The Faith of a Heretic

Jump me to the good part, where I can see veteran Archivists giving good advice!

Recently I have become concerned about my economic survival.

At age 24, and having finished grad school in the end of December, I took two months off before seriously starting a job search. In this time off I cleared my head from the intense schedule I had gamed in the two  years before. Not only had I taken a full time courseload (something I actually regret now, not due to the difficulty but because it meant less time to get practicum experience) but I also was involved in a number of internships, and it was time for a break. I also wanted to try to establish a revenue stream by other means, namely by starting a new business.

I applied to a few jobs here and there during that time, but mostly just relaxed and tried to reflect on my vocation to be. A bit over two months ago I began a focused search and began to apply to dozens of jobs, mostly informed by the immensely invaluable  I Need a Library Job. The result of the search thus far has been fruitless. Not only did I recently realize that the dozens of federal jobs I had been applying to were being rejected because I was not following an unrequested Federal Resume Format, but I also encountered a complete wall of silence from other private and academic listings I applied to. What came to mind after over a month of this perpetual failure was: I am obviously going up against hundreds of over-qualified applicants per job and I am probably doing something horribly wrong. Perhaps, just as I had made a major misstep in using the wrong resume format for Federal jobs, I was also failing in some other unknown capacity in my application process to other types of listings.

This quest takes a lot out of you and is extremely stressful. The worst part is writing the actual cover letters. If you write a good one, it takes at least a half hour, and many listings have redundant, proprietary application forms which take at least as long to fill out. I applied to all sorts of jobs: librarian positions, archivists, technicians, assistants, analysts, researchers, museum techs, museum curators, directors, writers, copy-editors etc etc while keeping in mind I would really prefer to work with special collections or history. Not hearing back from any of these people, I began to look into teaching English overseas. For those who might be interested, I recommend it: there is an insane abundance of jobs and you will have a job within a week. It’s still my backup plan if my business or library career doesn’t take off.

With my failure in mind, my first student loan payments coming due, seeing my savings dwindle, the threat of being kicked out of my house looming overhead – and in a state of desperation/despondency I decided to email the Society of American Archivists “Archives” listserv for guidance. What follows is that correspondence.

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People often ask me how I lost and continue to lose weight so effectively. I decided to compile my methods into a guide I am developing slowly but consistently – it’s also intended as a general resource for obese people who want to lose weight and have been unable to in the past.

In a prior post on this blog I linked an early version of this work, but it’s come a long way since then. While the first version was written mainly on a whim after I had a sudden burst of inspiration while taking a shower, and was little over ten pages, the new guide is approaching 40 pages, as I approach nearly 160 lbs lost in less than a year.

You should read it if:

• You are curious how I am losing weight
• You are obese yourself, feel hopeless and want to lose weight

If you do read it and are one of those who is looking to lose weight, please provide feedback. I have privately distributed to a few individuals on forums I am part of, they followed my plan and all lost weight significantly, but I am still eager for wider feedback. I hope to continue to develop it to well over 100 pages, as fate allows.

Here is the download link:

http://www.krauselabs.net/dump/bookwip.pdf

Bill Maher does a bit called “Dispatches from the Bubble” in which he criticizes the republicans for fostering an insulated, delusional mental culture based around willful ignorance and groupthink. I recently went on a vacation and ran into my own bubble of sorts, amongst those who are oblivious to basic concepts of health and nutrition and are unaware of the simple fact that they are killing themselves.

I thought I would write on my experiences in the form of perceived major missteps in nutrition and the development of well being. I come from a somewhat privileged perspective: I became unhealthy and obese due to a metabolic sensitivity to carbohydrate and not gluttony, ignorance to science or basic tenets of health. When I discovered I was sensitive to carbohydrate I changed my diet (For good) and have been rapidly losing weight since. The mistakes I have encountered in my travels and lodging with family are not of this sort, that is to say: they are not medical in a clinical sense. Rather these mistakes represent a lack of wisdom, reason and knowledge regarding the most basic principles of health.

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Awhile ago I made a post about the virtues of religious friends and my experience with mainstream atheists. Today I have an urge to talk about the role that religion plays, and must play, in the social order. What is true is that truth and self-awareness are not factors here. Clearly the Christians do not live in an authentic way; they embellish and make invention upon aspects of their law book which are in agreement with right reason and ignore other commandments which are clearly horrific artifacts from a racist, warmongering and paranoid Bronze Age tribe. No Christian would in his right mind sell his daughter into sexual slavery to settle a debt, or condone the smashing of babies against rocks, the summary execution of a man who stayed in the company of an ovulating woman, or the genocide of a sovereign people, to name a few crimes of thousands condoned in the textual sources. So let us make no pretensions about the fact that the religious, and by religious I refer primarily to those who practice Abrahamic religion, are aware of any moral truths by their own practice. If a religious man is truly virtuous it is by accident or by reason, not an actualization of his creed.

That being said religion is not merely an interpretation of the textual sources; it is not a self-contained philosophy. Religion is accompanied by a world of tradition, custom and ritual which instructs a stable social bedrock. The church in bygone times served as the nucleus of wholesome, structured, ordered social activity of a non-religious but nevertheless essential sort. Holidays instruct days in which we are led to pause and consider certain virtues, history and past events. The world of ritual and tradition rightfully sacralizes the relationship between man and the cosmos, and creates a sort of narrative that the society at large can share in. These accompaniments of religion are essential to a healthy, flourishing society, a society without such a bedrock is aimless, depraved and lost.

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I recently finished writing a guide for the fat ass (which I define as an individual above 300 lbs) focused on weight loss and health transformation through nutrition and exercise. It summarizes lessons learned, my philosophy of health and a discussion of mainstream nutrition in the United States.

The pdf is available here.

NOTE: I am sure I will revise this in a year’s time, as I continue to slim down and lose even more weight (up to 135 lbs at this time) – but it just represents what I personally have discovered thus far.

Related Scientific Resources

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Body. Soul. Mind.

Sensations: the body.

Desires: the soul.

Reasoning: the mind.

To experience sensations: even grazing beasts do that. To let your desires control you: even wild animals do that – and rutting humans, and tyrants (from Phalaris to Nero…).

To make your mind your guide to what seems best: even people who deny the gods do that. Even people who betray their country. Even people who do [that] behind closed doors.

If all the rest is common coin, then what is unique to the good man?

To welcome with affection what is sent by fate. Not to stain or disturb the spirit within him with a mess of false beliefs. Instead, to preserve it faithfully, by calmly obeying God – saying nothing untrue, doing nothing unjust. And if others don’t acknowledge it – this life lived with simplicity, humility, cheerfulness – he doesn’t resent them for it, and isn’t deterred from following the road where it leads: to the end of life. An end to be approached in purity, in serenity, in acceptance, in peaceful unity with what must be.

- from Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. 3.16, Hays trans.

…Yet while technology has greatly enhanced group and collaborative work – the bare essential people skills, the art of oral communication should not be overlooked. Librarians are educators. We must be capable of painting a portrait of the complex systems we curate,  to prepare professional presentations, to bring new personnel onto a project, to assertively participate in a group environment and be  productive and faithful teammates. This is true now more than ever, as group collaboration has shifted from mere good practice to a professional necessity given the breadth of our services and allied professions. How to communicate well orally is another matter.

I fall back upon old forms while considering the new. Many undergraduate liberal arts degrees require a study in communications. This style of instruction, to which I have been a part of, is often business centered. Issues center on group theory, dynamics, group manipulation, and coherent/effective transfer of information, contrasting against the various factors of noise, distance, time and medium. All well and good, but such instruction is fixated on professional rather than holistic ends; the goal is to do one’s professional job in a uniform and often stifling manner which is as expected in western capitalist culture. Personally I find it important to consider such studies as to ground oneself, but to look further back for a normative foundation in communication. While the modern study of communications may often reveal insights into human communication (a particular thing I learned to become wary of from my communication classes is “groupthink”) it is prone to missing the heart of it. The greatest communicators were not businessmen but poets, warriors and philosophers. Aristotle immediately comes to mind as a model of a proper and well versed rhetorician or communicator. In his treatise On Rhetoric Aristotle argues that good rhetoric is based upon three persuasive appeals or “Pillars”:

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As detailed in my previous posts (“The New Pugilist”) several months ago I began a regiment of good nutrition and exercise in order to better master my body. In defiance of this initiative my weight remained static. After poking around on some weight lifting and combat sport forums I started reading up on low-carb and ketogenic diets. In ketogenic diet the customary body energy, glycogen which is converted from carbs, is shifted to ketone bodies, which convert from fat. It is a nutritional plan which calls for adequate protein, high fat and typically less than 50 grams of carbs a day.

I read amazing success stories and weight lifters and athletes who advocated for very low carb nutritional plans. I found myself in a curious situation: while I was boxing and eating right ,I was still quite fat. With nothing to lose, and seemingly no progress being made with my “textbook” nutritional plan, I switched to a ketogenic diet. While ketogenic diet is used in medicine to alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy – it also is purported to be effective for weight loss in individuals which are particularly sensitive to carbohydrates, although there is apparently some controversy surrounding the benefits and potential side effects.

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Duke Nukem Forever is great if you want to experience what it feels like to be a gerbil on a treadmill, or a rat running a maze. It treats the player as a complete incompetent and has the the weakest gun play I have encountered in an FPS; it reminds me of the sort of action you’d expect from a Russian bargain bin game. The much lauded interactivity consists of a series of “quick time events” which add nothing to gameplay and clearly occupied the developer’s attention away from actually important tasks. You will have to manually pull up dozens, if not hundreds, of jammed doors. This is done by walking up to said door, pressing your use use key and then rapidly tapping space bar. While you can do pointless things like piss in a urinal – you cannot control the motion of the golden stream. This I refer to as the allegory of the golden stream. Like all things in Duke Nukem Forever, it creates the illusion of worthiness, when in fact it is merely a gimmick intended to distract us from gaping failures elsewhere.

Polish is non-existent. Some characters have no animations and just inhabit the game world like statues. The game developers clearly attempted to mask the laughable graphics engine with some shaders and post-processing effects which make the entire world look like its covered in a thick layer of bubble wrap. A clearly defined path is made for the player, and zero possibility presents itself to actually play something. Rather, the game is a series of scripted events designed to deliver stale punchlines. Much like a Seltzer and Friedberg  flick (and to a lesser degree Family Guy), Duke’s mere invocation of pop culture memory is intended to make us laugh. All it does is depress.

The artificial intelligence is reminiscent of pre-Half-Life days. Enemies clunkily run or walk up to you then shoot their weapons in  specific, consistent groupings much like in Doom. And as to the Duke feel? Well this feels like a pastiche, and a vulgar one at that. While the obsessive Duke worship you experience in the game was perhaps amusing at first, it quickly loses its flare, and persists throughout most of the game. Indeed, as I was playing I did not really reminisce or feel nostalgia for the Duke of yore; instead the game reminded me of Doom 3. A dark corridor shooter where enemies jump out in a claustrophobic environment. Yet Duke Nukem Forever is arguably more unbearable than Doom 3 (and that isn’t a compliment to the underwhelming Doom 3) – with its incredibly simple and insulting “gameplay” in which required interactions are highlighted with a radiant yellow glow. Duke Nukem Forever is one part corridor shooter, one part jumping puzzle and three parts Hollywood studio style marketing hype.

Don’t buy this and don’t play it.

Well, my website was recently exploited and hacked. I fixed it, but as part of the changes I made to locate and eliminate the exploit I switched to a new WordPress theme called 2010. Well, I know it’s a default theme, but it’s starting to grow on me. I’m considering switching to this theme permanently.

This is mainly a notice to let my paltry group of visitors know that I have not died (yet) and that the site is functioning properly. Any thoughts on the new design would be appreciated.

I also owe this slab new words. Soon.