I had a great day today. That's kind of a big deal for me as it could be argued that I've had a a rather shitty go of it (I'm a tad inebriated now so you'll have to forgive the cusses in this post). To distinguish from other days this day was great on it's own and was not at all about that. I've had other great days since then (along with so many bad days), but at the end of them they're still about that because despite outward appearances I'm still (and probably forever) rather damaged. Today was different though. It was great on it's own.

I went snowboarding for the third time ever today and decided that it is a thing I like enough to invest money in buying equipment. I had a good lesson and a fantastic afternoon where I made real progress with my skills. It was too warm out, and the snow was imperfect and the atmosphere was typical dreary grey Ontario winter, but it was also awesome. Because the world is pretty fucking awesome when you think about it.

Despite having had a shitty go of it I also recognize that I'm absurdly privileged. Absurd isn't nearly a strong enough adjective but it's the best I've got right now. I'm a white straight male with a high IQ who grew up in a middle class, nominatively Protestant household in a first world country as the child of parents who both pursued and encouraged post-secondary education. All of that made it easy for me to obtain a Computer Science degree that has enabled me to get a job which pays me enough to live an upper middle class lifestyle as an independent adult without any debt. When the shitty thing did happen to me, it happened in a country where we could access excellent health care without incurring financial disaster. The only anti-privilege I can think of in my life was the divorce of my parents when I was in grade seven. But around half my friends at the time came from "broken" households so it's hard to argue that I was part of some oppressed minority. Plus my parent's divorce was mostly amicable from my point of view so I'm even privileged within the group of children of "broken" households. All these things put me ahead of such a large portion of the population of the world that it isn't worth coming up with an actual number. It rounds up to 100% in all contexts.

So yeah, a bad thing happened to me, but the world is still awesome and I am in a position where I feel like I must strive to acknowledge that. What on earth could I possibly complain about? There is so much to see and do and there is stuff that is basically magic happening all the time. My iPhone 4S is a super-computer in my pocket. Magic. In May my brother and I are taking my mom to France. We'll travel over 6000km and it will only take about 8 hours and we'll do it by FLYING and the flight will cost less than $1000 each round trip. Magic. I'm free to post my thoughts to a blog on the Internet which is just millions of piles of Magic. I spent a whole day today doing controlled falls down a really big hill in glorious nature instead of fighting bears and struggling to survive the winter. Not magic, but still pretty awesome that I not only have the spare time but that western society has oriented itself in such a way that it was not hard or prohibitively expensive for me to spend my spare time in such a frivolous way.

Maybe it's the endorphins from a day outside exercising, or maybe it's the four pints of medium-strength (~6%) beer enjoyed in the company of happy fun people but I'm in a good mood this evening because today was a great day.

It's not that I haven't been reading lately, or even that I've been skipping blogging about the books I read. The reason I haven't posted about a book since the end of October is that the book I was reading since then was Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It is an epic-sized book in every sense. 981 pages of small type (in trade paperback format), followed by 96 pages of endnotes in even smaller type (which are required reading to actually understand what is going on). Beyond the physical size (and weight!), the actual text is daunting and challenging. It takes place in the near future but much has changed in the world and the book doesn't waste much time explaining the lay of the land. You just sort of pick it up along the way. Add invented slang, a large cast of characters (who are never thoroughly introduced), intense non-linearity, and obscure self-references and you get a book that requires significant attention while reading if you want to make progress.

I am glad I read it, but it was hard work and took a long time is what I'm saying.

I don't even know how to talk about it here, so I'm going to defer to the comments of smarter people than myself. One remark I quite liked came from Jay McInerney in his review of the book for the New York Times: "While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences." The writing is spectacular but sometimes it goes off on tangents, and those tangents grow their own tangents and you find yourself so far from where you started that you're not even sure you're reading the same book. Like the endnotes, of which there are 388, some of them have their own footnotes!

Fortunately for me, I think, I enjoy tangents. Even when whole chapters pass that have nothing to do with the plot of the book, it's all still fascinating and engaging. I loved the language and words he used, like cardioid and demapping, but most of all the idiom "howling fantods," defined perfectly by Urban Dictionary:

A stage 4 case of the heebie jeebies.

Realizing that, after all this time, as I approach the end of this 981 page novel with 96 pages of footnotes, as much as I have loved every run-on sentence and obscure pharmacological reference I still cannot coherently answer the frequently-asked and painfully-simple airplane-seatmate question "what's it about?" has giving me a serious case of the howling fantods.

There is much reference to Québec separatism, despite being an American novel written by an American. In the near-future world of the novel (remembering that it was written pre-referendum in the 1990s) the cause of separatism has escalated rather than calmed, with multiple Québec terrorist groups causing problems all over North America (including the assassination of Jean Chrétien apparently). Although that all sounds serious, it's presented in a pretty ridiculous, slap-stick manner that is endlessly amusing (to me at least). The chief terrorist group of the book is Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents (AFR), the wheelchair assassins, whose back-story consumes eight pages of endnotes and is far to involved to cover here. It's all great stuff though and any book that spends time discussing Canada in any way always seems more engaging to me.

The book finishes at a strange point with many unanswered questions. Upon completion I remembered that the very first twenty pages or so take place about a year after the events at end of the book. I went back and re-read them, only to realize that that section has a whole different meaning than my first interpretation. This is a book that must be read multiple times in order to extract all it has to offer, but I'm not sure I'll be up to trying again for a couple years. I poked around online for interpretations and it appears to be an activity of some interest on the Internet, piecing together what may have happened in the year between the end of the novel and the events of the first twenty pages.

This hasn't been a very coherent blog post. Despite my attempts to improve my writing skills I do not have the talent necessary to discuss a book of this magnitude in any meaningful way. It is just too big. If you're interested in learning more, check out the introduction to the tenth anniversary edition written by David Eggers; it's spot on.

Myself, I will close with the synopsis from the original edition in an attempt to at least convey what the book was about.

Infinite Jest is the name of a movie said to be so entertaining that anyone who watches it loses all desire to do anything but watch it. People die happily, viewing it in endless repetition. The novel Infinite Jest is the story of this addictive entertainment, and in particular how it affects a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts and a nearby tennis academy, whose students have many budding addictions of their own. As the novel unfolds, various individuals, organizations, and governments vie to obtain the master copy of Infinite Jest for their own ends, and the denizens of the tennis school and the halfway house are caught up in increasingly desperate efforts to control the movie - as is a cast including burglars, transvestite muggers, scam artists, medical professionals, pro football stars, bookies, drug addicts both active and recovering, film students, political assassins, and one of the most endearingly messed-up families ever captured in a novel. On this outrageous frame hangs an exploration of essential questions about what entertainment is, and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment interacts with our need to connect with other humans; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are. Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. The huge cast and multilevel narrative serve a story that accelerates to a breathtaking, heartbreaking, unforgettable conclusion. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the very idea of what a novel can do.

As usual, the holidays were a busy time for me this year. I failed at all my relaxation goals (like finishing the epic-sized book I've been reading for the past month) and spent the whole break in a constant state of activity. Fortunately the activity was all fantastic and normally involved spending time with amazing people. I saw old friends and family and also enjoyed the company of a surprising number of new people, all of whom were awesome too.

Using as few words as possible my holidays went roughly like this: The Hobbit, board games and scotch, full-day Civilization game, Christmas with my mom's side (ultra special guests: Shannon, Gareth and little monster), Christmas with my dad's side, family Christmas in London and then in Toronto (with Django), Christmas in Ottawa with lots of snow and hatchets, Christmas in Caledonia with pizza and marbles, market in London, Life of Pi, New Year's Party at my place, hanging with Mike in Toronto, hummus, Yerba Mate, more scotch and amazing beers.

I totally abandoned all my recent health changes for the holidays and I definitely notice the effects. I'm sluggish and five pounds of fat that magically melted off my body over the last three months has completely returned. I'm eager to get back to "standard operating procedure" and kicked it off this evening with a big-ass salad piled high with avocado. Gonna focus on large quantities of veggies for a bit while I wait for my body to once again stop craving sugar and flour.

I was having a pint with some friends from climbing the other day at the Granite Brew Pub and one of them asked me why anyone would want flavoured beer. Like isn't a normal, finely crafted beer enough? Don't random flavours ruin the beer? The context was in regards to one of the beers Granite had on cask that night: "The Chai Wallah Has A Moustache" which is an oatmeal stout flavoured with chai.

I didn't have a good answer for him that night other than to make the distinction between the major types of flavoured beers. Something like Bud Light Lime is really just Bud Light with lime-aid mixed in. Flavoured beers from the craft beer scene tend to use high quality ingredients for the flavours and those ingredients are often mixed into the mash that is the precursor to beer. The brewing process then continues with the extra ingredients so they can become more fully incorporated into the final result.

Flavours have been added to beer for as long as beer has existed, which is a rather long time. I recently had a Scotch ale which was brewed in a style that is over 4000 years old. It involves the addition of flowers from heather bushes after boiling, which are left in the mix for an hour to infuse the beer with flavour (almost like tea).

I think beer can be a great vehicle for exploring interesting flavour combinations. I still prefer to drink beers that are more "pure" in style, but I also do not hesitate to try some of the more random things. The chai beer I mentioned above has a beautiful aroma like chai tea, but the flavour is mostly standard stout (a good stout, but a bit of a tease given the nose). I don't normally like fruit-flavoured beers (I find them too sweet), but spices, chocolate or coffee can all go very well when combined with beer.

At Cask Days this year I had a spiced pumpkin ale which was amazing, and I recently picked up two bottles of Vanilla Bean Imperial Espresso Stout from Great Lakes Brewery. This is one of the best flavoured beers I've ever had. It isn't heavy-handed with the flavours, they simply accentuate the natural taste of a very fine beer. Too bad it was a just a one-off; it's unlikely they'll make more.

So why would people want flavoured beer? If it's something like Bud Light Lime or Coors Light Iced T, I have no idea. But I don't know why you'd drink the unflavoured versions of those beers either. With craft beer though, you can get some fantastic combinations and flavour profiles that are just totally unique, unexpected and occasionally awesome. So although the majority of my beers are "normal" I will still continue to seek out and sample new flavoured beers whenever I can.

I social media-ized my navigation bar. That is all.

I wrote about sugar a bunch in my recent post about health. Today I came across an interesting article by Gary Taubes talking about how the sugar industry has employed a lot of the same tactics as the tobacco industry in trying to prevent the FDA in the United States from suggesting that Americans limit their intake of added sugar to any specific amount. Check out Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lie at Mother Jones. Gary Taubes also did an AMA on reddit to answer questions about the article.

In both the article and the AMA the thing I liked best is that although he believes strongly in his position, he is very clearly open to being proven wrong. The article is mostly just a summary of the history of lobbying by the sugar industry and in the AMA he prefixes most of his answers with phrases like "assuming I'm right." Furthermore he has started a nonprofit organization, called NuSI to "improve the quality of science in nutrition and obesity research" in order to overcome the fact that "current dietary guidelines are not based on rigorous science."

Now perhaps the research from NuSI will be just as biased as the research funded and pushed by the sugar industry. But maybe it will help balance things out?

Many people in the comments to the article claim that the data actually point to the rise in the use of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as the real problem. I'm not sure whether HFCS is so much worse than sugar as to single-handedly cause the explosion in obesity in the US. However an interesting side point is that the sugar industry has been able to jump on the recent hysteria about HFCS to position itself as the safe and natural alternative. Industry lobby groups are terrifying.

I've paid my deposit and am now officially signed up to go on a 12-day canoe trip deep in the tundra of the Northwest Territories with Canoe Arctic. I received my receipt for the deposit in the mail today from Alex Hall (the owner and guide) along with a lovely, two page, hand-written letter discussing some of the details. I'm totally impressed by the letter. I can't remember the last time I received something in the mail that felt so personal. For all we gain from computers and the Internet, we're definitely losing something as well.

Anyway I'm super excited about the trip. I'm going on Trip #3 which occurs in mid-July and travels quite a distance along the Thelon River. There are still a few spots available so if you think tundra canoing sounds awesome you should contact Alex and arrange to join me!

I've read this book before but it's been a while and so I decided to revisit it. I always enjoy Margaret Atwood's writing and I love dystopian stuff. She's great at portraying horrible potential futures in ways that make them seem disturbingly possible (check out "Oryx and Crake" for another example).

Anyway, great book, definitely up there with Brave New World and 1984. Check it out if you haven't read it before.

I updated my links page tonight using a cool little PHP library I found for interfacing with Google Reader. I was able to use it to access my Google Reader account and dump out all the subscription information into a nice format. Note that I'm not doing this on the fly as that would require storing my Google password somewhere which is not a thing I'm going to do. But I have a nice little utility now so I can update the links page really easily whenever I want.

I also updated my résumé a bit because I felt bad every time some annoying recruiter contacted me after seeing it with all its old, out-dated information and still thought I would be a good fit for whatever position they were flogging. I'd at least like to properly represent myself before telling them to go away.

As far as I know I'm not unhealthy. I don't really have any complaints about how I feel physically day-to-day. However over the past few years I've started to notice that I am aging and that some things are not the same as when I was 20. Simultaneously, many of my friends have been pursuing various alternative approaches to diet and exercise. As a result I became much more mindful of my own choices. I did not make any changes, but for the last couple years I have been making the effort to think about each thing I eat and how much time I spend being active.

The Internet is full of competing theories on how best to eat and exercise. My conclusion is that as a species we haven't figured it out yet. Sure there are recommendations from various government bodies but the more you research the more it seems that "best" is really much more personal than a generic food guide can cover. The key is most likely listening to your own body and adjusting your choices to achieve optimal levels of fitness and well-being.

A few months ago I set myself a goal in the realm of health. I want to live a long life with minimum illness in a body that not only can I rely on to perform well physically, but that I will enjoy using in physical settings. I want to be able to be joyfully active. I also set a corollary to that goal: I do not want to allow the goal to limit my experiences. I shouldn't avoid trying something once or twice just because it conflicts with maximizing long life. The pursuit of good health should be a default setting, but exceptions should be allowed without fuss. Living long is pointless if you don't do anything with that life.

With that in mind I have been making small alterations to my diet and exercise over the last couple months. I want to emphasize that these changes are not meant to be temporary. I'm changing my life style, not going on a diet. If I find some changes don't work or produce negative results I'll adjust as I go but the idea is to zero in on the optimal configuration.

First, I have defined processed/refined sugar to be an exception to my default setting (this includes disgusting artificial sweeteners, but I didn't eat those anyway because of the disgustingness). In an average day I no longer eat any at all. If I need to sweeten something I use maple syrup or honey, but I do that very rarely.

One of the interesting side-effects of this is that I had to eliminate almost all processed food because so much contains sugar. I now make my own salad dressings and sauces and lots of other stuff. The other interesting side-effect is that when I do make an exception and indulge in some tasty baked good I often find I want less of that item or I find it too sweet altogether and want none. I'm also finding fruit to be more delicious than it was before. I am thoroughly convinced that the spread of cheap accessible sugar is the cause of most of society's obesity woes.

My biggest exception sugar-wise is chocolate. I eat dark chocolate quite regularly but if a bar is marked as 75% cocoa, that means the other 25% is mostly sugar. 85% is my default darkness and I rarely eat more than a couple squares at a time so I don't think that is too bad. I've also found a couple 100% bars (no sugar at all) that aren't too bad for straight eating however I still prefer the 85%.

The next change I've made diet-wise is concerning meat and fish. I suspect the only way I'll stop eating meat is if the world runs out of it or if my doctor can convince me that it is hurting me significantly. I'm not a raging carnivore or anything. It's not unusual for me to go for a day or two with no meat at all. So I have decided that when I do eat meat, I want to eat good meat and I'm willing to pay a premium for it.

When I was younger my dad had a little hobby farm and he had a bunch of chickens. He fed them normal feed and they had a pen to sleep in, but for the most part they ran around the yard pecking at grass and bugs and doing whatever came naturally to them. Those chickens produced the best eggs (thick hard shells with violently yellow yolks) I've ever had. Similarly, the ones he butchered produced the best tasting chicken I've ever eaten (super moist and extremely flavourful, even in the white meat).

Factory farming is very different. Chickens sit in cages their entire life and are fed whatever the companies find fattens them up the quickest. They are injected with hormones and antibiotics whether they need them or not. Same with cows and pigs (and even fish that is farmed). These practices have made meat cheaper than ever which makes meat more accessible to all of society. However it's pretty easy to see and taste the difference. Additionally, most research I've seen suggests that the meat from pastured animals that are allowed to act like they would if left to their own devices (grazing, rooting, pecking, walking around, etc.) has a much better nutrient profile than factory farmed meat. For example, grass-fed beef has a much better ratio of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids (more omega-3 good, too much omega-6 bad) than beef from cows fed with corn (cows aren't supposed to eat corn).

My take on this is not one of animal welfare. I am all for prosecuting people who are cruel to animals, but it would be hypocritical of me to suggest that it is better to eat a happy pastured cow than an unhappy factory-farmed cow. I'm still eating the cow. My point here is that pastured animals taste better and science suggests they are better for you. So that's what I try to eat when I eat meat (or eggs) now. There are some great farms near Toronto that will deliver frozen, pastured meat to the city and what I've had so far has been delicious.

Next up on diet improvement has been to increase my fresh fruit and vegetable intake (note that despite various food guides, corn and potatoes are not vegetables, they are lumps of starch). This one was a no-brainer, every single diet recommends more fresh produce. I try to buy most of my produce from local markets now. Many people complain that the farmer's markets are expensive but I find if you buy the stuff that is actually in season it can be quite cheap. So right now squashes and apples and a few others are very cheap. Earlier in the summer you could buy bushels of tomatoes and peppers for almost nothing. I have been roasting and freezing the extras for eating over the winter and anything roasted is awesome.

(A quick aside here...I made the best peaches ever this summer. Take a bunch of peaches, quarter them and remove the pits. Place them on a parchment lined baking sheet, skin down. Put a small dab of the best real butter you can buy on each quarter. Sprinkle them all with coarse salt and a bit of freshly squeezed lemon juice. Roast in a 400F oven until they look delicious. Eat them hot or cold and freeze the extras. Mix them with things like yogurt. Pure bliss.)

The biggest change to my diet is that I have greatly reduced my intake of wheat. This one is an experiment. Several of my friends have cut out wheat and I wanted to see what it would be like. To start with, I stopped eating cereal or bagels in the morning. I made this change over a year ago. Now I generally eat a bowl of berries mixed with plain greek yogurt and a small handful of almonds and hazelnuts. It's delicious and I found that I don't get hungry again until about 12:30pm. With cereal, I'd sometimes be hungry by 10:00am.

That seemed like a conclusive win and pushed me to try to cut out my daily sandwich at lunch. I haven't had a sandwich for lunch for about a month now. Instead I bring leftovers from supper or I make wraps with veggies, meat and cheese out of big leafy greens like kale or collards or swiss chard. It takes a bit more planning, but now I don't slip into a low-grade coma around 3pm. I still have an apple as a snack around that time, but I don't actually feel like I need it anymore. I'll still keep eating them though because apples are yummy.

For supper I now avoid pasta and if I do really want pasta I'll occasionally grab a bag of rice or lentil noodles. And as for tasty baked goods...well they're loaded with sugar so I was avoiding them anyway.

Again I'll still happily consume wheat as an exception, but it seems like a good default setting to avoid it.

The last big change is that I've stopped thinking about fat at all (other than avoiding highly processed artificial fats like margarine or trans-fatty things). Low-fat versions of foods often have added sugar or random chemicals to keep an acceptable taste. So it's really just trading one questionably bad thing for some other definitely bad things.

The idea that saturated fat is bad for your heart is coming under fire lately, mostly from the paleo/primal lifestyle camp. It was originally based on rather poor research from the fifties by Ancel Keys which found among seven countries that more saturated fat led to more heart disease. But it turns out he ignored data from fifteen other countries that pretty much destroys the fancy graph he drew (some countries had low-saturated fat intake and high heart disease and others had high intake and low disease). Somehow this bad research became the foundation of modern diet recommendations. My understanding is that this happened despite inconclusive follow-up research that tried to do controlled tests on the relationship between heart disease and saturated fat intake. At the same time as Keys was working on this, other researchers found similar and more pronounced connections between dietary sugar and heart disease but for whatever reason society decided that saturated fat was the bigger evil.

Anyway, my conclusion from what I've read is that we don't really know whether saturated fat is as bad as they say. However the human body actually needs some saturated fat. When you diet and lose fat weight, that is your body consuming your own saturated fat as energy. It's good at it. If you eat saturated fat instead your body consumes it the same way. It's a good source of energy. Saturated fat from animals is also a good source of fat soluble vitamins like K2, A and D. The human species has been eating saturated fat forever (and some societies like the Inuit eat a ridiculous amount of it with no ill effects). Heart disease is a recent epidemic that seems to match more closely with the rise in sugar consumption. So I'm going to enjoy my nuts, avocado, butter, cheese, bacon and other meats (from pastured animals when possible) while being sure to have regular blood work from my doctor to monitor my heart health.

To sum up my new approach to food: Eat lots of fresh produce. Avoid sugar and wheat. Don't worry about (unprocessed) fats. Eat meat from pastured animals. Don't eat processed foods. These are default settings that may be overridden for deriving maximum enjoyment of life, particularly in social situations (alcohol is a fantastic exception).

That's enough about diet, now on to exercise. I mentioned recently how I found a month of regular running really changed my fitness level and how I might keep it up. Well that didn't happen because I find running to be terrible. Instead I'm continuing to push myself to climb twice a week and in between I focus on body-weight exercises.

I'm a bit allergic to gym equipment. I find it strange that we should need special objects to be in shape. So instead I use my own body. I do about fifteen minutes of repeated sets of push-ups, deep squats, planks and chin-ups whenever I feel like it. I don't have a regimented schedule but I try to do it a few times a week. I've noticed increases in strength when climbing. Since my goal is to be able to enjoy using my body (and for me climbing is the ultimate expression of that) I'd say this is a successful strategy.

The other thing I do is walk a lot. I've always done that since living in Toronto but now that I'm so close to work I need to do it consciously. So I often take the long way home (thirty minutes instead of three). I hope to combine these walks with a rekindling of my interest in photography but that hasn't happened yet.

Finally, one more thing I'm forcing myself to be conscious of is the amount of time I spend in a sedentary position. In my field of work that is a real danger so I try to break up my day with short walks outside.

So that's it. Those are most of my thoughts on health at the current point in time. There are a couple smaller issues like sleep patterns and sunlight exposure but I think this post is long enough. I've noticed improvements so I'm going to stick with it.