On Mondays, I deadlift. The barbell has gotten very heavy lately -- the wonderful result, no doubt, of regularly deadlifting. It’s daunting, and I think more than any other activity I do each week, it’s the one that I go into with the most self-doubt. Will the barbell move? When I get to the top set -- when I load, as I did today, 100 pounds onto the 45 pound bar -- I put some “hype” music on my iPhone and try to psych myself up for the lift. I mean, I know I can do it. I lifted as much before -- for the last month, 140 pounds x 5 reps. But I still worry -- starting sometime Sunday afternoon, kind of incessantly -- that it’s not going to happen. And yet I show up. I grind it out. Some days, it’s harder than others, but the bar always comes up off the ground.
I show up. I grind it out.
Running doesn’t feel this way, even though it’s arguably just as hard. I mean, I don’t really worry the night before -- whether a speed workout or a long run -- if I’ll be able to do it.
Yesterday, I ran 10+ miles -- my first run outdoors since New Year’s Day. The weather has been unpleasant -- cold and snowy. But it’s the wind that’s kept me indoors. I hate the wind; I have this deep-seated fear of being blown away, like Piglet on that blustery day.
I know plenty of people balk at running on the treadmill. (Plenty of runners act as though it’s “not real running” which is bullshit. Plenty of runners act as though it’s torture. And at the same time plenty of runners seem committed to suffering in inclement weather rather -- and for them, that kind of suffering seems key.) I have a list of TV shows that I watch on the iPad while I’m running, and the time goes by quickly enough. I finally finished The Crown, for example. Spoiler alert: the princess dies. I’m almost done with The Perfect Couple.
I feel like Kin and I have been watching a lot more TV lately. Perhaps it was some sort of “holiday” shift for us. We do this every once in a while, and then we soon remember that books are better. We didn’t like Wild Robot -- we didn’t even finish it. The new Gladiator movie was only interesting insofar as it prompted us to discuss when, if ever, CGI (or AI) was acceptable for special effects. We watched The Order and a series on Netflix with that actor from Slow Horses with such a terrible ending that I’m not even going to bother to Google what her name or the title was -- that is, we’ve watched mostly forgettable stuff. And then, on Saturday night, we watched A Real Pain -- Jesse Eisenberg’s new movie -- and it was absolutely wonderful. The final shot -- the camera on Kieran Culkin’s face -- will haunt me for a while. And last night, we watched The Substance, with Demi Moore. It was incredibly grotesque -- a feminist David Cronenberg, maybe -- but I couldn’t turn away.
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On Mondays, I get groceries delivered. It’s a new process -- fucking Whole Foods, I know I know. But as I noted a few weeks ago, grocery shopping is one of the worst things about living in New York. There are a couple of stores within walking distance, but they are wildly overpriced and understocked. I swear the shelves are full of items that fell off the back of the proverbial truck. I’ve purchased things like mustard and salad dressing -- items so full of preservatives they should never go bad -- that I realized when I get home are expiring in less than a month. So anyway. Whole Foods it is.
Online shopping always pushes you towards the subscription -- subscribe and save, sort of thing. And no doubt, big companies like Amazon know exactly how often you might need to buy toilet paper or mouthwash. But it’s pretty clear that subscriptions are about over-consumption, not convenience. Says the person who thought she’d be smart and subscribe to a local chocolate company as well as to coffee bean delivery -- two pantry necessities, right? -- and still never has the right amount of chocolate or coffee in the house.
Getting groceries delivered forces me to plan the week’s meals, which is annoying. But it’s fine. It’s fine. I don’t mind cooking, and sadly several of the places we’ve dined at lately have been disappointing. Disappointing ramen. Disappointing pancakes. We did have some good Tex-Mex. But I ordered the duck soup -- what was I thinking?! Something about the Marx Brothers, I guess. I should have got the tacos. So in that case, I was just disappointed with myself.
In other disappointing ramen news...
Also disappointing: hot chocolate. Just in general. It’s never as good as it sounds. Never.
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I read some Heidegger. I tried to read some Heidegger. I finished a book, written by Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology. I really only have two thoughts: 1) translation AI sucks and cannot replace humans. I mean, I’m know you can run text through something like Google Translate and you’ll get a neat little German-to-English result. But it offers nothing nothing nothing on what a human translator can do -- needs to do -- with something like Heidegger. Nice for menus; useless for literature and philosophy. And 2) Heidegger is incredibly relevant right now but I’m not sure I understand enough to explain why or how. And maybe 3) not sure if I have the energy to try. Blame all that exertion for deadlifting, maybe.
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The morning walk
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I wrote about congestion pricing in NYC for today’s Second Breakfast newsletter. It’s about cars, and it’s not about cars. It’s about how hard it is to disentangles oneself from Facebook, even when Mark Zuckerberg is pretty clearly committed to undermining democracy. It’s about how everyone wants to integrate AI deeply into their practices without really thinking about the social and environmental repercussions.
I’ve seen a lot of folks pushing back lately on claims that AI uses massive amounts of electricity and water. There were some memes in circulation this past week that tied the use of generative AI to water shortages in fighting the LA fires. And these sorts of casual cause-and-effect things always get the Internet armchair fact-checkers upset, to be sure. But we really can’t stop and think about how global climate change is absolutely bound up in both our material and digital practices. Perhaps we can’t because it just doesn’t seem at all clear what the hell we can do other than burn burn burn.
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On Saturday night, Kin and I went to our neighborhood jazz club Birdland to see Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band. I mean, I love big band. Shove as many trumpets and saxophones on a stage as possible (as long as there’s room for the stand-up bass and piano, of course), and I’m in. But this particular act appealed to me for a number of reasons: of all the shows we’ve seen at Birdland, I think we’ve seen one female performer. And of all the shows we’ve seen at Birdland, and of all the jazz we listen to at home, I’m not sure we’ve paid any attention to the contributions of indigenous musicians to the genre.
It was, I think, my favorite show I’ve seen there. (The number of women I’ve now seen perform, quintupled.) I don’t have a set list, but they performed songs by Mildred Bailey and Jim Pepper. They played an arrangement of a poem by Queen Liliʻuokalani that was heartbreakingly beautiful. They played a song that one of the trumpet players composed -- a three-part piece about the Dineh, about windtalkers, about the “iron horse.” They played a Jesuit hymn, rewritten by the bassist, that spoke to the genocidal efforts of the Indian Boarding Schools.
We have to know the past to better face the future.