Getting Old(er) Tomorrow
Last week I was surprised by my family in Illinois. I had gone home for a 20th high school reunion and while there my family seized the opportunity to get a cake and sing happy birthday to me a week early. I was caught up in the reunion at the time and so the surprise was pretty effective.
Today, technology chimed in to help remind me of my birthday as well.
A combination of Outlook reminders and spam email messages recommending Viagra as a back drop seemed pretty ironic or funny or whatever it is.
Tomorrow, is the actual birthday and I’ll be home on my birthday for the first time in several years. I’m looking forward to an easy going birthday with family, and then the day after that I hit the road for two back to back trips. One trip to Orlando for Affiliate Summit Un-conference at SeaWorld and the other the Digital Video Expo in Pasadena California. I suspect all that travel piled on to the travel from last week is going to make me feel my age a bit.
Working on a New Novel – PETER3D OUT
For the last few weeks, I have been working on a new novel called PETER3D OUT. Its a mystery in a cyberpunk future
I’ve been thinking over the premise and plot for several months and now I’m writing this puppy up.
Its going to be published in a very raw, rough draft at http://peter3dout.com .
I don’t have the registration set up yet, but basically anyone that registers (free) can read the book for free and ask questions, edit/proof/ or even piss all over it if you like.
Looking for all levels of critique, but I prefer the constructive types of criticism if I can get it. If not I will settle for the venom that makes me stronger. 
Barefoot Craze in North Carolina- Toe Shoes not so Crazy
A few weeks back I was interviewed by the Charlotte NBC news team. They came out to my office on my dock and interviewed me for about an hour, then I went running around the neighborhood for about an hour with essentially a two person news team. That story finally aired last night(
‘Barefoot running’ craze hits Charlotte
and the article and video are now available online too. (Note the maroon toe shoes below are not the shoes I have, and not really the best shoes for running either, there’s a different model better suited for running. These shoes are better for yoga and martial arts.
Here is the result!
It was a lot of fun, and frankly felt like something of a tv show from a production perspective. I don’t have a lot of experience with TV nor the news myself. But I have been on TV several times over the years.
But this was a first from the perspective of combining both an interview and from the experience of all the filming. They recorded what seemed to be about 2 hours worth of material. Well actually it was probably really about an hour, it just took 2 hours to set everything up. But that 1 hour boiled down to 2 minutes and twenty seconds of interview, which also featured a few other people in other interviews. 
So any way, I was fascinated with the process. I’ve done some video work for the web over the years, mostly video tutorials, and with much inferior equipment and training, but that experience gave me enough of a perspective on what was going on to appreciate the whole situation better.
It actually took about a month or so for the interview to actually make it onto the news, which was probably more of a surprise than I expected. I had this notion that the interview would probably air with a week or so, but even in my own experience videos I shoot or create often times don’t see the light of day for weeks or months and some never make it off my hard drive at all!
Now, since the interview was taken, I have started to move on with my barefoot adventures. This week in fact I started cross training going completely barefoot.
When I first started running in Vibrams, I would run a mile and then walk a mile.
Now, I am taking it even easier, walking a mile and jogging a bit during that walk.
Mostly, I am trying to build up the pads on my feet a bit, and maybe more so build up my confidence that I can run barefoot on the streets.
So far the experience has been very good. Not quite as much of a pleasure as putting on toe shoes were the first time, but I can definitely feel even more muscles getting a work out when I go barefoot all together.
Frankly, I’m not sure where this is all taking me, but the journey has been interesting so far.
Vibram Five Finger Injuries – Lessons Learned about Avoiding Barefoot Injuries
I’ve been running in Vibram’s since September, that is up until about 2 weeks ago.
I ramped up through the learning training curve last fall and things were going fantastic. Loved the results, loved the feel, loved the new strength in my feet and legs after getting trained up, even started to love running for the first time in 37 years, despite always being naturally ‘good at running’. I just read this article about “The Dangers of barefooting – How to Start Off on the Right Foot” by Al Gauthier.
The Problem – My Vibram Five Finger Toe Injury
So a couple weeks back I was running, I had been building up to longer and longer distances thinking about attempting my first marathon (I was just getting to the half marathon distance.
But I live in BF NC where there are mostly 2 lane roads, and no running conducive areas. The paper has an article at least every month about a runner or bicyclist that has been run down by a car, typically because the driver didn’t see them, didn’t allow enough space or because they were drunk, but also because there is no shoulder on most of these roads, so even a driver paying attention is not going to have a lot of room to make space, let alone time to react if they are coming around a corner at the posted speed limit.
So as I trek out to build up my distance, this is the environment I have to run in.
Sure I have a nice life insurance policy, or at least nice enough to cover college for the kids and pay off our debts, but not much more.
That said, I don’t plan on running in the clouds anytime soon, so I started trying to learn how to run through the grass and ditches along the side of the road, especially through those dangerous areas of blind curves.
Running in grass in Vibrams is like getting a foot massage. It feels great!
But running on a softer surface, like grass, or lately spongy rain soaked turf and soil, requires a lot more muscle and concentration, both to power through the distances trudging through a resistance like environment, but also to avoid injury from twists.
One thing I’ve noticed with bare footing in Vibrams is that when your legs get tired, or you get tired, you are more prone to an injury because you don’t have the protective encasement of shoes to compensate for a slight miscalculation.
The Injury – Bend your big toe underneath your foot while you run and it will hurt!
So 2 weeks back I twisted something slightly in my left foot.
It wasn’t anything real bad and I stopped running for a few days. After about 5 days, I thought I was mostly better, and I headed out for a run.
I thought I would try some sprinting exercises, run full out for 100 m then jog super slow for 200-300 and repeat. After about 3 repetitions, I quickly realized that my foot wasn’t 100% yet, so I then switched into a casual run, planning to do about 3 miles, which would have normally been very easy for me even in Vibrams after running those distances for months.
Halfway through, I was limping, and headed back home.
I should have walked but didn’t think it was ‘too bad’.
Well the limping run actually made my legs and feet a little more tired, because I hadn’t trained in a limping gate. Shortly there after, I stumbled a bit on my bad foot, literally tripping over my big toe.
The toe stubbed on pavement, and knuckled under my foot.
A sharp burst of pain hit and went away. I looked down and had skinned the top of my toe slightly through both the Vibram mesh, the injinji toe socks and my skin.
My toe felt like it had either been jammed, slightly dislocated temporarily at the knuckle from a hyperextension, or possibly fractured (when I was younger 20 years ago, I had fractured both my big toes several times either during kick boxing, riding a three wheeler once and catching my foot between a tree and the back tire, and a half dozen other situations).
I was still a mile from home when this happened and slowly jogged home on the foot. (mistake again)
Lesson Learned – Avoiding Vibram Five Finger Toe Injuries
I’ve learned and re-learned several lessons over the last 7 months about running in Vibrams. Most of them involved taking things very slow, because even though I’ve been running for over 25 years, I’ve only been running in Vibrams for 6 months. I’M A NEWBIE!
Most of the lessons have been about my stride in Vibrams, my form, differences in stride and form when I’m running on different terrains and when I’m running fresh, or tired or stiff or in the cold etc. Every difference is a major new lesson that I have to learn.
I can’t run the same way every day in Vibrams if I’m running under a different set of circumstances, and as such I get stronger because my muscles are dealing with completely different circumstances (that’s the good thing).
But my chances of injury increase because I’m dealing with something I’ve never dealt with before and I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I’M DOING YET!
The swelling has gone away, my bruises on my toe are almost gone too. I REALLY want to go running and think I could, but I have to check myself with my brain.
Instead, I walked a half mile last night instead of running 3. This morning I woke up and had the feeling of a slight not under the ball of my foot just below my second toe. Its just a little swelling, but it goes to show I wasn’t ready to run last night.
Today, I’ll need to walk somemore, but probably no more than a mile.
Basically, I’m starting all over again with my Vibrams post injury. Sure, I’ll probably learn faster and move up the curve back to half marathon level faster, but it is still starting over.
This time, I’m also going to do some cross training, weight training to strengthen my feet and ankles. I’m still thinking about the types of exercise I will do, probably a lot of things involving inclines and soft spongy surfaces.
My Wife’s Vibram Injury
My wife has a pair of Vibram Sprints. She has only had them for about 3 months. The first or second week she had them, she tried to run a 2.5 mile stretch up a steep hilly mountain with a friend. She too suffered from a trip where her toe stubbed and went under her foot. She skinned up her toe worse than I did, but didn’t seem to suffer from the pull/jam/fracture that I went through. She was dumb and lucky.
She should have tried to go that far that fast and definitely not through a hilly area. She learned a hard lesson quick. I usually learn the hard lessons a lot slower than she does.
Goodbye January! Catching up after travel and sickness
I’ve never been so happy to see February come. For over a week now, there has been some one in our house that was disgustingly sick. I was home with the kids all but one day last week, after returning from a weekend trip to Boston for WordCamp. Thursday, I made it to the office for a day, thinking the kids were better, but two of them were sick again by the early evening.
The third got sick about 1 am Friday morning, and I joined her, Mya, about an hour later. I was completely wasted for about 24 hours and barely functional until late last night. I was able to venture out into fresh air a couple times to watch the kids sledding Saturday after we got hit by a nice little snow/ice storm.
Then later Saturday, my son got sick again, about 4 days after he got sick the first time. I told him he was lucky that he had been OK, enough to go sledding while he could. I think it was rolling down a hill of snow that ultimately put him over the edge and started him puking all over his snow boots.
Corbin was sick the rest of the night. It had been a while since he had been that sick, apparently several years. Despite the fact that he had just watched the rest of us empty our guts all week, he was very surprised that we couldn’t give him a pill or some medicine that would fix his eleven year old stomach.
I had to think back a bit and the last time I could remember him being sick like that might have been when he was about 3 or 4 years old. Talk about lucky, he just didn’t have the experience of being sick like that and literally didn’t know what to do, like not throw up on his own feet, the floor, etc. He’s regularly been the kid in class that received perfect attendance awards.
I don’t think I ever received a perfect attendance award in my life. When I was his age, I was typically sick with a flu bug like that at least a couple times a year.
He thought that after throwing up, he could just launch in and eat a couple hot dogs and drink 3 glasses of water. Big mistake.
I had to sit down with him and basically teach him how to be sick.
- No, there isn’t medicine that fixes this instantly
- No, you can’t drink as much as you want
- No, you can’t eat as much as you want even if you are hungry
- Yes, being sick might keep you awake most of the night
- No, you can not have something to help you sleep (too much TV commercials
) - Yes, its a good thing that you are awake, it might help save your life if you do throw up
- Yes, you have to carry a bowl with you when you walk back and forth to the bathroom
- In the immortal words of Jack Nicholson in the Bucket List, “You can’t trust a fart” (oops too late on that advice)
I had mixed feelings about the fact that he didn’t really know any of these life lessons. It was awesome that he had been so healthy not to have gone through this and learned it the hard way, but I also felt like maybe I hadn’t done something sooner to teach him these basics sooner.
The good news, he knows now!
Finally, last night after the family went to bed, my own appetite finally came back. I had eaten my first normal meal last night, but started actually getting hungry last night around 10PM.
I started doing some basic easy work, busy work you might say last night. Stuff that needed to be done, but nothing that took a whole lot of brain power, concentration or effort. I was saving that for today, for a fresh perspective unburdened by sickness and misery, and now that I’ve finally written a blog article after weeks and weeks it seems like, time to get going on that!
Am I Allergic to My Wife’s Male Friend’s Text Messages During Sex?
If you have ever studied psychology at a basic level, you have probably been introduced to the theories of conditioning. There was Pavlov’s dog who was conditioned to expect food when a bell rang, which triggered the dog(s) to drool when they heard the bell ring.
Well there was a conditioning experiment involving an infant known as Little Albert. This experiment featured an infant of about 11 months who had been tested and was not frightened of a white lab rate; he even tried to play with the critter a bit.
Well the experimenters started introducing a very loud noise whenever the lab rat was shown to the baby. The baby could not see the source of the noise. Eventually the neutral stimulus, the rate, began to instill the emotion of fear in Little Albert due to the combined presence during the test of the loud noise with the rat. Little Albert was conditioned to fear the rat that he initially liked.
This experiment was done in the 1920’s, the mother did not know about the experiment and eventually took her baby from the hospital they were in and left. Today the experiment is considered unethical. Experiments involving fear with people are generally not condoned.
Text Message from the Other Guy during Sex
So the other night my wife and I are enjoying an intimate moment. Suddenly her cell phone buzzes and the room lights up as her phone comes to life with a text message.
For the most part, I have come to accept that my wife has a male friend and that they communicate very regularly via text, email, facebook etc. I do not think she is cheating on me, I do not think she plans to have an affair with Hobie, etc.
In the early days, I was surprised and felt a little blind sided by the establishment of this friendship and it hurt like hell, mostly because I was reacting and just didn’t know what the hell was going on.
Its been a few weeks, and I’m mostly over it. But I still experience triggers that cause me to feel emotional pain. I’m trying to work through those so that those triggers won’t cause emotional pain any longer. Essentially I have to find a way for my rational mind to over come the irrational fear of losing my wife, the irrational jealousy of my wife’s friend who happens to be a guy that hit on her quite a bit, and the irrational feeling that I’ve failed my wife a bit since I’m not able to connect with her and communicate with her like this other guy can and apparently does.
Oh, and if I talk about any of this with my wife, it pisses her off, makes her mad, and in general makes the whole situation worse. She feels like she is being dragged through the mud and punished for doing something she never did.
Hell I now fear that if I talk to her about this, she will get mad or think more about leaving me for another guy.
So the problem is one of a feedback loop negatively reinforcing several behaviors.
My wife receives a text message from Hobie
When I notice (and I don’t see the majority of these messages, but ever few days I happen to see or hear, like when we are having sex) I feel a little bit of pain from the fact that he has instant electronic access to my wife whenever and where ever she is.
If I exhibit that pain, become morose, sigh deeply, grimace, etc, it makes my wife angry because she thinks I’m blaming her.
When she becomes angry, she clams up and won’t talk to me. She fears anything she says will essentially be used against her.
When she clams up, she becomes more distant from me.
This in turn makes me feel even further removed from her (even though Hobie gets to talk to her) and that makes it harder for me to remain calm and balanced and feel like everything is ok, they are just friends etc.
That makes me more distant and makes it difficult for me to give her the physical comfort and appreciation that she needs in the way of hugs and kisses and things. ergo I’m having a hard time feeling it and then exhibiting it.
FUCK! Why can’t she just stop talking to him?
That appears to be the obvious simple answer, but I won’t ask her to do that. If he’s her friend, that’s fine. She doesn’t ask me to turn away from my friends and I won’t do that to her. We both need friends to stay healthy and happy , which makes it possible for us to stay connected and love each other.
So I instead have to find a way to de-sensitize myself to things like her texting with Hobie.
That’s what I have been doing, but a couple nights ago when she got a message during an intimate moment, I realize that technology (not becky and not her friend nor their relationship), but technology has created a situation where there are truly no barriers.
We can reach out and touch someone anytime, any day, any where.
My wife and I both use our cell phones for alarm clocks. The damned devices are with us almost all day long every day. I get calls late at night, typically for work, from my business partner and friend Joe Klein who is a few time zones away, sometimes from other friends or family, sometimes business meetings setup at late hours with other internet types who tend to burn the midnight oil. This issue is one that has been felt by my wife far more than it has been in reverse.
She’s learned to cope with it better than I have in part because I was talking to people about business and she HATES talking with me about my business. Which drives me to talk with others about it even more. But also, when I talk with people about business it is never someone that my wife has met and seen me flirting with in a very physical way. That’s because I don’t flirt with people in a very physical way mostly, no opportunity no problem has been my married moto I guess you could say.
She has texted a little bit with some of her friends and coworkers over the years, but it was almost never another guy, until recently.
So I’m learning to cope, but the negative emotional stimulus is still there and in the early days it rapidly conditioned me to feel negative emotions not only when he sent her messages but when her phone twirped at all. She turned her phone to buzz for a couple days, which gave me a audible break from all the texting going on. That did help, kind of like removing a person with cat allergies from a house full of cats.
Now when her phone buzzes or twirps, I get that sinking gut wrenching, my wife is leaving me feeling in my belly any more. . . . Well, except when the message comes from Hobie. Then I do still feel something negative, especially when she is spending time with me, especially when that time is later in the evening and we are um . . bonding.
I feel like we need a cell free zone in the bedroom or maybe in the bedroom after a certain time at night, even if it is just temporary until my Hobie allergies have a chance to completely subside.
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