(Knowing) What I Want

I just finished reading week and I am more pooped than when I started it. The first few days of the break had me doing absolutely nothing.

Not a damn thing

And it felt really good... for the first few hours when I got to sleep in... then my mind started turning, thinking about coming mid-terms and assignments/reports because the reality is that I have two this week, another next week and a major assignment and another smaller assignment all due within 14 days of returning. I've also started looking for summer positions to expand my experience because I won't be applying to the OVC until January 2018; my aim is to stand out, against other applicants who have higher grades.

Everybody panic!

The panic conveniently serves to keep me motivated to get my stuff done because I maintain an odd calm sense of control over a precarious set of tasks, where I'm a juggler with all the balls in the air and I've got most of them under control. Honestly, I surprised myself when I managed various social commitments as well as non-academic work, (minimal) house work and the actual academic work. This embodies a philosophy I had when I was in school, about keeping just busy enough not to let an idle mind take over. Mind you, I had no idea what I was actually doing at that point in my life...

#adulting

My friend JR has been having her own struggles and asked me, how the heck I stay motivated over this period (~6mos) and not want to crawl into a hole and sleep a million years. I figured that it has to do with the fact that I finally grew up and found something I have a keen interest in. I spent almost a decade of my best years in early adulthood working to pay the bills, and it was logically the thing to be doing because it's socially expected.

Break out of the norm!

Last week at work, I met a client who struck me as sharp, on the ball and particularly observant; I found out she was a senior project manager for a large corporate chain but was let go due to restructuring and decided to return to teacher's college in her 40s. We chatted a bit and she said that at first, she was really pissed to be let go because she was good at her job, enjoyed it and was financially secure. But, that she's never been happier than for having been given the opportunity to do that soul searching and be brave enough to decide not to seek another PM job but to give OISE a try and become a teacher.

She and I are not the common denominator and in many ways, we are both the exception. As stressful and busy as things get, I continually feel with even more certainty that I am exactly where I should be.

Lesson #8: Think Forward and Let Go

I have a final exam on Tuesday and you'd think I'd have spent the better part of the week thinking about the exam and studying for it but.... instead, I've spent it checking out horse-related videos on VideoJug and watching Heartland. I figure that maybe I can pick up on things I’m doing wrong during my lessons. I figured that the fall last week is fully attributed to (my own) rider error since the horse can only do as it’s being told.

While I’ve gotten a better technical appreciation, execution has been trying. Last night, Sheri got us into seated trot early in the lesson. The equine friend I was paired with last night is a sweet, large pony, Nikki. She’s an agreeable sweet-heart and easy to get along with but l-a-z-y. When I thought I had gotten into a trot, Sheri yells at me “that’s barely a trot! Use the crop!!” And all the while I was thinking “wow, this seated trot is much better. I’m not bouncing around everywhere”. *siiiigh*

Like I mentioned last week, there are over a dozen things a rider is trying to contend with so it’s not by any means a walk in the park. All our muscles and even mind-set needs to be retrained so it’s certainly a challenge, considering that I ride once a week. Here is the slew of mistakes I need to work on correcting… lower leg positioning, long leg, deeper seat, relaxing lower back, loosening hips, tightening abs, keeping a constant light contact with the horse/saddle and steady my hands. My biggest problem is the lower leg position because when I go out of alignment there, everything else starts to go out of whack.

I did a lot of seated trot last night and I think that while my brain was “in it”, my heart wasn’t. I couldn’t commit to just relaxing and going with the flow, literally. I was stuck thinking about getting all the technical bits right and thinking about the minute details of the exact moment instead of thinking forward and holistically. That’s the thing I'm realizing about the canter… you have to just feel it with your body and mind and stop thinking about what's happening and trying to tweak each thing. It's like knowing what you want, asking for it and then letting (trust, perhaps?) the horse take you there; you don't have to be in control of every minute detail--kind of like life, eh? But this doesn't go to say that without some key pieces in place, you'd do any worse... because getting your lower legs in place and long will be the start of everything else; it's like getting a solid foundation down first. Because if I don't get that right, I'll set off my balance, start bouncing about and then get more tense and try to compensate in the wrong fashion and well… end up on the ground. When I think back about the instances where Bonnie got into a canter (though momentarily), I remember not thinking and just sitting and thinking forward. I didn't even have to hold onto the saddle!

Hopefully thinking about something else for the next few days will reorient my thoughts by giving space and a chance to ‘reset’. Intermediate microeconomics, here I come!

Start Talking with your Wallet

It's been a little while since I've been on here. I know, I promised to check out the Corporate Social Responsibility Report but I've just been overwhelmed with things. So while I won't get into the Report yet, I'm going to consider something that I overlooked in the previous post.

It's something my manager said to me, "we don't eat too much beef or even pork; but if you can get chicken, sign me up for another next month", that got me thinking. I have been sharing my chicken shares with members of my office and family. While expensive (~$24.00/chicken), just the size and taste alone have sold me on purchasing these birds for consumption. But, who's going to pay $24.00/chicken?? Most families won't go this way because it's "just not affordable".

Fifty plus years ago, the most expensive item in our diet was protein. Now protein is cheap and easily purchased in any supermarket. While protein is important for proper development and regular functioning, people come to expect that protein (which should be a luxury) as something that can be easily attained for a cheap price.

Let's get some history on the chicken and how it became the most common animal on our dinner plates. The domesticated chicken we eat now has a genealogy that goes back to 7,000 to 10,000 years. It appears that the chicken's wild ancestor is the red jungle fowl, Gallus gallus from Southeast Asia, but, G. Gallus is not the sole ancestor of our common day chicken. Chickens happen to be the first domesticated animals of humans and it is this progressive history that has created our current day chicken.

Currently, 580 million chickens are raised for meat consumption (broilers) for the Canadian population and the balance to total 600 million, are raised as layers for eggs. For a population of approximately 34 million, that is approximately 17 chickens per person, per year. That's a lot of meat. And, how do you do cheap meat at grand scales? You mechanize everything, cut corners and ignore long term health and environmental conditions.

Loblaw's mandated that they would source locally the beef and pork that they get--which is a good step. But, what about chicken? Loblaw didn't mention anything about where they're sourcing their chicken from. Have you gone in to buy a whole chicken at a typical grocery store? I am pretty certain that you could get 1 fresh chicken for under $10.00.

The common excuse is affordability and the inability to enact change. We as consumers speak most clearly with our wallets. Big food corps and box stores will react to their consumers' spending habits (e.g. Wal-mart has put together an organics section because they are purely reacting to consumer demand). It is up to each of us to make the positive change. But at this point, most of us are too caught up in the trivial things that, we toss things like food to the wayside and let the big corp tell us what we will have for dinner.

Sources:
Choose Veg.ca (http://www.chooseveg.ca/animal-cruelty-canada.asp)
Chicken Farmers of Canada (http://chicken.ca/)
Smithsonian Issue June 2012 (How the Chicken Conquered the World)

Why fix it if it ain't broke?

Today I wore my watch. Do any of you even still own watches? It's becoming more and more something of the past. I got my first watch (it was white, I remember) when I was 7 or 8. I insisted wearing it on my right wrist by my dad told me that it wasn't normal and wasn't going to work for a rightie (though he's not right, I do understand now, why that is the case). People bought good watches with the intent to keep them for a long time. Jon Osterman's father was a watchmaker who originally expected his son to follow his footsteps. When Jon was 16, the US drops the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. With his father being confronted with the undeniable facts of nuclear physics, he told Jon to stop studying watchmaking and turn to nuclear physics.

I bet a lot of people thought this way. It's understandable, I think, for people to desire to move away from a seemingly archaic profession. Look at farmers: there are less and less family run farms. In fact, I believe that it is ~1% of our food that comes from the "family farm". That says a lot.


Our society looks at technological advances and believed "this is the next big thing". And who would not want to know what the next "big thing" is. We all want to get in on it so that we can be the first to take advantage of it. It's usually going to make our lives easier.

But, despite all this potential for greatness, I wonder if there is something to be said for something that took many years to develop and exists for many years as status quo.