Breaking the TV Shackles

It doesn't seem possible, but my month without TV is over!  What happened to you, October?  Blink of an eye....

Ah, October, you went by so fast!

I noticed two somewhat negative behavioral developments during my month without TV:

1. I spent much of the time I would have wasted watching shows on Netflix repeatedly checking my email, Facebook, and OKC accounts.  
2. I hardly got any knitting done and I put off folding laundry for almost a week, because these are tasks I typically do while watching entertainment.

Hmmm, there may have been some logic in combining my no Internet & no TV months after all...  That said, there were some very positive behavioral developments over October:

Sweatin' to the Tube

Last night, while explaining Operation Consumption Liberation and October's challenge to a new friend, I had a momentary freak-out: "ACK!  I did an exercise DVD the other day.  Is that cheating?" Technically, in the sense that my eyes were somewhat trained on the boob tube for ~25 minutes, yes, I did break my rule.  But I didn't enjoy it.  I mean, I sweated and suffered! 

Sadly, I was not Sweatin' to the Oldies (2) the other day.

After a minute or two of consideration, I decided that exercise DVDs are a totally legitimate exemption to my month without DVDs, TV, Hulu, and Netflix. This is a distinction of healthiness. While there are some people for whom aerobic activity is not advisable without the supervision of a doctor, exercise is a crucial component for healthy living. Working out along with a small-screen Denise Austin or Richard Simmons or Jillian Michaels might not be as effective as running a 5k or working with a trainer at the gym, but it IS good for the ticker.  There are clear and undeniable benefits to one's overall quality of life.

It is much more difficult to identify such health benefits in the act of watching TV programs and DVDs for sheer entertainment.  Yes, television programs and movies can engage the brain and educate (see NOVA, Sesame Street, Charlie Rose, or Jeopardy), stimulate some of the senses (see the impressive visual effects on Game of Thrones, costumes on Mad Men, or consider Ken Burns' "Jazz"), and provoke cathartic releases. (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is good for hysterical laughter to the point of tears, for example.  Or watching any movie on an airplane will incite me to cry.)  And sometimes, after a super busy or emotionally taxing day, it feels good to many of us to sit down and simply tune out for a little while to whatever mindless drivel is on the tube.  

Mad (Wo)Men: Why don't people in the real world dress like this?

The problem is how often we sit down in front of the TV to tune out for a little while and then don't get up for two, three, or four hours because we've been sucked into an America's Next Top Model marathon on VH1.  Or we stay up way too late watching whichever Netflix-streaming show we're currently obsessed with because we HAVE TO KNOW what happens in the next episode, and the next, and the one after that.  

I justify such sprees by multitasking: I file paperwork, I knit, I fold laundry.  But am I efficient at those tasks?  Not usually.  In fact, the one thing I seem to do faster and more in front of the TV is eat.   So let's review: I'm spending hours sitting around lethargically, dragging out household tasks, eating empty calories, and I'm still going to bed much too late.  There is nothing healthy about this slate of co-morbid habits.  They are human, but they are not healthy.  This is exactly why I decided to do a month of no TV etc.

You dare to turn off the Elimination Panel?

There are many other ways we can choose to entertain, stimulate or refresh ourselves at the end of the day.  We can call up or go out with an old friend and catch up.  We can go to a concert or gallery,  take a bath, or take a walk.  Shoot, if I'd been smarter in designing my October, I would have vowed to replace TV viewing with making out--so much more entertaining and stimulating than TV! (Though not exactly relaxing...I hope!)  Any of these connect us more with the three-dimensional world and do more to promote good health.  That said, following along with an exercise DVD is as 3D of a TV-watching experience as one is ever going to find. 

I will say, nine days into October, that I'm not having a hard time not watching TV et al. at home ever night.   However, thus far, I'm not seeing a remarkable improvement in my productivity or healthy habits, probably because I'm filling the void left by TV and DVDs and streaming with surfing the web and checking Facebook repeatedly.  Oops.  Maybe I should have merged my Superfluous Web Browsing and No TV/Netflix/etc. months like I contemplated earlier this year.  What happened to more evening walks?  So that's my goal for the next week: less browse, more walk.  

What co-morbid bad habits plague you?  How does watching the small screen enrich your life and how does it deplete your life?  I'd love to hear about your experiences!

Until next time...

Low Gas Wrap

Cherry blossom avenue: so, so pretty!

I’m a little amazed at how rapidly April flew by.  For Low Gas Consumption Month, I’d meant to write a commentary about Earth Day and the environment, but time got away from me, and here we are on, the first of May. 

Ahh, spring, you sure took your sweet time arriving this year!

I drove up to Shoreline to volunteer three times this month.  Other than that, I didn't get in my car--driving approximately 40 miles for the whole month.  When I was driving to Shoreline last Saturday morning, I felt like I was dreaming because it felt so foreign to me after a two-week break.  Then I realized I better snap out of it, because driving in that kind of mental state is dangerous! 

If only I-5 were always so unoccupied.

I confess, I do enjoy driving.  But I also enjoy walking and biking (especially when it isn’t raining!), and I find the practice of riding the bus to be beneficial.  (The loss of control over when you leave and when you arrive offers good practice in patience and adaptation for much more serious loss-of-control situations.  And, for a writer, there is always someone of intrigue on the bus.) 

Anyway, now that my low gasoline consumption is winding down, I intend to continue using alternate forms of transportation more than I did before.  The price in gas hasn’t exactly dropped; CO2 emissions still aren’t good for the environment; and the weather is still continuing to improve (fingers crossed).  I’m setting a loose goal for myself here and now: I am going to try to consume no more than one tank of gas a month.  Of course, things do come up (multiple airport runs, vacations), and I won’t punish myself for that.  But I would like to incline my mind to consider other options before driving.

Goal: more biking around Greenlake this summer.

Not that you need any more pushing than the price at the pump, but I really want to encourage you all to try driving less.  We all have excuses of why we need to drive.  It does take some mental and logistical rearranging to bike or carpool or bus, and there are times in life when that kind of thought is in much shorter demand than cash for gas.  For those of you with young children, I know it is often impractical to impossible to ditch the car.  But there are also the undeniable benefits of biking and walking with kids: it doesn’t just promote physical activity, but the world outside our homes offers an endless learning lab. 

Walk learning opportunity #23: is it a feral cat or not?

For those of you in Seattle, Friday, May 20 is the official 2011 Bike to Work Day.  If you’ve got yourself a pair of wheels, give a bike commute a try on this one day.

Anyway, Operation Consumption Liberation now moves onto my second month of curbing my frivolous spending, the Goods and Services edition.

It's a good time to be less reliant on my car.

 

The State at the Pump: U-District.

I mean, really, did I time my Low Gas Consumption month perfectly, or what? 

Gas prices aside, I should also note that the weather in Seattle has improved since the first week of April.  Not a wild improvement, but I did hear the weatherman say that La Nina is WEAKENING, and to expect a "weather-neutral summer."  I can get behind that. 

Because the sky was more sunny than cloudy today, I decided to make the most of my leisure Sunday morning and walk to the yoga studio where I've been doing an immersion all weekend.  Which is located on Capitol Hill.  Five miles from my place.  Apparently, I don't need to drive to the mountains to get in a nice little hike.

And it was a really nice walk. As I walked, I recalled a college assignment from a Renaissance and Reformation history class I took at the University of Idaho.  We had to walk from Moscow, ID to Troy, ID--an 11-mile distance--and then write a three-page paper about our experience.  I think the assignment was part of a unit on The Return of Martin Guerre; the professor wanted us to have a sense of how peasants traveled in the 16th century, or something. Honestly, it was a somewhat useless assignment, but I remember it was a really lovely day when I did the walk.  I remember being a little scared of getting hit by a car when walking along Highway 8 (I think there is actually a bike trail now), but all and all, it was a nice way to pass the morning.  But not something you do everyday.

I'm not going to write a three-page paper about my walk today, because I think that I'd say about the same thing: nice way to pass my morning, but not something I can do everyday.  So, instead of writing three-pages, here's a little photo essay of my walk today! 

Spring has sprung: local color on my street

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lake Union view from the University Bridge

Le Fournil Bakery on Eastlake. Those are giant cubes of butter.  Butter!

The I-5/WA-520 Junction--never so quiet as on a Sunday AM!

Bruce Lee's last resting place, Lakeview Cemetery

Louisa Boren Lookout. Thar be Lake Washington and Bellevue, mateys!

The tower at Volunteer Park.  Would have been a great day to climb it!

Eager brunchers waiting outside Coastal Kitchen

Space Needle and the Sound!

View of downtown, and a sky full of bus wires--Pine & 15th Ave E

And that's all, folks!  Hope your weekend was as lovely as mine!

Almost Pedal Time... (!)

http://atom.smasher.org/gas-station/

My challenge for the month of April is a biggie.  In fact, while I’ve been a little intimidated by all of my previous challenges, I have to confess, I’m nervous as hell about this next one.  Because April is the month I’ve chosen to cut back my consumption of gasoline.

Now, anyone who drives a car or pays any attention to the news knows that, recently, the price of gasoline has been increasing faster than you can say Exxon.  GasBuddy.com has this feature where you can chart out the historical gas retail price averages for many North American markets over different time periods, ranging from one month to six years.  According to the chart I pulled up for Seattle, average gas prices for regular unleaded have gone up 60 cents per gallon since Christmas Day, and half of that price increase has been in the last month.  That's a 1-cent increase per day.  As I’m writing this, the average price of gas per gallon in Seattle is $3.748, $0.206 cents higher than the national average. 

So my upcoming month of limited gasoline consumption is certainly timely from a budget perspective.  Of course, when I decided to embark on my Operation Consumption Liberation in late December, back in the days when the Seattle average gas price was $3.18 (and I thought that was high!), the current wave of political unrest in the Middle East had just begun to heat up.  I had no idea how much of a good idea an April gas vacay would be.  Instead, I chose April for the following reasons:

1. Earth Day is in April, so I wanted to do something good for the environment.
2. April is a 30-day month, not a 31-day month, like May.
3. The weather is warmer in April than in, say, super-short February, which is important given that I’ll be walking more, biking more, and waiting for buses more.  (I’ll be going into all of this in my next post.)
4. Seattle is amazingly beautiful in the springtime—last year, I was training heavily for a half marathon during April and May, and I really enjoyed running around so much and seeing all the different flowers blooming.
5. In fact, I heart Seattle so much in the spring that I don’t want to miss a moment of it, so I don’t really want to leave town.  A low-gas consumption month kind of requires no trips on the airplane, right?

Spring=pretty flowering dogwoods on my street

 Of course, while April is warmer than February, it isn’t typically a warm month.  And April isn’t the driest month of the year in Seattle either.  Here’s a little chart to illustrate Seattle’s average monthly high and low temperatures and average monthly precipitation from www.usclimatedata.com:
 

Source: U.S. Climate Data

 Actually, that ~2-inch average April rainfall looks pretty sweet compared to the soggy >5-inch fall and winter months.  Still, those 2 inches of rain are behind most of my anxiety about going car-free this coming month. I'm not keen on biking in the rain.  It isn't just the inconvenience of getting soaked between home and the office; I am afraid.  I'm scared I will wipe out while riding downhill on a wet road, breaking my collarbone and totaling my bike.  For the record, other bicycle-riding worries include: getting hit by a car, going too slow for an impatient driver and getting yelled at, and getting laughed at and passed by other bicyclists while I have to walk my bike up another one of Seattle's big-arse hills.

A little hill--I can bike up this one.  Barely.

Thus, it isn't surprising that I've been thinking a lot lately about how I can avoid biking during low-gas month.  For example: I can take the bus!  However, given my desire to cut both my overall gas consumption (buses run on gas, yo.) and my spending ($2.25 non-peak/$2.50 peak bus fare with 2-hour transfer), I've decided to limit my bus usage for the month too.

"Well," thinks bike-fearing Jess, "if I can't bus all the time, I can walk!"  Sure, I can walk to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the library, but walking takes time.  On Tuesday, I decided to find out just how long it takes to walk home from my writing office.  +45 minutes.  One way.  It was a lovely day for a walk, but I can't spend 90 minutes walking to the office every day.  Maybe one way, once a week.

"Then perhaps I won't go to the office very much all month..."  Umm, speaking of wasting money...  I pay rent, I better use it.  Carpool?  Don't know anyone else in the building, everyone has their own weird hours, no.  There's just no way around it.  If I'm going to dump the car and limit the bus, I'm going to need to get on the bike.

Look, I live near an official bike route!

 So, yesterday, a gorgeous sunny day, I pulled my bike out of storage, dusted it off, and put air in the tires.  I put on my helmet, and consulted Google Maps on my smartphone for bike route advice to the office.  Then I biked it.  And yes, I got a smarmy look from one or two drivers who had to drive around my slow self, and yes, there were some painful hills, including one where I had it got steep so quick that I had to hop off and push my bike up the hill.  But I made it there and back.  And it only took 20 minutes each way. Of course, yesterday was fair weather biking.  Sooner or later, I'm going to have to face my fear of wet road conditions. 

Anyway, I just wanted to write about my pre-April planning and some of my concerns.  Also, do you have any great rainy-biking advise for me? Please, send it my way, along with any good luck wishes, prayers if you prefer....  I'll be laying out my rules for low-gas April early next week.

(Oh, yeah, I'm doing fine with no alcohol March.  As I mentioned in my last post, I'm doing a spring-cleaning week of no sweets to get my sugar consumption under control again--four days in and feeling sane still!)