A year later.

I was born and raised in Orlando, a place that is so much more than Disney. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I grew up surrounded by diversity. I guess the first time I realized how fortunate I was, was in grad school. A lot of people came from the deep South to attend where I was going. I distinctly remember one day I was sitting on the balcony eating black beans and yellow rice for lunch and a number of people asked me what I was eating because it looked so strange, and a guy of Hispanic descent was so excited to see someone eating food that reminded him of home. I was actually taken aback. I didn’t think my enjoyment of Cuban food was particularly exotic; when I was little my family frequented a little Cuban restaurant downtown. Different cultures, different food, different languages… it was all normal.

Orlando is diverse in other ways, too. We have huge, conservative churches. We have huge, liberal churches. We have Gay Days at Disney. We have Christian music festivals at Disney. I myself am rather conservative, both politically and religiously. I have friends, also conservative, that accidentally went to a local restaurant run by drag queens. When they realized what was going on, they laughed at themselves, stayed, had a good time, and went on their way. Somehow this all just works.

One morning I woke up to the news that my city had been devastated by a terrorist attack. A Muslim man had shot up a locally famous gay bar, murdering many, many people. Shaken, I posted about it on social media, and had people immediately jump down my throat for daring to say it was a Muslim. It made me angry. I was just repeating what the news reports had said. The intricate workings of a mind so twisted they would do something like this will never be fully understood, I guess, but this perpetrator had pledged allegiance to ISIS, then taken the lives of as many people as he could before the police took him down. That’s what was known. That’s all I had said.

Shortly after that I saw people quickly lose interest in what had happened precisely because it was a Muslim man who had shot up a gay bar on Hispanic night. People, to my utter disgust, wanted desperately for it to be a white Christian good ol’ boy. Others, again to my utter disgust, wanted it to be something more than just one twisted individual so they could use this event to further their own political agenda. (Social media can be a gross place, but that’s another post for another day.)

Everyone wanted to blame their political foes. Even the President came here and blamed the Republican party, even though the murderer was a registered Democrat. None of that was even relevant.

But all those people looking to lay blame were outsiders, just like the man who killed so many at Pulse that night. He drove over here from a different city.

I didn’t know anyone who died but I still grieved. It weighed so heavily on me. Part of it was terrorism always seems like something that happens elsewhere; not right up the road from the little Cuban restaurant you frequented as a child. Part of it was in my city, you have churches and gay bars and ethnic restaurants and all skin tones and different languages, and while people may have strongly held beliefs, it is clear here that you can respect people’s differences. But ultimately it was so senseless, so evil what happened.

Shortly after I went to a candlelight vigil to remember the lost. There were a variety of speakers and at one point, one of them asked everyone to stand in support of something I couldn’t in good conscience support because of my deeply held moral beliefs. So I stayed sitting, holding my candle and praying. And nothing happened. No one said a word; I don’t know if anyone even noticed. Because that’s how this city is. This terror attack brought the city together like nothing I’ve ever seen. 

Churches sent their congregants out of services to go donate blood. Others quickly rallied to get water and food to those standing in line. Groups who maybe otherwise wouldn’t have joined together got in the trenches together because this was bigger than all that. We were just all humans, recognizing each other’s humanity.

There are still people out there trying to claim this tragedy. Maybe it belongs to everyone, but I don’t think so. It belongs to Orlando. Like Big Papi said in Fenway after the Marathon bombing, “This is OUR ******* city.”

And one maniac with a gun isn’t going to change that.

GSAW review

Repeat after me: This is not a sequel. This is not a sequel. This is not a sequel. There, that should do it.

If you’ve ever heavily revised your own work, or had someone help you with that process, you should know that the end product is sometimes very different from the original piece. You take what works, ditch the rest, rework it til you get a worthy product. That’s exactly what happened with Go Set a Watchman turning into TKAM. If you are a TKAM lover you will recognize pieces of it in GSAW. It’s curious just from a writer’s perspective that some characters and events that are iconic in TKAM are just little bits of memory in GSAW and some of them don’t have the same results. I won’t say more for those of you that like to remain unspoiled about such things. So from one perspective, it’s a fun intellectual game to go through and spot those elements.

Writing-wise it is not strong. There’s not a lot of reason within GSAW to care about the characters if you don’t already love them from reading TKAM. I do find the plot intriguing: a woman in her young 20’s who has left her home in Maycomb to make a new life in New York City, coming to visit every so often, and struggling with belonging, loyalty, and identity. If you’ve ever realized the flaws in something you once held as idyllic, then you will relate to Jean Louise on some level.

It’s written in third-person limited from Jean Louise’s perspective, and we get bits of her childhood background told in flashbacks throughout the narrative. Some you’ll recognize; some you won’t. Some of the characters’ behavior and actions will prove to you that it’s not a sequel, if you didn’t already get that through your head. There are inconsistencies that wouldn’t be there (presumably) if this was a true sequel. The relationship between Scout and her aunt, for instance, is not believable in the context of how it ended in TKAM and how you might fill in the blanks that they learned to value each other despite their very different perspectives. If you remember that GSAW came first, this shouldn’t bother you though.

Now for the controversy. Much of the conflict is driven by characters’ responses to the Supreme Court decision to force integration in the South. Is Atticus a racist? I say no, in a semi-spoilery explanation. (THIS IS YOUR SPOILER ALERT!)

One of the themes of TKAM is seeing things from another’s perspective; getting in their shoes and walking around in them for awhile. How would a southern gentleman from ALABAMA respond to this situation? The lines being thrown around the internet as proof that Atticus is a racist are taken greatly out of context. Uncle Jack explains some of what appears to be Atticus’s racism to Jean Louise. She has discovered what she thinks is this great flaw in her father and Uncle Jack helps her work it out. Atticus went to a Klan meeting once but it was just to see who was involved so he could stand up to them if need be. The quotes regarding Atticus asking Scout if she wants the black population invading their social spaces or whatever is VERY much being cherry picked to drum up hysteria. In context, he’s meaning that question as they are right now in that moment. It’s actually an interesting commentary on what happens to communities who have change forced upon them by the Supreme Court and other distant groups with no understanding of the actual people and the consequences then put on all involved, rather than letting states lead through organic mind-changing and persuasion, (Wait, that sounds vaguely familiar…) His point is that of course he views everyone as equal, but neither group, white or black, is ready for integration because the white community needs to work through their bitterness and the black community needs to learn skills to survive in this society now. You can’t litigate your way into knowing how to run a store, hold office, etc. Scout is angry that the people of Maycomb aren’t doing more for the black community, but Atticus’s perspective is that you can’t rush it. They both don’t like the Supreme Court decision. You can interpret that as “racist” through our modern lens but it fits their character. It would be unbelievable and poor writing to write southern characters in that era as progressive. The conflict between Scout and Atticus actually reminds me of George Washington Carver and WEB DuBois’ disparate views on how to successfully integrate. Carver wanted to go peaceably, slowly, through education and with a long end-game, to show the white community that the black community was valuable and worth bringing into the fold, so to speak, while DuBois was much more on the we’re here and you better like it end of things. (That is a really rough summary of their perspectives, so sorry, history buffs.) It’s an accurate look at how people thought about a serious issue. You can’t force a heart change and culture shift with a law.  

It’s a quick read because the writing is simple and the narrative is not complex. There is cussing, just fyi. If you’re curious, read it, keeping in mind that IT IS NOT A SEQUEL. It’s not going to be a classic but it’s worth one reading.

My experience with 21 Day Fix Extreme!

As promised, here is my review of 21 Day Fix Extreme. Some of you may be familiar with the basics: portion controlled eating in color-coded boxes to measure servings so you aren’t counting calories all day, calculated based on your weight, caloric needs, and whether you are trying to lose weight or maintain your current weight, then you are working out 30 minutes a day for 3 weeks. I’m not going to go into that part in detail so if you want to know more about that aspect, please feel free to ask!

I want to talk about the workouts themselves and just how it went overall. My goal in doing 21DFX was to maintain my weight and get stronger and more defined. The workouts are MUCH harder than the original 21 Day Fix, so “Extreme” is apt. The workouts are fast-paced but Autumn always shows you exactly what the move is before you do it and there’s a modifier to follow if it’s too much. I have a hard time watching a move and repeating it without this kind of break-down so the format is really great for me. You get much less of a break between moves than in the original but it’s enough time to grab a sip of water and get back at it. In almost every workout, except maybe yoga day, you are working multiple muscle groups at all times (mixing lunges with rows, squats and bicep curls, etc.) The Pilates day has you wrapped up in an exercise band to make the moves more challenging, but thus more effective. That was one of the only parts I had a hard time with: I had to push pause to get my band situated (or get my 5 year old to pause/push play since I couldn’t do that at the same time as getting my band wrapped around my feet correctly!) During the workouts you’re encouraged to take a moment to shake it out if you need to and get back in, and some of the people in the dvd occasionally can’t finish their sets without taking a break. I found this really encouraging. These are real people doing the moves and it is hard. There’s no pretense about it. Autumn shows the moves, gets everyone started, then walks around correcting form and that is really helpful too if I find that I’m not lunging low enough or holding my back straight enough. She also describes very clearly what muscles you are working, which helped me focus. The hardest move of all for me out of the lot was doing push-ups while holding weights, then between push-ups doing a row. Also I couldn’t do all the yoga moves fully and had to follow the modifier on quite a few of the poses but I still got a lot out of it and actually improved dramatically in just 3 weeks. I loved the challenge.

The only other part that was hard was eating enough food. I had to eat A LOT on this plan in order to not lose weight and I’d often have a few containers left at the end of the day because I simply wasn’t hungry. My allotment of servings a day was 5 veg, 3 fruit, 5 protein, 4 carb, one each healthy fat/cheese and seeds/oil, and 5 teaspoons of seed or nut butter or more oil.  

My experience got a little complicated when on what would have been the first day of my last week, I got really sick with a stomach virus. It was over pretty fast but over the course of 48 hours all I had to eat was one piece of toast, a few veggies and crackers, and lots of Gatorade and I lost 3 pounds. On the third day I just ate whatever sounded good to my weak system to put the weight back on, and then went back on the 21DFX plan and resumed my workouts, finishing the full 7 days from that point.

I achieved my goal of toning up, rather than losing weight, but I could pretty much guarantee if you were eating to lose weight on this program it would start melting right off. It is not a program for just getting back into fitness though. I occasionally found myself telling myself, “You ran a half-marathon. You can do this for 30 more seconds!” It’s that intense. You’re also supposed to take a week off before starting it over. This week is my week off so I’m planning on doing PiYo a couple days this week and then thinking about what my next move is: repeat 21DFX or just incorporate some of the workouts and get back to running on other days. 

My results aren't super-dramatic because I was in a fit place to begin with but you can see for yourself below what just 3 weeks did for me. I'll have more "after" pictures up on my coach site soon.