Posts that are kinesthetic-ish
It’s been a while since I wrote about geeky things, so here goes: I love my new desk setup. Several months in the making and saving, a few days in shopping, and a few hours of setup and calibration… and it makes me smile every time I use it.
Design criteria:
- A sit-stand workstation that makes use of my existing laptop, monitor, and keyboard/mouse.
- Assisted lifting that does not require power – which means hydraulics or springs or levers or something of the sort. Sorry, geekdesk.
- Affordable on a grad student’s budget. (This desk is the most expensive piece of furniture in my apartment, but it’s also the one I’ll spend the most time at. The bed is the second most expensive, and it’s probably the one I’ll spend the second most time using, so this seemed fair.)
- Sturdy — which, for something this specialized and load-bearing, means getting quality components meant for the use, rather than cobbling together stacks of boxes and books and clamps myself.
- Portable, such that I can disassemble the components and haul them to the next place in a minivan (better yet: car).
I wanted a sit-stand workstation because I spend ridiculous amounts of time on my computer and am the restless sort, so being able to change positions and maintain proper alignment while I fidget around is a real boon to ergonomics. I’ve made makeshift sitting and standing desks for years, from kitchen counters to book piles to a strategically placed empty dresser, but no matter how well I set them up, a static desk just didn’t seem right.
The past few years of experimentation did teach me about how one should be aligned in both sitting and standing positions, though.
Once you know the proper alignment, all you have to do is measure three dimensions, then figure out how to buy or craft the components so the desk will fit you. Here’s what to measure on yourself:
‘
Based on that, you need equipment with the following specs:
- A = vertical distance between monitor top and keyboard bottom
- B-C = vertical distance the sit-stand mechanism needs to adjust
- Don’t forget to get the weight of your monitor, keyboard, and laptop, or whatever you’re thinking about putting on your sit-stand mechanism, and making sure it can support and lift that!
For all of these, it’s a good idea to get things that adjust beyond the minimums you need – for instance, if my next laptop is bigger and heavier, the stand should still support it. One thing I appreciate about my chosen stand is that the monitor can adjust both together with and independently of the keyboard – that way I can move the whole setup up and down in one go (since dimension A does not change between sitting and standing), and also change the keyboard-monitor height difference (for instance, if a taller friend wants to use my computer for a bit).
Here are the relevant specs on the sit-stand workstation I chose. They didn’t specify dimension A precisely, but the pictures and the 5″ of dimension-A-adjustment specification convinced me that I could get it to fit within my range.
- Weight Capacity: Maximum load on height-adjustment assembly = 31 lbs (14 kg). LCD weight = 6–16 lbs (2.7–7.2 kg), laptop = 6–10 lbs (2.7–4.5 kg), combined weight of LCD/laptop = 12–26 lbs (5.5–11.8 kg)
- † Lift Range: LCD and keyboard adjust 18″ (46 cm) in tandem; LCD and laptop adjust 5″ (13 cm) independently; maximum LCD/laptop height adjustment = 23″ (58 cm)
My final bill of materials:
Total: $580 USD
You’ll notice I chose to put the monitor stand on a giant desk, and use the same surface for digital and paper work. I could also put it on a small table and use that as solely a computer workstation, then have a big desk separate from that just for papers and workshop-type adventures — and I may, depending on the nature of my lab classes in the fall semester (if I have any) or whether I start doing hobby electronics or something of the sort. If you go this route, you can do the whole thing for under $500; just get the ergotron and a cheap but sturdy folding card table, or a small computer desk at Goodwill, and you’ll be all set with a more compact computer desk than mine.
It’s not perfect; I’ve yet to figure out cord management, and adjusting the tension on the spring so it counterbalanced my computer equipment precisely took a bit of awkward fiddling ’till I got it right, but I’m a huge fan. Over the next few months, we’ll see how my back and productivity feel, but as of day 3, I like it very much, and find myself moving it up and down frequently enough (multiple times an hour — told you I was restless) to think I’ve made a rather good investment in this setup.
Saturday, July 9th, 2011 | fedora, kinesthetic, olin | 10 Comments »
Nushio wrote up the RSI session that Sebastian and I did at FUDCon – a belated thank-you to Nushio for this! (Speaking of FUDCon, my lighting talk on croissants also got turned into an opensource.com article that’s sparked some interesting discussion.) Sacha asked what tools I’d recommend for RSI self-are, so here’s my list in no particular order. I have no financial stake in any of these products, I just use ‘em and enjoy ‘em, often on the road. For me, it’s important that a tool be portable, versatile, inexpensive, and effective – so here’s my list. Hopefully it will help someone.
Stuff I take with me on the road
Ben’s Block is a wooden triangular prism that works on the area on the back of your neck just at the base of your skull, between your ears. This is the most site-specific tool I have, and it’s expensive for what it is. However, it’s worth it to me; I carry tremendous neck and shoulder tension, and that space below my skull is what will radiate RSI pain out to everything else if left unchecked. I haven’t found a better way to get that deep tension out in all the tiny little muscles at the base of your head, so I keep this in my luggage when I’m traveling. Warning: if your neck is tight, this will hurt. Use the bluntest side the first time you try it. Actually, use the bluntest side and put a towel over it the first time. You might even have to double up the towel. This thing is pretty intense.
A firm solid rubber ball, about the size of a racquetball. I’ve heard tennis balls work as well. This is the most versatile thing in my arsenal and if I only had room for one item in my luggage this would be it. Use it to work fascia and trigger points – I’ll often use it on the soles of my feet by standing up and stepping on the ball as I roll it around, and also frequently deploy it on my back by leaning against the wall and trapping it between my shoulder blades. Also potentially intense depending on how tight you are. (Hey, you want to feel better, right?)
The Accu-Massage is a portable shoulder/neck rub that quickly comes apart into three nunchuck-sized sections. I could also just ask strangers if I can trade shoulder rubs with them, but sometimes this is slightly less awkward. (However, I will trade shoulder rubs with folks at conferences and such; just ask me. I’ve been told I’m pretty good at shoulder rubs.)
Stuff I keep by my bed at home
Too big or not vital enough to take on the road, but good enough to keep around the house.
Da Vinci Tool – Really, really good for getting underneath the shoulderblades, but when I’m traveling the rubber ball works reasonably well enough to make me not want to take up the extra luggage space. Actually, my Da Vinci Tool is somewhere on Nagle’s desk at Sprout. I should get it back sometime.
My Body Back Buddy is the tool I have and use the least, mostly because I haven’t explored too much of its capabilities yet. It’s too big to travel with, and if I had to ditch one tool, this would be it.
My Armaid is insanely expensive – even more so than the Ben’s Block – and highly specialized, but it does what it does amazingly well, which is release the muscle fibers on my forearm that have gotten stuck together from long hours on the keyboard and frequently cause me localized RSI pain there. The Ben’s Block treats the tension’s starting point, and the Armaid treats the place where the pain first shows up, so I like using them together. It’s also huge and hard to pack, but I have taken it on longer trips in the past and if I could take it everywhere, I would.
Stuff I’m thinking about getting
I’m considering the purchase of a sacro-wedgy (which I realize has the worst product name ever) and/or a spineworx because they work specifically on parts I know I’m consistently getting out of alignment in, and seem like they’ll work according to the various things I’ve learned about bodywork and self-care and what my muscles and bones need. They are still are way cheaper than a good massage session.
Good books
C’mon, my first impulse with any problem is to read about it. What did you expect?
I’d recommend It’s Not Carpel Tunnel Syndrome! to anyone who’s interested in the myriad of perspectives that RSI has gathered – there are many causes and many treatment methodologies, and since everyone’s body and life and motion patterns and therefore RSI is different, the important thing is to find something that works well for you.
I’m a huge believer in self-care and movement education; after your therapist loosens up an area or a muscle, you’d better learn how to keep that muscle loose unless you want to go to therapy sessions forever! The stretches in Sharon Butler’s book have been illuminating for me, as well as Esther Gokhale’s posture method.
My blind spots
I haven’t quite gotten all the pieces that I want or need for my own RSI self-management. My biggest stumbling block right now is finding a way to build up strength – yes, I know I could lift weights, but I need something I’ll actually keep up with. This means I need something mindful and geared towards an overly intellectual, kinesthetically novicelike geek. This is important, because my muscle tone is poor and so I keep collapsing back into bad postures which cause me to get more knots and lapse back towards RSI. I’ve started trying out yoga in the hopes that it might help, and like it so far, but am very open to more suggestions – any thoughts? Exercise is definitely one of my weak points.
Sunday, March 6th, 2011 | fedora, kinesthetic | No Comments »
For the past few weeks, I’ve been getting Rolfing done by Jason Sager, who is fantastic. Some of you know I started Rolfing for my RSI, and that it’s been a positive experience not just in terms of pain relief, physical awareness as well; some of you also know I started dancing in order to get over my fear and awkwardness of physical contact, and that dancing has also been a positive experience in terms of cutting down that anxiety and letting me flow – not overanalyze, but actually connect – with another human being’s body, without fear, and to communicate and express things through motion. So you might imagine how much rejoicing went on in my brain when I stumbled across Jason and discovered that he was a Rolfer and a lindy/blues dance instructor.
We decided to do the Ten Series, since Diana’s earlier work last summer had gotten me out of the zomg everything hurts all the time pain!!! zone and I could now focus more on alignment and awareness and making sure RSI didn’t come back to haunt me the same way ever again, dammit.
The first session was a lot of torso work – ribs, abdomen. Here’s how Jason describes it:
Often referred to as the “freeing the breath” session, the first session focuses on ribs, shoulders, and abdominal muscles. For clients unaccustomed to breath work this is often a surprising session where many report feeling that it redefines their idea of what a full inhale feels like. Session 1 also introduces the idea of breathing into areas of the body as a means to help release tensions.
I’d already gotten my “whoa, breathing!‘ moment with Diana, so this was an expansion on that theme. We started out by having me walk up and down the hallway while Jason watched how my muscles and bones moved in relation to each other. He pointed out that I wasn’t twisting as I walked – my hips stayed locked in one position perpendicular to my walk path, making me waddle like a penguin. My torso muscles somehow wouldn’t let me twist.
As we worked, Jason pointed out that my lower ribs had flared out so my diaphragm was always pulled tight. He applied pressure on the floating ribs to give the diaphragm a chance to ease up, and I was surprised at how difficult it was to get my insides to relax – but suddenly, it was as if stiff cardboard was replaced by pliable sponge, and I felt my diaphragm’s motion and went whoa, that’s weird. I was feeling the internal three-dimensionality of my breathing for what seemed like the first time; I’m used to thinking about my body primarily as it could be mapped or projected to the surface, to my skin.
The tightness in my ribs was fairly localized to the middle section; when I inhaled, the middle section of my ribs didn’t expand –
only the top and bottom of my ribcage did, so it felt like there were separate bellows going in my chest rather than one big integrated breath. We worked on that, and I focused on being aware of the coordination of my breathing; I tend to inhale more than I exhale, so exhaling fully sets me up for better breathing in general. At the end of the session, my breath was integrated from the bottom of my ribcage to somewhere below my collarbone – my neck and shoulders were still too tight to let it go all the way up, but that one’s for later.
The second session started in on feet.
Session 2 is the first step towards rebuilding support in the legs. The
primary territory for this session is below the knee, restoring motion
between the bones of the feet, tuning up the arches, and starting to
rebalance how the body rests on the feet. Depending on need, this
session may also involve some work on the upper legs and hips.
I love walking barefoot, and will kick off my shoes every chance I get, so my feet are actually apparently in pretty decent shape. Sweet! I had ridiculously tight calf muscles, though; instead of splitting into two on either side of my knee, my gastrocnemius had fused into one large mass; the muscle on the outside of the calf that allows the foot to tilt/cup inwards (looking at anatomy diagrams now, possibly the flexor hallucis longus) was also inhibiting my ankle flexion, and sure enough, loosening those gave me a new sense of space – very tiny, very subtle, but there – in my hips when I walked.
I also learned that my quadriceps are actually composed of many parts and layers, and that they run at a slight diagonal instead of the perfectly-vertical single-muscle mass I had imagined. I learned this very, very vividly when Jason started easing apart those layers. Rolfing is intense – and personally, I find that very worthwhile and illuminating. As I walked out of Jason’s office, I could feel the individual muscles in my legs articulating in a way I’d never been aware of before; they were free to move and I was aware of their movement, so now I have a better chance of being able to keep them that way.
That’s all so far; my third session is tomorrow. I’ve also been borrowing Jason’s books, and am starting to learn what sort of books are useful for me in terms of physical awareness. Eric Franklin’s books Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery and Conditioning for Dance have been my favorites, and I’m getting myself a copy of the latter. They combine analysis and science (physics – mechanics and dynamics) of detailed anatomy – which my left-brain engineering self can grasp and pick apart – with pictures and imagery and vivid descriptions of where and how a movement ought to feel. And different ways the same movement can feel, depending on how you think about it!
This stands in stark contrast to a lot of “exercise program” books that only show you photos of what a movement looks like from the outside – and then fills half the book with “Maggie, a mother of 4, lost 40 lbs!” pep stories that… well, good for Maggie, but I don’t really need that sort of motivation. (I want awareness and control, not weight loss, thank you very much.) Franklin’s book is a lovely balance for an overintellectual geek who started out with so little physical awareness she couldn’t look at that picture of Maggie at the gym and imagine what it would feel like to do a lat pulldown.
Will report back after tomorrow’s session on how I’m feeling and what I’ve learned. Mmm, the learnnnnnn.
Sunday, March 6th, 2011 | kinesthetic | No Comments »
Today… was a decompression day. I spent Saturday feeling more and more introverted and getting more passive-aggressively grumpy as a result – I’d simply reached my Too Much Peopleness quota. This happens after extended periods of time in contact with large groups of strangers, and I need solitude to recharge.
It inadvertently started last night after sushi, when I lay down to rest my (swollen) knee and simply… didn’t wake up again until 3:30am, having slept through 2 alarms, Robyn coming in and out, lights turning on and off… I was dead to the world. Woke up at 3:30, 5:30, and 8:30, each time vacillating somewhat miserably between the need to rest (not so much to sleep – which I needed too – but to be by myself for a while) and guilt over being unable to do work when I attempted to do so. At 8:30, when Robyn got up, I decided screw it, I’m going to sleep. My naps became immediately more restful thereafter, but I’ve still only gotten sleep in bits and snatches.
Dancing helped. There’s blues in Portland every Sunday night, so I took the bus up and spun around in my socks for about 2 hours. I even got asked for repeat dances, which… was flattering, but nice. I was definitely hindered slightly by my knee, which would occasionally send stabbing jolts up my leg, but it was a good night, a night of solid connections. A lot of leads with gentle, subtle styles, which was perfect for my energy level (low) and my knee (ouch) and what I wanted to do (listen quietly, not get flung around the room). One lead complimented me on my “good instincts.” I nearly laughed; they’re not so much instincts as they are years of getting over paranoia, and I’m still not all that great. But I did do a few dips tonight, which surprised me, and it was a good way to turn my brain off for a little while. Live band, too.
Reading and writing is a good way to get my functionality back. My ability to process audio is one of the things that drops out when I’m tired – actually, realizing that it has is a good indication to me that I’m tired. My ability to process text is one of the last things to go (if I ever lose it, I’m really in trouble, and I can only remember it happening once in recent memory). It’s challenging to rest, because sleep… is hard. But I can go upstairs and play guitar. The team is in the lobby (so am I) and they’re playing poker (I’ve been writing).
Highest priority tomorrow is slides, slides slides slides. Slides and being present at OSCON; I’m trying to be more gentle with myself about recharging so I can actually take the event on full-steam. There’s a lot I want to learn, a lot of people I want to meet, a lot of stuff I want to do, but I’ve got to be in a shape to do it. HOOYAH. Will make it through! I’ll be good and tired when I reach Chicago this weekend (visiting my parents for a few days, by request).
It’s a long summer, but a good one. I will… collapse in August. I’ll have the time and space I need to breathe then. It’ll be good.
Monday, July 19th, 2010 | kinesthetic | 2 Comments »
These notes are partially in preparation for hanging out with Nagle on this topic at some point.
I haven’t gone dancing since I got back from Raleigh, and should fix that soon. Actually, I’ve been thinking (for several months now) about what I’d like my body to be able to do, and experimenting a little bit in that direction. I’m pleased with the economy of motion I’ve been able to gain more conscious control of when typing (sometimes, when I remember to pay attention) and playing music. The main breakthrough in the past year has been awareness – physically, I haven’t actually gotten more fit since this time last year, but I have become considerably more continuously and subtly aware of how my body’s doing and how various things affect it. I consider my ability to monitor future changes to be a good investment, so despite my grumblings later in this post on how I should be better at X, Y, or Z, I think this was a year well-spent.
I’m a little better about being aware of having a range of motion, but not sufficiently so, and I’m not satisfied with the degree of flexibility I’ve become aware of. I’m playing with some techniques from proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) stretching and seeing whether they make a difference – I haven’t started measuring objectively whether they do, and perhaps I should – but all I know is that it feels good.
Cardiovascularly and endurance-wise… well, things could be better. I’ve tried doing things like the couch to 5k running plan before, but the problem is that I’m (1) hyperactive and easily bored, and (2) am terrible with cardiovascular exercise that requires considerable effort to context-switch. In other words, I’m not going to take 5 minutes to stop working, change into shorts and sneakers, and then go run for 30 minutes. I need to be able to context-switch between whatever-I-am-doing and yay being hyper yay! in – let’s say 30 seconds. Still haven’t found a great lifehack for that yet – although I can drop into throwing punch combos while continuing to read on my computer screen on the (frequent) days I work from home. I’m willing to work hard in terms of doing physical exercise, I just need to find ways to make getting into that working-hard the path of least resistance. I think I need my exercise to be more social, but I’m not stable enough (even if I didn’t travel at all) to make that sort of commitment with other people. Meh.
I’m highly displeased at the general state of atrophy my muscles are in, though I admit that having them mostly unknotted is a triumph in itself; I do stand taller and walk straighter than I used to, and I’m a little more aware of the places where that’s not yet the case because something I don’t yet understand is stuck. I’m aware of it enough to rub out some of my knots with various implements like a small rubber ball for my shoulderblades and what looks like a giant blue crabclaw-cracker for my forearms, and I’ll frequently end the evening by working out those knots and feeling the warm blood slowly come back into my fingers.
I hypothesize that better muscle tone in my back, shoulders, and forearms would improve the situation considerably, so I jumped on the one-month groupon for metrorock (thanks to Liz for the heads-up) and look forward to my first consecutive month in Boston (…April, I think) so I can take full advantage of it. I don’t expect the experiment to last beyond that; it’s purely a “let’s see if building up these muscles does indeed help” thing, and I tend to do well with the “go almost-every-day for a short-time-period” style of trying new things out.
Between now and then, I’m learning how to exercise in ways compatible with travel; I’m doing a lot of inclined-$bodyweight_exercise because I’m often not strong enough to have good control when doing, say, a normal push-up. Basically, I’m trying to get to the point where I can go climbing and have fun without too much worry of overdoing it; I went once with some friends when we were in college and enthusiastically rendered myself unable to move without great pain the next day, and I’m… trying to avoid that now. Suggestions for travel exercise equipment welcome. I’ve been thinking about getting one of the lifeline gym bag kits – the jungle gyms in particular look like a lot of fun – but I want to make sure that whatever I get won’t just sit and gather dust.
I’m eating relatively well; I’m pleased with that. Cooking a lot of vegetables and stocking the fridge with healthy things gives me both a “let us relax now… with FIRE!” outlet via the cooking part and a path-of-least-resistance to eating things that are good for me more often than not. And honestly, I’m going to have fried cheese and beer and giant burgers because my metabolism will not be like this forever and I like it and it’s tasty – I mostly want to make sure I get vitamins and stuff as well. I could be better about not being dehydrated. My skin is perpetually dry, but ever since I moved the lotion bottle from my bedroom to the bathroom, I’ve actually been using lotion, and this has improved. Maybe I need to get a pair of 2L soda bottles, fill ‘em up with water each morning, and finish both by the end of every day.
Sleep schedule: oh geez. Where do I start with this? I still don’t have one. The monthlong agreement with Andrew from September 2009 to get 6 consecutive hours per night was aggravating, but ultimately good for me. Perhaps I should try that again. I suspect that coupling hard physical exercise with a regular sleep schedule will be a Good Idea in terms of helping me stay… not necessarily steadier, but more able to buffer my Random ADHDness. Controlled sprints over wild spurts – I can get a lot done in wild spurts, and I’ve done that since I was a little kid, but now the thing is learning how to harness that, direct it towards what I want to sprint at, when I want to sprint at it… this is very hard for me to do, it’s several years since I started trying, and it’s… getting better. Not yet up to standards. But better.
Actually, this might be a good week to try something I’ve been meaning to experiment with for a while. What happens if I try to shift my wake-up time significantly earlier – say, 5am? That means I have to head to bed by 11 in order to get 6 hours (skeptical, but… okay). I’ll start by seeing how it goes tomorrow morning, and I’ll head off to braindump the rest of my buffer from the day and then plan out tomorrow and wind down.
Sunday, February 7th, 2010 | kinesthetic | 1 Comment »
Been experimenting with massage tools to loosen up my own muscle knots. There’s a rubber wedge that unfreezes my shoulder blade, a sort of crab-cracker for the neck and shoulders, a wooden block that frees my neck, rollers for my forearm. They hurt like the devil, but in the good way that means blood flow and mobility will follow. They’ll be travelling with me all of July, marking the first time since my extended 3+ month China/Philippines trip in 2007 that I’ve packed anything larger than a backpack. (Not counting moving between residences of my own, of course).
Now that I’m starting to get used to the feeling of muscles releasing via massage, I need to learn how to keep them loose. One blocker to that is that I’m weak – by that I don’t mean out of shape in general (though I could certainly get better), but that specific muscles simply haven’t been used in years because they’ve either been knotted up or bound by other muscles that were. I don’t have the strength or the control (proper posture is still something of a crapshoot; I repeatedly stand or sit until I get it right, but I can’t consciously move myself into position) to use them properly, which means I still overuse the wrong muscles, which means things knot up again. So I am going to look at awareness first, then control, then strength, then flexibility. Slowly. It’ll take weeks and months and years.
I’ve become increasingly interested in the physical feedback mechanisms that work for piano playing, which I am still quite new to. I want to get that peripheral awareness of my body into computing; in both, you submerge yourself into your instrument in order to create something, so if you have to consciously and constantly figure out how to use your instrument, it’s no good – but piano-playing does this in such a way that you must stay very aware of your body’s relationship with the instrument to perform well, whereas there is no such immediate performance incentive with computing. In other words, while bad posture while typing might make your hands hurt in a couple hours, bad posture while playing piano makes you sound terrible right now. Dimming my monitor unless my posture’s good? I don’t know… but I’m starting to leave space open to think of hacks to make for this.
While talking with my aunt (the kindergarten teacher) about how young children learn to use and move their bodies, and how I’ve always been physically awkward and kinesthetically unaware (and to compensate, extremely cerebral), we both realized I’d spent a large chunk of my toddlerhood in a hospital bed. 2 months in a coma is a long time for a 2-year-old to not be running around, and I was in a bed for quite some time after I came out of that coma. Physical therapy as a 3-year-old let me walk and sit again, but whie I can perform all these actions functionally, I wasn’t doing them very consciously, or well, throughout most of my life.
Reading through early childhood motor development books and exercises (apparently this is where gym teachers get their stuff from) has been instructive. Some of their exercises are hard! And it’s frustrating, because my brain can think of how a body ought to be able to do this, but my body won’t, in subtle ways – my hips won’t rotate like so when I sit, and now it’s not just a child’s unfamiliarity wih having a body that I need to fight, but two decades of habits embedded in the body of a young adult. At least I won’t have another growth spurt and another body mapping to relearn in a few years. If I get a tripod, I’ll try to film some of them so I can document my physical awkwardness diminishing.
I love learning in unfamiiar worlds. It’s a game to see how quickly I can become fluent in something completely foreign to me, to learn how to learn something from scratch. In some ways, it’s a blessing I missed out on a lot of things as a kid; it allows me to see them with fresh eyes as a conscious, grown-up learner… and I’ll never take knowing anything for granted. Or at least I’ll do my best.
Friday, June 26th, 2009 | kinesthetic | 1 Comment »
Today I found out what it means to take a deep breath, one that makes your ribcage expand, your whole spine stretch out as the oxygen comes in. There’s scar tissue that’s been in my chest for two decades from the pneumonia days. Imagine a 3-year-old with her tiny ribcage a battlefield of chest tube scars. Imagine this kid growing up, shooting up like a weed into lanky adolescence, scar tissue stretching across the much, much larger torso of a 23-year-old.
Imagine that some of that twisted corset just got released.
Imagine the surprise of feeling your ribcage move. Undulate. Articulate. Expand like a balloon when you inhale. Not fluidly, and not symmetrically – my ribcage feels like a blotchy tough thick latex balloon blowing out in weird lumps – but it’s enough for me to know that oh, it’s supposed to move, supposed to feel like something other than carved wood, that this expansion and contraction and elongation that I’m starting to feel should become my conception of What Normal Lungs And Spines And Ribs Do.
I wonder if I could find a peak flow meter somewhere and test out my new lung capacity. This kind of thing is what I’ve needed; a different physical and intellectual model for what my body could become. Your shoulders move! Your collarbones articulate! You should be able to exhale, inhale, run, sing – your body is a living, moving thing. Not just an ambulatory robot that can get your brain between keyboards; it only felt that way because everything’s been locked up for so long.
I need to find ways to not lose this.
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009 | kinesthetic, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Nagle reminded me that there were some things I haven’t shared yet (also, note the new “kinesthetic” category for this blog; my past two somatic awareness posts are also on there now.)
Keyboard awareness has been key for me (pun intended). This is with both senses of the word “keyboard” – computer and piano. Add that to the “and my elbow is double-jointed” thing, and you get “hello, risk factors for messing up your arms early in life!” I’m stunned I lasted this long, really. Anyway.
There’s a great contrast between the piano, where I’m acutely aware of what I’m doing because it’s my “job” to listen for this fine-tuned feedback that depends on what my muscles do (it’s not perfect, but it’s easy to adjust when I’m reading books because I can immediately go “yeah, that sounds good!”) and the computer, where my job is almost to be not aware of how I’m sitting… I feel like I need to be able to be unaware of the physicality of my input methods in order to get the mental work onto my screen. So I’m continuously trying to transfer knowledge back and forth between both.
I’m also becoming more aware of what my level of mental and physical awareness is when I am…
- at the computer
- at the piano, sightreading
- at the piano, playing something I know, having a good time, playing musically and listening…
1 and 2 are both very cerebral, and somatic awareness is almost nil. 3 has a ton of awareness in both directions. Based on this, one breakthrough was from trying to find the 4th counterpart – computer with awareness. I tried to type while listening to my computer keyboard, playing it melodically with a rhythm and body motion as if it were a piano piece – and different kinds of piano pieces (Prokofiev != Bach in terms of everything, including physical movement, etc). Instead of musical phrases, I leaned into and paced my typing to sentence phrases. This didn’t disrupt my mental flow as much and gave me some access to my physical one, but there’s a ways to go before using my computer can be more than a just-my-brain activity.
Yes, it did strike me that a “you’re typing too hard” indicator might be a useful bit of technology to exist. Since the computer doesn’t know how hard you’re striking keyboard keys, it’d have to be on the keyboard itself, or on a listener near the keyboard that can
It still feels awkward, though – it’s hard to determine when my physical awkwardness comes from inexperience doing the right thing, or simply doing the wrong thing. I wonder if I’ll get a gauge for that in time.
Friday, May 8th, 2009 | kinesthetic, music | No Comments »
I met Maya, Esther’s daughter and the teacher of this weekend’s workshop, yesterday. This is a good prompt to write more notes for Nagle – or rather, using Nagle as an excuse to write more notes for myself. Taking a note from Nagle, here are photographs. As going shirtless is not as socially appropriate for me, these photos are a little less informative. It’ll come as no surprise that my default posture is… well, let’s insert your favorite negative adjective here, shall we?
The right two pictures are same as the left two, with some annotations (line of hips, as indicated by the waistband of my jeans; vertical line drawn from my heels, tilt of head as inferred by the angle of my glasses (which weren’t repositioned on my nose between photographs, so this should be relatively accurate). On the left of each two-photo set is my usual slump. On the right is me attempting to tallstand (a technique from Esther’s book).
When I tallstand:
- I’m taller! (Not as much as the photo shows. The camera is also shifted a little.
- Weight shifts towards my heels; I feel more balanced, like there’s less muscular effort holding me upright. There still is muscular effort, though, and plenty of it. A lot of that muscular effort seems to come from my quads.
- My pelvis is a little more anteverted…
- …but I think I might be curving my lower back inwards and compressing it a little in order to antevert my pelvis. I’ve worked to minimize a lower back compression, and mostly gauge my progress by how tall I am, but I don’t know if this is as good as it can get, or if there are other adjustments I should make (and how to get somatic feedback on them).
- My sternum definitely feels more open, even if my shoulders only roll back that far (they’ve gotten better in the last 2 weeks, so you can imagine how they started out).
- My head tilts back more, but not enough. My neck won’t straighten more than that – the muscles are too tight. As best as I can identify them, the culprits are my sternocleidomastoids, levator scapulae, subclavius, maybe my scalenus anterior, and the traps and pecs in general (more pecs, I think). This note might be something to take to Abi. This is based on my observations that the stretch/tension when I tallstand (or roll my shoulders back in general) seems to lie below my clavicle, between my sternum and behind my ears (the back of the jaw), down the back sides of my neck radiating up into the base of my skull, and directly in front of my shoulder (the space between and directly below my glenohumeral and sternoclavicular joints).
So, more concretely, questions:
- Have I missed or misidentified any likely culprits on the long list of suspected tight muscles? What kind of self-care can I do to release them? (Definitely also an Abi question.)
- How do I get feedback/correction on not “crunching” my lower back while tallstanding?
- Since tight muscles mean there’s a pronounced forward cantilevering jut in my neck (that shouldn’t actually be there) for a little while longer, how can I best hold my head to help adjust it in the right direction as my muscles loosen? If I tried to make my chin level, it’d jut forward more; what’s a good compromise?
- I’ve been having a hard time monitoring my neck alignment in general, since you can’t see a mirror you’re facing sideways to. Aside from having other people take photos, what can I do? I’d love for this to be kinesthetic rather than visual feedback. Note also that my shoulders are still tight enough that raising my hand to my neck to feel it changes the way I carry my neck, so that may not work so well.
- Should my quads be activated while standing? If not, how can I release them without feeling like I’m going to topple over?
I’m starting to get to the limitations of how far I can learn about this for myself, which is great, because tomorrow is the start of the workshop, and my questions list is slowly falling into place.
Thursday, May 7th, 2009 | kinesthetic, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
I promised Nagle that I’d keep a log of how my work with my back (really, more like “work with my physical awareness”) was going over the 12 days I was in Chicago, and then I sort of crashed and went to sleep after Day 1 (yesterday). So here’s the update for May 1 and 2.
So far, it’s been “proper tools make a difference” time – after drastically expanding my physical awareness over the last few weeks in Boston (massage, bodywork, exercising, reading books on anatomy and actually caring about them, looking at how I played the piano, etc) I came to the conclusion that my progress would be much accelerated with the proper tools. Okay, so I’m an engineer. It’s also easy to see that improving your typing habits is greatly facilitated by not using a laptop keyboard that kinks your wrists in all sorts of interesting, non-ergonomic, and (eventually) painful angles.
Even if my pain threshold is as high as it ever was (in the past, I have walked around for several days with acute stomach pain before finding out it was appendicitis, went up a mountain while suffering from what we later discovered was acute bronchitis, and so on) my pain awareness threshold is dramatically lowering. Basically, I see problems earlier, so I can stop them before they really start. This gets annoying, because keyboards and train seats and all sorts of things now trigger in me the “…wait, this is terrible!” reaction within 5-15 minutes.
Anyway, tools. I am now the owner of a curved keyboard, thanks to the recommendations of Ryan and Spang and a loaner of an older version of this thing from Greg. It is not a perfect keyboard (what did they do to the function keys? they’re little nubs!) but the feel is terrific, and for the first time I think I’m actually not living up to my summer title of “Keyboard Thunder.” The keys are soft. And not just to me. And my wrists have not yet sent out “this will hurt later” signals. So that’s fantastic, albeit Ridiculously Expensive. I may also get a keyboard tray when I return to Boston. Chalk this up to tuition money for the month.
I’m also trying out the G1 phone with Android to see if it transforms the things I can do dramatically enough for me to keep it despite its (extremely hefty) price tag. So far, indicators look good. It’s subtly enhancing my ability to answer random questions on the fly without making me addicted (a-la-Crackberry) to it; I need to take better notes and ask more specific questions on what I want from a phone platform, but that’s in a few days as I’m still in the “mess around” stage of things. The killer app is really IRC – it’ll let me be online and interacting with the communities I work with in real-time without having to be glued to my (very non-ergonomic) laptop. (Weirdly enough, I am happier, healthier, and more productive when not slouching at a desk all day. Who knew?) I haven’t gotten that to work yet. So.
That’s the gadgetry. What about the back?
Well, yesterday I learned that plane seats are awful and I don’t yet have strong enough core and back muscles to keep myself upright in proper posture for a BOS-ORD flight by dint of sheer will. Today I learned that they’re also not quite strong enough to do it on a 90 minute car ride either. I’m working on conditioning those muscles now. I’ve also learned that oven mitts make pretty decent supplementary padding to make car seats more ergonomic (we were delivering kitchen equipment to one of the houses my parents are working on).
My shoulders have reached a new plateau of being able to roll back; that is, they’re finally comfortable with this level of stretch, but after some range-of-motion exploration today it seems that the tension in my pectorals and various neck muscles around the collarbone (I haven’t learned the names of all the muscles there yet; that’s for later this week) will keep them from going back further as of right now. As my shoulders learn to un-slump, my neck regains the ability of doing things other than cantilevering forward.
This leads to the awkward problem of “how do I read?” and “how do I write on paper on a desk?” because I am used to doing both of these by craning my neck down. Still haven’t figured these out. Angling forward from the hips feels weird and straining on my back; angling the chin stretches my neck, looking down doesn’t scale terribly well. And I can’t really carry a drafting table with me at all times. More to play with.
My feet have atrophied from 2 years in shoes. I’m used to walking barefoot around my room, my school, my dorm, anywhere I can get away with it. The number of hours per day I have spent in such places dramatically decreased after graduation. They’re still pretty decent; all 3 of my foot arches (6 total for 2 feet) have at least a semblance of muscle tone and feel darn happy walking on grass and through woods and creeks and don’t get tired doing that at all, and I can pick up things with my toes and everything.
Still, I have been noticing over the past year (though I didn’t recognize its significance until reading a couple books and talking with Nagle) that after extended periods in shoes with no arch support or carrying heavy loads, my feet felt flatter, and that felt bad. And that my feet get tired after walking on asphalt or concrete for more than a few minutes, something that used not to bother me at all. So I think they may have gone from “pretty freakin’ healthy” to “minimally maintained, but still respectably decent compared to most of the industrialized world.” I want my old feet back again. Working on it. (Grimacing because I may have to purchase inserts for my hiking shoes. I do not like owning More Things, in general. Ah well.)
Today I played a lot with the tiny muscles in my hands – or running through my hands, anyway, since they actually route through the forearm. There are some extremely tender spots on my palm, most notably in the fleshy ball underneath my thumb. I’ve noticed a few times that when I found a sore spot on my palm and pressed it, it was hard and knotty; if I kept pressing (and it hurt) after a while the knot would soften and I would feel something in my fingers relax. It didn’t work for every spot I tried. And there are some that are (what seem to me to be) soft but are just screaming tender masses. So I am not sure exactly what is going on. Will investigate anatomy of hand.
Tomorrow:
- calculate net worth. Remember, I’m at home to work on the “I’m going to manage my own finances, mom and dad” thing – and we’re moving slowly here.
- practice piano, focusing on the key of Eb. Bonus: memorize Groovin’ High chord progression.
- work on my neck and the muscles surrounding it (probably a lot of shoulders stuff) – both in terms of playing with moving it around and in terms of learning the anatomy surrounding it.
If I’ve got time, I could probably…
- install/configure the Hear@Boston wiki
- go through a jazz listening exercise with Larry Kernfeld’s book (should transfer CD tracks to iPod for the duration of checking out this book, really)
- try Dragon Naturally Speaking with my Zoom H2 as the microphone instead of the sort of enh one shipped with the software. I’m getting bad recognition results, but the software is also complaining about sound quality, and comments I’ve read online indicate the mic might be the problem.
- get IRC to work on my new phone
- …or other random things I decide I want to do.
A final note: by far the most telling sign of progress with my hands and body is that I just typed this entire post at full speed (using a qwerty layout, since I’m on my parents’ desktop) and my hands are just now starting to go “hm… you may want to rest soon.” No pain. Just gentle awareness. After typing 1350 words. Yessss.
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 | kinesthetic, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
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