Music and Emotion

Lately I've been revisiting my youth by filling my Android playlist with Guns N' Roses. I used to listen to a lot of GnR when I was a teen; they were among the first few bands I took an instant liking to (the other notable being Skid Row) in my adolescence, but I didn't start forming an opinion as to why they stood out. Until recently.

Music, in its basest form, exists to elicit a mood, to evoke one or more emotions. If we take a look at Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, we can categorize a basic range of emotion which includes Joy, Sadness, Trust, Disgust, Fear, Anger, Surprise and Anticipation. Which of these emotions translates to feelings which can be lyrically expressed in music? Joy and Sadness, certainly; love and loss are common musical themes. But what if there is an absence of lyrical content in music? What is left?

I've noted that the building blocks of music are threefold: beat, groove, and melody. Defining at least one of each of these three gives you a basic song. Likewise, the absence of any one of these three may very well leave a basic song feeling empty and unfinished; the listener feels as though the song is missing something.

This topic warrants further exploration; I'll return to it in a later blog entry.

Paleodad

I've been long thinking on how to approach changing my eating habits. My research has taken me down a few different paths, and I'm really wondering if maybe there is a nutrition system which doesn't violate others?

• I have an interest in veganism for the health benefits, but I would miss certain things (milk, eggs, the occasional steak, butter, Christmas turkey); I'm not wholly certain that I want to go down the road of substitutions for things that I do like, and consuming enough protein certainly takes extra care.
• An ovo-lacto vegetarian nutrition system would certainly alleviate some of that, but there again I'm missing certain meats that are currently part of my daily life.
• On the other end of the meatatarian spectrum, the Atkins system (while dangerous) contains a key element: simple carbohydrates are completely omitted from the menu.
• More recently, I've been turned on to the Paleo diet, which purports to eliminate "man made" foods from the menu, focus on healthy choices, and champions a balanced, well thought-out meal planning system.

Given my workout routine, and the complete lack of things like rice, cereals, white potatoes, and wheat, I think the Paleo diet is quite possibly the best choice for me at this point. That's not to say it's right for everyone, but I believe that, with a little planning, it could go a long way for me.

Intensity

I hurt my elbow in October of 2012; I immediately had to drop any sort of training I was doing in favor of avoiding exacerbating the bursitis any more than I already had. Not being the type of person to enjoy admitting failure, I opted to lay low for a while, endure the pain where it struck (of particular interest was lifting a can of coffee grounds, which automatically caused agony to grip my elbow).

Well, it's been months. The torment of inaction has been nagging at me, and I think my elbow is back up to where it should be. I have decided to ease back into my workout routine (called High Intensity Interval Training, for the curious), and see how I feel over the course of the next short period of time.

The damage:

• seated cable pull-down (8 reps, 3 sets)
• crunches (32 reps)
• barbell curls (8 reps, 3 sets)
• barbell shoulder squats (8 reps, 3 sets)

This was last night's workout. Not huge, not overly intense, but it's what I needed to bootstrap my reintegration into the lifestyle I'm trying to build for myself. My blood was pumping, my heart was pounding, and I felt great when I relaxed afterward.

Today is a little different; muscles that I'd worked are singing their usual tune, and I am looking positively toward the next workout. I wish I could do more, but I want to take it slowly to avoid further injury.

This is it

I've been longing for change for a while now. Today marks a new enterprise in which I intend to make significant life-altering decisions which will (hopefully) echo for decades to come.