They say that the first step to kicking an addiction is to own that you have one in the first place. I am owning it. I am addicted to salt.

I have tried to rationalize this in the past with various reasonable-sounding excuses such as:
-- Food without salt is like dimensionless tripe. Eating tripe is bad enough, but eating dimensionless tripe sounds ghastly.
-- I don't eat processed food so much and it is the "processing" that does you in and not the salt.
-- Salt has added iodine in it. I totally need it for my thyroid gland.
-- True story. I bought iodine-free salt by mistake and my brain stopped working for a week.
- HOW ELSE can I get iodine??! I don't want to eat fishy smelling kelp.

Other dubious excuses have included...
-- It's just salt. At least it's not sugar!
-- I drink a ton of water, surely it must wash it all away
-- Everyone needs to die someway. I choose hypertension.
-- Hypertension has genetic roots and no one in my family has it.
-- Wait, I think one of my grand parents died of a kidney failure. Does that mean there was a possibility there of an incipient hypertensive process at work? Oh well.. shut up. Everyone knows kidney failure is clearly multifactorial.

And some completely bogus ones:
-- Other people also like salt, as do I. It proves that I am not a mutant alien.
-- Salt is like the national food where I am from. It would be so unpatriotic to consume any less. No-one wants to be unpatriotic. I don't! Do you?

But everything really boils down to one truth.
-- Mmmmmm salty... OH SO SALTY!!!!

I don't like pretzels too much. I am not a big fan of peanut-butter either. But around thanksgiving, I somehow acquired a box of Anderson's peanut-butter filled pretzels.

(FINE. I intentionally bought it!).

Because all those perfect crystals of salt on the pretzels were too hypnotizing to resist. Needless to add, not only did I relish the crystals, as a bonus, I also ate the COMPLETE box of nearly 681 grams - all by myself, in ONE week. (That's 1.5 pounds, you non-metric heathen.) You know how much of salt that is? 8000 mg or 8 grams of salt. And of course, I didn't just eat these pretzels the entire week. I also ate other things also heavily laced with salt. And I go through 1 cylinder of salt in roughly 1.5-2 months.

I decided to finally own it and honestly tracked my sodium intake over the past three weeks. Turns out I consume more than 5000 mg (5g) of salt every day. To put it in context, my daily requirement of salt is around 1200 mg ~1.2g. That's more than 4x times over the healthy limit. It is starting to look like I am the druglord of all salt addicts across the planet.

So I guess one of my new year, new decade resolutions would be to cut down on the salt. They tell you to go easy on yourself when you make resolutions. But going easy might still mean around 3x salt consumption. I am going to have to tread the hard path strewn with rocksalt.

may not make me taller...



but by the looks of it, might just make me laugh.

These is something so entertaining about absolutely inane fluffy pointless rudderless movies that are sheer stupid fun (and zombie movies of course... but maybe they belong in the same bin). And the team that made pineapple express definitely sweeps the prizes in this category.

Can't wait! :-)

It's like I am having a Spanish version competition with (e:uncutsaniflush).

Maybe I am. ;-)

But I just want this song to be on here because I like the tune so much. Maybe a tad too slow for salsa but absolutely lovely song. I wonder what kind of dance would go along with it... I am guessing a latin version of a slightly fast waltz. While I know a little bit of salsa now, I literally don't know anything about any of the other latin dances. Maybe I should take a general latin 101 dance class - if there is such a thing.



I suspect that if it made my grocery shopping karaoke list, I might get more than my usual share of curious looks, though...

First, la India resembles my aunt and my cousin so much - right down to all that tough attitude! It's so hard to not think of them as I watch her. She may not be the queen of salsa but she is very much the rebellious princess. And second, I love love love this song! I could listen to it on a loop the whole day. It's such a perfectly composed duet. The beats per minute are awesome for dancing and the melody is so uplifting!



Marc Anthony should really have kept all that gorgeous hair!

With love...

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

Celia Cruz - the Goddess of Salsa who lives in the hearts of salsa dancers around the planet and is intertwined inseparably with their souls ...

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

It's amazing how she managed to flawlessly breathe life into Salsa for nearly 60+ years and kept on innovating till the very end! She may not be alive today but she is a rockstar who will live anew every time a salsa dancer is born!

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

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Come and experience the magic and soul of salsa at Configuration Dance with Sarita and Sean in the new year! New Salsa for the Soul classes start Thursday, January 6th, 2011. Email Sarah "Sarita" Hooper and Sean Ortiz at SalsafortheSoul [at] gmail for more information about the BEST salsa classes in Buffalo! :-)

Thanks to (e:heidi), I had one of the most fun audience experiences I have had in a while. She urged me yesterday to "Get yer butt down here" and I am glad I did exactly what she asked me... after a couple hours.

Even though I was just passively standing in a corner and watching the battles, all the windmilling that went on left me completely breathless... and a bit worried. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, this was definitely not what it looked like...


Nopes. This was not it either...


It was more like a couple hours of this...


The breathlessness was a result of all the frenetic action in front of me. I could hardly keep up with all the battles. How does one judge these things? They all looked awesome to me. I am guessing that the three interesting people who were judging the dances were watching for technically challenging moves. I say interesting, because the judges seemed rather young. I wonder if they were experts or just appointed judges for the evening...

But my subconscious worry was because I was approximating the number of subtle shear injuries all these dancers were accumulating as they danced. Most of the battling dancers were pushing their bodies to the extreme. They were achieving what would have been physically impossible without a high velocity movement of their limbs. If I had a speed gun yesterday, I am sure it would have recorded the same velocity as a windmill in buffalo on a particularly windy day... and we all know that's not really a pastoral idyllic scene.

It was absolutely dazzling to watch at close quarters but it left me with some doubts about why I would want to take such an intense hip hop class. On the other hand, life would not be challenging or half as interesting if I limply sat here and chomped on those windmill biscuits with tea, would it?

---

NB: If you want to experience windmills, worlds apart from what Don Quixote battled, and a completely novel approach to what self-expression through dance can mean, trot on down to Verve Studios on Main street (above the Hyatt Art Store) and see the battles for yourself. Verve studio is electrifying hip hop on the web at this

Who on earth thought up this splendid idea for the library's homepage?!

UGH. Hurts my brain.



If I had been about to donate, I would have second thoughts after witnessing this level of tackiness.

I love this song to bits. The lyrics ring so true for me right now and the music is SO incredibly Rainbow + Deep Purple with that unmistakable magic of Rata Blanca...



Fui como un ángel caído
preso de mi libertad
hasta que te conocí
por esas calles

Fue porque quiso el destino
que te pudiera encontrar
y hoy no sé como seguir
cuando no estás

Te agradezco que sanes mi alma
sobrevivo encontrando en tus ojos
el resplandor de un verde talismán

Si al final esta vida es un sueño
sólo sé que a tu lado me quiero despertar
amanecer una vez más

Sabes, cuando era muy joven
nunca pensé que el amor me daría
sin preguntar tantas respuestas

Y hoy me fío de pocos
y hoy que reina la traición
se que alguien puede curar mi corazón

Un amor
Un amor viví
Llorando. Y me decía
Las palabras de Dios,
Llorando por ti,
es con amor.

Un amor
Un amor viví
Llorando. Ya tormentado
Las palabras de Dios,
Llorando por ti,
es con amor.

Hay para ya vivir junto a ti
Me enamoré ya de ti
Ya sin tus besos yo no puedo
Vivir y recordar

Yo quisiera
Para entender un amor y saber
Que me quería ya tormentado
Las palabras de Dios,
Llorando por ti,
es con amor.

Hay para ya vivir junto a ti
Me enamoré ya de ti
Ya sin tus besos yo no puedo
Vivir y recordar

The people have spoken. (E:peeps) have infinite wisdom and are to be trusted. So I have a fitness question for you all.

I think I have finally identified the weakest link behind my lack of core stability - and no, it's not my stick-like forearms. I have a fairly good posture and no lower back or upper back issues so it's most certainly my weak abdomen muscles. I really loathe doing abdominal crunches... well, I guess I could do them, but they will be my last resort. Can you think of any other exercises or exercise-routines that you have personally done and seen results with?

I know the web has a trillion pieces of advice and probably a zillion flatten-your-abdomen exercises, but I am specifically looking for exercises that you have achieved results with - not really to flatten my abdomen, but to build up the isotonic strength of my abdominal muscles, however un-flat the results might be.

Ideas?

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PS: Before you suggest belly-dancing, have YOU really achieved muscle tone with beginner belly dancing?!