I was gifted a Canon DSLR when I was about 16. I remember being so eager to take “beautiful photos”. I remember purchasing a couple DVDs, my hope then was that after an hour or two I could begin taking photos that were similar to the ones that I admired. But quickly I found out that after setting the mode to manual, the photos were overexposed, blurry — not at all what I had envisioned. Shortly after, I gave up and more or less never really picked the camera back up, my frustration getting the best of me.
Fast forward to today, 20 years plus later, I’m resetting my expectations and my relationship with the craft of photography and mindset has changed. I actually don’t think I’ll capture “good” photos for many years to come. I’m a beginner and there’s going to be a phase of years where I have good taste, but lack the technique:
I recognize there’s so much to learn. As of now, I’m hearing the following phrases pop up a lot. I’m watching YouTube videos (had signed up for a course that unfortunately was cancelled the day before it started):
Composition
Aperture
F-Stop
Exposure
ISO
White balance
This is at the very tip of the iceberg. I’m certain there is a voluminous amount of knowledge for me to acquire.
Also, at 36, I’m recognizing that so much of how I want to spend my days is more or less interests I’ve had since I was a young boy. For example, dance. I love dancing when I was about 10 or 11 and 25 years later, here I am, honing the craft, taking two dance classes a week, practicing on evenings when I’m alone and don’t have my daughter to look after.
Anyways, I digress.
Ultimately, through photography and other mediums (including video) I want to continue story telling.
I’m winding down for the night, in the bed with my Macbook Pro, and just before drafting up this blog post, I snapped a few photos with my DSLR to practice my photography skills. I was really looking forward to taking this 5 week photography course. I was looking forward to it and disappointed that I’m no longer going to be taking this class. On the other hand, my routine of taking house dance classes on Thursday night continues!
So above, I set the featured image to a photo I had snapped this evening. This picture is the result of using “Manual” mode on my DSLR, me practicing playing with the various parameters including F-Stop, Shutter Speed, Exposure.
Today
Stretched in the morning – today’s routine (of my custom block I programmed for myself) consisted of targeting the calves and ankles (really really challenging and particularly painful), followed by some squat exercises
Took the 93 bus to Wimbledon and then posted a quick Instagram story, sharing a screenshot of Apple Notes – I had shared a funny situation I witnessed while on the bus, one between a father sending empty threats to his 4 year old son, only for the son to call his dad’s bluff
Opened up a ticket with AWS Support – I am consulting for a company in the UK and after unblocking them on an issue they’ve been stuck on for 3 weeks, I decided to wrap up the engagement by finding a long term solution to an AWS Amplify issue that’s preventing them from using the latest version of the AWS Amplify command line interface (CLI)
Picked up Elliott from school at 2:00pm – because the weather suddenly got cold, I was way under dressed so we went back to my flat to pick up a jacket. Since we had some time to kill, I set her up with her sticker book that we had picked up this past weekend and then we watched “Sing Thriller”, a show she said she saw advertised on Netflix. Elliott and I used to watch the movie “Sing” all the time when she was an infant.
During the hamstring (lunge) exercise, I hold and prop myself with my arms, my tummy constantly making contact with my (target) thigh. I notice that when I try to deliberately relax my upper body and arms, the intensity of the hamstring stretch violently increases. As I type this, I think this makes sense since during relaxation of upper my body, I’m probably shifting the work onto the hamstrings. In any case, I was reflecting on today’s session and was curious and compare yesterday’s lunge range of motion compared to that of 2 months ago and though I know and feel a difference in my body, seems to me that the increase range of motion is probably a few small degrees. I will say I do notice what I consider for me significant gains in the hip flexor range of motion and as a result, I’m inching my way closer and closer to a forward split.
Also, still trying to experiment with the forward fold — emphasizing hamstring, not lower back — and by hinging at the hips, though I still feel the stretch strongly in my hamstrings, I also now feel the stretch not in my lower back, but towards the middle. And, even with the assistance of the band wrapped around my feet, I’m not fully able to relax in the stretch and feel that hinging in the hips requires more “effort” of the hips, and I actually produce a sweat every time I attempt the forward fold.
Separately, yesterday my body signaled to me that during the hamstring lunge, to point the toes since that increased the stretch for me in location of the hamstring that isn’t targeted when I am flexing my foot back.
Like many others, I watch and study lots of house dance videos. I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to the craft — at the time of this writing, about 14 months into the journey — however I’m noticing an increased ability within myself to tease out what highly skilled dancers are trying to convey in their rounds. Because I recently started training privately with Mavinga, I’m leveraging the opportunity by attempting to analyzing her videos and then coming up with questions that I can ask her since it’s rare and a wonderful opportunity to sit with the person and have them articulate what they were doing in a particular round. In particular, I like the below video (hopefully YouTube skips to the specific time frame I embedded in the URL) where Mavinga catches a particular phrase in the music and then (I think) signals to the battle opponent that he missed an opportunity to play with musicality or perhaps she’s trying to convey something along the lines of “Did you hear that? Maybe not.” It’s playful.
Elliott is and continues to blossom into a beautiful little girl. Today, the two of us spent the afternoon playing with slime, drawing characters from the movie “Inside Out 2”, then I wrapped up the evening with reading her two children’s books that I had purchased for her, books that happen to revolve around a little girl who is growing up with two homes (i.e. her current situation).
As shared in the (below) video’s text, today I was unexpectedly hit with a wave of grief while music was playing in the background, the song “The Lumineers – Stubborn Love.”
Elliott and I were sitting at the kitchen table, the two of us drawing (an activity we do often), when this song was automatically played by Spotify, a song that my ex-wife and I used to listen to. And memories of our family unit lit up in my head. The power of music. A song can instantly teleport me to specific moments that I’ve buried in the back of my head.
Though I momentarily felt sadness, I at the same time reminded myself that I am actually happier now that I’m divorced, living a more authentic life. In addition, I was crying not only for myself, but grieving for Elliott as well. I vowed years ago — long before Elliott was born — that I would put in the work, to guarantee, to ensure, that she would never experience her parents divorcing. And yet, here I am. Here we are. The universe: it was written.
This whole divorce process has been emotionally challenging for her: how could it not? Divorce impacts the parents, the children, the extended families. There’s a ripple effect.
Although part of it me has thoughts of shielding her from negative emotions, I believe that part of my job as her dad is to show her fragments of the truth, fragments of the reality of life, overtime, and hold space and care and attention for her to process — to feel — the emotions. Overtime, I believe, she becomes more and more resilient.
Sharing some (what I consider) age appropriate truths is essential for Elliott however this is one (of many) areas where her mother and I disagree. For instance, when the cat died this past year, Jess had texted me, telling me to “not tell Elliott.” I had replied via email, telling Jess I felt that we are doing a disservice to Elliott, not allowing her to grieve and instead, making up a story that the cat is lost, giving her a false sense of hope. This is one of the many instances that remind me that Jess and I hold different philosophical parenting beliefs.
I’m still feeling a little under the weather, my throat feeling a bit when swallowing, the discomfort starting Sunday evening when I got home from an event.
I programmed my current block 6 weeks ago and today I’m on the second day, which focuses on hamstrings and quadriceps.
I’m definitely pushing myself a bit with stretching because today, after the session, I feel sore up in the upper hamstring, right below my buttocks, predominately on my right leg. The increased soreness might also have to do with the fact now that the forward fold I’m practicing is not less of an anterior chain stretch, less of a stretch of the lower back and more emphasis shifting to the hamstrings.
Today I also wore knee pads while performing the lunge. Unsure what’s going on but on the target leg (i.e. back leg), when the is pressed against the hardwood floor, the hard surface — even with the Pilates mat — creates excessive discomfort, shifting focus away from the quadriceps.
This past weekend (which was full of dance due to a 3.5 hours of dancing at a party, 3 hours of intense workshops, followed by a competition), I started feeling pain when bending my right knee and what’s interesting is that the pain was located in a place that I’ve never experienced before. Historically, I would get “IT Band” pain when squatting, the sharp pain location BEHIND the knee cap, in the hamstring. However, for the first time in my life, the pain (a different sensation, more of a “too much volume” pain) is above the knee cap (picture below).
Although I was in pain (to the point of considering taking an Advil, which I rarely take, the last time a few years ago when I broke both my hands/wrists in a motorcycle crash), I was somewhat curious and excited; I wasn’t feeling pain the same chronic area. Although I could be wrong, I had the thought that because I am moving my body differently in my dance (partially due to freeing some restrictions via stretching), my body is compensating differently. It feels like a growth opportunity, actually.
Creating YouTube Playlist on my channel serves multiple purposes. First, doing so in a way for me to practice my organization skills. Second, a playlist enables me to chronologically view my dance journey. Third, playlists help viewers (subscribers and non-subscribers) paint a better picture of what dance classes in studios look and feel like.
Now, I do have a backlog of edited house dance recap videos that live on my iPhone and Instagram (stories), not yet uploaded to YouTube. How many? If I had to guess, probably in the range of 50 videos or so. Will I upload all of them? Although I’d like to, probably not. Perhaps a select few.
What other playlists will I want to create? Off the cuff, here are a few ideas
Stretching and flexibility journey – I started stretching on May 16, 2024 (162 days ago) and similar to my dance, I’ve been documenting my flexibility journey
Daughter and dad recap videos – Whenever I watch videos of Elliott and me, I feel joy and love. It’s yet another way to remind myself that I am living a life that’s both worth living and living a live that’s aligned with my long term values
In the middle of recording a video during yesterday evening’s dance class, my iPhone popped up an alert, a message notifying me that I ran out of disk space and that the current video recording was halted. After seeing the notification, I had mentally prepared myself to visit the Apple store to trade in my phone, upgrading the iPhone to one with larger disk capacity — perhaps doubling the capacity, from 2TB to 4 TB — but fortunately discovered that I can reclaim about 1/2 a TB of space by performing some clean up, pushing out the need to upgrade my phone.
What’s taking up all that space?
I attend dance classes ritually on Tuesdays and Thursdays and almost every class, I capture footage of the entire class, recording myself in order to both 1) create recap videos and 2) reflect on my dance, what I liked, what I dislike. These dance classes in London tend to run 90 minutes and recording at 30 frames per second (FPS), 1080P, HEVC encoding (I had assumed video was being encoded with H.264 and today learned about HEVC, a more efficient format), that’s about 3.6 GB of disk space per hour of video, taking up about 5.4 GB of space per class.
But why the hell is CapCut program itself eating up almost 1TB of space, almost half of the capacity on my iPhone?
What the hell is going on!?
It appears that CapCut duplicates each imported video file in a project. That’s my guess and it would make sense because the application should not affect the original file. This would explain why a project file consisting of a 30 second video clip extracted from 2 hour clip take up 10GB?
So now, I am currently performing some maintenance on my iPhone, carefully deleting project files. What’s odd is that there seems to be some sort of misreporting of disk space because when I delete what I think is 10 GB of project files, I only see a few hundred (about 400 MB) reclaimed. Maybe, just maybe, there’s another reason, like perhaps some background process or thread has not kicked in to update the disk utilization?
Either way, I am going to hold off on upgrading my iPhone that contains a larger capacity and try and reclaim 500GB of space.
All the time, we all hear the following: “Just be yourself.” On the whole, I concede that these words form sage and sound advice. In fact, as someone who historically shaped shifted throughout his life in order to conform to social expectations, I mindfully practice being myself every day.
The act of being oneself is a topic over the past six months occupies a large portion of my mental real estate. Because I’m interested in this topic, I fall victim to Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (i.e. frequency bias), my attention antennae keep gravitating towards discussion where the topic of “being oneself” centers the conversation.
In fact, this entire post was motivated by a podcast episode (from The Capsule, a London based dance podcast) revolving around sports psychology performance. During that episode, the guest (Jo-L) shares his perspective on having the choice to be yourself:
“You can make a choice … People are going to love you for everything that you are … and everything you want to be … [or] they are going to hate you for that. Then, on the other hand, there are going to be like hating you for all the things that you are not, as in that you pretend to be. So like, essentially speaking, you’re making the choice between like …. you’re going to be loved or hated anyway, so you might as well be loved for the things that you wanted to be loved for.”
In response to this, the podcast host points out even a more subtle, more dangerous aspect to what I’m going to call betraying yourself.
“… or even worst, lose [a dance battle] cause of who I am not. Imagine changing your whole dance because that’s the RIGHT thing to do or the RIGHT way of dancing”.
Overall, I agree and I myself will continue biasing towards just being myself.
However, my curious nature wanted to dig into the notion of betraying yourself (i.e. “not being yourself”) and how I consider it to be quite a seductive position. Because there will be moments in which you betray yourself. Because there are moments when you will be rewarded in the form of praises from others.
According to Chase Jarvis, he believes this constant betrayal happens to all of us:
“We will all betray ourselves over and over again and the goal is to just do so slightly less and return to ourselves with a little more kindness and a little more awareness and get 1 percent better every day … the person who is a degree off who walks a thousand miles”
With that in mind, let’s compare being yourself versus betraying yourself.
Be yourself
When you just show up as who you are, you might be liked by others. This quadrant, to me, is the ideal condition, wouldn’t you say? There’s no performing. You spend little cycles taking the temperature of the room. You spend less time evaluating body language and attuning to facial micro expressions. You are doing what dialectical behavior therapy calls participating, mindfully being in the moment.
Of course, when you are being yourself, you may be disliked by others. This is inevitable, considering there are over 8 billion people occupying this earth. How could any one person be liked by everyone? That’s statistically impossible. Furthermore, every individual person on this earth is unique, according to Reiss Motivation Profile, which posits that though we are all motivated by the same 16 basic human desires, how much we’re motivated by each value differs.
Betraying yourself
On the whole, betraying yourself is more or less “masking”, being someone you are not. At the risk of being overly understanding (is that even possible), we all do this, according to Chase Jarvis
“We will all betray ourselves over and over again and the goal is to just do so slightly less and return to ourselves with a little more kindness and a little more awareness and get 1 percent better every day … the person who is a degree off who walks a thousand miles”
Now, betraying yourself can be effective (and dare I say, useful) in certain contexts. For me, personally, assuming we all betray ourselves on and off throughout the course of our life, I want to both give latitude to myself and increase my awareness when this betrayal occurs.
Though we can betray ourselves in the short term, it is not, according to sports Psychologist Michael Gervais, unsustainable in the long term.
“You contort to fit in. You sacrifice authentic expression on the altar of approval. You twist yourself into a shape that appears socially acceptable but it’s performative in nature. The response does not represent your authentic self. Contorting creates a temporary relief but leaves you feeling disconnected from others. Because you don’t share your true self, you never feel connected, understood, or embraced, nor do you become a trusted member of the community. By pretending to be someone you’re not, you constantly feel the pressure to maintain the facade. This can intensity the feelings of insecurity and fear of exposure.” (pg. 40; Gervais: First Rule of Mastery)
Now, what about betraying yourself and being disliked by others? If being yourself and being like by others is the most ideal quadrant, then betraying yourself and being disliked is the least ideal, the most disappointing. The possibility of this happening sufficiently motivates me to shy away from this behavior: what a slap in the face to pretend to be someone you are not, only to be rejected?
Summary
So, armed with this information, how do I want to approach my life from this point? These days, I tend to choose “Be Yourself”. I’m someone who values high degrees of acceptance (i.e. two standard deviations from the norm).
I will end this post with a little snippet from Steve Job’s commencement speech, which I’ve been memorizing and rehearsing daily, as if it were my own personal mantra. I wake up in the morning, verbally recall these words, and then from memory, try and write down these words. For me, it is one of the ways I am practicing a stoic approach to living:
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what’s truly important. Remembering that you’re going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You’re already naked. There’s no reason not to follow your heart …
Your time is limited, so don’t go wasting it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other people’s opinions drown your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly to become. Everything else is secondary”
Best part of my day yesterday was when Elliott handed me over a little drawing (see featured image above) that she drew with a pen and 8×11 printer paper that was folded in half. I felt joy wash over me and had asked her to what drawings on the card were: “That’s you. That’s me. And that’s a heart, for us”
Today
Talked with Martin and Ethan on FaceTime video – nice catching up with my good friend Martin and his son. Ethan was eating a “healthy” ice cream that he had made (with his mom) made of fruits and (cow’s) milk. The color of the ice cream was … orange … and when I had asked what the flavor was, Martin said “Maybe Watermelon?” I was like, come on Martin, it’s god damn orange, how could it be watermelon, are you color blind ?!?
Stretched – forward fold, elephant walk, and hamstring lunge. And posted on the Stretch Therapy forum
Sent a voice message to Kennedy and sung her happy birthday – my little Libra friend just turned 23 and I had setup a notification in my task manager, reminding me to wish her happy birthday
Cancelled Dance Class – Every Tuesday, without fail, I dance at Pineapple and take a house dance class. However, my legs are still shattered from this past Sunday’s 1:1 Dance Private with Samantha Mavinga. So I listened to my body, honoring its request to get some rest.
Worked out of Starbucks at Wimbledon – they have way more comfortable seats than the Costa I typically work out of. In addition, because this Starbucks has a long bench, I can periodically alter my sitting position. And because I’m more flexible than ever, I can (without pain) sit crossed legged (i.e. Indian Style)
Tackled administrative items that I’ve been procrastinating on – sent 3400.00 GBP to my (soon to be) ex wife for interim spousal support, an amount I disagree with but accept (side note: I believe in universal laws and will leave it at that for now), contacted IRS
Practiced skills learned from Waves of Focus – pausing, considering organizing one thing, link bury and mark
OrganizedElliott’s slime party – contacted the slime vendor and coordinate with other parents to confirm time and place. My ex had thrown a party for Elliott and I wanted to do something nice for Elliott on the weekend that I had her and she was so excited about the idea of a slime party
