Thoughts About Losing Weight (Again)

Until I was about fifty, I was a jogger, and my weight wasn't a problem at all. We didn't even own a scale. But I got lazy and heavy.
For the past twenty years or so, I have weighed about eight kilograms more than I wanted to, and I somehow thought that I could will the excess weight off very gradually, without making any drastic change in my eating habits. Indeed, my weight fluctuated between two kilograms below my ordinary weight to one or two kilograms above it, but it always settled back to the same number. I wasn't gaining weight, which is apparently an achievement in itself, but I certainly wasn't losing any.
Essentially, I wasn't seriously motivated to put myself on a diet. Sure, it would be nice not to have the paunch I was carrying around, but most men my age have a paunch, usually quite a bit bigger. It goes with the territory. Also, the articles I looked at casually seemed to say that being moderately overweight wasn't much of a health risk. But perhaps that's a tautology: if you aren't so fat that you're endangering your health, you aren't overweight.
A couple of times I did manage to diet and lose those eight kilograms, but, while my attention was directed elsewhere, as it were, my weight crept back up to what it was before I dieted. That's a blow to one's motivation.
But about two months ago I had some alarming results on a blood test, which gave me a strong motivation to reduce the carbohydrates in my diet very drastically. On top of that, my knees have become arthritic, and carrying excess weight isn't good for them. Since then I've lost five of those eight kilograms. Let's see whether this time, once I get down to my target weight, I can stay there.
My strategy is not to count things or weigh things but to eliminate certain foods, especially bread, as completely as possible from my diet, and, when I'm hungry, to eat foods like vegetables, fruit, and nuts, which are good for me. Or I drink a cup of coffee or tea (without sugar or any artificial sweetener, of course).
While subjecting myself to this regimen, I've noticed some things:

• Carbohydrates are habit-forming and eating them stimulates the desire for more. Conversely, refraining from eating them reduces the desire for them.
• In order to lose weight (or change one's diet for any other reason), you must believe what should be obvious, but which most people deny: what you eat really makes a difference. It's so easy to say: "What harm could a mouthful of halva or a couple of cookies do?" (It helps if you congratulate yourself for not giving in to temptation.)
• If you watch what people eat (at a buffet or party, for example) you can generally see a strong correlation between what they eat, how much they eat, and how fat they are. But you have to remember that it's not immoral to be fat, and it's not virtuous to be thin. Eating is fun, and if some people want to enjoy themselves, it's up to them.
• There is a difference between real hunger and simply wanting to put something tasty in your mouth.
• There are times when I feel like eating something in some generic way, but I stop myself and compare my present, dieting behavior, to my former eating habits. So that's why I couldn't lose those eight kilograms!
• Oddly, when I weigh myself in the morning and see those low numbers, I sometimes feel alarmed. A couple of people have noticed that I've shed some weight and have asked my whether I'm ill. We're conditioned in contradictory fashion about weight. We think that slim people are pretty, but we think that thin people are unhealthy.
• Being too strict with yourself is counter-productive.
• Nothing is more boring than listening to someone talk about their food obsessions. Enough of this!

Creativity and Dreams

The most creative moments in our lives are dreams, and there is a strong connection between art and dreaming. For me, the best part of art is the inexplicable part, as in this famous, enigmatic painting by Picasso, where the figures appear to be floating in a dream.

A while back I proposed giving a talk entitled "Translating Creativity" at the annual translators' conference in Jerusalem, but we were going to be in India when the conference was held, so I withdrew my proposal. But I'm still deeply interested in the topic.
When I was taking clarinet lessons in high school, my teacher, Irving Neidich, told me that the greatest music is that which surprises you every time you hear it, which makes sense. How else could a soloist play the same piece time and time again and not be bored and not bore her listeners? Only because she discovers something new in the piece every time she plays it.
I did a brief search for "creativity" on the Internet and ran across a "creativity test," which, being a sucker for that kind of thing, I took. It turns out my creativity is significantly lower than average. Troubled by that result, I took another look at some of the statues I have made, and I realized that the people who designed the test had a rather different idea of creativity in their mind.

It was fairly dumb of me to bother taking that test, when our house is full of concrete evidence of my creativity.
If I ever get around to writing that paper on "Translating Creativity," it would have to begin with a section on recognizing creativity. And, since you can't recognize something you can't define, I'd have to define it.
And that would bring me back to the subject of dreams, which are undeniably creative. If you look up "dreams" on the Internet, you'll find dozens of articles about "How to Harness Your Dreams" to succeed and make a lot of money. I'm not interested either in that or in dreams as a key to one's personality. I'm interested in the feeling you have when you dream: you are in an invented world, which you invented, and things happen arbitrarily there. However, you accept those events as if they were ordinary. A person you haven't thought of for years shows up in your dream, but he or she doesn't look at all the way they did in real life - but you know who they are! You also find yourself in inexplicable situations. In my anxiety dreams I discover I had been supposed to teach a college course in calculus and forgotten about it, aside from the fact that I've never studied calculus and could not more teach it than I could teach Sumerian.
Recently we heard performances of Beethoven string quartets. In a way, the late ones are like a stream of consciousness, the volatile flow of moods, as in a dream. Obviously Beethoven didn't record his moods in real time. But he remembered the flow and put it in musical form, highly complex, carefully planned, but sounding spontaneous.

Thinking in the Languages of Music

It's a good idea to take a simple melody, "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," or "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," and play it in all twelve keys, or to take a phrase you made up, a riff, and play it in all the twelve keys.
Usually I do it using the circle of fifths, so that the tonic of the tune becomes the dominant next time around, but once in an informal music group I was attending, we were challenged to play "Autumn Leaves" twelve times, each time going down half a step. We started making a lot of mistakes when we got to the keys with lots of sharps and flats. Jazz musicians commonly play that trick with "Mack the Knife."
Another good idea is to play through all seven of the modes in one key, starting in the Lydian mode with the sharp fourth and then flatting each note in proper order till you get to the Locrian, with the flatted fifth, then flatting the tonic and finding yourself playing the Lydian mode in them in the next key, and so on until you get back to the first key. E.g.:
C - D- E- F# - G - A- B - C (Lydian)
C - D- E- F - G - A- B- C (Ionian or major)
C - D- E- F - G - A- Bb - C (Mixolydian)
C - D- Eb - F- G- A- Bb - C (Dorian)
C - D- Eb - F- G- Ab- Bb - C (Aeolian, or natural minor)
C - Db- Eb - F- G- Ab- Bb - C (phrygian)
C - Db- Eb - F- Gb- Ab- Bb - C (locrian)

then when you flat the C, turning it enharmonically into B, you have the B Lydian scale:
B - Db (=C#) - Eb (=D#) - F (=E#) - Gb (=F#) - Ab (=G#) - Bb (=A#) - B


This kind of exercise is valuable because it's interesting and forces you to pay attention to what you're playing. It's a bit like changing sentences from one tense to another when you're learning a language or moving from singular to plural verb forms.

Incidentally, while I was checking on the nomenclature, I ran across a valuable chart of scales.