East Grove Blues

I just watched the movie Where the wild things are and I was thoroughly impressed.

The sound track was really well done. The acting was fantastic and the special effects were perfect. I don’t know how they did what they did but it was fantastic. It felt like I had walked into one of my own dreams.

It really makes you think about the different aspects of yourself and how you confront those or how you ignore them. It is a great way to illustrate the need of each person to sit back and see what they are doing and how they affect other people.

I think this is a great movie about childhood and what it means to really grow up. In such a short time you can really watch the kid mature as he sees the consequences of his actions.

I also think this is a great children’s movie. It has adventure, imagination and danger. More importantly it was smart, mind blowingly so. If you haven’t seen it already then I would recommend it. I wish they had more children’s movies at this level.

I had two separate tsunami dreams in the same night. One had me escaping from a prison camp with some Peace Corps friends after the wave hit and the other had me driving around on top of a hill waiting for the tsunami to hit. After it hit I helped clean up a bit and move people to higher ground.

Last night I was in a strange land and I was going to some special place. My friends and I get waylaid by demons. We are trapped and can not escape. One of the demons and I fall in love. She tells me how to escape and then helps us to escape.

I am in the pool I visit in Japan, but it is smaller. I am with many friends from high school and we are joking around. An old crush comes and starts acting weird around me. I ask her what is going on, but she won’t tell me. We go to my house in Huntley. There she tells me that she has broken up with her boy friend and confesses he love for me. I am very happy and we hug and talk. We go to her house and have a party. We play music, but with instruments that I don’t know how to play.

I either wake up in real life or that of the dream and then start dreaming again. I am at a party, but now I am in what I think is Africa. I am surrounded by peace corps volunteers. I visit some horse people. They are being controlled by lizard men. The general tells me of an attack on Madagascar that will lead to the take over of all of South Africa.

I had some interesting dreams last night:

I am in Huntley/unknown river bank. There is a problem with some Egyptian type characters changing their rituals from old to new.  The new ritual connects people with the earth and the king. The old ritual has the king dominating the people. The proponents of the old try to come back and take over. They do it through lies and trickery.  They try to heat up the world with bottles of salt water/algae in the ocean.

My second dream I wouldn’t comment on, but this has happened twice now so I thought it was worth remembering. In the dreams I kiss an old girl friend/or acquaintance then talk. They always have a boy friend and in the dream I am alright with just being friends, but they usually feel guilty for kissing me. It is never a passionate kiss, just a peck on the lips.

I can kind of make out the first dream, but the second one is beyond me. I have no idea what it might mean or implicate.

I have desided to stop trying any more diets for the moment. They are just not for me. I like food, real food, too much and to give anything up just seems silly to me now. It was a good experience, if anything to get me eating meat again, and so I can’t rail against it. In fact the paleo diet did exactly as promised in many ways. I felt stronger and fitter than ever before, I lost fat and my exercise program improved greatly. The down side was the cost of my mental stability. The diet made me moody and rather depressed. Not because of the food, but the lack of it. I couldn’t eat the things that I love to eat and I had to watch everything that I did eat to make sure it was ’safe’. That stressed me out more often than not and that can make a person more unhealthy than the food.

So here I am, back to square one. Hopefully a little wiser, but more likely not. I have to tack this on to all the other things I have tried and ended up discarding after obsessing about them. The list now stands at: Politics, religion (multiple times), exercise and diet (twice). I have to apologize to all the folks that I preached to about the evils of this and that. If it gets bad again someone has to tell me shut up!

I am blessed to have a family that has been their for me and has done just that several times. They always seem to say the right thing at the right time to shake me out of my stupor. I really do need people to help me come back to reality. Sometimes I start taking the world I create in my head and move it into the world that I am living in. That is not a good thing and leaves me and others hurt. I think I have said it before, but I get lost in my head.

This time I need to be weary of the internet. I tried finding solutions to my problems and ended wandering down a rabbit hole. The hole always had a solution, but it was far away and you kept having to give things up to get there. I feel like I have come out of the maze of roses just in time to head home and begin new things.

There are some positive changes that have occurred because of my little journey. I am no longer exercising like a crazy man for three or four hours a day. I am taking time off and relaxing more. I am eating more meat. When I am eating a balanced meal I don’t feel hungry afterwards. During my trek into vegetarian/vegan land I was always hungry, and paleo world caused the same thing. Now I am eating and when I am done I am full and happy. This also means that I probably eat a bit less and that is ok as well. (That might be wishful thinking though)

The point of this rambling is two fold. Don’t trust any diet with a name and if I am acting stupid I need people to tell me I am stupid.

I have been using this website as a sounding board for all that goes on in my head, what I believe at the moment, and a way to express myself without having to send gobs of e-mails to everyone. If you want to read it, you know where to find it. I like that approach to things because it doesn’t bog down people with e-mails they feel that they should read or feel guilty for not reading.

I find it amusing that I say that I hate it when I rant, and yet I feel like that is all I have done. Talking about one subject or another, it all comes back to my wholly uneducated opinion. I have felt rather foolish the last few days really. Mostly because I like to make broad statements about my intentions that I am completely incapable of doing. I know my limits, but I can also be blinded by idea’s.

Honestly I think I have spent too much time bottled up with my own thoughts and those of the internet that I have lost sight on something as simple as my own happiness. The internet can be amazing, but you can find anything to support an idea that you have. That can be gratifying for yourself, but it might not be the best thing for you to do. I have spent to much time worried about health and food that I ended up most likely making myself unhealthy. Much like last year when I spent so much time trying to run more that I made it impossible to run at all by hurting myself.

To keep this from becoming a rambling on all the things that I have done poorly I will try to condense it to one sentence. “I have spent too much time doing and not enough time just being.” Time to myself the last few weekends has really shown me that I need some time for more reflection to keep myself from going down the crazy slippery path that I was heading down. As always though, I’ll just have to see what will happen.

It is around sixty degrees today and sunny. It feels like spring and that is happiness. It has been a rather long and cold winter so far and any hint at spring makes me feel better. It could still snow in march, or even as late as april, but god willing it won’t. It is supposed to be warm for the rest of the week. The best part is that tomorrow I only have one class and the rest of the day I can spend walking around my middle school. I plan to hike up a mountain and enjoy the fantastic weather.

I hope spring brings with it better feelings. It has been a dark winter with a lot of dark thoughts. I have been on an emotional streak since november and I am ready for a level playing field. Feeling better is just a hope though, but sometimes that is all a person needs to get better. There is some truth to positive thinking and the body can do some pretty amazing things. I will wait and see as patiently as I can, and continue to hope for some better days and happier feelings.

I lost my appetite for a couple of days. That is a strange thing for me. I am used to being hungry, in fact, it feels odd when I am not. I thought about putting more food in my belly, but there was no desire, so I resisted the thought. My brain kept telling me it was time to eat more, but my body just kept saying no. I regained my appetite last night and today it has been going strong again. I almost wonder if I haven’t been sick or something. I don’t feel sick in any way and haven’t had a cold in over in a year.  My body likes to do strange things at times though. I feel like a spectator just waiting to see what will happen next.

So I keep doing research on the internet. It is so weird. I will read one report and then read a different one that says the exact opposite thing. For example one will say eat tofu and then another will cast it as the devil and must be avoided. I really do think there is something for everyone. The most important thing I have learned is to just experiment and see what works and what does not. The other day I tried some fatty pork and that was a huge mistake. It was badness for several hours. On the hand lean pork heart is fine. I wish I could get my hands on some grass fed beef from the farm and see how that works in my GI track. Hopefully I will find out soon enough.

In four weeks I will be getting on a plane and heading for home. Perhaps by then it will have stopped snowing in Iowa as well and spring will be following. I can’t wait to see the progression of flowers in the timber again. It is such a beautiful thing and the best part is that after/during the flowers there are mushrooms to eat. Glorious mushrooms! It is truly spring when I start thinking about a ‘mess a’ rooms’ in the skillet.

So monday night is typically movie night for me. Tonight’s showing was No Impact Man. It was a really well done and informal movie about a family trying to leave as little as possible for an entire year. You can read about it yourself and I would recommend the movie.

I have a lot of thoughts on it at the moment. I think the biggest thing for me is to shop as locally as you can, eat seasonally and responsibly.  Those are terribly broad statements and just saying them doesn’t change anything about anyone. They make a really good point in the movie though, if you can change yourself than perhaps others will follow your example. Just be sure that your being a good example. Which I am not seemingly more times than not. I am learning that slowly at the moment. I get on my rants, but who is to say that I am right. I think I am, but I am often not and as frustrating as that is for me, it must be even more so for my friends and family. Who wants to listen to some kid talk about health and make them feel horrible about themselves. It’s better just to do and let others make up their own minds. I know I learned that in the Peace Corps, but here I am relearning it again. I am not sure why I don’t learn these lessons better, or why I have to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. One of these days I will get it right.

I think in the end of the movie they really learned to balance their lives between modernity and green living. I honestly believe that to move forward as people we need to find that balance like they did. If we can then there is hope yet and I choose to believe in that hope.

The food looked so good. I miss cheese and I would love a loaf of bread right now. I’ve been having mixed results on my current experiment. Some days I feel really good and some days I feel awful. Like most people I want results right away, but I know it can takes months for real change to occur. I have to remember to be patient. The hardest thing for me right now is the quality of food that I can get. Food in Japan is amazing, and while I am fairly sure it is grown close by, I am not sure what they put on it. I know where the fish is coming from, but I don’t know where any other meat is, or what they are feeding it. That is frustrating. I could be switching my diet around to eat better, only to find out that I am eating worse things because of what they put in/on it. They also wrap everything in plastic. I hate plastics, it’s such a huge waste. What ever happened to clothe bags?

I am looking forward to getting home and being able to grow my own food and to talk to the other farmers about how they raise their crops/animals. I am just looking forward to coming home.

I will end on something I rarely will ever mention. Wisdom from the TV. Yes I said the TV.  A long time ago when I spent hours in front of the idiot box I saw an episode of King of the Hill where Hank, the main character, had some trouble with passing his food. He went to the doctor and they tried all sorts of different diets and medications and nothing worked. Eventually he got fed up and went back to his normal eating habits and everything went back to normal. He didn’t have any more problems. I feel like Hank at the moment. I keep trying different things to make myself better, but perhaps I am just causing more problems.

I’ll just have to see how it goes.

Here is a great run down of the Coup d’etat in Niger. Everyone is hoping for the best. I talked to my school teacher Sidiq. He is going back to school for a degree in sociology and is living in Niamey. He heard the gun shots but luckily no one he knew was hurt. They were all pretty scared for a while, but things settled down quickly. Ir’koy m’in halessi!

I was staring out of my window when three large crows attacked a hawk. The hawk flew away out of site. One crow returned and then so did the hawk. It flew around in my field of vision for several seconds then disappeared off to the right. For the next minute the hawk, now alone, flew in and out of my field of view.