The life of the mind and the spirit.
In the worlds of exercise, there’s a concept called “referred pain”. Let’s say you feel a sharp pain in a muscle in your upper back, around the neck. You rub it, put that ointment on it, maybe try to hit it with a tennis ball if you’re seasoned. None of … Keep reading
My twin girls are up to no good at school, as I hear it told. I don’t know that the two of them are causing the trouble. What I hear is that one of their closest friends is engaged in a battle to the death with a new girl who … Keep reading
Yesterday I read an article in the Guardian about a woman who found herself shocked to learn that her OCD wasn’t due to a brain defect. She’d built her whole identity around having a “mental illness”, confident that her brain was simply built different. Then she discovered that her brain … Keep reading
Did you know that your brain is split in half, right down the middle? That’s one of those odd facts that can help you win at trivia night. Nobody seems to know why our brains are built like that. Even weirder, the two sides act like entirely different people. There … Keep reading
In my spare time I do amateur research into conspiracy theory rabbit holes. The UFO stuff and cryptids and that kind of thing. The other day I got to reading about the “Slender Man”. The Slender Man is an entirely “Internet native” cryptid. Turns out he was invented on … Keep reading
That’s a line from the now-ancient Terminator 2, one of the best of the 80s action films (if not the top contender). The heroes manage to change the history of the future and avoid the apocalypse of Judgment Day. The theme “no fate” weaves through the film. That’s … Keep reading
At the gym this morning, doing my usual full-body Sunday morning session, it occurred to me how different my training is now from past years. For most of the time I spent lifting, from the late 1990s up through around 2018, I was a “numbers guy”. The only thing … Keep reading
Once-famed counterculture guru and self-proclaimed “psychonaut” Robert Anton Wilson used to say that everyone lives inside their own “reality tunnel”. What is a reality tunnel? Glad you asked. RAW describes it as a set of unconscious mental filters, made up from your beliefs, past experiences, emotions, and your … Keep reading
One of the top reasons people say they don’t exercise is that they find it boring. This is no doubt encouraged by the common falsehood that exercise means running, and running means jogging for two hours a day. Yes, doing that is extremely boring and probably one of the worst … Keep reading
I don’t feel like writing an email this morning. It’s cold, rainy, and I want to go hit my workout, so you’re getting a listicle. I call it… 5 Ways to Do What You Don’t Want To Do While that last one doesn’t directly help you get anything done, it … Keep reading