Week 12 of 2025

I gave myself a couple of days to be super sad about my terrible half marathon, and then I got back at it: I did deadlifts on Tuesdays (usually that happens on Monday; it happened this morning) and I ran as well. I'm adding a sixth day of running -- tentatively. We'll see how my body recovers. I'm really committing to keeping my heart rate very low during most of my runs, for once using my Garmin for this sort of thing: it buzzes at me when I leave Zone 2.

If running was a disaster, then ballet is now a shining star as my teacher Ron says I'm ready to move up from Absolute Beginner Ballet to Beginner Ballet. I'll do both classes this coming week, and I'm very nervous-excited, as I still feel so clumsy and awkward. Not sure if doing both classes -- Absolute Beginner on Fridays and Beginner on Saturdays -- is sustainable, particularly with that sixth day of running. But we'll see.

I'd scheduled a massage -- a gift to myself to help recovery with what I thought would surely be another PR. It was still very very nice to get a massage obviously. But I felt a little guilty, like I didn't really deserve it somehow. Brains are weird.

A friend called me last week, quite upset that their political radicalization -- a response to the lurch this country's taken towards autocracy -- was starting to alienate people. I said that I figured I'd severed ties with most everyone who disagreed with me politically the last time we'd all lived under the Trump Administration. It's easier to do, no doubt, when you're a freelance writer living in a big city. It really just meant unfriending on Facebook a bunch of people I grew up with in Wyoming.

But I admitted that my outspoken stance against AI -- and explicitly linking AI to this rise in techno-fascism -- had cost me some friends too. A lot of my friends work in ed-tech, no surprise, and a lot of people in ed-tech just love ed-tech and have been quite eager to view generative AI as the latest toy to play with. I sent out an email today -- the usual Monday Second Breakfast newsletter -- and I'm sure it's going to upset a lot of people. No one likes being called a racist. No one likes being called a fascist. But somehow, as I note, we have "racism without racists" and "technofascism without technofascists." (Friday's newsletter was similarly harsh on the ears of those who believe that computing and democracy are compatible. I guess I should remind everyone that they cheered when I returned to ed-tech, LOL.)

Speaking of stupidity and AI, I have had to disable the "feature" on all my Apple devices that autocompletes words as I type: the predictive text of generative AI but just in one word increments. It is absolutely the most annoying thing ever as it's rarely what I want to say. And hooray, that means I'm not a machine, churning out utterly predictable sentences. But we're all being bent towards that machinery, in ways that aren't always as overt as having ChatGPT write your 4000 word newsletters on the glory of AI's future. (Phew, dude. You gotta stop that shit.) It's so funny (not funny) isn't it: we're told that computers and AI are going to make us more efficient when in fact, we are spending even more time now clicking and back-spacing and correcting the shit that computers autocomplete and autocorrect for us.

Food updates: coffee and biscotti with Leonie at La Lanterna di Vittorio. Sandwiches from All'Antico Vinaio. Crispy sesame beef and fish in scallion and ginger broth from Chi. Cauliflower hummus, baba ghanouj, and spicy feta with frena bread, along with a roasted veggie salad and an ice cream sundae with halva from Frena.

Reading updates: almost done with On Freedom. In the middle of The Many Lives of Anne Frank. Both are just incredibly powerful and moving.

Viewing updates: season finale of Severance. First episode of Adolescence. Some of the latest Daredevil season. I think some other things must've played in the background, but I sure can't remember.