Changing Careers

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Health 1 Comment

With my small readership, this is more of a journal. Anyway, I’ve been working on changing careers to a more self-directed and more healthy career.

Sitting as an engineer for 11 years has taken a toll: medial rotation of the shoulders, cervical spine issues from constantly looking down at a computer screen, anterior pelvic tilt from tight hip flexors, synergistic dominance of hamstrings over the glutes which causes sciatic pain from easily stressed glutes.

I’ve been in school for the last 6 months at the Personal Training Institute, link here. It’s been an eye-opener. Learning about anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, nutrition, endocrine system, etc. has been great. When I injure myself now doing some crazy new thing like parkour I know what I’ve injured. I have a whole new way of looking at food, medicine, and life in general.

While I still do engineering work, I’m working on doing personal training on the side. Should be fun!

Here are some interesting blogs on the topic of how to live healthy:

Stupid Movies

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Movies 3 Comments

I’m not going to link to it because I don’t want to pollute your mind. Some wacko has come out with a movie called “Black Sheep” that is about sheep that eat humans. Some scientific experiment went wrong and now the sheep want to eat people. Can the people overcome the sheep?

Why do people want to create this kind of crap? Who wants to see people attacked and eaten by crazy sheep? Is there any lesson that you can get out of this? Are we so disconnected from the natural world that we’re afraid of sheep now? Are they saying that science is so blind that it’s too dangerous to explore? Why when we are alive does our entertainment culture want to be so concerned with death and a gruesome one at that?

I doubt there’s anything valuable to be attained for the human psyche in this film. Although, once you’ve seen it and you are conscious about your thoughts, you may learn the lesson about being selective to what you expose yourself to. Let me save you some time. It’s about scaring you for fun in a sick way and making money. So, if you want to be thrilled by killer sheep, go and pay your money and support these maladjusted greedy people.

I haven’t seen it. I have certainly judged a book by it’s cover. Would you want to read a book that has pictures of sheep eating people? What’s scary is that some children will see this film.

Mail = waste

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Junk Mail 1 Comment

All my real bills (things that have to be paid) come online. When I get things from my mailbox, there are usually about 10 things total that are personal correspondence. The rest of the items are:

  • REI catalogs for both my wife and I.
  • Children’s clothing catalogs (usually 4 different ones a month).
  • United Mileage mail for my 6 year old twins. They each get an offer twice a month.
  • Delta Mileage mail for my 6 year old twins. (Don’t they check the age on their members? )
  • Credit card offers that promise me the dreams I’ve always had. (I’ve dreamed for years about owing 30k at 21.23% interest.)
  • Various charities sending me address labels. (They hope I’ll feel guilty about accepting the labels I guess so I’ll pay something?)
  • Free news papers.
  • Trial subscriptions to Magazines like “Stuff” and other publications that I don’t want my children to ask me about with questions like, “Why is that lady wearing her underwear all wet?”. I usually say something like, “She must have been undressing for a shower and then slipped.”

This is not the complete list, but I’m sure you’re getting the same.

Where are they getting all the paper? This is such waste! I have to recycle this all. I have to shred the credit card offers so the destitute won’t falsify information from my recycling bin. I’ve heard about paying for some environmental services that will stop the junk mail.

BUT, why is this something that I have to do something about? The ones who are taking the good oxygen producing plants and turning it into junk and sending it to me are the creators of this problem. They are the ones who need to do something about it.

Anyone know about starting legislation to stop this crap?

Stress revisited…

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Health, Stress

In my previous post on stress, I realize my my driving factors around the thought assumed wealth meant less stress. Having more wealth hasn’t meant less stress for me. I realize it’s a way of operation and not the pursuit of a goal. I mean if you constantly believe things will fall apart without you, you will be stressed. If you constantly accept work, tasks, beliefs that add to your feeling of less time, money, space you will feel stressed. Focus on selecting things that expand you instead.

Knowing now that I had an operational model of always attributing high priority to things that really were not a high priority helps me to see. I see now that being more conscious about what I allow into my life is really the way to operate.

Bank of America believes in me!

Posted by abraham.williams@gmail.com on in Junk Mail

Today I get an offer from Bank of America…

“Some day, one day – today is the day. Write a check for cash.” I should state that I have a credit card with them and I haven’t used up all my credit yet. Anyway, here’s the rest of their copy.

“Your friends and family believe in you and so do we. Use the attached access checks as an additional way to optimize the financial flexibility of your [fancy credit card] account.”

Wow, BofA believes in me. I guess they’ve been talking to my friends and family, too. Clearly it’s BS. Not only is it BS, but it’s unconscionable. BofA is trying to make me feel some kind of a positive emotional response about people I care for in order to spend money that they’ll lend me. It’s clearly in their best interest (and I also mean in terms of compounding interest against me). Do they think I’m stupid? Yes, they do.

This kind of crappy psychological marketing copy is way too prevalent in our culture. It’s so prevalent that we accept it as common place. I think it’s a lack of thinking on the part of our culture over all. Are there others out there who think and want culture that is thinking, too?

Thought is welcome.