Questions, Fitness, Sor Juana

Tuesday, February 1, 2011
10:32PM

So I should absolutely be finishing up my reading of Sor Juana right now instead of writing this, but I'm procrastinating, and when I find myself procrastinating for any length of time, it's usually an indicator that I have something else on my mind. Don't know what that is exactly right now, probably just a desire to be with my own mind for a little while. You never really know what that means until every moment of every day is occupied with someone else's thoughts, ie graduate school and pouring in everything from professors and authors, never time for something like this.

So I was thinking rather generally about blogs today, why people keep them, what they intend to accomplish. It occurs to me that it's strange, my particular brand of blog, which is basically a personal journal, mildly edited for public viewing. Most people seem to pick a topic and write about it, but I feel that would be so wrong for me. It's like in anything I've ever done... writing, art, piano, dance... I never settle on a style for anything. Writing- one day I'll be into abstract, spiritual, mystic musings, and the next it'll be some smart-ass rhymy bit or some far-fetched bilingual something or other. Art... I'll do anything, abstract, realism, paint, chalk, oils, as long as it's not a boring pencil and paper. I like being able to change, and I feel like if I were to start a blog about gardening, for example, and say, hello, this blog is going to be about gardening, I could never write about... cooking, or relationships. Life changes daily, and I like to talk about it all... so long as that's in writing, lol.

Today I'm thinking about... questions, physical fitness related stuff, and the awesomeness of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.

#1 Questions- I find myself irritated frequently. It seems to me we should all be asking a lot more questions and asserting a lot fewer definitives. As my lovely Indigo Girls say, "There's more than one answer to these questions, pointing in a crooked line, and the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine." I am not surprised I don't want to talk more than I do; people always already have the answer. And the admission of a question reflects not a desire to learn, but a lack of knowledge... stupidity. I'll value curiosity 'til the day I die and maintain that it keeps us young. It's just... it would be lovely to have conversations with people, say hey, here's the 5 different ways I see it, instead of just, this is how I see it. Why CAN'T I think multiple, possibly contradictory things at the same time? Why does that need to cause people aggravation? I feel the aggravation stems from not wanting to feel confused, but if we're honest with ourselves, we have no way of being certain of really... anything. So, I want to hear your questions. I want to answer in questions. How would that be? If you could ask anything and not have an answer, just infinite space for the blooming of your curiosity? What if you're a flower, and you erupt into a space you're comfortable with, and the sun comes to you on its own? What if you could grow in your own good time, in your own perfect beauty? Wouldn't it be lovely?

#2- Fitness stuff- So I signed up for this Physique 7 at the Rec Center, which is a seven-week program to help you make a fitness transformation. I signed up, why I'm not really sure. I was hoping to have a reliable spotter and someone to push me in the person of the trainer. I never have a spot. Guess what, most women don't like to lift the way I do, or maybe they think they shouldn't. And John doesn't lift either, so I have no partner. I stop shy on everything, because I'm afraid I'm going to drop the bar on my face or have a back spasm and not get back up. But the trainer wanted me to do light weights, high reps of everything. I said that's not what I was looking to do. I'm hoping that when I go back, he'll have revised the routine instead of insisting I should go for muscular endurance over raw strength. My endurance is excellent. I swam 30 laps non-stop tonight, and if that's not testing muscular and cardiovascular endurance at the same time, I don't know what is. It seems sexist. He sees a girl, he assigns high reps and plenty of cardio in between. I am not looking to lose weight. Put some damn muscle on me! I also decided I might benefit from the nutritional advice by turning in nutrition logs once a week. The response I got on my three logged days made me laugh more than anything, and then it bugged me. I know where I need to tweak some things, but at the same time, I know the world isn't going to fall apart if I don't change them. Again, I'm not looking to lose weight. I'm just looking to eat for health. I wrote that I had a BigMac, and I still say it's fine to have one once in awhile. But it just said "No" in all caps and red. Some of the language was pretty derogatory. I think that happens in fitness sometimes. I don't feel any guilt over what I eat; I'm looking for health advice. It was interesting, I thought, which things were emphasized. "That will be stored as fat." "If you eat junky food, it will show in your skin, nails, and body." I don't feel my body is something to be punished or made villainous. It does a good job for me, and I love it. I think so often we think of diet and exercise as tools to lose weight and fat, and it should be about so much more. If you really want to focus on numbers, how about blood lipids, blood pressure, resting heart rate- to me, those are much better indicators of health. When I wake up, still lying in bed, my heart rate is about 50. It used to be around 80 or 90. That's my improvement. I have developed a fairly massive stroke volume, and so my heart doesn't have to work quite so hard. I feel these sorts of things need to be emphasized more. I guess for as long as I've really been involved in fitness, it's been my opinion that it's something you do to feel good, be healthy, make yourself stronger, not something you should do because you're punishing yourself. Every time I have a fitness student tell me they need to lose "30 pounds" as they rub their stomachs, it breaks my heart. I say, "That's a lot to lose in such a short time, it might be healthier to do less." But they think that by beating themselves to a pulp for 3-6 months, they're going to do it . THEN they're going to be better people, I guess. I don't know. It makes me sad. Love your body, love yourself. Exercise, eat healthy, do it because it's good for you and makes you lose that sluggish feeling, not because you think you need to look a certain way. ergggg... this will always irritate me limitlessly, and I suppose I'll write about it several more times.

#3 Sor Juana- I'm losing steam by this point, but I'm reading her stuff right now for Garcia's class. I have to present questions on it next Monday, and I'm glad she is one of my topics. I absolutely love her. Her word play is unimaginably witty, and what I'm reading now is a response to something another "sister" wrote to her, condemning her non-religious writings, her unholy fascination with knowledge in general- science, math. As a nun, this other "sister" told her, she should be writing about God. Sor Juana knew who wrote the letter and that it was a religious man tricking her. She responded as if she hadn't the faintest, and "apologized" for her writings in such a way that it was impossible for the reader to do anything but admire why she wanted to learn, etc. She was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and a rebel. The way she thought on things is they way I've often wished everyone would think about things... ask your questions, look for answers but don't arrive at them to soon, you may be stopping short. Any time I've had to read her for school, I've felt so... non-alone, like somewhere, sometime, there was a woman who thought like I do, albeit she was about a billion times more intelligent. I would have loved to have met her, spent the night in her convent astrolab, have her teach me about the stars and what she really thought about God, which is so unclear in her writings. She says stuff about God, but when she's talking about God, her tone is so different, her rhetoric is gone. It's like, here, I believe, and probably her readers accepted that, even though she seemed to write it only out of necessity. Many consider her to be the first feminist. I loved her villancicos when I read them a couple years ago. She seemed to write women into divinity, in places they weren't supposed to be, and I thought that was so revolutionary and amazing, defiant, for her time and place.

Anyway, I kinda want to get back to her now and wind down for the night. Peace. Blessings.