Author Archives: freestateofjen

Sea sick

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People probably think I’m a tough mofo, but I still get scared every now and then. It’s just that I don’t let my fear stop me. It’s not always easy.

I went fishing the other day with some awesome friends from Woodgate. A couple I lovingly refer to as The Tidies, which is an amalgamation of both their names, and another mate who could otherwise be known as Tytus Brosch (this in an in-joke that no one will understand, but I’m using here in the pursuit of anonymity and also because I wanted to draw a picture).

I really like boats and I like fishing, but it’s been many years since I was on a boat that wasn’t in command of the cool guy I’m married to and I was a bit worried about how my mate Tytus would behave on the water. What if he’s a total cowboy? I worried, and what if I need to pee out on the ocean when there’s three other poeple on a small boat? I wonder how long we’ll be out there. Will I get really hungry? What if the boat sinks? What if the waves are really big? On and on it went. None of that stuff was an issue. Tytus was great on the water, no hint of cowboy in him, but what I didn’t even consider for second was getting sea sick.

To my horror, I got sick! I was totally surprised because I’ve only ever been sea sick once when I was about eight years old, so I’ve been telling myself for years that don’t get sea sick and I’ve always felt a little bit self righteous about that.

One of us had already upchucked by the time we’d gotten to the first spot, and I said to myself, no way am I gonna let that happen to me, but as the morning wore on, I began to doubt my ability to follow through with that commitment. Even so, the remaining three of us didn’t say anything about feeling sick and we all kept fishing and joking around as though everything was perfectly normal, find and dandy.

After a while I felt I had to mention the situation and said, “Gees, I feel a bit sick.” Immediatley the other two people on the boat who didn’t appear sick at all yelled “Me too!”  and we all started laughing. All of us had been staying stum in an effort to hide our apparent “weakness”.

In the end we caught a few fish between us and had a great time, even though all of us were crook as dogs! We laughed about it and I guess that’s what will make the trip a lasting memory.

It’s always interesting to me that the things that I might be concerned about are never the things that come up as challenges. I’m really glad I didn’t let my reservations about the fishing trip stop me. I would never have had the opportunity to see this because I usually avoid getting up at 4am:

Sunrise through the mouth of the Burrum River. It’s a hard life in Woodgate. Oh, how I struggle. NOT!

 

What if the opposite of your fears transpired?

Feed my Frankenstein

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I went to see Alice Cooper at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre the other night. I’m not a huge rock music fan, but I loved Alice Cooper when I was a teenager, especially the song Poison. I had the single on tape and listened to it over and over again on my little black Sanyo tape player; my prized possession back in the day. I don’t miss tapes, but that doesn’t change the fact that I think iTunes sucks balls.

Anyway, because I’m a tightarse I drove down to Brisbane and back home again straight after the gig. It’s a four hour trip each way. It’s just such a giant pain organising accomodation and it’s so freakin’ expensive for what it is. I couldn’t face the idea of having to weave my way out of Brisbane the next day, so driving home was the best option. Being a tightarse has consequences of course and the most obvious one in this situation is being tired the next day. There are other consequences too, but more about that in a minute.

This post refers to the Frankenstein that is my insatiable apeitite for learning (the title of this post is an Alice Cooper song about sexual appetite), leading me to embark on a year-long quest for learning how to do things I’d never done before. One of them is tap dancing.

I’ve had four tap dancing lessons and I still haven’t learned how to do anything apart from marching forwards and marching backwards (which everyone can already do without lessons). The teacher and the other ladies in the class spend most of the lessons talking about work (they are all teachers) and about their kids. The remainder of the lessons are spent focused on the ladies who can already dance, which I get because there’s five of them and I’m the only beginner, but that doesn’t change the fact that I paid $110 for the “term” We spend about a total of five – six minutes actually dancing in an hour long lesson, which doesn’t normally start until ten minutes past when it’s meant to. It always finishes exactly when it’s meant to, though.  At the lesson yesterday I really started to get pissed off.

I originally thought I might be too stupid to dance because I could never get anything right and couldn’t follow any of the complicated instructions the instructor gave me, but it turns out the reason for that is because she’s not actually teaching me anything, which I wouldn’t have realised had I not met Adam last week. Adam was there for a meeting after the dance class and I got talking to him as I was leaving. He told me about clogging lessons, which I’d never heard of, so I looked it up online, contacted the teacher and arranged to go along to a lesson last Saturday.

I was a bit worried it would be the same as the tap dancing class, but it was the polar opposite; everyone was friendly, the teacher explained every single thing she did, told us all what each move was called, repeated each step and built up to a simple routine that all of us could do easily by the end of the lesson, which all cost a total of $8 for an entire hour of dancing – not talking. The lesson started on time and finished on time, with another group commencing immediatley after the group I was in finished. There were about fifteen people in my group and more than twenty-five in the second group. One lady even had a baby strapped to her front as she danced!

During the week I spent a fair bit of time on YouTube looking at beginner’s tap dancing routines. They were all easy to follow, the instructors announced what the steps were called, how to count beats to the music and they all went over the importance of the ankle and knee positions, which is something I’d never heard of in the tap dancing classes.

Being a tight arse makes me want to go back to the tap dancing classes to get my value for money, but it doesn’t take away the fact that I’m pissed off about not learning anything in the classes. What I’m actually pissed off about, if I’m really honest, is that I duped myself out of the money I’ve paid up front (I’m sure it won’t be refunded if I quit and I accept that), so I’m actually pissed off at myself, not the teacher. I can see the tap dancing classes aren’t working for me, so I’m losing more than the money I’ve paid up front by trying to get what I’ve paid for by continuing to go to the classes; I’m losing my time, which is worse than losing money because it’s a piece of my life that I will never get back and there’s no way to put a price on that. Even though I know this, it’s really hard to let that money go. I feel like I’ve been ripped off, but the only person who has ripped me off is myself.

Still, if I never went to the tap dancing classes I would never have met Adam and found out about the clogging. I would never have met Dot at the clogging class, who told me about square dancing classes (I loved square dancing when I was a kid) once a week for $5. I would never have bought my tap dancing shoes, which I can use for clogging and I would never have discovered all the cool tap routines on the internet. I also would have never had the opportunity to draw the stupid pictures that I’ve put in this post. That in itself would have been a great loss to humanity!

So, I’m pulling the pin on the tap dancing classes. It’s hard to decide that and I want to run the story that tells me it might get better next week. But, like the cool guy I’m married to said, “if you haven’t learnt anything in four weeks of lessons, do you really think you’re going to learn anything in the remaining six?”

Learning isn’t always addition, it can be subtraction too

Don’t let the sunk cost fallacy hold you back

 

 

 

Cords, Cubes and the Death of Knives

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I think I’m finally getting somewhere with this whole sucking thing. I’ve been practicing the banjo and I can actually play the entire dueling banjo song all the way through AND most of it actually sounds like the song from the movie, but in super slo-mo.

I have no idea what I’m doing, so I’m pretty much just making it all up as I go along. This is what I’m dealing with:

I= index R=ring M=middle

I had no idea how to play a cord, so I had to draw the way it looks so that I could understand it. It’s so bloody confusing because I couldn’t find instructions anywhere on which finger goes on which string on which fret, so I just had to work it out myself. I don’t know if this is “right”, but I’m kind of assuming that there must be no “right” otherwise it would be more obvious.

The tab (the sheet music) is just as confusing and I had to make all these notations on it so I knew which finger to use when I played the note. Again, I don’t know if I’m doing it “right”, but who cares. It’s not like I’m trying to get accepted into the Peabody Institute.

Click here to see what banjo tab for Dueling Banjos looks like. I don’t know what the bars along the bottom of each note mean, but I’m assuming they’ve got something to do with the speed the note has to be played at, which is something I learned in primary school like 35 years ago.

Even though it’s sort of coming together I still can’t imagine ever being able to play it like this.

The throwing knives I’ve been working on since the start of the year have had to be retired for a while. Two of the knives suffered a fatality the last time I used them, and it wasn’t like I threw them hard or anything. I’m also thinking that the instructional book I’ve got might be a bit shitty for learning from scratch, which is a pretty common thing so far. Instructions and teachers are never really that great for people who have no idea how to do something.

Two out of the three from the set are broken.

I’ve been working on solving a Rubik’s cube too. The instructions for that aren’t actually too bad, but I keep getting stuffed up when it comes to solving the top face. I’ve had it out once, so all I had to do was solve the pieces on the outside of the upperside, but I got confused about which was clockwise and which was anticlockwise. Unlike the banjo, the woodworking and the tap dancing I’m pretty confident I’ll get there in the end.

Solved bottom face (white) and bottom and middle layers. Click here for  the YouTube video I’ve been learning from.

One thing that hasn’t been that hard so far is the graffiti. I’m going to graffiti up the side of my house, so I’ve been playing around with what I’m going to draw. This is the start of it:

The two rectangles in the middle are the windows. I’m going for a climate change theme (but it might get changed) that will be overlayed with a story. It’s probably not going to be “real” graffiti because I won’t be using spraypaint. I don’t know how to use it properly and it’s also really expensive. I thought it a good idea to practice on paper before I commit anything to the wall.

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence – Abigail Adams

 

Sucking really Sucks!

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I had my first ever tap dancing lesson yesterday. I was really excited about it because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do and I had new shoes, so of course, that in itself is very exciting and I was dying to try them out:

I was disappointed with the first lesson and I had to fight hard not to get pissed off at myself (I couldn’t follow what everyone else was doing), at the teacher (she didn’t explain things very well [at all really] to begin with) and at the other people in the group (they’d all been dancing together for more than a year and all pretty much ignored me). To be really honest, it was actually hard not to cry because I felt so stupid and like I didn’t belong. The whole entire lesson the teacher and the other ladies talked about their kids or the kids they were teaching (some of them must have been teachers) and because I don’t have kids (or a job) it was like I wasn’t even there because there was no way for me to participate in the conversation. At one point I almost said, “Oh, yeah, my friend’s daughter does that too.” But I stopped myself because it would have drawn attention to how strange it was to invoke a friend’s child when they were all talking about their own.

When I felt like I wanted to cry, I said to myself, “no, fuck you. I’m doing this. It doesn’t matter about any of that other shit. I’m doing it.” This is the same inner mongrel that rises up and gets me through stuff when it’s hard. I wanted to play the brain injury card in my mind. It’s story I tell myself about why it’s hard for me to learn new stuff: I have a brain injury and that’s why I can’t get pattern-based activities (like dancing), but this time, I tried something new and told myself that there would be no brain injury card and that I would act like a “normal” person and just learn without telling myself little stories about why things are difficult. I also made a promise that I wouldn’t reveal to the teacher or the class that I had a brain injury. It’s certainly a fact that I have a brain injury and as a result, face challenges that non-brain injured people don’t, but revealing that I’m brain injured has never helped me in the past, so I decided that it’s pointless revealing that aspect of my life to anyone anymore.

I guess every approach to learning something new is going to have its limitations. If I learn at home on my own, I’m limited because it takes a long time to work out how to do stuff, and even then, I don’t know if I’m doing it right. If I learn in a group, especially a group that’s already formed, like the tap dancing group, it’s hard to fit in because groups have a dynamic and once a group is formed, it’s difficult for it to absorb new members, especially if the common ground is something that is not shared by the new member (in this case it seemed to be kids).

After feeling like I stuck out like a sore thumb in the dance class I got to feel like I was on display as I walked back to my car. A group of about 12 bearded, black t-shirted, rum can toting dudes were hanging out in front of a house across the street from where I’d parked. All of them leaning on cars, they stopped chatting and stared right at me, one guy elbowing the nearest bloke and pointing at me with his bearded chin. I got in the car, gave them a huge smile and waved at them as I drove off. None of them waved back. I went and got a pizza and ate the whole thing without feeling one shred of guilt because when you burn a bazillion calories everyday you can pretty much eat whatever the hell you like and still have legs for days.

It’s really very hard to suck at stuff, like so hard. I never really considered how shitty it might make me feel when I decided to commit to a year of sucking. I just told myself a little story of how it’s going to be awesome to learn all this new stuff, and oh, imagine all the new and wonderful friends I will make! Happy days afoot.

The way to manage this is to keep returning to things I know I’m good at or at least I’m comfortable with because to suck 100% of the time, would just, well, you know, suck! I’m 100% in control of my own body and I feel good about that and happy about all the work I’ve done and still do to make sure that I’m mentally and physcially fit and healthy: counting calories, running, cycling, walking, swimming, skipping, hard style dance, hiking, reading, writing, cooking and just generally being creative.  This is what some of that looks like:

A day out of my calorie book. I aim for 1700 calories a day, so this one is a bit over at 1935, but I allow myself this as it’s still in deficit (anything below 2000).

The blackboard where I track my weight lifting sessions. I don’t like weightlifting, but I do it because I like the results, and I’m also comfortable with it. If I didn’t record it on this blackboard, I’d never have kept at it. I rub it off everytime it fills up (like now) and start again with heavier weights. To keep the hatred at bay I never try to change the sets and reps. It’s always two sets, one of six reps and the second of four reps. The abs along the bottom have two sets of ten rep each, so 60 reps in total for each session, plus a one minute plank -ugh 😦

One way I keep my brain healthy: reading and writing. I know I’m good at these things because I’ve been doing them since I was about 3 or 4 years old.

So, in the face of sucking I look at what I’ve been able to achieve so far in my life and use that as a way to get through things when they seem hard. Recording everything I do is a great way to track my progress. Sometimes it feels like progress isn’t happening, but when everything is recorded, you can see that you’re getting somewhere and it means you’re less likely to give up, especially when stuff is new and you feel like you suck because new things are nearly always HARD, and just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s going to be hard forever.

Sucking is finite: Unleash your inner mongrel

Curious About Curiosity

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After reading The Polymath by Waqas Ahmed, I emailed a “curiosity professor” at a prestigious American university to ask him about his take on the loss of curiosity in adulthood. He response got me curious about why I thought that other people were less curious than me, so I set out to discover if I was right or wrong.

I surveyed all the people around me and in my small local community. For the most part people weren’t curious (as I suspected) and if they were, had never attempted to satisfy their curiosity. One man took the exercise as an opportunity to whinge about politicians. I tried to reframe it in terms of curiosity:

Me: So, would it be fair to say that you’re curious about how they came to hold their position?

Him: No, they’re just all bastards.

Me: Ok, so, do you mean you wonder how such bad people got to be in charge of things?

Him: No, nothing like that, they’re just all liars. Crooks, the lot of them.

Me: Ok.(said while looking at the pile of newspapers in front of him. If they made him so angry, why did he keep reading about them? Doesn’t make much sense if you ask me! It did seem like a lot of wasted energy and I wanted to ask him about it, but I recognised that it probably wouldn’t have been a good idea).

Most people I asked said they weren’t curious about anything, but I wondered if they were just saying that so they didn’t need to think about the answer. Surely, surely, everyone is curious about something? Although it was suggested in The Polymath: “Adults think that they know what they need to know, and as such become increasingly close minded.” How sorry I felt for others when I read this; a prison for their minds, but one, according to the same book, that brings cognitive closure, allowing the brain to shut down the investigative process to get rid of the feeling of ambiguity (not knowing the answer to something).

Stephen Wolfram was quoted in The Polymath: “Complacency and ignorance reduce our quality of life.” I’d certainly agree with that as far as curiosity goes because there’s so much more to know that what any of us already know. If we open our minds and keep them open we can be host to all kinds of new and elastic ideas about things we’d once believed were concrete.

These are things that I thought were concrete, but no longer do:

  • I’m nonathletic and I definitely will never be able to run (In 2019 I ran more than 180km)
  • All men are bastards and I never want to get married (I have an awesome husband and we’ve been together for 17 years)
  • Drinking alcohol is essential to a good night out (I gave up drinking 10 years ago and since then enjoy myself more being sober than i did when I was drinking)
  • I’m afraid of heights (in 2019 I climbed a mountain on my own)
  • Friendships are meant to last forever (I stopped speaking to my “best friend” in 2007)
  • I’ll never get a degree (I graduated in 2012)
  • If you dream it, you can do it (what a load of smack! Just not realistic at all)
  • It’s easier for others than it is for me (not true and what difference does it make anyway)

And on and on and on and on… (to the tune of Eat Sleep Rave Repeat by Fat Boy Slim)

What are you curious about?