Caught Between Should and Am: Fixing My Writing Problem

/ Andrew Tatusko / 3 Comments
shoes beside word lux

Running and light

Ever since I finished my dissertation, almost 5 years ago, I have been caught in a weird head space where I haven’t figured out my identity as an academic, a professional, and even as a person. I’ve had a few starts on blogging that usually stops after a couple of months. I get distracted by something else and totally lose interest. Why?

At first I thought it had to do with marathon training. Doing this is so time consuming and tiring that I would usually post about starting the process and then do nothing until the result. The fiction that I convinced myself was true is that I can’t write and train at the same time. If I am going to perform at my job, maintain my relationships, and be mentally healthy, I can either run, or write. I have told myself this even though I knew it was total bullshit. Great writers all have parallel obsessive habits from drinking and smoking to running. Telling myself lies to avoid doing something is a deep-seated character flaw. I’ve learned much about how this mechanism works, but this time it had me caught. The real question is not why I stopped writing, but what I was avoiding.

It was last night when I was catching up on Supergirl that a little sisterly advice hit me that freshly out of the closet Alex Danvers gave her sister Kara (Supergirl):

Look… sometimes, you know, in our life, when one part is really confusing, we will pour way more attention than necessary into another.

I started running for very good reasons that still hold. It was to improve mental and physical health. It is still the single best tool I have in my toolkit to maintain mental and physical health and stability and I can’t ever see myself stopping. However, I have poured a lot into it. Challenges are really effective to have in front of you to stay motivated. But at what point do you become obsessed with it to the point that you are avoiding something else? I went from at most running one marathon a year, and last year that was enough. This year I am not only running two marathons, but running 2017 miles which is about 700 more than the previous year, and I want to train to get a Boston Qualifying time which would shave about 5% off of my finishing time this past May. Have I crossed the tipping point where running has gone from healthy activity to obsession I am using to avoid something? I might be there.

I have struggled with my identity as an academic and as a professional since finishing my dissertation in 2013. For a very long time, my religious identity as a person of faith was my central obsession academically, emotionally, and socially. At the time I gave that up, a story I have not yet fully told, running filled the void. I traded one preoccupation with another. But my life as an academic sat hollow. If faith is no longer what I want to be doing, what should I be doing?

I have this theory that confidence in what we do is not something we are born with, but something we learn over time. As we become more competent in something we become more confident in our abilities and that alone builds our desire and drive to do it more. So, if I could just find out what I should be doing and become more competent in it, then I would resolve my confusion.

Well, it didn’t work. The experiment failed because my fundamentals beliefs were wrong. I believed I needed to become competent in what I believed others wanted to read. I focused on what others might find helpful like focusing on life hacks and self-help that I think works. How about something in my professional field that others find interesting? What about lessons I have learned in life that others might find useful? After a few tries, I got bored and stopped. None of that was very fulfilling. That material is all out there written by people who are singularly passionate about it. I am not one of those people. The entire theory of becoming competent got derailed by the one thing that all of these ideas has in common: doing what I think I should do based on what I believe others want. It’s like all that advice from successful writers went right through my head – do what inspires you, not what you think will inspire others.

If I should’t do what I believe I should do, what is it that inspires me or consistently interests me? That’s the real question. My answer has been that no one is interested in any of the stuff that interests me, so who cares? Another lie. Keep running. Today I’d rather run on truth than the bullshit I tell myself. Walking the dog last night, after that little moment from a cheesy TV show that struck me, I found an answer. The question was how these things were related. And they absolutely are.

My academic interests have always been first, in how to teach the whole human subject based on an understanding that it is the relationship between teacher and student that is the most revolutionary and fundamental aspect of human learning and progress. The second is related to it. My dissertation focused on secularization and higher education which is tied to patterns of belief in American society, the policies that both respond to and shape those patterns, and how historians tell that story. Both of these are looking at the dynamic relationship between faith, belief, and knowledge in society and in the student.

My professional interests are about how we can help college and university teachers be better teachers. What habits, programs, and behaviors can we improve as teachers to help students learn more effectively? Right now this is about designing a program of teacher formation through critical reflection to find areas of improvement and to experiment with different online classroom behaviors to help students learn more effectively.

My personal interests have to do with the connection between physical and mental health and supporting pragmatic behaviors that help improve health with scientific evidence. I have many friends who have been in long term recovery from addiction who have thrown themselves into physical activity as an integral part of how they manage their sobriety. I know of runners and other athletes who have traded their obsession for drugs, sex, and body dysmorphia for clean living, even without the aid of prescription drugs.

How are these tied together? Anyone can look at these three areas and find things in common: human progress, the nature of belief, evidence-based living, etc. But those aren’t what hit me as interesting. Instead, it’s this idea:

I am fundamentally interested in how groups of people form relationships that support and cultivate healthy patterns of belief, knowing, and action, and in relationships and ideas that do exactly the opposite.

So… that’s what really interests me and the three ways I look at it. With that, it’s time to stop thinking about what I should write for an imagined group of others out there, and just do what I find interesting. Someone out there has to be interested in this stuff too, right?

Starting Marathon Training…Slowly

/ Andrew Tatusko / 1 Comment

I started running in July of 2015 just to lose weight and to give my mental health a needed boost. After I finished my first half marathon that December and signed up for my marathon for May of 2016, I started running just for the sake of running. Today I mostly run because it’s just what I do. Also, if I skip out on it too long my brain gets all squirrely, I get depressed, and get a mild case of the “fuck-its” which neither I nor anyone around me enjoys that much.

I am running the Pittsburgh Marathon again this May and I hope to get in the Marine Corps Marathon this fall. My training program starts on Sunday and now that I think I know what I am doing, I am taking a whole different approach.

Last year, going from couch to marathon in 9 months, my entire goal was to increase mileage as much as possible and at as fast a possible pace. I had no time for base building and was coming off of my third minor injury. For someone who had never run that distance, my training would give me only 12 weeks. That’s way too short a time and most run coaches might dissuade me from doing too much. But I learn from mistakes which means I need to make them. I did not get injured again, but every recovery period was sore, distances were difficult, and I got flu-like bugs twice. I focused far too much on carbs and my protein intake was abysmal. But I completed the marathon in under 4 hours anyway.

After that I decided to work on just building up mileage and pace. I rarely paid attention to heart rate except for when it was too high. My only goal was to get to running 50 miles a week comfortably. I met that goal and did so in good health. I also emphasized carbs less and focused more on meeting protein targets. The result has been a stronger, faster, healthier me. Now I’ve reached a point where I should be far more literal about a training program, work more on strength beyond doing pushups, and run each session with a different goal in mind.

polar_training_program

So what I am doing this time? I wear a Polar m400 (seen at the top) to record all of my workouts. I sync that data to a few other platforms (Strava, Runkeeper, and MapMyRun) for the community and because I am a nerd. The Polar ecosystem has blossomed with each update. Now, Polar will design a training program based on your race goal and over the time period you specify. It mixes up the distances, effort by heart rate, and works in a dozen or so strength and stretching exercises. A feature that I had never used before that I used today is called Zone Lock. By pressing the big “start” button, you can lock in the heart rate zone with which you want to pace yourself and it beeps when you go over or under. You can program it to use a pace lock instead if that’s what you’re after. This is all about becoming more efficient and consistent and little beeps and alarms help a great deal when you are getting used to a new rhythm and relationship between your brain, heart, and feet.

The hard part will be going slowly. I am so adapted to doing everything at a heart rate of 148-165 and at a pace less than 7:50/mile that all of the slower paces just feel weird. But I am also not adapted to push through sprints very well. I need both of those parts of my physiology to improve my time and health for the next marathon. Zone 2 for me, based on age and resting heart rate, is somewhere between 115 and 132 bpm. The hard thing to do will be to keep most of my running time at that heart rate regardless of pace. As you see in the picture at the top, that means running somewhere in the ballpark of 10 minute miles to start. Painfully slow. But I am trusting the science and evidence rather than my feelings. Today was my first shot at it, and I have to say it was enjoyable. Once I got used to the cadence of going slow, I was fine. And after about an hour I was really sweating it out and working hard. that partially because I was running on tired legs at the end of the week, but also because the myth I had that running more slowly was less work was false. It is not less work, it is different work. And different is exactly what my body needs.

So on we go to Pittsburgh. Slow, fast, and everything in between.

From Couch to Marathon

/ Andrew Tatusko / 3 Comments

Pittsburgh Marathon RouteWhen I started my running journey last year, there was absolutely no way that anyone could have convinced me that I was going to run a marathon within the next 10 months. I was barely able to put together 3 miles last May and that was with walking. But I kept running. On May 1 not only did I finish my first marathon, but I did it on a challenging course and comfortably under 4 hours. I did this with no athletic experience other than 25% of a wrestling season before I quit. Nor was I ever a runner before July of 2015. I gave it a shot back in 1997 for a maybe three runs and stopped. I did the same pattern in April of last year. But something clicked in July and I stuck with it. Now I am in it for the long haul.

So what did I learn while training for a race I did not think I had any business running just a few months ago? What did I do right and what mistakes did I make? I look at life like a big science experiment. One of the most difficult problems in educational research is that there are so many variables that condition what happens in the teaching and learning process. Gender, socio-economic background, race, family systems, mental illness, personality, and many others are all somewhere in the background affecting things we think are simple to measure. Running is no different. There are dozens of general guidelines, but until you get out there, make some mistakes, identify the causes of problems spots, and then change the variables, you will never make progress. So you want to run your first marathon this year? Here are a few things you might want to think about.

Check Your Shoes When I started, I ran in old-ass shoes because that’s what I had and they were decent enough. When I started to realize I would be doing this as a weekly habit, I switched up to shiny new pair of Asics Gel Cumulus. I thought I had arrived. Until the blisters and shin pain settled in. It took me a few months to accept that I might have the wrong shoes on my feet. Just because a shoe gets rave reviews and costs in excess of 120 bucks does not mean it’s a good shoe for you. One afternoon I stopped in my local running store to get fitted. He watched my gait and told me right off that the shoe I was wearing was not right for my overpronating ways. He put me in a different shoe and I have been golden ever since. It’s not the brand or the prettiness of the shoe, it’s the kind of shoe that fits not just my feet, but my natural cadence. Now I alternate between Asics GT-2000 and Asics Gel Kayano. So get fitted, or get injured.

Find Your Own Groove No matter how many articles, videos, and conversations you consume about proper form, the best roller to use on your sore legs, stretching, strength exercises, mileage, interval training, hills, and nutrition, you have to go out and try on everything until you find what works for you. I tried as much as I could and only after finishing that grandaddy race, do I think I know what works for me. Give yourself freedom and time to make mistakes, but always get back up and run it out as soon as you can. That perseverance is what got me to the finish line.

Form Matters When I did not pay attention to form, I got tibialis anterior tendinosis (like shin splints, but so so much worse), back pain, ITB syndrome, and runner’s knee. Once I shortened my stride by increasing cadence, and paid close attention to my posture while running, all of those problems went away. But they were replaced by others. My hips got really tight and then my back stated to spasm. Everything is related. If you have a sore spot in one place, your body will adapt to it by using other muscle groups and will do so often in ways that those other muscle groups aren’t used to functioning leading to other injuries. If you feel pain, stop, figure out what you’re doing wrong, solve that issue, and then get back out there. Ignoring it will eventually put you on the couch for a few weeks and that will totally mess you up. The solution for me was stretching and using a good foam roller after my runs. But I can do better. If I add more cross training to strengthen my hips and core, I will do myself a world of service. Even though I was doing a lot of pushups every week, I can still do a bit more.

Build Mileage and Be Patient As a new runner, I wanted to get fast and far almost as a way to “get caught up” for lost time. That, more than anything, is probably why I kept hurting myself. Starting to run at age 41 means my body was clueless as to the stresses I was about to put it through. So it rebelled. At mile 22 as I was starting down the hill from East Liberty to the Central Business District of Pittsburgh, I started to cramp hard. It was awful. My quads and hamstrings spasmed and the pain was almost unbearable. Walking and stopping only made it worse. The good news is that I ran through it and crossed the finish line running. That was the goal. The bad news is that it happened. I was hydrated, had eaten three Clif Shot gels with water, and had had a solid taper and carb loading the week before. I cramped because I did not run enough during my training. Because of flu (twice), that back pain, and tight hips, I had to take some 20 days off from the training plan. This meant I had to do a little catch up which every trainer will tell you is a bad idea. However, had I not pushed through some longer runs shortly before the race, I would not have made it. The lesson is that I need to have a more solid foundation of running consistently and that takes time. The general wisdom is to increase no more than about 10-15% each week and for the longest run of the week to be no more than 35% of the total. I did not follow that rule, and I cramped up! This takes time and patience. It means that by the time you hit your first 20 miler during a training sequence, you should have worked yourself up to and adapted to a 50-60 mile week. That’s a lot of miles and a lot of time. A 12 week plan was not enough for my first marathon. I needed at least 16. More ideal would have been an 18 week plan. Beyond that, I am out of range for most of the published plans like Higdon’s or Galloway’s.

Watch Your Protein and Carb Intake I was a good boy with my carb to fat ratio, got my vegetables, and was mostly plant powered for my entire training sequence. I never bonked, rarely cramped, and had the longest stretch of injury-free health in my fledgling life as a runner. And for energy drinks while on the run, Tailwind is the shit. But I also overtrained, ran through a lot of soreness and fatigue, and got sick right after my 20 mile long run. OK…fatigue, soreness and sickness may have come anyway, but was there something I could have done better to help prevent all of those things? Yes! I was good with my vitamins, but missed the part where as my mileage increased, by immunity system would get compromised. That’s when I started taking an extra vitamin C  supplement which I will keep doing. The other part is that because I did not have a gradual enough mileage increase and my training was anything but consistent, even though I was technically under-trained, I put too much stress on my body all at once when I hit the peak weeks and my body basically shut down in viral hell for 12 weeks. Maybe I would have gotten sick anyway, but maybe it would not have been as awful as it was. Then I looked at recommended protein intake and what I was actually getting. Many articles recommend 0.6 to 0.9 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight. I was only getting about 55 a day and should have been getting closer to 100. My muscles were getting damaged with every run and I was not feeding them what they needed to heal other than loads of rice. So I started protein supplements because I still don’t want to go back to pounds of meat, but I can only take so many beans, lentils, and nuts each day. We’ll see how it pays off in the future, but it can’t hurt.

Even after all of the pain that the last 5 miles of the Pittsburgh Marathon put me through and even after exhaustion as I have ever known, I am driven to get better and follow some of these rules to be a more efficient and less injury prone runner. I want to cross a marathon finish line in good health some day. What it means is better planning for the long haul. Rather than wait for another training sequence to start, why not plan it now while I am still basically resting myself in a post-marathon “holy shit I actually did that” frame of mind. There’s a race in Philadelphia in November. Remember time and patience? It starts now.

I looked all over for plans to help me sort of start over and put into practice everything I have learned, but none of them get me the time and steady increase I am looking for. So I made my own. It lasts 35 weeks and assumes that you are already able to run a solid 25-30 mile week without pain or exhaustion. What I have done is take the best advice from several training programs and plopped it all into one sheet. This sucker will build mileage, let you rest, and will also give you some tempo time and hills to get that heart pounding and muscles toned. The typical pace should be right around conversational for you or a tad faster. This is about building a base and building fitness over a long time. I am also going to be doing pushups on MWF and will also figure out when to work in other exercises like squats a little bit later on. I use a Polar m400 with a heart monitor to see how hard I am working. Their redesigned Flow app includes some killer exercises to supplement a running program. Great for rest days! So here is the new plan. Feel free to download and share. Just cite where you got it if you can. If you want to start it with me, let me know how it is going.

2016 Run Program

You can also download the 2016 Run Program in a PDF.

Happy Running!

Protesting Trump’s Back Door to White Power

/ Andrew Tatusko / 1 Comment
racistMatthewHeimbach

Racist Matthew Heimbach shoves a black woman.

A recent video shows what we now know are members of a white supremacist “white nationalist” group called the Traditionalist Workers Party physically shoving a young African American protester. They are not simply shoving her out of the arena, they are seen giving her extra shots even as others in the mob audience join in. That should evoke our collective ire and disgust. When any man lays his hands on a woman, we should take notice and interrogate what is happening. When it is white men laying hands on a black woman, we need to look closer and demand answers. When it is white supremacists shoving a young black woman, we should demand justice without question. There is no space in a civil society to accept this kind of behavior or to offer any platform in which such beliefs are legitimate.

But this is not how all of the many incidents of people being escorted out of Trump rallies have worked. While some cases looked like this, it is not actually what was happening. The moment Donald Trump got a Secret Service detail as a candidate, his role within our population changed. Where he goes becomes federally restricted ground and that means different rules apply.

Some of the footage of protestors being escorted out is not about about race, but about what happens on “federal restricted buildings or grounds.” According to the H.R. 347, disrupting an event like this can carry fines and/or jail time of up to 10 years. This was a rewrite of a 1971 trespass law in order to give Secret Service a little more freedom to determine what constitutes a trespass. There are a few criteria for those who can be penalized under the law. For example, it is one who:

knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions;

Certainly, we can argue how effective this law is and how well these trespass laws are applied. This includes people who were allowed to protest Barack Obama, the President of the United States, while brandishing weapons. Nonetheless, it means that what we see in a 15 second clip of someone being escorted out of a Trump event by an official, especially the Secret Service, should be measured by what authorities are doing when they are escorting people out of the room. People have been arrested for protesting in these very conditions for decades. Not everyone has an unfettered right to any protected speech at a Trump event, or a Clinton event, or a Sanders event. This is the same when the President is in a designated area or other officials who are federally protected.

I am far less concerned about what Trump has to say on the stage. He is a showman telling people what he believes they want to hear. He says these things to get media coverage, to stay fresh in the news cycle he has mastered over the years, and to convert that spin into votes. His business acumen is up for debate, but his marketing talent is second to none. He is a master of that craft.

My concern is that he does not care who he is fueling with his rhetoric. At this point his failure to immediately disavow any legitimacy towards the support of KKK or David Duke and the significant presence and support he has gathered from the underbelly of American society in its white supremacist and neo-fascist organizations is disturbing. He knows that those votes matter to his campaign. He speaks to angry white men who fear that the minorities and the people of color will steal their property and their power for which there is a significant overlap with white supremacist organizations. Their sole purpose is to reclaim absolute power for the white race and reestablish white power to rule the USA as it did effectively up until 1964. Trump’s protectionism and isolationism support those goals like no other candidate does and as no other candidate has for a long time. When Trump declares “Make America Great Again” they are hearing “Make America White Again.” To give him power gives them power and that is the most dangerous open door to terrorism that might face us if he is in the Oval Office.

Relapse is Not Recovery

/ Andrew Tatusko / 2 Comments
Glacial_grooves

Is it a groove or a rut? Glacial grooves take time to form, so do our habits, addictions, and recovery efforts.

You have been biting your nails for years and are tired of it. Your nails are bloody stumps and they hurt all the time. So you decide to make a change. You start with a spray to make your fingers nasty enough that you won’t want to put them in your mouth. Lexapro becomes a regular morning companion at the advice of a doctor. And you start meditating 20 minutes every morning to relax because the main problem is anxiety and nail biting is a symptom. You feel great. Your fingers are feeling wonderful, you are more relaxed, and you look down and thing, “I could be a hand model.”

Then one day it’s raining and cold outside and you have a major deadline at work that day for something you are not sure will get finished. Tired after weeks of hard work you refuse the Lexapro, the spray, and the meditation. When you get home that night, you need bandages because your fingers are bloody stumps because you chewed them to a pulp that afternoon. You take a Lexapro and go to bed, back at Day 1.

Was going back to biting nails part of the recovery process? I have heard some ideas supported that say relapse into the very behaviors that a program of recovery is trying to prevent is part of the process of recovery itself. But that is like saying sitting down is a necessary part of running or that getting into a car accident is a necessary part of driving. Sitting down is highly probably and a car crash is probable but less so, but both are symptoms or consequences of both running and driving. Neither must happen for running or driving to be possible.

It’s a fact that relapse happens. Depending on the strength of one’s addictive patterns of behavior, it might happen more than once. But even if relapse is highly probable or if it is even inevitable in some cases, it does not make it a part of recovery. Highly probable does not mean necessary. Facts are not necessities. So what is relapse?

Relapse is a symptom of addiction, not recovery.

This is important. Nail biting probably won’t kill you. But alcohol, cutting, drugs, and even compulsive eating can. Stopping medication or other important behavioral modifications in illnesses like depression, bipolar, or schizophrenia stir the pot for a suicide soup. Relapse in any of these cases is not part of recovery, it is part of the illness from which you are trying to recover. And it can kill you.

When we have habits that are powerful shapers of our lives and around which our relationships and behaviors seem grounded like some gravitational or magnetic force, escape velocity is really hard to achieve. Like a ball tossed in the air, the tendency of our bodies and minds is to fall back down to the place where “normal” has existed as long as we can remember. But that’s the delusion. That “normal” feeling of being stuck to the addiction is anything but natural. It’s not a natural part of the brain to do things that put our very survival as human beings in danger. The brain is there to keep us alive, not kill us. Yet with many of these strong addictions, the brain turns on us like a bad scene from M. Night Shayamalan’s terrible film The Happening.

Relapse happens because addiction is powerful and change is difficult. Change in order to stop addictive behaviors seems insurmountable because addictive behaviors have formed absurdly deep grooves that our lives seem to automatically follow whether we want them to or not. Getting out of these patterns requires a radical program of behavioral change to fill in those old grooves and make some newer, healthier grooves for our lives to follow. This takes time, patience, and a hell of a lot of hard work and consistent, repeated effort. Relapse shoots us back into those old grooves and when we fall into them, they feel deeper and more impossible than before. For many they are inescapable.

Relapse is not a part of recovery, it is a symptom very addiction that people are trying to recover from. That distinction is important enough to make because it will save lives.

Living Lent Free

/ Andrew Tatusko / 2 Comments

ash_nocrossThis is my first year without Lent. For years it was a time for reflection and focus on my spiritual self and to seek out a better union with God. I have fasted, prayed, and read the Bible. I have attended liturgies and fully invested myself in both the Western and Eastern calendars and cycles within the broader Christian community. But not this year.

Lent is not happening not because I have resentments toward religion, God, or Christianity or the people who worship there. It isn’t happening because I have chosen a way to find health and happiness apart from God and it is working. In short, I can’t sit in a pew this year and pretend as if God matters, because God does not. I am approaching a significant marker in my life. In March I will have lived one year without God. As I approach that marker, I will say more. But for now suffice it to say that engaging in a Lent practice where God is not at all part of the picture feels strange to me and lacks integrity. I can’t be authentic and do Lent which is the exact opposite of what Lent is supposed to do.

Other than confiding in a few people about my shift in beliefs, or lack thereof, I had this consistent feeling of guilt and even shame that I was “giving up on God.” That’s not what happened. I did not “give up on God.” What happened is that I decided to stop pretending. There is nothing “wrong with me.” To the contrary. The truth is that I lost faith a very long time ago, but I refused to let go. That refusal is the problem.

I held on for two reasons, both of which are not very healthy. 1) To let go of God means I am letting someone down. I need to have faith because other people expect me to. So therefore I have to believe. 2) Letting go of God means that all of my very hard work to understand my faith is a complete waste and a disappointment. The root of both of these problems has nothing to do with God, but has everything to do with my imagined status before others and a fear of losing them. Doing anything as a response of fear of rejection is a bad way to have a healthy relationship with anyone or anything. I decided a few years ago to move past fear-based thinking and find a better way to live. As I have become less afraid, God has become less important. That is something significant. I decided in March of 2015 to stop ignoring it and accept it for what it was. I needed to let go of the God idea even on a trial basis just to see what would happen. So I did.

What I miss about Lent is the experience of a community seeking the same or at least a similar thing. The rhythms and experiences of a religious community that were so central to my life for many years feel strange not being there. This is punctuated by the various practices friends from my previous religious communities are sharing all over social media this season. Synchronizing yourself in time and space with other people especially in the visceral experience of seeking a higher order and purpose for living is incredibly powerful and rewarding. I love the honesty that Lent is supposed to engender. It is a foundation of practices that one should engage in every day of the year. In many ways Lent is a great reset button for the year. In Orthodoxy, the first Monday of Lent is called Clean Monday for that purpose. The Greeks will clean the house and fly kites to celebrate the journey to personal purity and reconciliation. It’s a beautiful practice.

But this year there is no special calendar marker for this year. Today is Tuesday, it’s freeing rain, my dog refused to poop as we got soaked and cold, and I came to work this morning. I will run on a treadmill later to get in my workout, see a few friends later if the weather permits, and then go home. I will catch up on Scandal with a bowl of popcorn, read, and go to sleep. Then Wednesday will arrive. I am finding my own rhythm now. While part of this journey into authenticity has been a sense of loss, I have gained so much more. Today, I am happier and healthier than I think I ever was when God was such an important focus in my life. I am more in tune with the world and with what is going on inside of me in relation to it. I am more honest and less afraid. If living without God was something of an experiment, it is working for me.

10 Albums That Influenced Me

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robgordon

Rob Gordon’s autobiographical record collection

A friend on Facebook posted a challenge to list in no particular order 10 influential albums. Now I want to dig a little bit deeper to make that list not so random. There have been albums that influenced me for a short period of time like Michael Jackson’s Thriller (who wasn’t influenced by that in 1983) or even Dokken’s Tooth and Nail (“Straight to the tahhhhppp…”). But they were gone from my life in a few years and never had a lasting impression. Other records have stuck with me for whatever reason.

I don’t think there needs to be a good reason why these albums stuck around. Most did so because of drumming. The records that influenced my playing are ones I listed to over and over again to learn how to do all that crazy shit and stayed there. But for others it was more about the aggression or serenity I thought needed in my life. Most I will pop in and give a play still today while others set me off on a path. In organizing this little list, I am thinking about Rob Gordon (John Cusack) who in the film High Fidelity organizes his immense vinyl collection not alphabetically, nor chronologically, but autobiographically. Brilliant. So here they are with the song that hooked me on each.

Metallica – Ride the Lightning

My musical taste started with metal. The pounding intro to “Fight Fire with Fire” followed by that killer double bass groove is the real origin of my musical legacy. This was trash metal and I got hooked. With the exception of “Fade to Black” which everyone seemed to love, but I thought was full of melodramatic ennui, this is still a kick-ass album. Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeth finished out the early phase of my junior high life.

Bad Brains – Bad Brains

If I found my deep-seated need for an aggressive outlet in my youth in metal, the political core of who I am started in hardcore. DC Hardcore was always loaded with aggression and an intelligent fed-up attitude with bourgeois, Reaganized, yuppie culture from Minor Threat and Government Issue and many others who would stick around only for a few months. I was a quiet and pretty sheltered kid so music was my one means to escape a sort of rage I had inside of me. I had a fire and Bad Brains spoke to it. This album still does. I play it regularly as the greatest achievement in hardcore music by the greatest hardcore band.

Rush – Signals

That double bass groove by Lars made me curious about drumming. But that drum intro to “Digital Man” and the wicked 7/8 business of “Subdivisions” baptized my hands and feet forever. Yes, most drummers will look at Moving Pictures as that album that made them drummers. But I must have played “Digital Man” 1000 times just to learn what a drumkit was. I played it horribly to start with nothing but a pair of wooden spoons from the kitchen and some boxes I set up like a New York busker in the Jay St. station. But I got better with practice. Through the blisters, this album made a drummer and prog-rock fan out of me for life.

Primus – Frizzle Fry

It starts with that 5/4 intro to Rush’s “YYZ” on the bell of the ride. Then the groove morphs into something utterly awesome. Tim “Herb” Alexander became a new kind of drumming model for me and “Defy the Laws of Tradition” became my warm up groove for all occasions. It’s to tight, intricate, and feels so good to lay down it hurts. That changed my approach to drumming which would follow its way into Sailing the Seas of Cheese and…

Fishbone – The Reality of My Surroundings

This shit got me the real funk. Fish’s grooves kill so much on this album they stank. I got blisters playing through “So Many Millions” and “Fight the Youth.” Every song cracks with a political lightning bolt that spoke to the problems in L.A., police brutality, and the awful living conditions of black folks living in ghettos constructed with the hands of white racist policies and the movement of segregation from the enforceable laws of the state to the shady practices of property developers, real estate agents, and a fucked-up welfare system designed to keep people poor, violent, and ruled by drug lords. I saw my whiteness through this album for the first time.

Pearl Jam – 10

I became a college student and this marks when I got drunk, I mean really drunk, for the first time. “I’m Still Alive” was something I screamed before I passed out a few times. I put that on a wash/rinse/repeat cycle for a while. I can almost feel hungover when I listen to “Black” even today. Shiver. Through the trajectory of my drinking career took a sharp nosedive when I found Jesus in the form of speaking in tongues and all other manner of strange, mind-bending, pseudo-cultic activities, a few years later, I returned to my home that I found in liquid courage. But this album is like a hanging chad in my existence.

Radiohead – OK Computer

In grad school I finally left the awful prison of Christian contemporary music when I first hear the line, “In the last world war…” What is this?! If there is a perfect album to be heard in existence this is it. I was deep into questioning every damn thing about reality and the technological structures with which we have surrounded ourselves and mediate our senses of self and purpose. In comes this album that transformed and fed my internal dialogue and research mission at the time. “Pull me out of the aircrash…” Who doesn’t resonate with that feeling of being crushed like a bug by forces we cannot control. This is an album about feeling the anxiety of those forces and feeling virtually powerless to do any damn thing about it. It is precisely how I felt at a time when I was comparing my finite existence to the infinite reality of the cosmos. I felt small but burdened with purpose to figure out a means for liberation. Damn, I really was a graduate student of theology in Princeton, wasn’t I. When I heard Fear Factory’s Obsolete, I resonated on the same intellectual frequency, but there was enough anger there to solve the philosophical conundrum. Now OK Computer is just a great album.

Nine Inch Nails – The Fragile

I owed taxes and had no money. I was just rejected from the PhD. program I was “called” to. I was angry. Before that rejection I had decided that I could not be a pastor of a church, the vocation for which I was in an M.Div. program, and I was now totally confused. All that existential muck rose to the top and then this album came out. When Reznor wrote it, he was not in a happy place either. It captured both my existential misery of not knowing what to do with my life and the aggression I wanted to get out of my system. It was something I could scream to in the privacy of my own car. Through Reznor’s “void” I felt a strange comfort as he spoke about it in his lyrics. On a strange level I indeed was “Too fucked up to care anymore…” But I was still young and overthinking everything. I eventually got a scholarship and a fellowship to continue with my studies. But at the same time I felt the first kick in the gut that God was not real and that my entire education in theology was a waste of time and money. I continued with it for another year and another degree getting a job in education shortly after. But this feeling of missed opportunities, misread tea leaves, and a miseducation haunted me.

Helmet – Meantime

This was an album I had for a long time, but never appreciated it until the same year The Fragile was released. I was finding my roots in metal again. But it was Stanier’s tight grooves, high-pitched snare, and that signature stop/start pattern of Page Hamilton’s that reinvigorated my taste and returned me to my musical home for good. I find peace in the heaviness. I bought Betty in 1999 after I returned to Helmet on the old tape I had all but forgotten about. Helmet captures the best of the hardcore growl and rage with the clean and aggressive structures of metal. It’s a controlled kind of crazy. I think that’s how I saw myself emerging at this point in my life. Controlled, but inside there was something crazy. It was a little too prescient perhaps. But since I put this in again at the twilight of the 20th century, I have never really looked back and continue to find my home in the heavy.

Slowdive – Souvlaki

At some point you have kids and things are so chaotic on a normal flow, some semblance of peace is necessary. This was an album and a genre of “shoegaze” I never paid attention to until kids entered the picture. None of their stuff had been in print for a while and I had to illegally download crappy copies of it from Napster for a while. Then legal digital music happened and I got my first iPod. I bought everything of Slowdive’s starting with this album and I have been a total shoegazer for the past 11 years. While the instrumental “Missing You” kind of mesmerized me, the epic sounding swell of “When the Sun Hits” nailed me. Now I want to go back to 1992 at Reading just to be at one of their shows. That wall of sound is something wash over me in all forms of music – including the REIGHNBEAU album I am listening to right now.

Practice Develops Passion

/ Andrew Tatusko / Leave a comment

Instead of trying to find complete congruence between our passions and our livelihoods, it is perhaps more productive simply to believe in the possibility of finding opportunities for growth and satisfaction at work, even in the midst of difficulties. – Charlotte Lieberman

500px-Love_Heart_broken.svgMy friend Hugh makes an important distinction between calling, passions, and doing a job. Over and over we read articles that say “do what you love” and while that sounds nice, it is neither realistic nor reasonable. Why this is so is not hearkening back to parents telling people passionate about art to “get a real job” or “music is nice, but it doesn’t pay the bills.” Doing what you love is not reasonable is because we often do not know exactly what it is that we love.

Often we think we know what we want, but the truth is that we have not built up any competence in what we love to tell us whether or not we actually love it. While some people find what they love and then do it, it’s not a formula to make most of us happy. The worst thing is to wind up in an endless search for happiness in pursuit of some ideal that will never materialize. So I want to suggest a different direction to this formula.

Becoming competent in something creates passion. To be passionate about something sometimes requires a degree of competence and that means practice even if we aren’t confident about our abilities. So we do a job in order to become more competent and that is where we learn about our passions. The job that you have in order to pay the bills might in itself create competence in an area you were never aware of before and you can find a passion about the world there.

I am no longer a proponent of the idea that any of us was created for a special purpose. There is no evidence that this is true other than one’s own desire and yearning and what other people tell you is your purpose. I wasted many years seeking mine and have watched others do the same and very rarely have this quest produced something that looks like happiness. People have tended to end up miserable and disappointed. When one’s expectations are so high, it becomes impossible for reality to match the vision precisely enough to tell you that you have indeed “arrived.”

The reality is that we are born into or have selected roles in our lives with specific behaviors that we need to exhibit on a daily basis. Living a good life is the accumulation of the choices we make in these roles and performing what we need to do on a daily basis is mostly trial and error and practice. The more competent we become at certain behaviors and skills, the more confident we become and the happier we feel that our fitness with what we are doing is right. I have learned this with running and music. To feel better about running, I need to run more miles and work on methods to help me perform at a higher and healthier level. It means running hills, doing speedwork, and weight training among other things that can be painful in the short term, but have wonderful payoff over time. If I want to play a difficult piece of music I need to decompose it into specific rudiments and skills that take time to perform and then put all of that together. That means hours of messing up, repetition, and patience. Getting better at these things motivates me because I feel better doing them and also have more to offer in the long term.

The payoff is in the achievement of a goal, not in living inside of an idealized passion. The goal is what motivates me, not the achievement of an ideal state of being. Don’t do what you love because you might not even know what that is yet. Establish achievable goals in your life that you are living right now and through trial and error you will find small sets of behaviors that you want to continue to do. Some things you will want to do as an end in themselves and some for the sole purpose of achieving a goal. But a life lived without goals will not produce enough motivation to keep moving and you will never find out what your real passions are.

You can start right now. Write down one thing you want to complete today. Then work on longer term goals. Break them down into one thing you can do every day. Your passion is in there. But you need to practice these behaviors in your life and become more competent in them to find it.

How People Make Ideas Powerful

/ Andrew Tatusko / Leave a comment

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What makes an idea powerful? This was a question posed to Marxist geographer David Harvey among others at a recent panel at the London School of Economics. Before launching into the unasked question of why Marx is not covered all that much at the world’s leading schools of economics, he did give a couple of insights. The first is that powerful ideas can and perhaps should be a material force in history. Second, a powerful idea reveals something that you didn’t see before. And finally, that to effect change in the world, regardless of the idea, you also have to transform social relations. This last point is I think the most important and one that was not really discussed all that much.

I was recently trying to figure out why it was that I can’t seem to “take it easy” on a run when I’m supposed to. For some reason I always feel the need to push myself and do something better than I did on the pervious run. I need a more efficient heartrate, a better split time here or there, a better average pace, faster cadence, etc. There is always something to improve and the little Polar device on my wrist records the data I then use it to push myself. I ran tonight for the first time after a month off for the flu and to mend a painful kneecap. And rather than take it easy, I had to seek a certain level of competence.

Part of this obsession with performance is an imagined social pressure. I share my data and want other runners to see how well I think I am doing. I don’t want to appear slow or lazy. I have sort of imagined this club where I need to post certain numbers to be accepted. This is foolish since no such club exists and runners are some of the most open and accepting people I have ever met. That you are running is the thing – not the numbers you post. However, most of this drive is because I am still trying to figure out this body of mine. I was never an athlete and I am just learning about my own limits and capabilities. The numbers do give me a clue as to my relative level of competence in running. They give me a steady stream of data to tweak and improve. No matter what pace others are running, I can always improve my own. It is just me and the numbers and improving my perfomance is my prime motivation.

So what measures competence in ideas? These are trickier. In science some ideas simply work better than others. If yours happens to work the best, the designation of theory might be yours to own. There are objective measures in science to determine this, but no theory exists without a great deal of smart people to confirm them and disseminate the knowledge on behalf of the person who thought the thing up. Science progresses not just from numbers and facts, but in so far as these numbers and facts work through communities of scholars at the right time and place. Just ask Galileo or Bruno about time and place. Who you know is important.

Science and art connect in this social dimension. I have for years fancied myself something of a writer, but unlike the numbers I can improve on a run to improve my performance, art is a far less an objective sort of arena to test one’s competence. I do know many people who had a certain knack for their art who then decided to work very hard at their craft, go to school to become experts, and moved into the world to perform with other musicians and continue to work. Some have done so in the presence of the right people at the right time and have made a career of it now performing with musicians whose music they were playing in high school cover bands. Others are no less competent, but have not found that lightning in a bottle. The point is that there are songs and books sitting on hard drives all over the world that many people will never hear or read. These are pieces that may be just as good or better than the stuff that gets great commercial success. For these ideas to live on in the collective memory of society and have a powerful and lasting impact, the right people at the right time must confer some degree of approval, or those ideas will be lost.

There are two points to all of this. The first is that I am far more comfortable with numbers my body generates that I can manipulate in order to achive competence in running. Working on this with absolutely no requirement for public opinion or approval is an utter joy to me. But this is also why I am something of a coward. I abhor the thought of the public scutinizing my writing with the prospect that I do indeed stink at it after all. I don’t quite have the fortitude to work that out just now. But with that said, it is a fear that I can resolve now that I have named it. It now has an objective reality that I can investigate and change much like I will change my efforts to improve my running numbers when I hit the pavement this weekend.

The second point is that given the social nature of ideas, it is important not only to tell people when they have thought of something good, we must put them into contact with the people who can spread those ideas and enlarge them. This is not only a moral good to build the competence of the creator, but it gives all good ideas a fighting change to take on that material reality and change something in our societies and cultures for the better. The great intangible effect of a solid university education is the network of people you join who can help move your ideas to places where they will flourish. People matter to ideas and the power they can wield. Good ideas deserve to live on in our social conscience rather than gather dust on shelves and in hard drives no one will ever see.

Getting Unstuck

/ Andrew Tatusko / 1 Comment

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“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

When I was 12, I learned how to sail at a YMCA camp on the Chesapeake Bay. We learned in these little boats called Sunfish designed for 1 or 2 people. After a week or so, I took a boat out for the first time without a counselor. It didn’t go that well.

It was a windy day and the water was a bit choppy. About 10 minutes into the short trip, I stopped moving. What happened was that the boat was caught “in irons.” This means the boat was headed into the wind, the sail was not catching any air, and the water stopped flowing over the rudder making steering impossible. Two options are available in this situation: wait for the wind to change direction, or push the sail and the rudder perpendicular to the wind.

The previous week I watched someone get popped in the head by a sail swinging across the boat. This is called tacking or coming about. So I did what any emotionally compromised kid with lack of confidence might do: nothing. Then I started to complain about being stuck as if the boat and the wind would apologize for hurting my feelings. I expected my experience to change just because I desired change. But I was unwilling to try something to change it. Eventually an instructor in a motorboat pulled up and hopped in my boat. He pushed the sail and the rudder, caught that magnificent breeze, and we flew across the water.

What I needed to learn that day, but wouldn’t apply it until decades later, was that nothing in my experience of life will change unless I do something different. I can’t feel or think my way into a different life in any way that is something more authentic than a really lucid delusion. I need to act differently in order to have a different life. The alternative is to be stuck, waiting for things to change all the while building a resentment that they are staying the same.

If we want things in life, we need to solve problems and do things in order to get them. Some methods work better than others. If we could each do one thing differently than the day before in order to change one aspect of our lives we want to improve, change is absolutely inevitable. If it doesn’t work, do something else. The one way to be stuck and stay stuck is to do nothing. A belief that the wind will catch your sail won’t get you moving. But moving the sail yourself will.