Britt's Blog

You may think from the title that I’m going to talk about puzzles or brain-teasers, but good old-fashioned sweaty, physical exercise is actually good for your brain. A Newsweek article about exercise, the brain, and psychology details exercise benefits that go beyond weight loss and muscle tone. The endorphin rush that makes you feel good right away is only the beginning. In the long term, exercise relieves stress and anxiety and improves sleep and self-esteem—not just because of effects on your muscles and fat cells, but because exercise actually changes your brain. Exercise can improve blood supply to the brain and cause your neurons to release neurotrophic factors that encourage new nerve cell growth and connections, aiding learning and actually mitigating stress and even depression.

Intriguing research also suggests that exercise’s antidepressant effects and mood improvement will not come to full fruition unless you can maintain a routine for a couple of months. This evidence supports something I’ve always advocated: starting off slow and easy, and making your first goal just establishing the exercise habit, instead of striving for gains in performance that will make your workouts more challenging (and daunting.)  Keep your workouts easy and unintimidating until you’re “in the groove,” and then you can (and should!) start setting more challenging goals.

In a blog that I follow, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin sagely comments:

A lot of people take up exercising when they want to lose weight, but I think that you’re more likely to stay motivated to exercise if you focus on the mental benefits instead of the physical benefits. Although it’s true that people who exercise regularly are better able to keep weight off, it’s very easy to get discouraged if you don’t lose weight easily — which never happens, right?

It’s better to focus on SANITY, not VANITY.

Great advice! Furthermore, exercise is not just for people who want to lose weight! The mental benefits are just one more reason that exercise should be part of everyone’s plan for healthy living.

Side note: I am using a Firefox extension called ScribeFire to make this post.  It puts an editor at the bottom of your Firefox window so you can surf around as you work on your posts without having to switch back and forth from your blog tab, plus it allows you to do cool stuff like drag and drop formatted text. I’m hoping it will encourage me to blog a little more than I have been.

This is one of those weird things, where you get exposed to an odd idea and then it keeps popping up.

Foldschool: Not just a kickass domain name; free templates for foldable cardboard furniture for your kids (via Lifehacker).

Artist Peggy Diggs collaborates with prisoners who design cardboard desks which are donated to a city-run homeless care facility (via Studio 360).

I have been neglecting the health/fitness side of life in order to keep up with the professional/putting-food-on-the-table side, and the pounds are starting to accumulate.

I’ve been having trouble motivating myself to get out and run, especially on the cold mornings when it seems much more attractive to just sleep in for another hour. In the past I’ve had some success at following a plan, with, like, a goal, and a schedule, and stuff.

Shortly after I started running, I did this popular Couch to 5K Running Plan. When you’re on a plan, skipping a workout isn’t just skipping a workout, it’s a setback! It means your whole schedule gets thrown off! For some reason, this gets my butt out of bed and out on the road, though I never would have thought such an abstract, transparently unenforcable motivational doohickey would work for me. Yet, lo and behold, after several weeks I discovered that I could actually run 5 kilometers at a stretch. (That’s three of your earth miles.) Later on I had some success getting out of a slump by setting a speed goal and working toward it by upping my speed on the treadmill according to a wacky schedule that my trainer at Ithaca College helped me develop.

I am still somewhat amazed that you can just make demands on your body, and it will magically get better at doing stuff.

So in the spirit of magical self improvement, I decided to start out at a level I know I can perform right now, even in my sorry state (running 1 mile, 4 days a week) and work my way up to something respectable. You’re not supposed to increase your distance more than 10% in any given week, so I decided on a slow-and-steady goal of increasing 5% per week, with an eye to doing a longer run on the weekends to push my maximum distance up faster. I’ve decided not to worry about pace, and just build some distance. To plan my program, I wanted to use a spreadsheet, but my Mac gets all squirrely and uncooperative when I use M$Excel, so I made a Google Spreadsheet to record my running goals and progress. And, hey, you can publish these Google doc things for everyone to see, so, why not? A little social reinforcement can be a good thing.

According to the spreadsheet, it should be an easily attainable goal to celebrate my birthday by running that 5K again. Here’s hoping!

I thought this was going to be a book about college. This impression was based on the title (Special Topics in Physics is, in fact, a course taught at many colleges, including in the Beloit College Department of Physics and Astronomy), the fact that the main character’s father is a professor, and because early on there is a tantalizing flash-forward to a Harvard dorm room.

However, no, it was not to be. This is a book about high school, specifically the main character’s senior year.

I have mixed feelings about high-school related entertainment. Buffy and Veronica Mars are to be tolerated due to their sheer brilliance. On the other hand, I have sworn off high-school settings in RPGs for good. I lived through it once; living through it again has not proven itself to be particularly rewarding.

And, generally, I have no strong urges to pick up a high school novel, be it Sweet Valley High or even something that supposedly doesn’t suck.

Special Topics didn’t exactly suck either. I’m not going to give it a ringing endorsement, but I found it quite absorbing, and it had a lot of gorgeous, chewy prose.

Blue van Meer is dragged across the country from one semester to the next by her peripatetic college-prof dad. Prof. Gareth van Meer is equal parts sneering, egotistical elitist and doting father. Unsurprisingly, Blue grows up pretty isolated and strange. She keeps a distance from the classrooms into which she is deposited, thinking of herself as an anthropologist, observing her supposed peers from a standpoint of safe objectivity.

But when her father decides to settles down to allow Blue to live out her senior year at a single exclusive prep-school, she is seduced by the clique of elite cool kids, known as the Bluebloods, and the mysterious Film Studies teacher, Hannah Schneider, who unites them.

And for a while the novel revs along nicely as a coming-of-age novel. Will Blue overcome the loss of her mother at an early age and the stifling influence of her overly intellectual father and finally learn how to love?

But then suddenly the novel veers off into the convoluted territory of the murder mystery. Admittedly, this was not unforeshadowed, and it would have been entirely tolerable, if we did not then spin out wildly on the oilslick of an improbable conspiracy theory.

The end of the novel finds us panting, clinging to the steering wheel, shakily gathering our senses, and making our wobbly way back onto the coming-of-age course as Blue finally Finds Her Own Place in the World.

I can’t totally pan Special Topics in Calamity Physics because if nothing else, it was a nice crunchy read, inspiring me to overly ambitious metaphors such as the above. I likes books what make me feel all intellechual. Also, I’m always inordinately proud of myself whenever I read something that isn’t SF. And the ending was, actually, somewhat satisfying and triumphant. So, approach with caution. As with many Special Topics courses, the subject matter is ill-defined, the syllabus unclear, and the ultimate education value questionable, but it’s a labor of love for the instructor… And now I’m mixing metaphors and should probably stop.