Jason Alan Griffin :: The Blog

Everything cycles. I’ve gotten out of the habit of regular exercise. Every once in a while I think it’s good to take a break and go through a softening period. It allows me to fully recover and to start again fresh. Even during the most recent hiatus, I still maintained an active lifestyle. In large part, thanks to my dog. I walk River at least twice a day and often go on short runs with him. I also get down on the floor and wrestle around for about twenty minutes almost every day. Also, during the time I wasn’t ‘working out’ I still taught Nia classes now and then and practiced my routine in my home studio. So I was far from sedentary. But about a month ago I decided to get back into my old routine. I was inspired by seeing a picture of myself taken a few months ago and comparing that to what I saw in the mirror. It was clear that the time off I had given myself to soften up had done just that. I know from experience that it isn’t a good idea to jump right into full blown workou...

Although much of my communication with River is through body language and gestures and quite a bit of it is through my tone and intention, there are a number of words that it is clear that he recognizes and responds to, even out of context. 

RIVER - he recognizes his name, but his response is not prescribed SIT - he sits LIE DOWN - he lies down GO LIE DOWN - he walks over to his bed (usually used when I’m at the dinner table) HERE - he knows I have something in my hand

 COME - he immediately walks to me

 STAY - he stays where he is

 STOP - he stops walking and sits down

 WAIT - he stops walking but doesn’t have to sit

 HUNGRY - indicates food is imminent FOOD - same as above GET YOUR _________ - he’ll go and retrieve the item indicated. Items he can ‘get’ are:     KONG - feeding toy     TOY - rope used for tugging     ROPE - another word for ‘toy’
       BEAR - stuffed animal ...

UPDATED: JANUARY 2, 2014 Full Schedule: 1- Take the Class Sunday, January 5 4:00 - 5:00pm Century Ballroom West Hall 915 E Pine St. Second Floor Class is open to the public for $10 --FREE to those attending the full training. 2- Do the 8BCs Saturday, January 11 2:00 - 6:00 pm JAG Studio 1208 E Republican St, Capitol Hill, Seattle 3- Learn the Moves Saturday, January 18 2:30 - 6:30 pm Dance Space Studio, Greenwood, Seattle 4- Teach what you Know GOLDFINGER teacher Jam Saturday, February 1 11:00 am - Noon Century Ballroom West Hall 915 E Pine St. Second Floor Class is open to the public for $5 Cost for full training is $75. If you attended the BOND GIRLS training in October of 2010, you can attend the GOLDFINGER training at a discount. Scroll to the bottom of this page to preregister, or pay in cash on the day of the first class. None of the sessions are required to learn the routine. If you can't make a session and are still interested in learning it, contac...

I don’t fit into a mold. And I don’t fall into formation very easily. My whole life I have felt like I was observing our society from the outside. Or at least from the very edge, looking in. And most of what I see confounds me. 

I’m especially confounded by traditions. When people practice something for the simple and sole reason that they did so last year, and the year prior, and their grandparents did it, and before that, and so on. I’ve heard and believed for a long time that ‘tradition’ is one of the worse reasons there is for doing something. Like religion, tradition is dangerous in that people will mindlessly follow it without question or justification. I pride myself on doing everything with consciousness and purpose. And it is important to me that the feelings I express and the actions I take come from a real truth inside of me, or I won’t do them. Because of this, I find myself hesitant to fall into the trappings of these traditions. Many days that are designated as holiday...

I know we are still in the middle of fall and have another month left before winter even starts, but I’m already starting to feel the shift. 

In Seattle, the weather has started to turn colder, which always makes me think of death. Not in a morbid way, but just as a part of the cycle of life and progress. Living things die and new ones are born. It’s seasonal and natural.  I don’t avoid talking about, acknowledging or even embracing the idea that loved ones die or will die someday. Living life without taking tomorrow for granted really makes each day special. 

As my way of honoring the feelings that I get around winter, I become aware of welcoming death in my life. I use it as a time to de-clutter my thoughts and my surroundings and my lifestyle; to slough off the old skin so I can start with fresh skin again in the spring. One of the things I’ve found myself doing this fall is systematically eliminating things that I’m either abusing through overuse or are just simply not servin...

This is an accounting of a day's worth of eating. I'm only posting this at the request of a friend of mine. I want to be clear that I am not making any reccommendations that anyone adopt this as their diet. I have put no thought into the planning, and make no claims that this is any sort of ideal diet. It's just me, having a typical day but have decided to document it and publish it. First, upon waking, I squeezed half a lemon into a glass of water and drank it down. Then made a pot of coffee and had my one cup, black! BREAKFAST: I used a vegetable peeler to lay thin slices of carrot into some butter cooking on the stove. Then I added two eggs and dumped some leftover collard greens from last nights dinner. I sprinkled it with some cajun spices and let it cook for a while. I like the whites to be cooked, but the yolks to be runny. LUNCH: about three hours later, I was hungry again, so I had a big salad: a big handful of mixed greens including boy choy, cilantro, pa...

So, the other day I happened across a Groupon offering a month-long membership to Gold’s Gym, including two personal training sessions, for only $19.  I had been flirting with the idea of going back into the gym for some weight-lifting, as I had sworn off of the activity five years early and was curious about what it might do for me now. So I brought the voucher into Gold’s and was sent to a sales desk, where the girl there tried her best to ‘upsell’ me. Unfortunately for her, I have worked at gyms all my adult life and I know the hard sell tactics. She started by first trying to build rapport with me, but she has a self-defeating habit of not listening to people when they answer her questions. This causes her to re-ask the same questions and instead of creating a bond, actually creating a rift between us. I had no intention of buying anything but the free month I came in for, but I let her run her spiel and even enlist the support of her fellow salesman when I balked at the r...