Soukie's Place
keeping track of random thoughts“You Better Run”
I have never been an athletic guy – I lack the talent and the passion – but for a couple of months now I have found myself hooked on running.
A big obstacle in doing something good for ourselves is time. Life is throwing many things at us and this can sometimes build up stress faster than what can be taken away during the little time we spend relaxing. So without reclaiming some of that time, there is not much that can be done.
I have found three things that are quite effective in removing stress: mindfulness meditation, alcohol and running. Obviously, I don’t recommend alcohol as any kind of solution to a problem; but an occasionalUnless you suffer depression or other clinical conditions. Drinking can also result in an addiction. glass – in a good company – can create a nice break if you tend to work, or think about work, non-stop.
Mindfulness meditation is much harder and not nearly as fun (group meditation does not strike me as a social activity) but it is healthier. People spend a lot of the time thinking about the future or pondering the past. That is fine since this capability is setting us apart as human beings; but when we overdo it (or do it in a wrong way) we can end up stressed and overwhelmed. So taking a time to calm down, tune into the ‘now’ and simply observe one’s thoughts helps.
Photo by The best method for dealing with the stress for me is running. It is extremely efficient in calming the psyche and producing ‘feel good’ hormones; it is the only method of the three that will make you physically fit, it takes about the same time or less, and it is almost as cheap as the meditation. Keeping fit will further help by making you feel better about yourself and boosting your confidence, and it will also lower your sick days and bills.
The running shoes you purchase are obviously the single most important factor for your comfort and running health. Statistically, every other reader of this article has an ‘overpronation’ or ‘underpronation’ – these are not medical conditions to be afraid of but they would make a sustained running schedule painful.
There are stores that will videotape you running on a treadmill (barefoot) and advise you on how much compensation your shoes should give you. This does not mean you need to buy very expensive shoes but it is way more accurate than trying to deduce the pronation from your worn shoes.
There is one other thing that is very important: Keeping it up. Even though you will notice very quickly the positive effects, it is easy to fall back under everyday tasks. To make sure you keep running, get one or more of the following:
- someone else to run with (this is also great because most runs should be done at a pace that allows you to hold a conversation),
- a GPS watch or a nice smart phone application such as Runmeter that allows you to race against the ‘ghosts’ of your previous runs, and keeps overview of the statistics across weeks etc.
- goals such as a time or a distance to achieve in a single run, or maybe a weekly distance or frequency of running; a good long-term goal can be to run a ’5K’ or a half-marathon.
If you are still reading this, it is time to tie your shoes and get started. See you out there!
The Lure of Virtual Life
Can you compete with this?
A few thoughts came to my mind as I was drinking coffee and watching myself and seven out of ten other visitors of a café: all at our phones or laptops, looking up things on the web. No sound of keyboards, the people not writing but not talking either; most of them being on their own, spending time in the virtual world. It is perhaps only a step from reading a book, but still it changes the atmosphere.
The virtual world is unbeatable in its offer of attractions: games, novels, old manuscripts, radio recordings, latest findings from the scientists, videos of your friends’ holidays, shops, online courses on all subjects, scans and photos of otherwise inaccessible works, recordings of the best musicians, jokes, movies, recipes, chats, auctions, photos, maps, virtual walks through cities, museums and lives of others, their living rooms, their thoughts, their stories.
And it is a world easier to deal with: full of unknown people and even friends easier to talk to (or not) if you are in the mood; available anytime and anywhere. You can see your friends via a web camera, talk to them, see how they react – if they smile, or knit their brows – and you can just ping them when you see them online, without arranging a meeting. You can compare different interpretations of the same aria by various vocalists for which in the real world you would have to look up and buy several different recordings. Almost everything is on the internet and usually for free.
So I am wondering whether an average face to face conversation can still be interesting for others. I imagine people must have been asking themselves this question many times in the past centuries: Can I compete with the knowledge in the books, and then with the news in the newspapers, and then with the news on TV, and now with the information on the internet? The first answer will probably be yes. Why? Because people want to have a contact with a real person in an authentic environment.
But is that enough? It could, if it is irreplaceable and unique to the real world, something that cannot be compensated by the virtual one. The opposite of virtual is physical: the touch, the smell. And the feeling of physical presence can’t be replaced by anything else. Moreover, the virtual world relies on our experience with the “real”. You can watch someone cooking a lunch over a camera but you can’t smell the food, feel the heat from the oven or pat them on the back; and without a previous physical experience you could not even imagine what it is like.
So why are we so inclined to spend more time online? Is it because we are looking for an easy way to spend time without the effort required in real interactions? If so, we could slowly lose part of the skill of communicating with others, and then be tempted to spend even less time trying. The virtual world is so accessible that it can be a kind of an escape: a way away from yourself and from others. When someone contacts you over the web, you can react only if you want to. You can show or hide. You are the ultimate decision maker. Everything is voluntary. People can easily click to send twenty emails with a copy-pasted content but no personal message in them.
Although we can do thousands of things the easy way just virtually, it seems it is not the rewarding way. It is not the way to build yourself stronger, wiser and more confident in the real world which is still here no matter how long anyone has been away from it. We just need to try harder, and use the internet as a tool to get information, to learn, to arrange things quickly – as a means, and not the end to itself – to have more time and maybe more input for the real face to face, in-person interaction. It is worth it, because nobody can hand you a cup of coffee over the internet.
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Home Video Rip-Off
Can I see the film that won all the awards, please?
I believe there exists an ideal length for a given book, song or movie. That does not mean that the same theme cannot be recreated in a more minimalist or expansive way but then it is a different work. Take Annie Hall as an example of a film which feels just right at an hour and a half.
Successful authors often produce more complex and expansive works as their skills grow. But the success can also inflate the egos, and then the length grows as any output seems suddenly worthy of preservation. The results are Metallica’s St. Anger full of endless yet uninspired songs, the Harry Potter series which even some fans admit does not need to be 40% longerWhen I saw the Order of the Phoenix in a bookstore I thought it was a ‘cumulative’ edition. When I realized the mistake, I decided to wait until Rowling edits the heptalogy to be shorter than War and Peace. than the Bible, and extended versions of movies. The popular culture, and especially Hollywood, is influenced by the dogma that bigger is better.
Movies are often released in alternate versions. The reasons for this can be good, bad or ugly: To restore the vision of the director if this was compromised (e.g. removing studio-imposed voice-over and happy ending from Blade Runner); to ‘improve’ on a significant work in the spirit of “more is better” (as in Apocalypse Now or Dances with Wolves); or to simply push the sales of home releases by including something extra without any artistic ambition (“Extended” and “Special” editions and “Director’s Cuts” are often a mere gimmick to give a consumer a reason to buy).
If the studio or the director include additional material for their special editions, it is certainly appreciated by the fans but the key words here are ‘alternate’ and ‘optional’. Prime offenders are critically acclaimed movies that are hard to find or do not exist in good quality in the very versions that put them where they are. An example of how special releases should be done are the Terminator 2 dvd and Blu-ray discs offering seamless branching between several cuts of the movie.
If anything, the original theatrical versionsGeorge Lucas is infamous for suppressing the original versions of Star Wars from the market but there the issue is more in digital alterations than extending the length. should always be available. Not only for historical reasons but because the quality of the revisited films might be debatable — as in Miloš Forman’s AmadeusThis Best Picture won 8 Academy Awards, 4 baftas and 4 Golden Globes, but the version you are likely to see nowadays is ⅛ longer. or Coppola’s Apocalypse NowThe ‘Redux’ version is longer by 32% which makes a very different movie. — or clearly inferior (Dances with WolvesCostner returned 55 minutes of cut footage into the film, often undermining the dramatic tension of the original.).
The distributors can also hope for fans to buy the standard version and pay again later for the beefed-up version. Warner Bros. is now releasing the Lord of the Rings trilogy on Blu-ray in theatrical versions only. Since here the situation with preferred versions is reversedThe theatrical version of The Fellowship of the Ring is crippled by comparison and the second and third parts (longer by 40 and 50 minutes respectively) are also superior., the customers reacted with an outrage, blasting the product with 1,700 negative reviews on Amazon as a blatant double dippingWhen Peter Jackson was making the trilogy, it was impossible to release the extended versions right away because of the additional post-production work. Now, five years later, this is not an excuse. attempt.
The best feedback to the distributors is through our buying decisions. If releases that do not have the decency to provide original versions received the same barrage of negative reviews and poor sales, things would change. In this game (we want the movies, they want the money) we need not give in first because we can live without the improper home releases but the corporations cannot survive without the sales.
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