Vices

There is a group of Native Alaskans that believe that catching a fish by rod and reel is bad for the soul. It is considered torturing your food and eating tortured food is like ingesting negative energy. It all makes perfect sense.  Others would say you are what you eat. The concept is the same. What you ingest has a significant impact on your health and wellbeing. I am approaching 30 at the speed of light and am starting to realize that I am not in as good of shape and health as I should be. This past winter I hiked the Grand Canyon, down to the bottom and back out, with my 73 year old Grandfather and my 69 year old Grandmother. The expectations for my quality of life as I progress in years is incredibly high, I have super genes that I have to live up to. This was part of my motivation for giving up booze and coffee, a quest for a healthy lifestyle.

I passed my 90 days of sobriety a couple/few weeks ago. Weekend before last I decided that I wanted to give alcohol and coffee a try again. In the past two weeks I have drank about 5 times.  Every time after I get a buzz I remember why I gave up alcohol, I don’t like feeling out of control. When I drink, even if it is just 2 drinks and a slight buzz I feel slightly out of control. So I am deciding once again to give up booze. This is after a beer and a glass and a half of red wine. No more booze for me. This time it is for the long haul. I am not putting a time limit. I am just saying I am done. I wanted to know how booze would taste. I think I like juice and tea better now.

Over the past couple of weeks I have had coffee as well. Both decaf and regular. My first cup back was a French vanilla blend. Today I had two cups; the morning cup was again the French vanilla blend. The second was half a cup of a strong pot of a French press. I bought a bag of decaf and drink that occasionally, more than the regular. It all kind of hurts my stomach and it is not quite the wonder drink I used to think it was. It just doesn’t taste the same as it used to. I probably won’t give up the coffee out right, but maybe stick to the decaf when I have a craving.

Here comes the kicker. I am giving up eating land animals. For the past two weeks the most meat I have had was the bruschetta I had on top of my pizza. That is not including the cold water fish I had for dinner last week. I feel so much better. So only water based animals for me: fish and shellfish. No more chicken, beef, pork, goat or other animal raised with hormones and vaccines. Maybe I will keep the option to eat game meat? That might seem a bit obscure though.

I don’t trust people who don’t have visible vices, at least one. So I can’t consciously cut out every single vice I have, luxury and decadence is a matter of quality of life. So I am going to cut out the things that I don’t think are enhancing my life but not cutting out every single vice I have. I will allow myself the option to drink coffee when I want it, when I have the desire and the craving. I will retain my vice for clothes and sweets but knock out booze and most meat (not that meat is a vice, it is more a luxury).

What about....

No matter where in the world you live, life takes on a certain daily routine. For some that can be a comfort, for others it can be oppressive. When I leave the routine I start to miss it. When I have been in the routine too long I hate it. My routine has become pretty set. Yoga twice a week, runs 2 – 3 times a week, very long bike ride on Saturday divided by an hour of horseback riding in between. Work takes up the lot of my day. Cooking, cleaning, hanging out with friends and cleaning their kitchens takes up the rest. For the most part my life has become predictable. This is what I loved and hated about the village, it was predictably unpredictable. Not knowing what each day was going to be like was exciting and strenuous at the same time. This level of unpredictability is what attracts adrenaline junkies to high adventure sports, I am not calling village life a high adventure sport but somewhere between that and everyday living. As I have come to learn, Lusaka is much more predictable than I could ever imagine and the unpredictable stuff is just inconvenient, not exciting. So as you might be gathering from this long diatribe, I have been a bit bored as of late and uninspired to write. That was until our trip to South Luangwa. I feel rejuvenated now. It was a wonderful adventure and has made me happy to be back in my routine and my daily ponderings. Many subjects have been mentioned and forgotten about; I just wanted to give an update.

Grad School

Courtesy: http://www.newenglandmagazine.com/university-of-maine/ 

Several people (friends and family) have asked me about my plans for grad school; I kind of just stopped mentioning it. There were two schools I applied to, UMaine and UWashington. I got into both. I got no money from either. I resided to the fact that I would not go to grad school without the school offering money. UMaine has allowed me to defer my acceptance for a year, UWashington has not. An amazing professor at the University of Maine has taken on the task of finding funding for me so that I may be a grad student in his lab, he is going to nominate me for a first year student grant and is looking for other projects. He was even kind enough to say that finding money for me was his top priority, I am assuming this is not entirely true (he is a busy man) but so incredibly nice. UWashington has advised me to find my own source of funding as the Marine Resource Policy program is a professional degree and grants are not given to professional students. UMaine encourages students to work on a dual masters for marine resource policy coupled with marine biology, I am thinking of doing aquaculture instead of marine biology making me the first student with that combination (according to one of the grad students I emailed). UWashington found a dual masters unnecessary. I find the dual masters pertinent to combine policy and science. As you can probably guess by now UMaine has become my first choice. UWashington came in a distance last, besides being in a great city close to friends and family the university has nothing to offer me, which is unfortunate because it would have been so wonderful to be so close to friends and family again. It now looks like I will be starting school in September of 2012, which means I will need to find a way to make some money between October 2011 and Sept 2012, if you know anyone that is hiring please let me know…I can do anything, or learn anything.

Not drinking…Coffee or Booze

May 27th was the beginning of my 90 day challenge. I am 42 days in and still going strong. I love it actually. I wake up clear headed every day, except for days I forget to drink enough water and have a slight hangover, dehydrated feeling. My head is clear because I don’t need caffeine to reeve up my engines or overcome my two beer hangover. I miss the taste of coffee. Sometimes I really want a cup of coffee when I am struggling through the late morning or after lunch coma. A cold beer would have tasted so good with the pizza I had for dinner last night. But the feeling of being “clean” is so much better than temporary satisfaction. Having self-imposed rules is great, I don’t have to ponder if I really want a beer or not and usually giving in to the general consensus of the group to go ahead and have one. The answer is just straight no. From the to the end of a day, an evening, a party, a work day whatever it is, the answer is no thank you, tea, water, juice, coke? Turning down liquid lubricant does make a night of dancing hard on the knees however. When I was drinking the booze dulled the pain in my knees while I was cutting a rug on the dance floor and 2 am would sneak up on me weekend after weekend. Now I am luck to make it to midnight, if I go out at all, and if I do the rumba room is not the first place you will find me but more likely in the geriatric wing outside sipping tonic water talking to some random person about something unimportant.

Getting Fit

This is my friend Amy Sanford (yogi, runner and woman extraordinaire), I stole this from her facebook page, I hope she forgives me. I think this is such a beautiful picture and it gives me inspiration to keep at yoga no matter how inflexible I am!

One of the big reasons to give up coffee and booze was to lose weight. I am not sure that has actually worked. Yu Jin’s pancakes, Ruben’s pie, and Great-grandma’s cinnamon rolls might be playing a factor in that lack of weight loss but I don’t want to point fingers. I don’t work out as much as I used to in the village and well I simply just eat too large of portions. In an attempt at self-control I will have to focus on cutting back and cutting out sugar. The bad thing about drinking tea instead of coffee is the urge to put in a smidge of sugar into my tea which I never would of considered doing to coffee. I am really tempted to try decaf but I am not so sure how it will go over. Supposedly decaf isn’t entirely decaf and I don’t know if it will leave me feeling as dehydrated as regular coffee but without the pep in my step. In the mean time I still do yoga on Mondays and Fridays usually; run on Tuesdays, Thursdays and now Sundays; with a quick workout on Wednesday or just a day of rest. This schedule is not set into as I went to yoga tonight since we had a holiday on Monday and I was busy on safari.

Learning to ride

Believe it or not I get really scared to jump right into something that I thin could be potentially dangerous, like riding a horse. I like to ease into the activity and slowly learn every detail. As my confidence grows in the new activity so does my fearlessness. This is proving to be my methodology of learning to ride horses. I am afraid to fall of the horse while riding, get kicked by the horse when milling about, or something else I haven’t even yet imagined. I am starting to get a little more comfortable on my new friend Jill, but when we start trotting my legs start shaking and they start to hurt almost instantly. Just when you start to think your legs are strong enough you find a weakness. Building up these muscles will be the most challenging part to learning to ride. I am getting more comfortable sitting on top of the horse in a precarious saddle; I am just having a hard time keeping up with the rhythm of the horse because my legs get tired so quickly. I have another lesson this Saturday, hopefully it goes w

Quittin' Coffee

Courtesy: http://3-b-s.eu/hot%20coffee%20downloads.html

It’s been two weeks since giving up coffee and booze. The coffee is the hardest to give up. I smell it brewing and want to drink the whole pot. By 10:00 there is a dull sensation in the middle of my forehead and behind my eyes. I didn’t give up caffeine all together. I drink tea now. Earl Grey in the morning and some Malawi tea at work. It’s not like a kick in the pants that coffee gives, especially the strong stuff I (used to) brew. I used to call it a cup of life, very appropriately named if you’re legitimately addicted. I was probably drinking a pot a day. I would have a cup in the morning at home. Get to work and make a French press of very strung stuff, drink most of that. By the third cup in the morning I could feel the acid rolling around in my stomach, eating the lining. Then there was my afternoon cup to get me through the nshima coma that hit after lunch. Now I think my body is going through withdrawals, if you can have withdrawals from coffee.


Two evenings in a row I ventured to the French Alliance for an art opening and then an Italian film about African Immigrants. Both nights at 21:00 I hit a wall, completely exhausted and no inner strength to get through it gracefully. I remember arriving at the second to last check point of my 200 mile race dead tired. I had been running dogs for about 36 hours on maybe 4 hours of sleep. All I wanted to do was crawl into a nice warm bed and sleep for 10 hours. I had nothing to be happy about I was cold, miserable, tired physically and mentally, I had to deal with the formalities of a race, feed my dogs then myself. For those less insane it might have been your idea of hell. Instead I started joking with the checkers who were making sure I had all the necessary equipment. I was laughing and chatting with my handlers and my mom. I ate a huge hamburger and passed out for about 2 hours. My mom and Uncle Wayneo told me about the Northern Lights they saw in pink and blue. I had never seen that before, only green ones. I was upset they didn’t wake me up. Wake me up? Was I mad? I had 8 more hours ahead of me and I wanted someone to wake me up to see pink and blue Northern Lights? But that was me on coffee. There is good reason to drink a lot of coffee in Alaska in the winter time.

Being off the coffee is getting easier, I think. I did just ride 30 km round trip to ride on a horse for less than an hour. The mood swings are stabilizing more. Hopefully the dull sensation deep in my skull, behind my eyes will go away...

My fantastic friends here in Lusaka are talking about starting a pool about when I am going to break and given to one of these vices. They should have one for the coffee and one for the booze. They are saying that they can’t let me know the dates because I could strike a deal with someone for part of the money and throw the bet. I asked if I make it to the end if I get the money. Nope. Incentive for me to finish. Seems as if this bet wants me to fail. Funny thing is I feel great today. I went out last night dancing, had a coke or two. Danced. Not quite with the same moves that I have with liquid courage, but decent enough to have a good time. I was home around midnight, crawled into bed with no worry of a terrible headache and no need to down a liter of water and aspirin. I woke up clear headed bright and early Sunday morning and got on with life in a productive manner. Skipped the coffee for my earl gray, cleaned up the house, started laundry, cooked all morning, cleaned up again, and wrote this afternoon and evening. The coffee isn’t eating my stomach lining and the booze isn’t drowning my brain cells or eating my liver. I am only two weeks into my new program but I could see this being a semi-permanent/ permanent change. That is why I chose 3 months instead of one, to give my body time to actually feel the benefits of new life choices.