MINDFLOW: P90X (Wordpress Original Archives)

15 minutes in and my arms and legs are jelly. My head feels woozy as well right now. 

 

 

 

It's been about 20 mins after I stopped working out and I'm still feeling pretty knocked out. Damn, I just noticed as I'm writing this that I'm having a hard time breathing, so windows now. The program thinks people have all those dumbbells, pull up bars, pressure bars and shite laying around their house. Because I sure don't.
Now, I have the whole video collection of P90x in mpg format which totals to about 7 to 8 gigs with 700mb each for individual one hour work outs. I figured that will not fit in my Psp so i prompted to re-download a whole new torrent of it in mp4 format about 300mb for each video.

The whole last  week  has been chaos - Midterms. Man, talk about stress. Not only that, tomorrow I have to start the national distance learning program or whatever the fuck it's called at the embassy. Basically a series of open book (not supposed to be) exams that I have to go to the embassy to take. It obviously is making mom crazy because of the placement of the schedules of whether it's in the morning or night.
The sound absorption sheets from Audimute I received right after my sociology test on Thursday. Took a whole fucking day of delay should I add on UPS's part. In tracking info, the delay was because 'no one was home to sign the package'. My ass. I live in an apartment with lobby people downstairs and they're there 24/7 to take in the shipment for us.

I set up the sheets in my dad's closet and moved my drums and 3 days later, Saturday when I was playing in the fully padded room, there was knocking on the other side. WHAT the FUCK. Can't I play my drums in peace? It's in the middle of the day 1 pm and who the fuck sleeps at that hour? First time I heard knocking, I stopped. I thought it was my call to eat lunch. I came back, heard more banging on the walls when I started playing. I didn't give in. The bangs went away. After playing for about another 45 mins I knew I needed to relocate my drums again. But where?
Come Sunday, I hammered nails on the walls and hung the sheets where I thought they would suck up most of the sound. Dad went outside and told me to try playing the drums to see how loud it was outside. He came back looking as if he'd seen death and told me it was too loud. I realized he was probably exaggerating the results and I went ahead and listened as he hit the drums. Surprisingly, it wasn't as loud as I thought it would be. They were about as loud as you would expect listening from a quiet corridor.

This is going to be a sucky week for me. I'm not looking forward to Halloween, I'm not happy with my neighbors, I just spent $100 of my ride cymbal money on shit I don't even need,  I'm exhausted from one workout video, I'm not looking forward to ANYTHING, and have to write a what the heck 4 pages of writing tonight.  I'm depressed, basically. I'm going downstairs to my local deli and getting me a can of redbull.
I don't think I want to continue the P90x training. It's proven to be too much for me. Maybe if i can get it to play in my psp by syncing the video I need for the day everyday and taking it with me to the gym downstairs, that might be another story. It all depends on how much I'm willing to work at it. Maybe Ill just give up, maybe ill put a little effort in, maybe a lot. I don't know. Cause these voices in my head keep saying love, just don't stare, reveal the word when you're supposed to.

-November 2009

Mike Portnoy part 2

Octavarium Era.

Drums are an intenseful, demanding, instrument. They aren't like ANY other instrument in a modern band musical setting, (guitar,bass,etc.) and requires you to have independence on all four limbs. Not only that, as many people know, drum are the heart and the pulse of the song. you speed up, everybody speeds up so it's ultra important our job as a drummer is to keep a steady rockin' beat.

Those are only the basics of course. Master veteran drummers like Portnoy, on top of doing what is already very hard, breaks through the mold and acquires what you would call, your own voice on the drums. I have heard that having your voice on the drums is many more times harder on top of being just a drummer. Surely, it takes decades of playing and/or a sheer amount of talent to achieve that.

Now I fell in love with drums or more importantly, percussion in my 8th grade high school music class. It was made mandatory at the time to purchase an acoustic guitar. I had already been down that road once in 5th grade of my middle school when the same thing was asked of my teacher so I already owned a guitar. Once again like three years back, I tried learning the chords, really learned the strumming but alas, nothing.

I promptly put down the 5 stringed instrument in one class thereafter and searched around the room for the next most interesting instrument. My eyes caught the snare drum which was laying on top of a corner chair; it was badly tuned and the heads needed replacing. The snare wires on the underside were damaged but it was still a 14" snare nonetheless. The christmas concert was in weeks. I had no real intentions of playing the guitar with 7 other classmates, fail or not. It wasn't that exciting at all.


This post went about 6 or 7 years back of my life. This was before anything. In part 3, I'll talk about my first experience with a real drum set and more. To be continued. Stay tuned.

Mike Portnoy has been nothing but a huge influence on my life.

Portnoy with his son, Max. Playing along to A7x's nightmare.

Mike Portnoy, best known as drummer for Dream Theater ( now currently touring with A7X) is a major influence in my drumming career. Early on in my Rock Band days with the plastic drumset, I always felt most songs, tier 1 - 8 has extremely boring drum parts. Till I came to unlock the tier 9 songs that is. It is also how I discovered Dream Theater and Portnoy's epic drumming. Immediately upon hearing the song Panic Attack! from DT, I was hooked. Instantly. Odd time signatures, awesome bass intro, intricated and  technical guitar solo and of course, Portnoy's epic drum parts. That was just the beginning of my descent into prog music. To be continued.. comment and follow if you want to hear the establishment of my musical drumming career.

Started new blog

BLOG 1 YAY

Just another something I can't live without, with me being your typical procrastinator.

I now have this app on my mac called Self Control. It lets me enter a list of sites I want to block. I decide how long it blocks said sites.

Woah, this status will appear on 9 diff sites including what you see here.