feeling too much like a sloth, I can haul my blubbery self out for a run or a workout. When I feel like I’ve had one too many chili dogs (okay, I don’t eat chili dogs, but feel free to insert slices of pizza or cheeseburgers or scoops of ice cream) I can starve myself the next day. I can fix most problems of excess by realizing the excess and shutting it down. Not so much this excess of pain.

I shouldn’t say excess, though. Since visiting the podiatrist back in October (I think) I’ve had varying levels of discomfort, but nothing that could really qualify as pain. I get tweaks and twinges and aches, but nothing that keeps me from walking around, nothing that keeps me from getting out for a run, nothing that I wouldn’t feel silly classifying as “pain.” That said, even on the best of days, I’m aware that all is not right with my heel; it’s always there, nagging at the edge of my consciousness like a burn on the roof of your mouth or that faint whiff of baby poop whenever I pass my hand in front of my face. (Seriously, I washed my hands MULTIPLE times, where is it COMING FROM??) It just won’t go away.

It’s so persistent, now — I’ve been dealing with some level of this ache in my foot for the past six months now — that I’m wondering if it’s not just something I have to live with. Like, I’m almost 35… well past the time when I could, for example, sprain the sharknado out of my ankle, then eat nothing but Cap’n Crunch and occasionally rub a piece of ice on the affected area and bounce back like the goldfingered rubber band man. I want to believe that I can shake this off, but I’m starting to wonder. I’ve been afflicted with this thing for quite a while… so long it’s just starting to feel normal, which frankly is not something I’m okay with.

I think it’s doubly frustrating because I’ve been redoubling my efforts at fitness in other areas and I’m making strides at a ridiculous rate. I’m pushing up my reps and my difficulties. I’m doing a ton of extra walking (my wife is partly to blame for that, since we compete now with our little step-tracking-gizmos. “Compete” is the wrong word. She stomps me in this “competition” every day). I’m losing weight again, faster than I have any right to. All of which is fantastic.

But I can’t shake this thing with my heel.

It’s troubling. Partly because I feel like my ability to run regularly and for long distances has kind of become part of my identity, even though I’ve only been doing it for three years. Partly because I feel like just about every challenge I set for myself lately, no matter how insurmountable it seems at first, feels like little more than a speedbump as I coast past it. I mean… in the past year alone, I decided to write a novel, and I finished a first draft in less than six months. I gave up sodas over the space of three or four weeks. But I can’t overcome this thing with my heel.

Tomorrow’s another long run. If form holds, the heel will feel shaky as hell for the first half mile, then loosen up and feel great for three or four or maybe five miles, then tighten up as I head into mile six and seven.

I really don’t know how to end this post. I usually like to end with some sort of turn toward optimism or at least some cheeky snide aside, but all I can muster on the issue is doubt. This issue is such a small issue in the scheme of things, but it’s still hanging over my head like a set of particularly heavy storm clouds after so many months.

Anyway… this post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Finish Line Full of Magnets

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I’m not a big fan of biographies, but I read Andre Agassi’s autobio a few years ago. Some fantastic stories about how much pain he was secretly suffering through the last years of his career. Some insane tales of a father who made him hit something like five thousand tennis balls every day (if you hit a million tennis balls in a year, you can’t help but become the best in the world!). But for some reason, the thing that most stuck out for me was his take on winning a match.

I noodled around with tennis a little bit, and even an idiot like me can grasp the wisdom of what he had to say. I’m butchering his words, but he likened winning a match to a magnet: You’re in the match, and then you catch a little bit of a break and all of a sudden you can’t lose. The closer you get to the finish, the more it pulls you along. But, just like a magnet, the closer you get, the more it resists you, the more it pushes you away, until you’re right at the brink of winning and you can’t conceive of any possible way to get there.

Things, as I may have mentioned before, don’t always have to mean things. Sometimes a bit of wisdom about tennis is just a bit of wisdom about tennis. Then again, I’m an English teacher by trade, which means I can draw meaning from the swirls of foam in toddler vomit. So off I go generalizing:

Finishing this first edit is like winning a tennis match. I struggled mightily for months to find a foothold. I thought my ideas were terrible, my draft was terrible, the plans I had for fixing it were actually breaking it. (I still harbor doubts, but it’s getting a little late for that.) Then — and I couldn’t pinpoint the moment for the life of me — something changed, and I gained in confidence, and I found the work coming easier and easier. It flowed like so much blood from a severed artery.

And then I realized how close I was to the end.

Not the end. The first edit is only the first step in a journey that will no doubt leave me footsore and sweaty, bloody and probably a little disoriented. But the end of a pretty important step. A step at the end of which I am going to unfetter my little creation and let it flap out into the wild, presumably into the maws of several prowling beasts.

I’m going to let people read it. Other people, outside of the insulated, well-padded room I built for myself in my brain, are going to read this story, meet my characters, and start sticking pointy things in their soft bits. And that’s a highly encouraging thing, because I need some serious feedback if I want to make sure the story works. But it’s also a terrifying thing. Like, it might turn out that the story is as compelling as a pile of gerbil turds. Maybe the characters are as likable as Maleficent, you know, before they flipped it and told the story from her side.

Maybe, in short, I’ve spent the past nine months writing, and I’d have been better off doing, I dunno, ANYTHING else. Collecting stamps. Growing a garden. Learning to crochet.

And what felt like a magnet pulling me toward the finish line now feels like a magnet pushing me away from it. I’m terrified to finish, so I’m hiding from the work. It’s easy. There’s no shortage of excuses and reasons to keep me from working on it. But I think the sad, simple fact is that I’m terrified of turning it over and letting it out of my little cage.

But I guess I have to let it go eventually. Cut the cord. Empty the nest.

I’ll probably be done with the edit in a couple of weeks. And that’s awesome.

But terrifying.

But mostly awesome.

But still terrifying.

…But awesome.