marche

I heard the greatest commercial where they presented data supporting a fitness routine called marche.  A consistent 30 minutes per day of marche had an amazing array of benefits.  Turns out marche is a fancy French word for walking.  Hey, they're on to something.

I've been wanting to catch up for a couple days now, with myself I mean.  And for me, that translates into one last blog post for February before March Madness hits.  It's not really madness, just spring break and planning for the upcoming conferences.  What I realized over time, using MapMyFitness, is that when I burn less than 6000 calories per month, I will gain weight.  Whether that is a result of my tendancy to overeat, I cannot say.  It's just a trend I've seen.

I tried to bike to work, and actually have done it three times now.  But then I had a shoe issue, which I am currently letting stop me in my plan.  Maybe I am getting lazy.  Maybe I don't plan well enough in advance.  Maybe I'm not exactly committed to doing it.  What might the barriers be?  Well, for starters I vomited the first time.  Don't know if it was the fumes or the train or the hard cycling after not being on the bike for awhile.  After that, I spaced out my morning/afternoon trains with a longer gap in between.  But then I wore my cycling shoes all day, walking around campus, and one of them broke.

I haven't been able to get myself to a bike shop to replace the shoes.  I haven't been walking the dogs or going for training runs.  But I have been doing some pretty fabulous marche.  I've heard that the difference between obese and not-obese is 100 calories per day.  But for me, that only gets me as far as overweight.  So I guess the difference between overweight and normal weight, for me, is 200 calories per day.  I just have to change my thinking.

Also, I've found my metabolism getting caught in a sugar addiction again.  I bought a dozen day-old bagels for goodness sakes.  I have bags and bars of chocolate on my desk.  I drink coffee until the evening.  I have not been keeping up with yoga.  But I have been doing a large amount of gardening.  Hauling the soil and buckets of rain water is still a decent total body workout.

I've been to a couple of amazing seminars recently.  Michael Bérubé totally blew my mind.  I'm still thinking about his ideas regarding reproductive rights; too important to be left to bioethicists. Gary Patterson told such stories about Michael Faraday, it took us back in time like Pitbull.  I had heard a lecture about Faraday at ASU, from Sir John Meurig Thomas.  This one was different, but complementary.  Today we're meeting to set a departmental dog policy.  I may already be a violator, since I've brought Edna and Mel to work on occasion.  Edna is quite vocal but hypoallergenic.  Mel is sweet and quiet, but sheds.  Two outlaws!

She wolf pack, we gotta go marche~!

Seduction

The chemistry of seduction is an elaborate molecular dance.  I was driving to school the other day thinking about how I was seduced by the whole idea of being a working, participating scientist.  The image came into my mind about being female, being seduced, being the object, being the target, reining in the sexuality, dominating the competition, overcoming skeptics, and always going back to Eve and that tree of knowledge.

Why does sister sound like sinister?  I went to a workshop in NoHo and there was no hate to be found there.  We exorcised it...gave it a break...broke the chains...freed our hearts...Rather than the typical battles, we just showed up and gave each other our support. What if all of life was like that?

According to about.com "abilities in subjects such as math are actually strongest when both halves of the brain work together." Therefore, engaging in dance (study of music), color, recognizing faces, expressing emotions, reading emotions, following one's intuition, and producing creative work is necessary to keep the brain of a person who regularly exercises logic, critical thinking, numbers, reasoning, and language healthy and connected.

Also, thinking about body language.  My friend is starting an acting class, the first topic of which was body language.  In a classroom, I bring a set of body language to the environment.  So far, I have had the desks in my classroom in clusters of 4, split in half by a diagonal, facing front, facing side.  We're getting to know each other, the students and I.  There is a "reading assignment" and "lecture topics" list posted now for each class meeting.  I really enjoyed the Rock with H.E.R. workshop because it gave me a bunch of confidence, and a set of body postures to match.

Also thinking about didgeridoo.  We attended a public lecture about sleep apnea given by USC Medical School.  The last seminar of a 4-seminar program was about how playing the didgeridoo could improve the quality of life for sufferers of sleep apnea.  The link to an article in the British Medical Journal is here.  I was driving in my car and heard Jamiroquai Synkronized and started jamming with Wallace Buchannan on the digderidoo.  Talk about rhythms and vibe.  I don't think we'll buy one, but maybe tapping into the Hu could work with or without the instrument.

Speaking of cycling news, in the course of biking to school twice I busted my shank.  So I guess that means it's time for new shoes.  But that's two days of not driving and two days of biking a moderate distance.  It was scary the first day and less scary the second day.  I don't know what I'll do this Tuesday because I fear at any moment my shoe will disconnect itself, leaving the bottom half clipped to the pedal and the top half flapping in the breeze.