The Powerful and Pivotal Slouching

 

The highest hurdle that a recreational reader falls upon is describing a piece of work that's as powerful and pivotal as Joan Didion's. Starting with that impactful title, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. A Yeats poem (another thing a recreational reader would struggle with fully understanding). You read it and a vibe draws you in like a Miles Davis or John Coltrane song. You keep reading, perceiving, until you can arrive at your own conclusions and that is --- Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers. Not that it means anything, because I am only, well, nothing. Realistically, not self-pityingly. More so, I will not even be able to write like her. But we keep reading her and  peeled layer after layer, discovering truths, embellished with her beautiful writing voice as she tells these stories. Delicious, tasteful details. She puts her skin in the game, so to speak, so it stands even if it's unbelievable. At some point, you concede to altering your previously held perceptions. Having read Joan Didion makes me grateful for being alive.  

With compliments to the reading of Diane Keaton, who performed the audiobook. Listening simultaneously while reading breathes more life into the books.

To compensate for my lack of ambition

I am inventing, or I am claiming myself as the discoverer of the Lack of Ambition Syndrome. 

  

Still imagining how I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes

Dubliners again. Paper book with the audio companion, the stories come alive with the accents, spirited voices of readers, auditory pleasures that make it more immersive. It's harder to get lost in thought. The equivalent of turning on subtitles when you're watching a movie. 

There's an almost embarrassing element to re-reading stories, especially with the classics. One, you can't remember everything. Two, you just now figure out those epiphanies that you can't believe you missed before, how good the book is at all. And you still won't catch all of them. Three, your own insights will make you laugh at insights you previously held, and your life as a whole. Partly embarrassed by your own epiphany, partly just glad. 

I would have turned out as Duffy in A Painful Case. 

His evenings were spent either before his landlady’s piano or roaming about the outskirts of the city. His liking for Mozart’s music brought him sometimes to an opera or a concert: these were the only dissipations of his life.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity’s sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life. He allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank but, as these circumstances never arose, his life rolled out evenly—an adventureless tale.

His room still bore witness of the orderliness of his mind. Some new pieces of music encumbered the music-stand in the lower room and on his shelves stood two volumes by Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Gay Science. He wrote seldom in the sheaf of papers which lay in his desk.

But in my life, love was possible. I live with this great fortune. 

He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.

Re-reading. Bouts of joy and perfectly silent loneliness all over again, with some embarrassment, but with a much better heuristic. It's all good. Nobody will even figure out the name of Mangan's sister.

Marcus Aurelius must be cringing on his grave

We expose ourselves to the dangers of algorithms. Our attention spans are being trimmed down to reels. We are inevitably exposed to influencers who for the sake of producing content, compromise expertise. Marcus Aurelius says that your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in your thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions (Meditations, 5.16 quoted in the Daily Stoic, p. 103). Especially if we hold these thoughts uncritically.

Liberica coffee today. Freshly roasted, dark roasted (maybe burning some of the flavor) but brings out more bitterness and lessens the acidity. It keeps its fruity identity. We trace its origins only a hundred or so kilometers from the earth where we come from. We can be so lucky.

Now it’s time to play with V. Jenga and then the dolls. She'll be Rainbow and I'll be Curly. We'll make them read Dr. Seuss. 

When you don't get to run or ride, get anxious or upset about wasting time, you must learn to forgive yourself. Your body needed that rest as much as you needed to get moving. Your mind can wait to zone itself out. Don't worry about the lost time now, just get ready to get back on track. 

Streaming Today

Until I looked closely, I would’ve dismissed it as an unproductive morning, and I would’ve felt drained and clunky as I had the past couple of days. There’s been a big cloud over my head. But my father’s home now. I didn’t get up early enough for a run or ride. But I made coffee for us. A page or two of The Daily Stoic. Much better, a chapter of Skin in the Game. Only the Rich are Poisoned: The Preferences of Others. Work this morning was just backlogs on document work and an email or two. I did it in our family room with V. while’s she’s watching a day in the life of two young youtubers, Sekora and Safari. I slack a little bit, scrolling through Strava, Messenger, Linkedin and watch a bike blogger take us through a route South Korea. I discovered how to import annotations from my 8-year-old ebook reader. Breakfast in front of the screen with the daily report, attendance sheets and lesson summaries while Spotify-ing. I take a break and play with V.; we design my room in our Toca World beach house. In the beach front, D. and I were celebrating our wedding anniversary with the people closest to our hearts. Kuya I.’s character was wearing gangster shades. V. and I pretend play, she’s a student, and I’m the teacher. Today’s lesson is "There’s a Wocket in my Pocket" by Dr. Seuss.  I head to the grocery store for supplies and buy lunch, seafood rice in a box. Wash the dishes. Switched the bike rear wheels and mounted the Allez on the trainer.  Zwifted on Makuri Islands, 30.13km in 59m 51s with 3 10-minute sweet spot ramps. V. pops up in the “man cave” (which is really the laundry area) and we dance to the Zwift theme. Bananas and a corned beef sandwich.  Shower, while setting the coffee machine up for today’s second cup. Fill the air cooler with water. Teach three students. Finish document work. I didn’t have to sweat blood for money today. Wash the dishes left in the sink. For a late dinner, I. requests three hotdogs. I cook the hotdogs for him. He's turning into a teenager and I often wish there's more I can do.  I open a can of spicy tuna and crackers for me. I chose between Netflix and HBO Go.  Netflix prevails. Wash a few more dishes. I drink zero alcohol, low sugar “beer” that tastes like carbonated water with hops, fruit and cereal, and paired a very vivid imagination you can think of it as craft beer. A small bag of corn chips. Two, because the bag was so small. At the end of the day, I decided that it was pointless to ask myself if I would have been happy to die today. Today was just dying to be told.

Intellectual Yet Idiot

 Still, an idiot.