The Actual World

Here's a drawing I did.

It's a good representation of my visual artistic abilities.

Those words on the left are "the actual world.".

Those words that bend around the dotted rectangle on the lower right are "this thing".

That word in the dotted rectangle is "me".

That box-in-a-box at the bottom isn't important: it's a check-box for me to tick once I've posted this (done!).

I drew this because of a sense of caution, or perhaps if I'm honest mild self-contempt, about this thing that I'm doing right now. How it's supposed to be about a thing that is very much in the world -- in business, in starting new things. And to some extent it is, in that the thinking and frameworks are very valuable. In fact I ought to and want to state that more strongly: the thing (the rectangle box) is of value, and offers something of value to the people (students) who enter into it. Most people would benefit from some time in the box.

BUT, me, in the box, doing the thing -- what's actually happening to ME is that I'm getting good at the rhetoric and frameworks and internal system of this thing: this course, this way of thinking, and all that. And outside that is the actual world. Which is its own, big, different set of circumstances. From which I am shielded.

That's all.

Los Angeles, I'm Yours

I'm in London, for work; I love London, and I love the people I see here. But but being on trips also reminds me of how much I love L.A., and living there, and really want to earn it and feel like I've made something of myself in that place. Like: that I am specific to it.

When you have friends like J-- and B-----, for example, this is what Thanksgiving looks like in L.A.

Pulau Ubin is a Beautiful, Strange Place

I've been going to Singapore periodically for (wow) the last couple of years, for work. But the work thing is relocating (even if they rehire me), so I won't be back there for awhile. Maybe ever. So I tacked an extra day on to this last trip, to visit Pulau Ubin: a small wetland island close to the city itself, that's touted as a way to view what pre-industrialized, pre-hyper-commercialized Singapore was like.

"Pulau Ubin" means "granite island" in Malay. (Wikipediaaaa)

I'm really glad I did. It was pretty weird. What follows is a tourist guide for how to have exactly the same day I did.

You get to Pulau Ubin by "bumboat", which I have checked several times is actually that word and apparently is. A bumboat is a small boat, as pictured. They hang about the docks in a town near the airport until 12 people are on, and then off they go. The ride takes about 10 minutes, and it's pretty, through small waterways between the mainland and the island.

Then you get there, and there are bicycle rental shops and eateries clustered by the small dock. You can, for instance, sit in a nearly empty one (it's a little after 10am) and eat a DELICIOUS oyster omelette, slightly anxious that the oysters will mess you up because you had a conversation with the Dean of the business school the night before, at the graduation dinner, about how badly oysters can screw you up but how you and he have been lucky and have never had a bad one.

You don't get a bad one, and the omelette's terrific.

So, omeletted, you go and rent the worst f**king rental bike in the history of rental-bikes-that-don't-actually break, for 10 Singapore dollars. You could have rented one for 2 Singapore dollars, and throughout the rest of your day -- which will mostly be spent biking around the island -- as your gear-chain slips with each push of your pedals every time you reach a more than say 10-degree incline, you will wonder whether you were (a) smart to get the 10 dollar one, because holy crap imagine the 2 dollar one; (b) dumb to get the 10 dollar one, because how much worse could the 2 dollar one be?; or (c) dumb to get the 10 dollar one, because there was an 18 dollar one and maybe that would've been more like an actual bike than this thing barely holding together.

All is well.

You then spend a couple hours biking around the wetlands, which are called Chek Jawa. In fact, you're not allowed to bike around the wetlands themselves, and when you lock up your bike with everyone else's there are monkeys stealing things from bike baskets, whom you fail to photograph. There are also kind of cute wild pigs, lumbering about, whom you do photograph, poorly, like some "Where's Waldo" shit in a picture that's mostly of bicycles so you invite anyone reading about this to click on the picture if you they want to take a whack at seeing the pigs sort of.

The walk through the wetlands really is beautiful. 

There is a raised walkway along the coast and over the water. The tide is high, so you can't see as much of the coral and shorelife as you would were it low.

Still, it's gorgeous.

After just a couple hundred meters you reach what you've been warned about -- closure due to improvements, workmen tearing up the slats to somehow make things better.

Thus ends your Chek Jawa wetlands coast walk.

However! You still have your Chek Jawa wetlands mangrove forest walk. Very different from the coastal; where the coastal was open and hung out over the water, this is lush and overgrown amidst the muddy thickness of mangroves.

It's great. There are monitor lizards, including one longer than your arm that you manage to capture some video of. You are a terrible photographer/videographer. Why the hell does your spellcheck not recognize "videographer"?

At the start of the mangrove forest, there's also a nifty overlook tower. You climb up and earn the friendship of a mother-son duo taking pictures of each other by offering to take a picture of the two of them, together. You will run into this pair throughout the rest of the day, on your bikes, and they will always smile and bee nice and eventually perhaps even acknowledge the shared fact of the rubbishness of these !"$(% bikes.

Butterfly photograph.

So, here's the thing. You are now done. Because: Chek Jawa is kind of the main reason to have come to Pulau Ubin. It was great. The other thing you'd had a mind to try out was the mountain-bike terrain park, but the fact that your rental bike is not suitable even for leisure riding makes that seem silly. Also, you were going to maybe eat some seafood. Done.

So you spend four more hours biking the island's little trails, and it's strange.

Because that's what most people seem to be doing. Wandering around on semi-functional, rented bicycles, moving vaguely amidst a number of totally nice pretty things that are not quite in themselves enough to justify anyone's presence.

The much-touted "Singapore as it was" appears to be locals living on small plots in very simple homes, bric-a-brac with old unused machines and the like. There is also also subsistence farming going on, according to some of the tourist information. You don't see any. There are a number of stands open that sell coconut water.

There's a pavilion that must be being prepared for the Chinese New Year. The flags are festive! There's a guy burning tires off to the right!

This is a compound of some sort. It's behind fencing. It looks like a tourist hotel fallen into disuse.

Far from the fenced-in tourist hotel, there's a jungle gym for training police that looks pretty fun.

The bridges are neat. People fish off of them.

The thing that's funny is how none of this is focal, and you are one of many people -- people who seem to come from the wide array of cultures one would expect, in Singapore -- milling around on bicycles between them as though none of you are quite sure why you've come to this place. Which, given the incidentalism of your own presence, makes sense: other people might have arrived here by the same processes. I have some time, I'd like to go someplace pretty near Singapore. internet says: Pulau Ubin.

Here are the names of some places you go, because they are on this island and labeled on your map: Noordin Campsite. Maman Campsite. Jelutong Bridge. Ketam Quarry (mountain biking). Merbah Hut. Jelatok Hut. Sensory Trail. Puaka Bridge.

The exception is groups of people, who look possibly Filipino, who camp themselves on the small beaches you can find if you go off your bike on these footpaths in a few places. They set up with food from a cooler and hunker down, and the impression you get is that they're there for the day. Unlike you, passing through, cluelessly wandering.

You do do the mountain-bike park, because what the heck, and it turns out that the easier trails (they're graded like ski slopes) are manageable even on your butt-tastic bike. You wind up at a beautiful quarry, which -- not the specific quarry, but the fact of quarries and stone -- is where the island's name comes from.

That's about it. You bike bike bike bike. Later, in your hotel, you will realize that your forearms and the back of your neck are burned - this isn't surprising. You return to the jetty you arrived, where some of the lazy, pretty healthy looking semi-feral dogs who wander about the island are laid out snoozing, and bumboat back.

The "hawker stalls" -- what in America might be called a food arcade, or even a "food court", although it is not organized around a central "court" -- on the mainland side by the pier turn out to be a treat, full of delicious and cheap Indonesian, Chinese, Indian, and Malay foods.

You go twice: once at around 9pm, and once at 3am. Both times you get the exact same thing, an Indonesian set meal with two small fried fish, an egg, coconut rice, and tiny salted dried sardines. It's excellent both times; costs 3.50 Sing both times. As you eat the second, it occurs to you that this may be the last meal you ever eat in Singapore. This second outing, late, there prostitutes around who seem to be men cross-dressed, and perhaps some who are pre- or post-op trans. They put the sale on you, which makes this trip a little more the less-fun kind of adventure. Mainly you feel bad about it, because maybe white guys wandering around at 3am who are guests of the one touristic hotel are exactly who they ought to be selling to, target-customer wise.

In a small courtyard between stalls, there's an inflated Chinese Happy New Year in good-fortune red, about 15 feet high.

Happy New Year. Good day.

On a Late-September Night in Brentwood, Los Angeles (2014)

I had dinner with my friend C- at a pleasant restaurant called A Votre Sante. We'd just taken a Sunday evening yoga class at the very-Brentwood Maha Yoga, with the setting sun spilling in on a bunch of fit well-heeled people doing pretty challenging yoga.

We sat outside at the restaurant, because C- wanted to. It was pretty outside: an ivy-covered wall in a snug but not too-tight alley; Christmas lights tastefully strung over the ivy, and black metal-frame chairs with bright red cushions.

We were the only ones out there when we sat down. Shortly thereafter, we were joined by a young dad and a 6-or-so year-old girl. The dad wore a 3-piece suit and the girl had on a simple white dress; for some reason, this didn't immediately strike me as odd, or strike me in any way. He had long curly hair that was neatly combed back -- a man out on the town. His daughter's hair was held back by a small white silk band.

After they chose tables, I leaned over to make sure they hadn't wanted the one next to ours, where my bag was parked. The man thanked me, then explained that "my daughter has asked me out for a date."

C. and I made approving, that-sounds-nice noises. And from there on were freaking riveted by the whole thing, stopping our own conversation to capture little snippets of theirs.

The little girl wanted to make an occasion of the night. Her dad went right along. She asked the waiter his name (Gustavo), and took some time getting it right -- Gustavo was nice about this. She wanted to order "chicken," so her dad and Gustavo conferred and settled on a chicken paella.

The dad asked if he should have wine or beer or just something like ice tea, and she seemed sort of confused. My read was that she was confused about what answer would make things most how she wanted them to be: was "wine" more occasiony than "beer"? I think she had a vague sense that drinking one of those-- wine, beer-- heightened an event, made it more of an occasion. I'm not sure where they came down on this one.

A few minutes into dinner, her dad asked "So, how are you doing? I know it must be hard for you..." I perked up with anxiety. I thought that perhaps this charming scene was a mid-divorce palliative of some kind. But in fact what was "hard" for the little girl was something to do with having her brother around all the time. She didn't seem too bothered about it; she clarified the specific kind of instance in which this was "hard", and seemed to say that the rest of the time things were pretty okay.

She made approving noises and comments about the food when it came. They chatted and talked the whole time.

As they got up -- their meal was quicker than ours, as it didn't involve coffee and may not, in fact, have involved desert -- C. asked if their date had been good. The little girl, whose name we knew was E. from her extensive introduction with Gustavo, said that yes it was. I asked if the food had been good, and she nodded and said yes it was.

She wandered off towards their car, a little shy and bored of us. I made a joke to her dad about how "she's off." He explained that he "apparently hadn't been spending enough time with her, that's what I was just told." Not at all in a put-upon or unhappy way; in a sort of matter-of-fact and grateful way, in fact. At this point little E. wandered back and he asked her again, continuing our polite engagement, if she'd had fun. And she said yes that she had and said, "I love you, daddy," just really very straightforwardly not at all like she was saying a thing. Although I got the sense that she was sort of glad to say it, like she'd been waiting to say it or something.

Her father jacked up; it happened in his chest and his face, and was clearly visible to two strangers from six feet away. He had no words at all; we smiled at the periphery and left him to it.

E. wandered away again, back back towards their car and towards home. Her father wandered after, wishing us both a good night as he went, and wishing us "good luck." He seemed to be imagining that C. and I were a couple, who might -- if we were lucky -- someday share and create the kind of experiences he'd had that night. Which was generous and sweet and mistaken, as we were/are two friends who'd just watched the whole little magic unfold.

HliAT, #2

How Long it Actually Takes to...

do the household stuff that needed doing the morning of July 23rd, 2014 in the city of Los Angeles after eating breakfast but before settling to work, to wit: take 3 Aspirin; make bed; clean up cat puke; change loo paper roll; put cat litter in littler box; pull the blinds): 5 minutes, 8.26 seconds

Reflections on Not Fighting on June 20th, 2014

I began this post awhile ago. Then it got too long; then other stuff happened.

I'm going to finish it now, tonight, whatever that means. It will mean combining a number of posts into one single, massive post; a post that is almost like a "piece of writing," except totally solipsistic and unedited by myself or others. WHO ARE YOU? WHY ARE YOU READING THIS? THANK YOU FOR READING THIS.

Hey how are ya? Here we go.

This is a story about how I got injured, and then I got better through the miracle and grace of our bodies and nature, and a couple of thoughts I've been having as -- now -- I get back into the swing of things, (touch wood, for the moment:) totally healthy.

On July 20th, I was supposed to have a fight near San Diego. Here’s the ticket:

I had a blog post planned for this pic, or maybe just a tumblr. My note for it was 8 days to fight: okay, this is kind of cool” because really- this is like a real ticket. Cool, huh?

But then, 10 days before the fight, sparring at my gym, I got chopped with a low kick. No one was being aggressive or reckless. It was a chop kick to my right leg; it happened while I was moving backwards because the technique R---, my kicker, was doing was one in which you shove your opponent back then chop at the right leg while his/her weight is on it. My right leg first of all isn’t used to taking low kicks; if you’re a righty (I’m a righty), you spend all or most of your time in a stance with your left leg front, which means the left leg is taking the chops. Also, my leg was in motion and the muscle was engaged -- this being the point of the technique. So I trained for 45 more minutes, not being tough -- I really didn't feel much more than a "hey, I sure took a shot there." And then about an hour after practice, this happened:

Back when I thought I would be doing these separately, the post for this pic was something along the lines of: 10 days to fight: holy s$!@ my f_____ leg

It came on suddenly; I was sitting and having a post-training meal with a friend, my awareness of the leg went like this:

- Hunh, yup I got low-kicked

- Hunh, guess that low kick hurt more than I thought

- Ah darn. That low kick banged me up a little. Maybe I won't do that run tomorrow

- HOLY CRAP MY LEG IS ON FIRE

- HOLY CRAP MY LEG IS ON FIRE AND THE SIZE OF 2 LEGS AND I CANNOT BEND IT

I’d gotten what’s called a corked thigh, which is a bad bruise to the quadricep. I had a sort of epic one, intra- and inter-muscular; when I finally went to the doctor there was lots of "hey, come look at this" between the docs before starting me on a couple of months of physical therapy with admonitions to stay off it, not get hit, et cetera et cetera.

I didn’t know this right away, of course. You get hurt doing muay thai and, while this was bad, I figured I’d see how the swelling was the following morning. Getting into the car was difficult, as was driving.

The following morning it was bad, but not awful. I switched out my run and instead lifted weights and did yoga.

On Saturday, two days after the kick, I trained. The leg hurt and was clearly impaired and was starting to feel like an injury rather than a hurt, but it still seemed like maybe something to just power through.

On Sunday I lifted and did yoga.

On Monday I did yoga and trained muay thai. This is one of the many blog posts I'm folding into this one; one about “6 days to fight: unknown strength”. That’s because by this point the leg was a problem, a problem I was worried about; it was stiff and painful and weak and unsteady. That permeated my yoga class, of course, making my yoga tentative and injured and lame. But then, at the end, I really nailed my head-stand to an unusual degree: it was strong and precise and I felt like I could’ve stayed up there for ten minutes. Hence "unknown strength": the post was to be about finding hidden wells of strength when you test yourself, on the path to fullness and to doing this fight. HAR! It’s hard to say now, but I think at this stage part of me really did think that it would be… well, not all right. I think I was annoyed that I was going to again do a fight not at 100%, in the sense that the leg wouldn’t be healed and would impact my performance.

Doing muay thai on Monday, I couldn’t knee. I tried to knee hard, which was dumb; R--- goaded me, over and over: “I’m not feeling it!” Which is good training. And not his fault because I did not freaking tell anyone about this problem. Finally I had to say something was up, and Coach got annoyed at me for not having said anything before. I also took a light kick to it, just in demonstration, but it hurt a lot.

If you're thinking right now that this story so far is a carnival of stupidity on my part, I hear you. The only thing I'll say in my defense is that I was not was not trying to be rugged; I was really just trying to train through and manage the pain of what I was still telling myself--less and less convincingly-- was a hurt, not an injury. I just wanted to get to the fight.

And then Tuesday morning, my ability to pass it off as anything but an injury was overcome. It was all fucked up; clearly all fucked up, swollen and bruised along the sides (where the blood from the hit was draining, not from the hit itself) and fucked up. A mass of purple bruising had appeared above my right knee; over the course of the next few days this mass would kind of ooze its way down my leg over my calf, doing a thing that I have never seen a bruise do and did not think they did but this definitely happened, very slowly, on my body right there.

So I went in, told coach. Fast-forward by Thursday we’d called it and pulled from the fight. I was sad and angry and frustrated and discouraged, as you can imagine. I'd trained hard, people at the gym had supported and trained me hard, and now like days before I had to drop. It sucked.

It's now the end of September, weeks and weeks after all this, and I'm hopeful (touch wood) about getting another fight in October. I think what's moving me to write all this, though, is that I really did wind up learning a lot during my period of convalescence, and I really am brimming with gratitude and happiness during this, now, my period of rebuilding.

Here's some stuff I wrote, right around July 20th, when I was still processing this:

I’m seeing a doctor tomorrow, so hopefully there will not be some dramatic uptick in my dismay . It is taking a long time to heal – it is still swollen, and stiff, and unable to bear weight – but I still think it’s just a narsty soft tissue thing.

I had this idea for another post, the note for which was “5 days to fight: omgmfl [that’s oh my God my fucking leg] p2, and why anything can be a blessing”, and that’s really the thing that’s going to set me off, here. Because it turns out that I have a lot thoughts about how this might be a blessing.

I am not feeling existentially anxious. I am feeling, of course, awake to the fragility of my own physical self, and the pleasures I take in that self and how those pleasures can be taken away. But the fact is that this is a soft tissue thing that will heal and I won’t even notice in… well, longer than I’d like [ed: present day me: it will not be fully healed by, for instance, October], but also the kind of time that you look back on and don’t even really remember how long it was.

What has changed, a lot for the moment, is my routine. Before the injury I was doing 2 workouts a day. They totaled between 2h50m and 3h30m put together, depending on what I did. With transit, &c., that means 5 – 6 hours a day were often spent on my physical self.

Now that time is open, and I am not active. I may try to ramp back into activity over the next couple of days, depending on what comes out of the doctor’s visit tomorrow. But for a week now, I’ve done nothing.

I’ve gone up and down on this a lot – certainly, being injured REALLY SUCKS, and being inactive when you want to be active REALLY SUCKS. But the heart of this blog post is still "why anything can be a blessing.” 

And then I wrote out the blessings, which now I'm going to edit, with the great wisdom of like 8 weeks (I did have a birthday!) between me and the callow young buck who originally wrote these words.

These are the blessings.

Appreciation Trite & true, both. I’m pretty good at being appreciative and “mindful” in general; I’m frequently moved to say little prayers of thanks when I’m in the mountains or out on the water, or after a satisfying training session. But obviously, nothing makes you grateful for something like having it taken from you, even temporarily. So I've been reinforced in my gratitude; in my gratitude to nature and good fortune for allowing me to be healthy; to the city I live in for being so so so full of wonderful ways to be active; to myself for doing all this stuff that I do, that I get so much out of, even though no doubt sometimes I have to push myself past some exhaustion or moodiness or whatever might be conspiring to get in my way; and yes to some general cosmic sense of goodwill and good fortune that just lets me be here, whole, a person, able to work out and be outside and do amazing things. I couldn't wait to get back, and now that I'm back I find my enthusiasm rejuvenated in a way that I’m really really appreciating (be careful, though, James: watch the leg.).

Don’t Be a Rigid Weirdo   In the complex melange of feelings I was and am feeling, which of course don't have to make sense, there is also the fact that I was, in fact, starting to feel a little hemmed in by my routine pre-injury. Fatigued in my muscles; sometimes overtired; and most of all just of in terms of time and how much structure these activities put on my day. Activities where are, after all, supposed to be fun: it's not like I'm a medical resident, here. During my period recovering, it was fun having so many nights with nothing to do (muay thai is at night); it was fun to have afternoons where I could just write, or had to, because there was no yoga or lifting or swimming or running to make work in the day. This is such a first-world type problem, I know, that it might require a whole new nomenclature of privilege. That's fine, I own that - I'm very lucky. And it feels like a valuable insight, regardless. It's led me, for example, to a simple shift in my schedule which is not such a big deal but feels like one, which is just (this sounds silly) that on days where I also do something else (lift, run, yoga) it is not always necessary for me to go to the conditioning hour before the actual muay thai part of muay thai. In addition to giving me another hour a day for writing which is of course what I'm ostensibly doing with my life, this actually improves my training, because when I'm there hitting pads or sparring that is really what I'm there to do, not part of some long thing that has gone on forever after another workout earlier in the day. Part of this is psychological, and part of it is that I was just overtraining, some. So I'm grateful to have had a chance to reassess myself in that way.

The psychological is pretty big. Here's what I wrote while I was laid up:

What’s particularly valuable to me about this is the way it spreads into many aspects of my life. By which I mean: the sense of freedom isn’t just having a few more hours a day. It’s being free of a structure that I was somehow allowing to constrain much more than that. There are a bunch of things I need and want to be doing – from dumb little personal projects that nonetheless are satisfying to complete, to taking active time to really engage the big questions of what to be doing with my life – which had somehow gotten lost in the cracks and divets between the chunks of time (3 hours writing; 3 hours business logistics; 1 hour work reading; workout; workout) that was all this schedule allowed. This is a tough nut to crack (duh: time), because it was absolutely not that I was wasting time before, or actually that I think I was spending too much time on exercise. The fact is that I sort of have that luxury, right now at least. But I was letting the schedule – and, it’s true, I think to some extent just being a little more tired – really box me into a way of thinking and a routine of days that wasn’t advancing any of these sort of “non-essential” but also essential things; again, specifically, we mean little personal projects (like catching up on blog posts) and then the opposite, vague but big thinking/researching on activities and directions for life, which I view as very much open for me, right now. Open and therefore needing time and attention I wasn’t giving it.

Don’t Ration   This is a good one, and also the one that has stuck least. Because I am already rationing again. But I'm trying to remember the lesson.

Digression, promise it hooks back to relevance: The Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival – which should really have been won by Emily Carmichael’s The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting – was won by another admittedly good film (2 films, I guess) called Brick Novax pt 1 and 2, written and directed by Mat Piedmont. These were funny ironic adventure stories in which the titular Brick – played by a stop-motion animated action figure, as is everyone/thing else in the films – does sexy space spy derring-do while bedding ladies and dropping bon mots. And one of Brick's lines, towards the end, was: “Never ration happiness.” This could well be an aphorism, I don’t know; but it struck me and has stuck with me since, both as a good aspiration and as something I fail to do.

Do this. Just do it. Or whatever.

I ration the shit out of happiness. I ration the shit out of everything; out of music I like and time and leftover hummus and people and love and every thing. If I love going to Nijiya late at night for 20% off sushi, I’ll have these conversations with myself about "should I go? should I not? I don't wanna 'use it up'". If I love the cakes at Susiecakes, a 5-minutes walk from my apartment, I’ll not go for months and months. Not like as a sensible eating thing, I mean; I suppose one shouldn't eat cake every day. But I don't want to eat cake every day, I want to eat it occasionally, and not doing so when I want to because I might "use up" the pleasure I take in it or something is dumb. There's something to be said for deliberately spooling out a limited resource, and perhaps for keeping something special. But mostly not. Mostly: USE IT UP. DO IT. If I love going to Nijiya after a training, I should always do that whenever I want to because guess what, I might get injured – badly injured, or slightly badly  – and not be able to train for 2 weeks or 2 months or years or forever. I won’t always live a two-minute walk from a bakery I like: I should take advantage of it while I do. This idea that I have -- and that I therefore suspect some other human beings may have, as well -- of “not overdoing it” just for the sake of “not overdoing it” is straight-up asinine. The only reason to deny yourself is if there is an instrumental value in doing that: if of course you don't want to eat cake every day because you don't want to gain a lot of weight; if you can't afford sushi 5 nights a week; if you need to work or are needed at home or with a friend so you can't kick back at the ocean. Otherwise: use it up. Use it up use it up use it up. We only get once, don’t leave a fucking cent on the table. The stuff I'm taking for granted today could disappear faster than I'll ever know, before I know it, before I know to look and see if it's gone.

I went out and had a carrot cake, the day I first wrote out the bulk of these thoughts. Not today; remember, I'm editing (sort of) my young foolish self. A whole huge slice of carrot cake; the slices at Susiecakes are big. It was great. Way too much; gross. Felt sick. I may not need to do that particular thing again for a minute, although I find myself with hankering for carrot cake, writing this.

You know what, that's it. I had other thoughts for here, but it's not just how long this has all gone. They were about how it feels to be getting back to activity, and all the stuff I've been doing, but I mean: who cares? I've been getting to do lots of cool stuff, and getting to be very active. I care, a lot, and maybe even you do but the point is-- it feels good to be back, out, doing. And hopefully I can take some of this along with me. I have to. I'm 35. If I don't start learning from my injuries, there's going to be a lot of pointless shit going down.

Thanks for reading, if you made it this far. Even if you didn't.

How Long it Actually Takes (HliAT), #1

This is the first entry in what will be a sporadic and poorly maintained ongoing series. I welcome submissions from my thousands of readers in the comments below. HliAT is pronounced "hell-ee-aht".

This series derives from a simple premise:

None of us knows what the f**k we are talking about when we say how long it will take us to do something. 

We say "I'll be back in a minute" when we mean 15 minutes; we say "it'll take 2 minutes, literally" about things that literally take 11-25 minutes. We are morons about time, and it's not just a matter of usage ("I'll be back in a minute", yes, I know, carries a different meaning than the literal single "a minute"). We really don't know how long it takes to do things, make terrible estimates, and force ourselves and others to suffer.

I've been on the giving and receiving end of this nonsense for my entire life. It's time to take a stand.

This series is going to change the whole world.

A few years ago, in Chicago, I started tracking how long it took me to do certain everyday things; things which are no longer relevant even to my life, so I can't imagine how spectacularly irrelevant they will seem to yours. HOWEVER, the principal stands, and many of these things are like other things that I still do, or perhaps that you do. So I shall post them here, now, and when it occurs to me to time how long it takes me to "pop into this store for a minute" in future, I shall post that as well.

So here we go, let's change the world.

How Long it Actually Takes to...

take the Orange Line from Madison/Washburn in the city of Chicago to Midway Airport at around 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon: 24 minutes, 30 seconds

take the 151 bus to the Metra in the city of Chicago from the South Water Street stop (taking the bus to the Millenium Station stop getting caught at 1 red light, and then walking to and taking your seat on the Metra): 3 minutes, 55.9 seconds

take the 151 bus to the Metra in the city of Chicago from the South Water Street stop (getting off the 151 at South Water Street and walking into Millennium Station through the South Water Street entrance all the way up to taking your seat on the Metra): 3 minutes, 14.2 seconds
important note: This was catching the 7:48am Metra to South Chicago; catching the 7:35am Metra would be even faster (probably 30 - 40s) because they open the train doors further down the platform on that one

walk from the 151 stop at the corner of Stockton/La Salle in the city of Chicago to the door of apartment #2503 in Eugenie Terrace, a nice place to live:
2 minutes, 5.07 seconds to the elevators at Eugenie
the wait for the elevator varies significantly, from 0 to 60s
in the instance I timed it was 1 minute, 57.1 seconds from arriving at the elevators downstairs to opening the door to my flat

walk from the Metra station at 55-56-57th street, taking the 57th street exit, to the U. Chicago Cummings Life Sciences Building: 15 minutes, 23.9 seconds
note: walkways clear of snow/ice

And more to come. This is only the beginning, my friends. Only the beginning.