The newsletter I sent out this morning felt incredibly disjointed. I wrote a lot of it on Friday, then deleted much of that on Saturday, and then continued to make minor edits through Sunday evening. All these periods of writing and editing felt disjointed too, as my typical weekend schedule was upended a little.

As one is wont to do, I'd over-scheduled myself: I had a 90-minute ballet class on Friday evening, per usual. Then I added a new ballet class on Saturday afternoon -- 90 minutes. We attended a play on Sunday afternoon. I also had a short run on Saturday morning and a long run on Sunday morning -- the latter at least not too terribly long at this stage of the half marathon training block. Just 75 minutes.

I'm exhausted from my weekend, and it's onward with an even busier week this week and a 10K race coming up on Saturday.

As I wrote about in a very early Second Breakfast newsletter, my single ballet class as a little girl was incredibly awful: the teacher humiliated me, and I never went back. For the past seven months, I've been taking ballet classes at the Alvin Ailey Dance Studio -- Absolute Beginner Ballet -- confronting some of the earliest ideas about who I am and who I could become. Let's be very clear, that was never ever going to be "ballet dancer."

It wasn't just dance. No physical activity was really available to me, I told myself, mostly because my eyesight and thus my eye-hand coordination are ridiculously bad.

But I'm much braver now than I was when I was 5, more willing to try things, more willing to suck at things, more willing to fail. Every Friday evening, I walk over to the Ailey building -- yes, it does help that it's Ailey -- and try very hard to learn how to hold and move my body in new ways. I am still stiff and awkward and far too often on the wrong foot when we dance across the floor. But I love it anyway, and I've improved a lot. And a couple of weeks ago, I asked my teacher Ron if he thought I was ready to take Beginner Ballet. And he said "oh yes, you're doing great." And I thought my heart would burst right out of my chest.

So, on Saturday afternoon, I took my first Beginner Ballet class. I'm not really sure I was ready. The Instagram influencer is in the class. Some of the "real" Ailey dancers. One or two of the really good dancers from the Friday class. It was a much smaller class, and it felt so obvious that I was the worst by far.

I'll keep trying. I mean, how else can I expect to get better, right?! It's still fresh in my memory how I sucked so bad the first few months in the Absolute Beginner Ballet class. (But this week, I won't go to ballet as I'm going to bruise my ego elsewhere: at a 10K race on Saturday morning.)

I don't know how to help anyone – but for the sake of my "day job," let's say students – get to the place where they have that bravery and tenacity to keep at it when it's hard. That "growth mindset" bullshit only gets you so far when everything else is stacked against you, making it next to impossible – psychologically and structurally – to take the risk.

And I also don't know how to convince anyone – students – of the value and the necessity of practice and training when AI promises a push-button of ease and automaticity.

As I noted in today's newsletter (and maybe in the BlueSky post I made about Friday's too), I took a trip down to Brooklyn on Wednesday, where students at BIHS showed me the AI PSAs they'd created. They were uniformly awesome, and it was really amazing to chat with them about trust, misinformation, and technology. These kids -- all the students at the school are immigrants, having been in the US less than four years -- have been in my head non-stop since then. I signed up to take a class on how to intervene in ICE raids in my neighborhood; sadly it coincides with another school visit I'll be doing.

It's hard right now for me to figure out exactly where or how I want my writing and my activism and my career to focus. (I don't know how to separate them either.) I have received a once-in-a-lifetime invitation to travel this fall for an event where (supposedly -- the speakers aren't confirmed) very important and influential people in my field will be. I'm truly honored to even be considered. But considering the location of this event and my inability to even imagine what the US will be like by then, I'm just not sure I should say "yes."

Also: the timing is pretty bad for marathon training.

Speaking of training, yesterday, Kin and I saw the play Sumo in one of its final performances. As the name suggests, it's about wrestling -- about toxic masculinity and tradition and bodies and love. It was pretty great, I thought (the NYT reviewer did not). Kin and I have also watched the first three episodes of Adolescence, which I might write about for Second Breakfast as I think it relates to some of the narratives not just about toxic masculinity and social media, but about the pushback from those refusing to grant that people's concerns are grounded in "science."

Still speaking of training, this past week's dining out included: a bagel order from Kossars. Halal cart (lamb over rice for me and chicken over rice for Kin) from Mido's. A bunch of empanadas and tostones from Empanada Mama. I'm trying to balance cooking at home with eating out, which works out fine as long as I plan to make super easy meals. I took a trek up to Trader Joe's on Thursday and bought a bunch of pre-packaged meals because the air fryer is some good technology. (The plastic packaging all this comes in, not so much.)