Samuel Budlong

Inspiration: Derek Simnett is one of the best sources of healthy, beautiful, and delicious vegan recipes on YouTube. He also brings tireless positive energy to all of his content, and goes above and beyond to make each of his videos fun, engaging, and informative. Over the last 5+ years, I've been consistently checking in with him to get ideas for how to improve my cooking and calisthenics skills. While I continue to learn a lot from him, the recipe that's given me the most return has been his smoothie bowl. If you watch one of his "What I Eat in a Day" videos like the one below, you are all but guaranteed to see him make one after a morning workout. The whole video is worth the watch, but if you want to skip right to the smoothie bowl, start the video at 6:08. At its core, a great smoothie bowl is a mix of leafy greens, fruit, a protein-dense ingredient, a source of healthy fats (think ground flax/chia, walnuts, peanut butter), combined with just enough plant-based milk or water to mix everything smoothly without it turning into a smoothie. You should be able to savor it with a spoon, like ice cream or sorbet. The beauty of smoothie bowls is the infinite combinations of ingredients you can use to make your own perfect recipe. As long as you have the key types of ingredients, you can't go wrong. We all have to start somewhere, though, so I invite you to try the recipe below and tweak it to your taste from there! Smoothie:

• 1 cup frozen mixed berries
• 1 cup frozen spinach
• 1 cup plant-based milk or water (I go with unsweetened soy milk. My favorites are from Eden Foods and Silk.)
• 1/2 medium banana
• 2 tablespoons peanut butter
• 1 scoop of your favorite plant-based protein powder (I love Bob's Red Mill Hemp Protein and the Blueberry Acai flavor from Vivo Life)
• Optional: about 5 grams of creatine monohydrate and a tablespoon of flaxseeds

Toppings:

• The remaining 1/2 banana
• 1/4 cup mixed raw nuts, trail mix, or granola

Instructions:

• Add all ingredients to the blender. The order you add the ingredients doesn't make a big difference, but I find it easiest to add the peanut butter and protein powder in the middle, and the milk or water at the end. This makes it easier for the ingredients to blend smoothly.
• You might find that some ingredients stick to the walls of the blender. If this happens, simply stop the blender after a few seconds, remove the lid, and scrape those bits off the wall and back into the mixture. Close the lid, and re-blend.
• Adjust the ratio of solid to liquid ingredients to reach desired consistency if you don't nail it the first time. For a thicker, more dense smoothie bowl, use less liquid or add a few more berries. For a smoother/runnier texture, add liquid a little bit at a time.

 

For a while, I grew up with an extended family. There were aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and half-siblings. The adults would cook, drink, and tell tales from their childhood. The kids were always playing games outside or on the computer, and getting spoiled by our grandparents. There were many stories, and my favorites were about my parents before they had me. I loved to learn about where they traveled and went to school, and how much like them my sister and I were.

Gradually, the weekends spent hosting and visiting became less frequent. My sister and I started playing sports and music, and hanging out with friends. We traveled to tournaments, recitals, and sleepovers instead of cookouts, birthdays, and impromptu get togethers. From junior-high on, we were a nuclear family, seeing relatives just a few times a year for major holidays. Every now and then, I would hear about how a relative recently moved, got married, went to college, or died.

Time passed. The relatives I used to watch in wonderment lived lives. They've grown up, grown old, grown apart. After graduating college and starting to work, I thought about what I want my family life to be. I want to have close ties, and I want my future children to grow up with lots of loving relatives around them. The more I reflected on my young adulthood, the more I yearned for the connections I felt as a child.

I didn't know where to start, but I got lucky. One uncle recently asked me if I would be open to visiting him, and I said yes. The plan developed into a two-week adventure to Panamá. My aunt grew up there, so she and I flew together, visiting her family and friends throughout our stay. I got immersed in a new culture, practiced Spanish, and connected with my aunt. Almost every day included a long drive to a relative's home, where I participated in the familial connection I used to feel. We cooked together, admired the lush landscape, and shared life stories.

Nobody on my aunt's side of the family knew who I was until she introduced me as her sobrino (nephew). I was humbled by how openly her family embraced me. They showed me where different fruits and vegetables grow, and how to cook them, or make them into drinks. They patiently listened as I stumbled through sentences, decoding what I was trying to say and responding with a pace and vocabulary I could grasp. They hugged and kissed me. I felt so much love.

It was the rainy season in Panamá, and one drizzly afternoon I picked The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People from my aunt's bookshelf. I had read other books about shaping our habits by Timothy Ferris and James Clear, but I had never read one of the books that they referenced as inspiration. In Part 3 of 7 Habits, Stephen Covey presents and discusses the concept of an Emotional Bank Account, where we can make deposits and withdrawals that strengthen or weaken our relationships. If we don't keep in touch, use discouraging language, or refuse to trust others, we make withdrawals from our account with that person. Conversely, if we really listen, understand, and share with others, we can make deposits that deepen our bonds.

Many of us know intuitively that our relationships require effort, but picturing relationships in this way helped me understand why and how some of my relationships have bloomed, while others have begun to whither, and what I can do about it. The 7 Habits presented a framework for reviving the bonds that I value, and I started taking note of the opportunities I had to make deposits, however small, into the relationships I hold dear in my personal and professional life.

If there are relationships from your past that feel beyond repair, or if you feel distant from the people you love, I invite you to read this book. My uncle was the person brave enough to re-initiate our relationship, and it made me feel a deep sense of love. You can be that person.

If you’ve ever loved someone, and hated them almost as much, then there is a play in Red Hook, Brooklyn that you need to see. Botte di Ferro lets you into a relationship that cycles relentlessly through euphoria and agony from adolescence to adulthood. Written by Ben Gassman, Botte di Ferro combines depth of emotion with precise and inventive direction from Tara Elliott.

Phone conversations, trips to the candy store, hospital visits, and study abroad escapades all bring us back to a Neapolitan pizzeria under the watchful gaze of Mount Vesuvius. The actors are completely vulnerable, wearing all of their emotions like tattoos.

The waiter (Alessandro Magania) and piazzola (Laura Caparrotti) guide the audience and the couple through an enchanted evening. Everything is a specialty of the house, including pizza, clams, and beautiful embellishments. They each give soliloquies that demand the eyes and ears of every audience member as they pour their hearts out in beautiful Italian. You don’t need to know what they’re saying. You can read it in their eyes and hear it in their voices.

She (Layla M. Khoushnoudi) needs just one scene to flash her “evil” wit, intoxicating affection, rage, and despair. Her capacity to inflict pain on Him is matched only by her willingness to suffer it again and again as the relationship hits its peaks and valleys. She knows exactly what she wants right now, but no one knows what she will want next.

He (Jess M. Barbagallo) doesn’t know what he wants. He can’t tell Her or the audience what’s going through his head. All he knows is he wants Her, no matter how fiercely they fight, or how many times he sabotages himself. The good moments are so good that it’s worth saying “Yes” to love now, knowing that tomorrow it could all unravel again.

The romance is too intense to handle for the entire production, so director Tara Elliott devised a brilliant way to give the audience periodic snippets of relief while keeping it hooked. The first comes thirty minutes into the play, when emotional fatigue starts to set in. Just when you think you can’t handle another beautiful disaster, the cast breaks into dance and lifts the audience out of heavy emotions and into carefree, creative bliss. For a few of these enchanted moments, you can breathe before being thrown back into the waves.

Botte di Ferro skips the shyness and pleasantness of the early stages of a relationship, giving the audience a heavy pour of real emotion. There is no like, no nice. There is love, hate, ecstasy, pain, truth, and lies. You will want to always never be in a dysfunctional relationship ever again for the rest of your life.

 

I had heard it from friends, acquaintances, and blog posts: "everyone should go to therapy." Did that really apply to me? Blanket statements are often hyperbolic, and my understanding of therapy was that it was a tool used to treat people with serious emotional trauma, depression, and other issues that I didn't identify with.

Over dinner with one of my best friends, the idea that maybe I could benefit from seeing a therapist became more attractive. My friend shared that they had been going to a therapist and enjoying the sessions, and thought that maybe I would be interested. I agreed to take the therapist's contact information down, and pondered whether to actually give them a call.

My biggest concern was not that I had some deep-seeded issues that I was ignoring, but that I would be wasting the therapist's time, and my money. There isn't anything obviously wrong with me. I'm happy. I feel generally fulfilled in life. I love my family and friends. I'm grateful to be who I am. What could we have to talk about?

An introductory session with the therapist put my concerns at ease. "Therapy is a tool we can use to work toward becoming the best version of ourselves, whatever that looks like to you. You don't need to have experienced a big trauma, or have a disorder, to reap the benefits of talking with a therapist." Reassured that this could be worth our time and effort, I decided to follow through and schedule weekly sessions.

By the fourth session via Zoom, I was crying on my keyboard about things I hadn't thought about in years. They weren't big-time traumatic events, but things that I had consciously or unconsciously decided to bury and leave unattended. Without addressing them, they clearly festered under the surface, and brought me to tears so many years later. Each time we reflect on these experiences, I feel that sadness, but the way that I think about them is changing, and the actions I take during the week to improve my relationship with them.

I'm so grateful to my friend for suggesting therapy to me, and I sincerely hope that whoever reads this gives it a thought. It's fantastic to have a professional, to whom you have no emotional ties, listen to what you're feeling, give you some ideas about how to work with those feelings, and help you achieve your goals. They can identify things you didn't know were there, and provide you with tools that you already have to improve your relationship with yourself and others.

On a pedestrian workday, one of my colleagues mentioned how excited they were to use "Tableau" to present some analysis to their managers. Intrigued by this mysterious French tool, I asked if I could see what they were working on, and was instantly attracted to the ease with which I could drag and drop "pills" into different areas and create charts that would took me hours to make in Excel. It triggered my traumatic experiences from making analyses for internships in college with sample data and basic color-coded line graphs.

Understanding the basics of columns (or "fields") and rows (or "records") that make up databases was a headache at first, but once I grasped those two concepts alone, my learning accelerated dramatically. Looking back at this time, I really didn't understand what data was, and how it fit into a database. With this fundamental understanding, however, I could grasp basic SQL queries and visualize what the results might look like.

In the year that followed, I read everything I could get my hands on about Tableau in particular. My co-worker friend shared a book called Practical Tableau by Ryan Sleeper, which is an amazing resource to get started, and to refer back to. I used real data from work, Tableau Public, Kaggle, and data.world to follow Ryan's instructions for creating different types of charts. My first moment of pride was making a "wheel" chart like Ryan suggests, and presenting my first dashboard at my job.

After grasping the basics, I jumped at any work opportunity to do some analysis and dig up answers from our database, which further boosted me along the learning curve, and resulted in more data-related projects. The project requests started getting more complicated, so I learned more out of necessity. Now I had to know which types of charts lend themselves to certain data types, or data questions. I needed better SQL skills to pull and transform messy data into something that can be easily used in Tableau's interface, and I needed to figure out how to code enough to write calculations to make my analyses more insightful.

To delve deeper into data science, I signed up for Codecademy and have been using it consistently for two years. It's been an effective tool for practicing data science skills like SQL and the Python libraries that allow for data cleaning and wrangling, plotting graphs, and advanced skills in machine learning.

Currently, I'm competent in using python libraries to create and manipulate data frames, build visualizations, deploy machine learning algorithms, and make basic neural networks for deep learning applications such as natural language processing. These concepts were completely foreign to me just two years ago, and I am excited about how much there still is to learn.

The best part about this whole process is the community of learners. Everyone seems to feel like a beginner, because there is no way to master every single thing in the data science world. There are so many things to learn that it's best to work with what we know so far, and pick up knowledge as we explore projects. We've all heard that the best way to learn is by doing, and data science is not an exception.

In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg describes keystone habits as minor changes that spill over into other areas of life. For example, developing a habit of consistently waking up at 7:00am may cause us to start getting to bed before 11pm. With better sleep hygiene, we might find ourselves with more energy throughout the day to be more productive and make better decisions. We might even start to exercise, and make more conscious food choices. By committing to one habit, we can create a virtuous cycle that improves other areas of our lives.

Similarly, John Clear wrote about how well-designed, tiny changes can have tremendous implications for our health, athletic performance, productivity, and finances in one of my favorite books, Atomic Habits.

Committing to a vegan lifestyle by avoiding animal products has been a keystone habit for me. It's the best decision I've made for my life, and started with a small change in my habits. Besides the myriad health benefits, going vegan made me more conscious of my decisions and how they affect others lives of others. Here's how it happened.

I wanted to play sports all the time as a kid, and I didn't care what the game was. I loved the feeling of moving through space and making a basket, making a catch, getting a hit, or scoring a goal. It felt like magic. I moved and something amazing happened. My affinity for sports stuck with me through high school and into college. I wasn't a good enough athlete to compete at that level, so I found the next best options: playing on the "scout team" for the women's basketball team, playing club baseball, and interning with the strength and conditioning coach.

Being around such talented athletes and working with a successful coach introduced me to the world of sports performance by getting experience in what happens behind the scenes, such as stretching, weight lifting, and nutrition. I fell in love with the process, and decided to get a personal training certification through the American Council on Exercise (ACE). In the study materials, I read that the cited research did not suggest vegan and vegetarian exhibit decreased performance compared to those consuming an omnivorous diet. This piece of information from a reputable source was contrary to everything I had been told growing up.

In middle school, I received my first bits of fitness advice: eat steak, drink whole milk. This was fantastic news. I loved steak and whole milk. When confronted with information about the strong, healthy vegetarians and vegans I pitied in the past, I had to learn more, and hopefully disprove it. 

The deeper I dug, the more evidence I found that vegans and vegetarians do not suffer from malnutrition or poor athletic performance. On the contrary, I found more research suggesting that people adopting such diets, especially vegans, enjoy significantly lower rates of heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes, and erectile disfunction. I was incredulous, and hooked.

With skepticism, I started adding more vegetables to each of my meals. At the time, I was eating omelettes with sausage for breakfast, chicken or steak with rice and veggies for lunch, and a savory dinner like chicken parmigiana or grilled salmon and a salad. I started to feel better, lose some weight, and enjoy fewer acne breakouts. The most noticeable change, however, was that I was able to concentrate (okay, stay awake) through a 90-minute macroeconomics class.

So I made small changes to my diet, reading nutrition journals, and figuring out how to make healthy-yet-tasty vegan meals. With the help of a cookbook from my cousin, and chefs and nutritionists on YouTube, I found it easy enough to get through the day with enjoyable meals that made me feel good.

What sounded like a sacrifice at the beginning transformed into a minor change that provided tremendous payoffs to my health and well-being. It made me contemplate other areas in my life where I could make similar progress. I started meditating, reading more, drinking less alcohol and caffeine, and getting more sleep. I became more empathetic as I learned more about how livestock animals are born, how they live, and how they die. It made me more conscious of my life, and the lives of others. I found myself listening more, and enjoying the company of others more than I used to.

You don't have to go vegan to realize positive changes in life. That was the biggest keystone habit for me. However, I invite you to incorporate some more fruits and vegetables throughout your day, and see how you feel. My free and unsolicited advice is to try things out by making small, manageable changes, and enjoy the process.