Rigid Body Dynamics
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RIGID BODY DYNAMICS*
As long as I can remember I have been told that I have a bad back. I slouched, therefore I had a bad back. This wasn’t a side effect of awkwardness or having short friends; it was definitely my bad back. It runs in the family: we are lanky people whose backs tend to malfunction. Every once in a while people that looked like doctors would come to my middle school and take prints of our feet instead of gym class. These people, who I later learned were mostly there to sell us slabs of foam we could put in our shoes, also thought I had a bad back. Later, a real doctor told me one of my legs was a few millimeters shorter than the other and that made my slouching worse. My parents made me put the uncool foamy things into my shoes and my mom started insisting I do yoga every morning. She had an old book authored by someone with an Indian sounding name and she was convinced that doing sun salutations before class would help this bad back situation. I hated it.
The first winter I spend in an American high school I joined a track and field team instead of submitting to a physical education course. When the upstate New York weather became too cold for outside practices, we took to doing circuits in the kind of small weight room you would expect to see in an all girls boarding school. After a few weeks it was decided that we would also join a yoga class. It was taught by a couple of teachers and it was awkward. There were always giggles about the tight clothes they wore and the ending of each session consisted of a guided meditation that was simply terrible. In one session, after assuming shavasana, our arms and legs stretched out on our mats and our eyes closed, we were instructed to imagine being on the back of a large swan, brushing up against soft feathers, being taken away from all the worries of the day. It was the corniest thing I could imagine. When asked about the class, I started saying that I was just a ‘tense person’ and that these thing just did not work for me. I attended all of the practices with my team but could not wait for the warm weather and a return to endless laps on the tartan and weekend off-campus runs. I still hated yoga.
About halfway through my time in graduate school I started exercising regularly. I did not really have a plan; I briefly thought about it and then one day just packed my old running shoes and shorts together with my research notebooks and leftovers that have been renamed to lunch and brought them to my office. At the end of the day, I took a bus to the gym instead of walking straight home. I ran a few laps on the inside track, did some crunches and bashfully changed in the busy locker room. It made me tired in a way different from the brain fog that research work brings about and that felt good. For a while I went to the gym twice a week and without much of a workout plan, then I found a workout plan I liked**, and then there were a few summer weeks when my boyfriend had to pay for a gym pass while he was visiting me and we both ended up working out almost every day just so that money would not be a waste. Being someone who is equally susceptible to forming strong habits and terrified of becoming a quitter, once the summer ended and I was making daily trips to my office again, I just kept bringing my gym clothes with me four days a week. On the fifth day the workout plan I had been following suggested I do some yoga.
Around the same time, a colleague from my research group became something of a yoga aficionado. During my first year in graduate school he was obsessively reading Russian literature, the year after that he was practicing guitar for hours every day and in my third year he turned that incredible focus onto yoga. He told me it was just like effective field theory: the body finds equilibrium and then the rest is just fluctuations and variations around that point. Being a theoretical physicist, he had read up about it and was interested in constructing a metaphysical framework for his practice. However, there was not much that was metaphysical about the yoga routines I was trying to do once a week; I was mostly just trying to simultaneously breathe and not fall over. This time around, though, I did not hate it.
I have not become more patient or flexible and my balance is still quite terrible, but when I step into downward facing dog and look back I can see that my thighs get taut and hard and I can see the tension and strength in my legs while they keep me bent. And when I try and take a deep breath in, if I focus, I can feel each section of my spine move with the traveling air, the slight expansion moving from my stomach into my chest and my muscles working to allow my lungs to grow fuller. I can tell that my body functions just like a well put together mechanism should. By being slow and deliberate, dictated by breath rather than how many repetitions fit into a forty-five second interval, these workouts make it hard to ignore that I am a surprisingly functional collection of levers, beams and strings under tension, all somehow working in unison. I feel forced to appreciate the pure mechanics of my body and its objective strength, and the facets of its motion completely decoupled from aesthetics and other more external notions we typically imbue our bodies with.
I have never felt weak. On the contrary, I have often felt like I was not fragile enough to truly be feminine. Similarly, I always had a notion of having to be strong because I was female, but the idea of physical strength, of exercising ownership over my body by letting it do the sort of mechanical things it has been optimized for, has never been a part of that. Being somewhat clumsy and more than somewhat interested in reading I was rarely encouraged to take up sports as a child. While my brother sampled every sport our small town had to offer, I resorted to the life of the mind and only remembered how to use my arms and legs when forced to do so in gym class. The physical fitness of my body was an externality, something on the edge of being forced onto me. The yoga I hated doing as a teenager was utilitarian, aimed at helping the familial bad back and my unattractive slouch. Participating in track and field in high school, I ran to win and I conditioned to run better to win more. For a brief period of time, I was fast enough to make one of the internal record lists my school kept, albeit as the least fast on it. I stopped running almost completely when I went to college.
In college, I dressed up often, wore a lot of make up and dyed my hair fire colors with the idea that looking unapologetic and unafraid would make me unapologetic and unafraid. I learned to talk about accepting diverse bodies and using them to make a statement, about ‘healthy at every size’ and ‘eyeliner so sharp it could kill a man’ and all of the other millennial feminist talking points. I learned to say that my body was my own and over time I convinced myself that this was true. I declined hugs and fought an ex-boyfriend on whether I should wear short shorts. When it came to defending it, my body was definitely, loudly and proudly, my own.
Young women are encouraged to be in charge of our bodies in this way, to maintain authority over who touches us and what we are allowed to wear. In a way, we define our bodies through defense mechanisms; we acknowledge that they are seen as decorations, as commodities and objects of desire rather than something with intrinsic functionality. We forget that having a body that moves and stretches precedes having a body that can be dressed or desired. We forget that there is a strength that does not need to be defined through a fight. By not having more conversation about the purely mechanical strength we can foster in our bodies, we tacitly endorse the idea of femininity being fundamentally intertwined with fragility. In addition to undermining our own innate physical ability, this connection diminishes the women that are muscular or visibly strong. Professional athletes end up on the covers of magazines in gowns, asserting their normalcy, while their male counterpart receive praise for simply going through the mechanical motions of things their bodies have been trained to do. Being a woman in a body that moves quickly becomes a complex issue and a constant negotiation between the many ways in which it can be misconstrued or disrespected. Spending a conscious moment in downward dog does not change that, but it helps to remember that there is a potential for strength in our bones, muscles and tendons and it does not depend on anyone else.
Best,
Karmela
* In physics, rigid body designates an object that does not deform when forces are applied to it (in contrast to, for instance, fluids). Consequently, in analyzing its dynamics one only has to consider the ways in which it can rotate or translate and kinematic laws stemming from a Newtonian analysis apply. This framework is what most people encounter in introductory physics classes where Newton’s laws are used to determine the position, speed or acceleration of the body as a function of time.
** I tend to pick and choose workouts from this four-week plan and I do yoga as guided by this app. I am not an expert on physical fitness so I can’t claim that either is a great resource, but they have served me well so far.
***
ABOUT THIS WEEK
LEARNING: While I spent most of last week trying to inhale information about neutron stars and the two-fluid model for the quantum condensates in their interiors, this week I mostly worked on one of the other projects I am hoping to really commit to in the following months. It involves one-dimensional quasi-crystals and the Hofstadter butterfly and in addition to being a really rich theory problem, it feels a little unreal to throw around words like “multi-fractal” – something I had read popular science books about as a teenager – as a legitimate part of my job. However, the problem me an collaborators are hoping to tackle is a rather difficult one and I may have to confront my reluctance to use computer code in my work but hopefully we can make progress. We submitted another paper for editorial review this week so maybe at least that momentum can work in our favor.
The art and physics course I am working on as a teaching assistant met for the first time this week and after hearing all of the students’ introductions and ideas, I am growing more and more excited about what the rest of the semester might look like. In addition to the big theater production my advisor is putting together with a theater and dance collaborators, students have expressed interest in writing short plays, painting and composing music and one of them even turned in an assignment a whole week early. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that everyone completes all of these projects they seem to be so enthusiastic about (and slightly wondering whether there is any way for me to allot time to some related creative endeavor).
LISTENING: A couple of the podcasts that make it into my regular rotation have discussed yoga in the past and this old episode of Surprisingly Awesome is really fun and informative (they explain the history of yoga making it overseas, including an unexpected connection with Swedish exercise programs), this episode of Science Vs tackles studies on the benefits of meditation and other mindfulness practices and this episode of the Allusionist taught me that ‘namaste’ is not as profound as it sounds coming from Instagram gurus.
As far as recent favorites go, I have been pretty interested in the new Radiotopia Showcase show Secrets. In addition to consisting of well told stories about things that are difficult to discuss, this show not only offers an insight into what keeping big secrets is actually like and how it changes people but also provides a somewhat subtle commentary on race, immigration and social class in Sweden (where the producers are from) that is sadly surprisingly reminiscent of the sentiments within the US. This latest episode was rather hard-hitting on that front. On a rather different note, I also really liked this episode of the Memory Palace about a woman who abandoned a high-class life to study wild prairie chickens. It is an inspiring story about rule breaking and successful escapes and Nate DiMeo’s short and concise narration, with lots of emotion but not much room for corniness, really makes it sound important and impactful.
On the music front I have been listening to the Melvins a fair amount after being reminded of their work by an episode of Supercontext. Stoner Witch and A Senile Animal are solid albums and somewhat classic but not too profound (as far as stoner metal goes, Sleep always makes me feel more feelings). I also can’t seem to get this Fuzz song out of my head.
READING: I am still working my way through some of Scott Snyder’s run on Batman that is collected in Black Mirror. Having made it more than half-way through the volume, I have gained more of an appreciation for what Snyder seems to be trying to do. While the actual crimes Dick-Grayson-as-Batman investigates remain somewhat cliché and not terribly exciting (as it turns out, I struggle to find comic book villains compelling), it is clear that Synder is interested in his characters and what makes them who they are. The past and personal histories are a big theme of all of the stories collected in Black Mirror and the classic cast of characters with backstories we are all familiar from is not so much running from the past but rather reconciling with the fact that their personalities are deeply rooted in their past experiences. Grayson narrates most of the issues, bringing in advice and analogies from his family history as a circus performer and Jim Gordon rather explicitly confronts his own family history when his psychopathic son returns to Gotham. In Synder’s vision, he the city of Gotham itself plays a dual role – it is as much of a character as it is a clearly fetishized setting for stories that would be unreal anywhere else and it is unclear whether Gotham is the way it is because the people that live there are terrible or the people becomes terrible once they fall under Gotham’s spell. Among all of Synder’s themes this is the one that is most explicit and most depends on narration of various characters, which does make it feel somewhat forced at times. However, as I am learning to disregard the fact that Snyder hits many classic superhero beats (only in a classic comic book is it ok for a character to say “she is the daughter of the man who murdered your parents” in casual conversation), this book is definitely growing on me.
EATING: There are two layers of stereotypes about what vegans eat. First, there is the older notion that if you don’t eat animal products you must be consuming outrageous amounts of tofu and soy milk. Second, if you have an Instagram account then you know that it is actually all avocados, peanut butter, chia seeds and banana bread. I am not quite sure how banana bread made it onto that list but it is fairly easy to veganize, it is very flexible when it comes to all sorts of swaps and bananas are pretty ubiquitous, especially ones that are half-forgotten and overripe. Since I have been vegan, I have made a lot of banana bread and banana bread muffins and the version I am sharing below is just the latest in a series of quick efforts to fight my sweet tooth with something homemade. It is based on this recipe from Dessert for Two and requires just one bowl and about thirty minutes to make. I am not going to pretend that it is terribly healthy but it definitely makes for a great snack (especially if you pair it with the aforementioned peanut butter, or crumble it on top of some coconut yogurt).
For one small loaf you will need:
1 tablespoon ground flaxseed
1 large, overripe, mushy banana
5 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon brown sugar
2 tablespoons melted coconut oil (or any neutral vegetable oil)
¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
¼ cup rolled oats
½ cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
A pinch of salt
Make the flax ‘egg’: in a small bowl mix the ground flaxseed with three tablespoons of warm water and stir until well combined. Let rest for about 5 minutes until it looks slightly gelatinous.
While your flax is congealing, line a small loaf tin with parchment paper, or grease it lightly with vegetable oil. Preheat the oven to 350 F.
Mash the banana: in a medium bowl mash the banana with a fork until only small chunks remain then add the flax mixture, coconut oil (preferably melted) and five tablespoons of brown sugar. Mix well.
Add the dry ingredients: sprinkle the flour, cocoa powder, oats, salt and baking soda on top of the wet ingredients and fold until a cohesive batter forms. It will be fairly wet but should be quite smooth.
Pour the batter into the loaf tin, smooth the top and sprinkle with the remaining teaspoon of brown sugar. At this point you can add other toppings such as chopped almonds, banana slices or whole banana halves.
Bake for 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes clean. The bread will have a slightly fudgy, brownie-like consistency.
Tips: Add chopped walnuts, raisins or chocolate chips (or chunks) to the batter for an even more indulgent treat or make a simple glaze by mixing powdered sugar with almond milk and whisking until it is runny and sticky. Swirl some natural peanut butter straight into the batter for a marbled effect (dollop a few tablespoons on top and then use a knife or a chopstick to create swirls).
To de-veganize: replace the flax mixture with a chicken’s egg.