The Opposite of Terror

Nerkygrrl's gramma shared this video with me today.


It actually chokes me up every time I watch it. Nowadays when I think of a group of people carefully orchestrating a surprise at a train station... well... I think of this. The realization that there are people out there (at least in Belgium), committing senseless acts of joy makes my heart swell and my eyes water. Furthermore, it makes me want to be part of it. I know that it's a trick of choreography, but the magic of the event is that you can't tell which bystander is next going to seamlessly joining the other dancers, as if strangers have stepped out of their lives to become part of something spontaneous and wonderful.

That's the sort of universe that I want to live in. One where every person, if they open themselves to it, feels an internal pulse and connection to everyone else. Where, given the right music and the right moment, everybody dances.

Spreadin' The Love

I love reading Neil Gaiman's journal. Partly it's fun to see inside his world, but mostly it's that almost every single day he digs up some strange treasure from the Internet and lays it at my feet. I had a cat that used to do something like that, except with mouse entrails. Same difference, though.

So that's what I want to do for awhile... at least for a month. Every day or so, I'll share one thing that is making me happy.

Today I'm happy that I'm losing some weight. We're only talking about a few pounds, but these are the persistent pounds I picked up seven years ago, when I turned thirty. It was like, "You're thirty? Happy birthday! Here's your love handles."

The key to my recent success has been self-honesty about the calorie deficit between how much I eat and how much I actually exercise. Instead of the weight-lifting of my youth, I now focus on yoga. It's been great for my flexibility and back health, but it doesn't burn nearly as many calories. That's fine... but it means that I shouldn't eat like I used to. Recently I started using an iPhone application called Lose It! to track what I eat and how I exercise. The program is free and dead simple (the two key feature of most great portable apps), but it's really been doing the trick for me. I feel best about my weight when I am at 153 pounds, and right now I'm at 155.4 and falling. At the current rate, I'll probably be back to 153 pounds in another week or so.