Saturday, December 29, 2018

Tickets: 1 of ?

I've joined a book club. I really hope it continues; we've met once and I really enjoyed it. I've never been in one. It's loosely tsundoku-themed, which I imagine could be said of many book clubs.

Its being thus has brought me into more contact with that concept--tsundoku--and how it's crept across the zeitgeist from its original, book-centric meaning to encompass all of the things we all do where we're making lists / collecting things / setting intentions to read / see / create / do, instead of actually just doing the things. Making stacks, literal and figurative.

I've got a stack of tickets that I've had for years. I may even have done this exact thing I'm doing right now already -- either here in this blog (I think not?) or in my own personal journaling (I think so). But I'm going to do it here, now; what I'm going to do is just finally do what I've been meaning to do for however long (honestly: years) and just kind of work through this stack of tickets to write out my thoughts about them. Half of which I will have totally forgotten! Because this ish happened years ago! What is wrong with me?

I am listening to Laura Stevenson's new single, "The Mystic & The Master", and its b-side "Maker of Things". They're terrific; Laura Stevenson is terrific.

Let's go.

The Little Foxes (preview)
Antaeus Theatre Company
October 21, 2018 2pm
Good great starting with an easy one. I saw this a couple of months ago. I remember it well. Antaeus is a wonderful theater company here in L.A., and I try to see everything that they do. I'd never seen this play, which is by Lillian Hellman and was terrific to see. I was braced by how contemporary and engaging so much of it was (much credit for which goes, no doubt, to the uniformly excellent cast and characteristic crisp, sharp, specific direction). I was also engaged by how not contemporary parts were, dramaturgically -- by how the creaky machinery of plot mechanics of another era really leap out at you and mark something as of its time. I am very happy I saw this, and to tell you about it.

Hole in the Sky
Circle X Theatre Co.
August 26, 2018 8pm
So one note @ the top: this production was a produced site-specifically, at a ranch out in Lake View Terrace, which made it quite a trek for me (and, I suspect, many of its audience members). And I wanted to change the date of my ticket, and Circle X was very prompt and friendly about letting this happen. Thanks, Circle X -- I'll be back because of that, if nothing else.
Also, this was a very worthwhile production. So again: it was produced site-specifically: it's a play about the tensions created by water use and water shortage in a California agricultural community, and of course how class and race interweave with these material concerns and the people they press on. So it was performed on a ranch. They did a really good job--seriously--at making that a non-crappy experience for the audience; it was comfortable, sightlines were good, etc. As night fell, some of the visual value of being on the ranch was reduced since it just became like being outside. But they did a nice thing with a truck pulling up at one point, and etc. It certainly made the whole story more lived in. The play leaned--for my taste--towards exposition, didacticism, and plot swerves that whose wind-up had been unclear (to me). But I learned from it, and was grateful for the chance to live for an evening inside voices and concerns that are very real and warrant dramatic presentation. I'll certainly see Circle X's next production and, if it's like this one, see the one after that too.

The Women
Archway Theatre Company
April 7, 2018 8pm
This was fun! My friend costume designed and acted in this production of another famous play of a bygone era; it was staged in the very vintage clothing shop from which the costumes were drawn. Everyone was dressed just right (as far as I could tell!), and I was grateful to be exposed to a play that was significant and successful in its time but that I had missed until now.

Isle of Dogs
The Landmark [for movies, I'll just say the theater I saw them @]
March 31, 2018 12:05pm
I don't have a lot to say about this that hasn't been said. It was really well made; it was really carefully and elegantly and successfully conceived and executed. It felt a little clinical and distant, to me, like Anderson's work generally does. And I guess most of all was the thing of its being set in Japan but still--to me--feeling like the choices that were made about whom you can understand and who speaks like...basically, I think it wound up other-ing Japanese people some. Which felt particularly twee and odd, in a movie set on their home turf. Other people might not feel that way, and I'm not pushing some big thesis about the filmmakers. That's how I felt.

Annihilation
ArcLight Santa Monica
March 16, 2018 8:05pm
THIS MOVIE WAS VERY GOOD WHY DID IT NOT DO BETTER? That is about all I have to add. It was so cool to see original IP (I know it's based on a book, which I'd like to read; I mean "original" IP in that it does not rely on a popular and preexisting franchise/character/topic) in like a real sci-fi movie with ideas and crazy stuff happening and the ol' resonance-between-the-protagonist's-inner-turmoil-and-the-crazy-stuff-happening-in-the-world thing, but that thing is so great when the "crazy stuff" is great! (And, when you have a committed and engaging performance from your lead actress, as this film did). I'm really glad I saw this! I wish more people had seen this!

Black Panther
The Landmark
March 12, 2018 1:15pm
What do you need me to say about this movie? It's as good as you've heard. Maybe better? Here let's do lists; this isn't ranked but here are movies based on Marvel IP that I thought were totally terrific: Black Panther, X-Men and X-Men 2, Logan (probably my favorite), and...okay I'm putting The Avengers on this first-tier list because of that post-credit scene where they're eating gyros or whatever and I did enjoy it so much, but I think it's actually more like in its own little tier between first-tier and second tier. By the way @ the Landmark early afternoon on a weekday there's "bargain" pricing; I didn't even know that! Cost me twelve bucks to see a superfun supercool movie. Big win.

That's it. I'm not going to attempt any summary till I'm done with all these, and maybe not even then.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Incidental Fauna of the Southern California Coastline, July 6th 2018

It's so nice to be here just talking to you.

The water off the coast is now (finally!) warm; very warm, very comfortable. You can swim for a long time, especially in a suit

this was the morning I'm writing about
I'm writing about some animal stuff that happened in/at it.

A little before 8 a.m., and there's a shorebird on the empty beach. Rather: there's a shorebird on the nearly-empty beach. An older man who's living rough on this patch, and whose wake-up my arrival frequently coincides with -- he stretches out of the sleeping-bag (I think) that's laid over himself, resting amidst a few bags of stuff and a mountain bike with thick tires. He's fine to me; I'm fine to him. We say good morning. No other people.

Not that many animals, either. At least not visible. But: this one bird. Pecking and scampering, doing its thing. And it's a really interesting bird: it's not a sandpiper; it's not a seagull. It's not an egret or heron. I watch it doing its thing; its thing is neat. It scampers back-forth with the waves, 'Piper-like. It clearly is hunting: it searches, it pecks. It has a long bill, it has long-ish legs. It's not a bird I've seen before.

It pecks, it hunts, and its hunting takes it gradually down the break towards where I am standing, watching it. After it gets pretty close--15 feet--it hunts for a couple of waves then takes flight; flies just twenty feet or so, to the far side of me, and continues its pecking and hunting progression.

I go for my swim (more on this below, hold on). After, later, I try to figure out what the bird was. The Internet is a weird place to figure things out; once you get there you see how winding your path was. But after a bunch of search-adjustsearch-blahBLAHblah, I settle: I'm pretty sure that it was this.
Frank Lehman / Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
I actually...I'm embarrassed to say I imagined at one point that the story of how I figured this out would be interesting. It is not. I won't tell it. But the bird was fantastic. If that's what it was. I think that's what it was: a Marbled Godwit. The name is apparently an attempt to represent their call, rather than some extraordinarily bizarre act of antiquated sacrilege. Anyway, my bird was silent. Focused!

Now, back/forward to the swim. I'm out, swimming; it's gorgeous, a pretty still day with no big scuffling or swells once I'm out past the break and the surface is glassy.

On the glassy surface, I see one of those disturbances--very small--that at once you're quite sure is some thing. I swim up; it is. It is one of these.
It is flopped on its back, doomed (I think) on the water. I've kind of often wondered this: when I lived in a building with a pool, I probably saved two to five bees/wasps a day from that pool. It seems like a majorly maladaptive trait: to need water (as all living things do), but to...die? If you get to close and your wings get caught? I guess I'm saying it always surprises me that these charismatic Hymenoptera haven't kinda evolved out of this watery-doom thing. But:

The wasp is on its back, well out on the water. I lift it up from below and it's now on my finger. What's exciting about this is the super close-up view; wasps, you don't usually get to see really, right? They are zipping around, tiny threatening aerialists -- you don't get to study them up close, mostly. This one, obviously, wasn't zipping anywhere. At least not for the moment.

So then I'm faced with this question, which strikes me at once. How long am I willing to wait, for this wasp? I immediately see that the only good option is to hope it can sort itself out on my hand here--do what it needs to get going, and go. Because: (a) swimming all the way back to shore with my hand up and a waterlogged wasp sticking to it seems both kind of annoying and not very feasible; would take a long time, would suck, might not succeed (wasp washed off). (b) Just being like...f*ckit: sorry wasp-y. U die, also didn't feel right. I in general feel that way, about things like this. I'm way far from perfect, in terms of my local and broader impact on the earth and it's creatures. But whenever it's one of those choices, like: I could interrupt my swim or not; this wasp could live or die. I could get out of bed to rescue this fly or not; this fly could or die. I could run through this dumb bush, get a little cut up (or not), avoiding this lizard; this lizard could live or die. It always just seems so weak and small to choose the small comfort / ease thing for myself when the animal's stakes are existence or not. Which is how this choice felt.

But how long would I wait?

Did the wasp even have a chance? Was it too...saturated?

I watched it.

It surprised me by "preening" itself. Well: first I gently (careful of wings) kind of used the stick from one damp hand to set it right (i.e., not flat on its back with its wings plastered down) on the other, which I'd air-dried as well as I could. So but then: if I were a wasp in this spot, I think I'd be like: "sh*t: I am drying my wings." Not this wasp. No. It preened. This was a cool, cool thing to see close. Holding it up almost right to my face, I saw its tiny frontal legs making those "running forward over the carapace of the skull piece"-type motions; like it was doing its hair or cleaning its face off or something like that. I still can't explain it (and haven't revisited the research-weirdness that is trying to research these things on the web). Was it assuring the patency of its airways? That, I believe, would be really important. It had to be something important, I guess; that or I just got this very vain wasp. It did that for a while, though -- like most of our time. Preened, little front-arms rubbing over its face.

This whole time its wings were like...man. Just a mess. They were all wet and sideways and f#cked up and...that's the thing I (not I as a hypothetical was; I) was worried about. Cuz if its wings didn't work, then I did not know what.

Its antenna were awesome. So ar-tic-u-lat-ed.

So okay then it did its wings, and they took like thirty seconds. First, it messed up. It tried to extend them and flap them off--I could tell it was doing this; once I was watching it closely, over time, I was struck by how 'animal-like' it was. I tend to think of insects as strange alien things in this alien tinyworld; once I dropped down into it, this one just seemed like a creature--anyway the first time it tried to extend and like flap off its wings it screwed it up totally, tipped sideways and again plastered itself to my hand, which of course was not fully dry because we are a freaking 1/4-mile or whatever out bobbing on the ocean this whole time, wasp, wut r u doing here anyway?

So it's stuck to my hand again.

So I do the thing with my other hand, again; edge of my thumb, gently as I can, lifting its stuck wing from flush to my skin. It's at this point that it occurs it to me that yes, this is wasp; yes it is now oriented to sting. For some reason, this just occurs to me. I'm not worried about it. It is not like I'm super-tough about wasp stings or something. No way do I want that. It hurts like a lot. But I somehow feel sure that that's not how this goes down; also I have some vague trivia factoid back of my mind that maybe not all wasps even can sting (only the females? or something? I still have not checked this out because...meh. I will. Soon.).

So but then, after I thumbed its wet-plastered wing up from first failed attempt...then the whole rest of it took like ten seconds. It splayed them out: two pairs of wings, bigger-smaller. (I really saw this! Or: I thought that I saw it! This whole thing was my own tiny (wet) nature show).

And then it kind of whuzzzzzed them for not long, two seconds at most

and leapt off my hand and was gone.

That was it.

Compared to the dainty extent of its ministrations to its head / face / mandibles / ?, the whole wing thing--which I would have thought would be hard and mission-critical--took two seconds. Maybe, once it was out, it wasn't worried at all. I was a magic piece of wood or whatever (what does it care? I'm not eating it. Sure fine I am wood); it knew its wings would be fine; it wanted to sort itself out before flying.

I checked, really searched, all the water around me. In case it had dumped itself plop back in ocean. The water was glassy, and I could see several feet; I cautiously started swimming again, looking. Didn't see anything.

The whole episode took longer than three minutes and fewer than ten.

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Lucky (sunglasses)

I've written in this space about compulsions, and the tensions of my own largely on-top-of-it relationships to my own. I've also written, in a general way, about what a lucky life I have. THIS IS A POST ABOUT BOTH.

A thing I'm compulsive about, after runs, is forgetting my sunglasses. Look, I know they're not fancy; I bet you have nicer ones (they cost $46.44 when I bought them in 2014, which is-- what? $Eight-grand, today? ). They're not fancy but I like them; I've used them on runs and on bikes for four years! They work great! And if I lost them I'd be sad -- I'd have to get something else, it would cost more, and I'd be sad.

This is dumb, right? I mean.

So anyway I'm concerned always, specifically, about leaving them on top of my car. You drive to the trailhead, you do your trail run (today: 9 miles here), and you come back and you're changing out of your sweaty clothes and you've got all this stuff and you're putting things on top of your car to dry while you change and...you might forget your sunglasses, right? Like some (most?) of my compulsions, this one isn't crazy and has an upside -- I am inclined to forget my sunglasses on top of my car, they blend into the blackness and--especially if I've not in fact worn them for much of the run--they're somehow sort of the last thing on my mind. But I've never done that, because I'm like, worried about it!

Till today.

Today I got home, and I did not have them. I looked for them in my room, after dumping my stuff. I looked for them in the area outside my room, where I kind of stage some dumped post-run stuff before sorting it out. I looked in the various bathrooms I'd used and had not. I walked to my car and I looked in it. I found the other pair of sunglasses I'd (why?) decided to wear for the drive home, but not these. It was looking bad.

I worked for awhile, telling myself it didn't matter (with success). I ate some food, walked back to check my car one last time. On the walk, I acquainted myself with the reality in which I had sustained the jagged loss of this pair of sunglasses; the positive angle of getting a newer pair that might even be better (I knew it would not, but I was being very brave). I gave my car one last--

Here is the drive, back from the trailhead to my house:


That's a 17-minute, eight-mile drive; for those who don't know: the "1" is a freeway that runs 'long the ocean, then that hook left (as you're driving, right as you stare at the image right now) is onto the "10", which is one of L.A.'s main arterial freeways. So: freeway driving, lane-switching, etc.

--look and smiled at once:


I'm already so lucky! It's totally dumb! Why should I get this luck-nugget as well? Tucked against bicycle rack, just so, such that...

hwelp: I'm not going to question it.

I put them on, walked my desk, and began typing this to tell you.

Saturday, June 2, 2018

It's Not Weird it is Good

I've started using Toggl to track time spent doing lots of things.

It's part of an overall organizational rubric I've been trying to implement for about a year. I'm provisionally satisfied with this rubric. The idea is that there are five categories, and that if I'm doing okay in each of these five categories then I'm doing okay. And the idea is not to complicate them too much with too many sub-cats. They are:

Write (good)
Write (world)
Service
Self
OToYS

"OToYS" stands for "on top of your sh*t".

The categories are self-explanatory (I think!); more importantly, their specifics aren't important for our present discussion. The point is: I use these across everything. My to-do lists are thus organized (again, there are sub-categories, but I try to keep them from proliferating wildly); bookmarks in my browser are organized by this rubric; tasks in Toggl; habits in HabitBull; I squeeze everything into these boxes that I can, which turns out to be almost every thing. There's a color code that persists across all programs / apps (as above), although that can be fussy when the colors don't quite match up.

Point is, I'm tracking anything work or work-esque in Toggl. Recreational stuff, including fitness stuff, doesn't get tracked on the hourly basis (although it does get marked in HabitBull). I'm writing (listening to this lovely, relaxing music) on this nice Saturday because

(a) I never get to talk about this stuff with anyone, and
(b) When I imagine myself talking about this stuff with anyone (most of my interactions--I suspect I'm not alone, here--most of my interactions are between myself and imaginary interlocutors) I always kind of laugh it off with some kind of self-deprecatory, "lol, I know I know, it's a little bit crazy and compulsive, ha ha." This is also the posture I take (in imaginary conversations, but also in glancing kitchen interactions in the group-house type setup I currently live in) towards the fact that I keep a reasonably careful running log of my caloric intake throughout the day: "ha ha, I know, it's so nuts lol."

I wanted to write because I think it's not nuts.

So there may be an edge to some of these words, and you--Reader-friend--you may be like whoa, slimb, why are you yelling at me? I don't mean to be, Reader-friend. Sorry. It's not even that I imagine 'you', whoever you are, when I'm having these imaginary conversations. Unless there is some specific scenario I'm thinking about (rare), those imaginary conversations are pretty much with myself or an 'audience.' I'm talking to me; these words are at me.

Every Time Someone Asks What I Do

Them   What do you do?
Me   I'm a writer. Prose, mostly.**
Them   Oh! What do you write?
Me   [short version:] Well, I'm writing this {interesting non-fiction project}. 
[long version:] Well, I do non-fiction stuff that's mostly how I, y'know, make money, and I also have this quixotic undertaking of writing a masterpiece sci-fantasy serialized novel that I've been working on for a few years and that is never done and that's kind of my heart and my passion etc. 

And always, always when I say this last thing

I wonder (in my head) 

Me   [in my head] yeah and how much time do I spend, on each of these categories? Am I working on Erra enough? Am I working on Erra too much? What's the deal???

** I promise, saying 'prose' is not as tacky or naff or unclear as it sounds. I live in L.A.; most people everyone who say that they write, in this place, mean a specific thing. When I weirdly say 'prose', people probably don't know exactly what I mean, but I've found it's a simple way of saving the conversation about fifteen seconds (big savings!).
So yeah: no, me: ur a d1ck. It is, in fact, super-great that I weirdly track all this stuff.

For the work-hours, Toggl and I all that. First of all let me note that, beyond the material pressure to make some kind of living, which (at this second) is going okay, I have no real external to...anything. ever. And while I'm self-motivated, that also means that there is no measurement, no management, no oversight. I have to self-manage.

To wit: I often feel unproductive. I often wonder if my lack of output is in fact due to lack of effort or focus, even if it doesn't feel that way. I often wonder why I'm more (or less) mentally exhausted on a given day, or at the end of a given week: if I actually worked more or if perhaps something else is going on. I often wonder--basically every time I explain to someone what I do--how the ratio of my time expenditure on various projects works out, because...look to the sidebar for this one.

(I don't know why I'm writing this, or trying to convince you! It's not like people are unaware of the benefits of time tracking, outside just client billing or whatever. That latter application ("client billing or whatever") seems to represent a small portion only of what these firms that sell all these time-tracking apps are selling.)

I think what I want to say on this--to myself, mostly; also to you, Reader-friend, of course; and if you disagree then yes right str8 2 u--what I want to say on this is that

having an actual empirical tracking mechanism, having numbers, helps me at least make a start of creating quantifiable metrics around things that are important to me. Things for which I'd otherwise have to resort to 'sense's and 'feelings', or very rough time signatures ("I guess I spent yesterday morning working on [that project], so...").

We all live inside them, these 'senses' and 'feelings'. That is what it is; I myself spend a lot of time (deliberately, on-purpose) following them.

And I know that I can't/won't achieve actual "empirical" mastery of the expenditure of the minutes and hours of my life; I know I can't in fact capture and quantify all this in a way that is even close to complete. I also know that thinking I could do that, and attempting to do that, (a) would drive me crazy, and (b) still wouldn't get me to that total mastery, and thus I'd be at risk of a bigger/more dangerous mistake than just resorting to senses and instinct; i.e., I'd be running the risk of thinking I knew more than I do.

I know nothing. I know that. There's no way to end-run my innate, reptile-brain, heuristic stupidity; I don't know myself that well, or the world, and certainly don't have a clear view on how I'm navigating through it effectively or not.

So / but, trying to do these small things--keeping track of specific, measurable work-flows that feel like they matter--does help keep me grounded in what feels like an at-least credible attempt to anchor my views of my workweek / time-management in something real; gives me something to look at that is, hopefully, 'directionally correct'. Something outside myself to guide...whatever it is that goes on in my head.

I'm sure I'll still find myself laughing this off, in these imaginary conversations I have on...whatever, long runs. Sh1t like that. But I wanted to say this and I'm glad that I did.

Thank you, as always.




Monday, February 12, 2018

HliAT #30: That Walk That's Like ECH But It's Also Like Doable But It's Also Like _ech_....

How long it actually Takes to...

walk, briskly but not rushing
from the base of the steps at the intersection of O'brien Rd and Hennessy Road
in Wan Chai
up the steps then along the overpass/walkway
until you reach, by (I think) the basically most direct route
the lobby elevators of the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong09:47.19 sec

The methodology of this HliAT was to start the timer on my phone, then stop it. I was diligent with it! It took the silly thing a second to load as I began, so I walked down to the base of the steps to start clean.

So the point of this one was a thought about disruptions, and the tradeoff between one "big" "satisfying" disruption, vs. sitting there kind of picking away at one's distraction or hunger or whatever, over an extended work session.

And my takeaway is actually: yeah, things take a long time. The context is I was sitting in the perfectly nice, but kind of anodyne and corporate lobby cafe mezzanine area of this very nice hotel, and had been working for awhile, and was kind of wondering about getting some food or taking a break, and weighing the merits of the not-appetizing (all desserts), stupidly expensive snack foods available at this anodyne &c., versus walking into Wan Chai to get some real stuff. And I was telling myself, not incorrectly, that "the walk won't take that long" and if I just do it wouldn't take that long, and etc. BUT, I was also telling myself -- "it'll take awhile. It'll be disruptive."

And my takeaway with this HliAT is: that second thought's right. If you're desperate, or have budgeted an hour-long break: great, take the "short" walk, which sums up to over 20 minutes of walking going and coming, plus whatever time you spend wandering and choosing -- whatever; great, do that if you have an hourlong break, i.e. lunch or a real rest from work. But for just a break? Don't kid yourself. Stretch your legs, eat a protein bar -- stick with it, kid.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

Honolulu Cafe, ~6:30am: a Text That I Sent to my Folks [hyperlinks added]

Family cha chaan teng update. Several notable ones near the fancy hotel. The one that opens earliest, Honolulu Cafe, is known more for its baked goods than savory breakfast sets. I wish the one known for its scrambled eggs opened early, but it opens at seven which--even when I'm not traveling--is much too late for the category of meal in question. I go to Honolulu Cafe at 515 and they have this neat thing going on that these places do where the metal screen is still down on the storefront but a small door within it is _open_; I hop in. It's dark and the guy says they're not open till six (I'm highly abbreviating a language-barrier interaction) but gestures for me to sit. I'm crestfallen but go with this; this is still my best bet for an early opening, and i don't want to bail on my cct outing. This turns out to be one of those times when the thwarting of my drive to use every minute of the day efficiently is great; I'm well aware that I'm "too" focused on this, and am good at being like 'hey maybe this is one of those times.' It was. I got work done and sat ina dark cct as the staff arrived, punched punch cards, bantered and complained. No one paid me any mind, after that first interaction. I wrote down the Cantonese that i needed on my work notepad, wanting to be ready to move through my optimal preferences here. At 6 on the dot a waiter came up; I ordered nai cha, bo lo bao, and daahn taht. The egg tart came first of the food, just after the tea. It was _great_; exceeded high expectations.
the egg tart did not last long enough for photographic evidence
this is the pineapple bun and the tea
The bo lo bao met high expectations -- it came out, fresh, about twenty minutes later. I was surprised that, on my running tab check on the table, the two 10s were the baked goods while the 21 was the tea -- I learned this whenI ordered my second tea. I loved every minute and got good work done. I will probably post this verbatim, with pic, but wanted to actually send it you first. Love you all. This isa fantastic city. Xo

Sunday, February 4, 2018

Hit It Running [1 of (presumably, we'll see) 2]

It's very cold here in Hong Kong, for Hong Kong, and apparently no one's prepared. On campus today, students took a final exam in full coats and hats. I am sitting in my cold little rental flat, a tiny space heater shaking its head back and forth at my side, because that is the only source of warmth available in the place. This is not because my host is a dingle; he's an excellent host. The city just is not prepared for the 40s, apparently.

I've already fallen asleep twice, radng ths. I'm just going to power through.

This is a post about a reasonably specific: an approach that, I have that I think may be of use as a data point to other people who derive a pleasure and satisfaction from pushing their bodies with physical exercise.

The point of this post is that, when you're traveling, you should ignore the voiehrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Start again.

The point of this post is that when you're traveling you should ignore the part of your voice that says "pull back, wait, give yourself a break" about your morning workout / evening workout / whatever. Here's what I mean:

It's worth refuting, this "take it slow, give yourself a break" mentality -- when you're traveling. It's worth refuting, therefore this blog post is worth writing, because it has smarts in it. This is in distinction to the general "nah" of laziness, mental or physical, that might keep you from doing the thing under everdyae

oh no, okay, wait! I just had a good dream. (I fell asleep for a couple of minutes, in front of this dumb little heater in my lovely little flat). I watched this movie, 77 Heartbreaks, on the flight over. Actually I watched ⅔ of it; jjjjjjjjjjjja

try again! 

Actually, I watched ⅔s of it, cuz the flight ended. But the microdream that I had one falling-asleep-at-the-keyboard ago involved a young couple clearly modeled on / looking like that young couple. And they're somehow....they are constrained by the fact that the borders of the phone screen is cutting off part of the picture on top (this hasn't yet happened in a way that's affected a good game I'm plyaing on my phone, but has happened) and so that's making it hard for decisions to get made

and the thing is he likes this one restaurant on one side of a little Hong Kong street
and she likes others, or one specific other
cuz they're opposites, see

and they can't agree!

and but then they meet in the middle of the street because neither of their respective companions showed up or ghy ol something and so there they are

this young couple

in the middle of a Hong Kong street; him in front of his restaurant

she in front of hers

and they see each other know the moment for what it is,
the Moment That They Met,

and then there's a funny postscript agout not fbeaofeah

ARGH

funny postscript about

"which restaurant will they go to"

as they tug in opposite directions; and:

cut.

That's not what this post is about.

Okay so maybe I should start this again.

When you travel, reader, friend,
and if you--like me--are someone who gains pleasure from physical exercise
Hit it Hard.

You will have a voice that says, "whoa, wait, chillout. Take it easy."
And instead of being weak or whatever this voice might usually be characterized as
this voice will be compelling, worth following, because it contains the truth.
You're treavling, that's tiring; you were flying for whatever like 20 hours.
You need to conserve your strength.
Plus, you have less time, so the general idea of "work smarter, not harder"
don't waste the time of a workout on a second-rate workout
one that you're tired, a bit, during
one that you don't know exactly where the running rout leasd, or hwate0awi

the point is the idea of "taking it easy" might not seem crazy!
It's not crazy!
But:
krush it.
Go. Do the thing.
Do it even if maybe you'll do it crappily, maybe you don't know the running routes yet
you're a bit tired you won't run good spltis
etc.

DO IT.
do. it.

Why?

(1) the nonspecific reason is that, barring injury or rhager yoaummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmms

okay starting again reason 1 is:

non-specifically, "go do the thing" is very good advice. It's not always correct, of coruse,.T BUt htia

okay forget it I'll finish this tomorrow morning promise I will and promise I won't change anything obie ti a

nope! I am back. It is ten minutes later; I washed my face and now I'm in this tiny flat's even tinier bedroom--room for a twin bed and nothing else, the door can't even open properly with this bed in here--and the heater on heating the small space so back to the smart point I'm trying to make.

Maybe, let's review.
I went on a run this morning despite the fact that I had all kinds of reasons not to;
unlike most of the time when you have "all kinds of reasons not to" these reasons were somewhat defensible, since they related smartl yt to444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444444m

no i better give up i will finish thi stomorow

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Killed a Lizard

The western fence lizard is familiar to anyone familiar with the low-lying mountains of southern California; these scuttering, dusky little lizards pop up all over the place, doing their funny lizard push-ups and scampering up walls and all of the lizard things.
i didn't kill this lizard. i saved this lizard; the little interloper got caught in my door in my place in Topanga; I found it once it had exhausted itself from trying to scrabble up/through the glass, but (I really do think) before it was dehydrated past hope or whatever. I was able to scoop it up (carefully!) just with my hand and a sheet of paper, and release it.
On runs--not them; me--they do something else. I've indulged in many jeremiads about this thing that they do, to friends and family, because it is frustrating and self-endangering;

what they do is, when scampering across the path, while you're running, behave in a way that seems to me to be totally totally maladaptive if you're interested in not being eaten by a predator:

I am running on a narrow single track -- the whole thing is say two-and-a-half feet wide, hemmed in by thick chaparral and brush either side. A lizard darts out and, incredibly, instead of continuing its direction of motion to dash into the protection of the thick brush, charts a straight course that is clearly along my trajectory, as if trying to outrun me as of course it cannot since it is a tiny lizard, causing me to pull up my pace and often do all kinds of side-stepping calisthenics to avoid it. I've never had to, like, toss myself off the side of a cliff to avoid one, but I've sure stumbled and scratched up my legs and just generally emerged from these encounters shaking my head at the tiny reptile brains of these things that veer off what seems like a promising course to safety in order to endanger themselves (what if I were a hawk?) and also make me have to do silly trail-dances to dodge them. But I'd never--or, at least, not knowingly--stepped on one until a few days ago.

I've reviewed this a bunch; there really was not anything I could have done. This was not, actually, a scenario like the one I've just described. I'd feel worse then, because (presumably) if I'd simply stopped running the lizard would have escaped. This was more sudden. I was going downhill in Temescal, running the return of a pleasant short loop of the kind I've been doing a good deal of lately. I saw a flash of dark from the brush; it was either after I'd pushed off my left and was coming down on my (I'm pretty sure) right foot, or--the earliest possible, as my memory has it--just as I pushed off my left to come down on my right. Running perpendicular across my path. And the dark flash slipped perfectly underneath my shoe, disappeared for a moment during which I felt nothing, and then I was past it and on down the trail.

And I stopped, of course; and here...it's not like this is so horrible, so if you're titillated by that sorry no dice, but it does get a bit unpleasant so perhaps you'll want to skip this paragraph. I'll put all the this-kind-of stuff in this paragraph. So I stopped, of course, and turned back up the trail; my idea was (a) to make sure, and (b) to see if, you know, there was a situation where I had to do a thing to finish a thing. And for a second I was happy, because I saw nothing, and then a saw a fluttering shadow and knew I'd been right. And I approached it, and it was already in the process of-- I don't know, it may not even have been conscious or neurologically active: it was flopping around like a broken machine, or a wind-up toy losing gearage with half its parts missing, jack-knifing in strange ways on its side, flopping spasms. It was a pretty big one, big as my hand nose to tail (for these lizards, at least the ones that I see, that is pretty big). And after some moments its flopping spasms subsided, replaced by twitches in its small, pronged lizard feet. I picked it up, pretty sure I would not need to do a thing to finish a thing; pretty sure it was finished. Its little feet still jerked and spasmed, but I was practically certain it wasn't in pain -- I had not popped its head or anything dramatic, but a thick foam of blood had soaked out from the whole right side of its jaw, and my guess is that I'd broken its neck or otherwise utterly shattered the machinery of its neurological/physical systems. It had a blue-brushed belly; a couple weeks earlier, talking to my parents about lizards on the trails, my mom had observed (from her internet research) that western fence lizards sometimes have blue bellies, and then said oh but maybe I haven't seen any like that, and I'd corrected her that no, they were dusky on top but I'd seen their blue bellies, I'd liked their blue bellies.

I held it in my hand -- after ten, fifteen seconds even foot twitches subsided. I laid it to the side of the trail, so its form would not be further mangled by footfalls. I hoped that something would come, eat it soon; I'm practically certain that hope was well-founded. I finished my run.

It's a small thing, compared to all the things. OF COURSE. But these inexorable things are, like, very inexorable; there's no positive gloss or yeah, but... I didn't beat myself up: I really don't think there's much I could have done. It just made me sad. And it felt/feels unfair, in the way of these things, and in a way that--perhaps--part of my sadness is about how these stories are always so broken and unfair. An existentially catastrophic thing happened to this animal; a thing that was--for I hope just a flash--horribly painful as well, no doubt. And I'm the one who gets to talk about it; I'm the one who gets to think about that lizard, on my next trail run, or right now, or whatever. I KNOW I AM TALKING ABOUT A F#*(ING LIZARD, THANKS; I GOT THAT. But it's a tyranny of narrative that applies to all of these things, and is why--leap here, lookout--our fixation on murderers and perpetrators of harm in the stories we tell is so odious to me. Because one of the grievous harms of physical and psychological harm, of victimization, is that it takes you out of the world in a way that ends your story. Ends or compromises your ability to tell it; ends or curtails the timeline of it. And it's not fair! To the extent that anyone did a bad thing in this setting, I did -- I went recreationally to a place that's not really mine, or that is I M H O more that lizard's than mine, and as a result of my going to that place and how I chose to behave there, even if I was not being a big crazy jerk, that animal died. I did the bad thing, but I get the story. That's bullshit. It's bullshit. That's not how it should be.

I'm glad I wrote this. I'm impressed with you, friendly reader, if you read it all through. But I wanted to write it as a final...to like...to not let myself, forget. Such a small, "stupid" thing; and isn't that crazy, too? Because it is small and stupid, compared to so many other things. I agree. BUT I BET IT DOES NOT SEEM THAT SMALL TO THAT LIZARD-- OH WAIT, NOTHING "SEEMS" ANY"THING" TO THAT LIZARD ANYMORE, BECAUSE I CRUSHED ITS BRAIN BENEATH MY SHOE BECAUSE I LIKE TRAILRUNNING.

Anyway: sorry, thanks. I will try to be nice to the world all around me, and all of the creatures and forms it contains. Thanks for reading.

Sunday, January 7, 2018

HliAT #29: Across the courtyard and back in a flash!

How long it actually Takes to...

move from the microwave (exactly: right in front of it) in the kitchen  
through the open door (i.e., no time spent opening/closing doors)
across the courtyard with a glass of water in hand;
place glass of water down onto your desk in 'garden-studio' (your room; door: also open);
move back from your room--
NOTE: all moving' = walking briskly,
neither hustling nor ambling--
again through door to kitchen
BACK to microwave
in time to press 'Cancel' so microwave doesn't beep
(important, cuz it's 5am.
Everyone's sleeping): 0:27 sec

The methodology of this HliAT was to start the microwave and note time upon departure (1:09) and return (0:42).

The useful takeaway from this HliAT is that, despite the fact that this time is >30 seconds, you cannot reliably cross courtyard to room with a thing in your hands and get back in time to cut off a 30 -second burst in the microwave (the easiest shortcut button to press, start a cycle). Because, while this time is >30 seconds, your margin of error is like three seconds and you don't want to miss out on 'Cancel'-ing the microwave before it is done and beeeeEEEps because [as noted] other people are sleeping. You already clattered a plate in the courtyard at like 4am (sorry, Housemates).

If you need to heat something for a 30-second burst, just press the button and wait for it, dummy.