Wednesday, March 30, 2022

leftovers #3 - hi resolution (lessons)

Hi again, my last thought on this matter (I promise), but I did want to share one thing I learned and try to incorporate this lesson into my future thinking about resolutions. Despite my experience so far in 2022, I still think the best philosophy remains to implement good ideas immediately rather than waiting until next year. However, there are obvious strengths to the New Year's Resolution concept. It clearly worked out well for me to look at the start of a year as an opportunity to outline some personal development goals. So, what's the best thing to do next year?

I think sometimes there is a problem when you try to combine two concerns into one. You try to envision a complete solution that solves the big issue, but you never notice that the components each require their own separate remedy. Here, I think there are two types of self-improvement ideas that should be considered on separate terms. The first is what I'll call New Ideas, and for these I think the best approach is the one noted above - implement New Ideas immediately. The second is more like a reminder when you've drifted off the path. These may be a better fit for New Year's Resolutions. This is because if you are constantly doing self-checkups, you won't have much time left to live your life! However, it's still wise to have some moments for a quick assessment, just to ensure that you are staying true to your course.

The funny thing about all the sleep quality stuff I mentioned last week is that I had a similar moment years ago, when I was a sophomore in college. I emerged from the first semester deeply unhappy with myself and needed to make a change. I don't know how I ended up deciding to wake up earlier, but that's pretty much what happened, and I kept it up until graduation. I don't want to give too much credit to one detail from a decade and a half ago, but I think this change enabled me to get a lot more out of my college experience than I would have if I had stayed my original course. What I learned then was what I reminded myself of now - for me, six to seven in the morning was always a more productive hour than midnight to one.

In a sense, my New Year's Resolution about sleep was more of a return to a successful routine rather than a bright New Idea for 2022. There is no logical time to make these self-assessments and decide if certain routines need to be restored, so to me it might as well be January 1. Why not? If it's going to be a once-yearly process, might as well join everyone else and get in on the New Year's party.

Sunday, March 27, 2022

the important thing

Given my recent return to two great traditions - watching the knockout rounds of the UEFA Champions League and running around the dirty river until my next injury - I thought I would check out this post from almost exactly three years ago. The post looks at a specific detail that applies to each of the above in its own way - the effect of starting in broad daylight, then finishing in the darkness of night. From a technical perspective, the post was far from my best work. The overall concept is fine, and I enjoyed rereading some of my own writing (that footnote!). However, I think the post should have been either half or twice its final length.

The point of the post, I suppose, was that winning is partly a function of confronting the darkness of a possible defeat, and that the path to victory means knowing how to carry the fear of failure throughout the journey. I could have explained that message in half the words. The undercurrent of the post is that in some ways this lesson is applicable to running, and possibly even life - to run well becomes possible only by embracing the reality of injury or decline, just as to live well is enabled in part by accepting the finite limits of a mortal life such that we can accept the suffering which eventually finds us all. The reason I raise doubling the length as an option is that in order to properly expose and explore that undercurrent, I would have needed to cover additional territory in the post.

Considering this notion that I should have either halved or doubled the original post, I suppose I must consider an all-too familiar question - what would have been the point? I guess at some level we should always keep in mind that the important thing is to make the best of it, whether it be in the context of a post or some other sense of the expression. But there is an issue in that making the best of the post likely wouldn't have accomplished much, for all I said was in some ways just restating the same old thing, this sentiment demonstrated by the endless clichés - life is short, embrace mindfulness, be bold, have a full heart, the circle of life, blah blah blah. So I guess the question is whether there was, or is, any value in adding to the bloated literature on the topic, even if framed within the relatively unusual combination of two mundane interests - soccer tournaments and jogging around like a pompous two-city slicker. Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp once pointed out that soccer is "the most important, least important thing" and maybe I can reframe this for us runners - running is "the least important, most important thing".

But I've already said the important thing - maybe even "the most important, most important thing" - which is of course to make the best of it, to the fullest extent that anyone can do such a thing. You should always make the best of it, whether it be a post or a life. We don't need those clichés from above to know that this is an obvious point to almost everyone, but maybe those clichés suggest the necessity of regular reinforcement. After all, it does seem like most of our time is spent closer to the least important than the most important, and this observation suggests that we routinely fall somewhere short of making the best of it. I reveal the same problem when I talk or even write about my life, going on as I do about "the most important, least important things". There is truth in the matter - I look forward to soccer games involving players that have never heard of me, then I go out for a run after lunch so that I come home in time to miss dinner. If I write honestly then I don't dig too much into "the most important, most important things", for I've successfully distracted myself with so much other nonsense, which is another way of saying that I'm not much different from most people.

I guess I'm left to wonder if I'm missing something. If this approach is so commonplace then maybe it's actually the best way, or at least the most appropriate way, for people to approach the important things. Maybe this is what I tried to write about three years ago. When I watch Liverpool fall behind in a match, I know they must confront the grim reality of elimination, but what happens next might have more to say about my life than it does about a soccer game. When it comes to the topic of falling short, it's easier for most people to talk about it through a filter like a soccer tournament or a favorite movie or some pop song or whatever, anything but specifics from their own life - the time they lost that job, or were rejected by that program, or realized that the doctors had tried everything. Perhaps the drawback of using those specifics is that we are simply too close to the situation and therefore cannot step back to see the full picture. The advantage of seeing it through a filter is that we see why the way we carry ourselves matters even if it doesn't work out in the end. I know as a soccer fan that nothing is worse than watching a team give up before the end of the game, and who makes movies about a protagonist who won't try? I think there is always an option, however trivial it may seem in the moment, for how to carry ourselves in the face of terrible luck or in the aftermath of an unspeakable loss - in the reality of the most difficult moment, if we resolve to embrace the situation, then there is a new chance to make the best of it.

When the streetlights begin flickering along Mass Ave, I often recognize the first signs of fatigue in my mind and body. I remember certain evenings when I had run so far off the path that I could feel the panic start simmering, deep down in my gut, as the familiar ceded territory to the endless darkness. There is no such nonsense as a "runner's high" in these moments, just fear and tension and the fact that tripping at the wrong time could mean the end in so many senses of the word. I have to remind myself that making it home in these moments always comes down focus - if I can sharpen my senses so that each step moves me in the right direction, I give myself a chance to meet the challenge. I think the experience of these late, long runs has informed much of my approach to the other challenges of living that full life. It isn't so much about confronting or even accepting the reality of inevitable misfortunes, but more so about understanding the stakes when the reality is making itself comfortable on your couch. Do you hide in the closet or offer it a drink? There might not be a good answer, but I think the most important thing about life is to make the best of it, each situation ultimately demanding the same focus of putting one foot in front of the other, because I don't know any other way to make it home.

Wednesday, March 23, 2022

leftovers - reader come home (toa analytics)

Today's post is only tangentially about Maryanne Wolf's Reader Come Home, which contained plenty of interesting details about a range of topics. I'm pulling a couple of those details today as a starting point for some follow-up questions about the context or relevance of those data-driven conclusions. The goal is to show some examples of how I approach one specific aspect of analytical thinking - the process of understanding how a researcher made a certain conclusion, then determining how strongly I feel about the resulting implications.

First, there was a thought regarding how college professors report that students are becoming less patient with complex literature, particularly in terms of how much time is required for comprehending these works. This is an easy observation to accept, but I do wonder if the time aspect is more relevant than first meets the eye. If students generally feel like there are more constraints on their time compared to an equivalent student in the past, then these professors would be misunderstanding the source of this impatience.

There was also a reference to studies that suggest the short-term memory capacity of adults is shrinking, perhaps by up to 50% over the past decade or two. It's an alarming statistic but presented without a comparison point - how are adults succeeding in their lives as a result of this change? In my mind, if there are so many new tools available to us for tracking, organizing, and referencing information, then you could argue that a certain percentage decline in short-term memory would be expected (and optimal). That said, I do concede that 50% feels high.

Finally, Wolf mentioned new research investigating whether digitally trained youth can multitask more effectively than older generations. I would hope so! There seems to be a trend toward dismissing multitasking out of hand, but I'd prefer a perspective that looks at the task with a consideration for key details. What does it mean to multitask? What is being measured, and how? Who is in the measurement group? What is successful multitasking? Wolf's book does well in the reference to multitasking by pointing out that the one promising theory supposes expert training in at least one of the tasks better enables effective multitasking, which reveals helpful details that allow a reader to better appreciate the broader conversation among experts about multitasking.

Sunday, March 20, 2022

leftovers #2 - hi resolution (part two - the milner sleep cycle)

Wrapping up on the leftovers for this post with some thoughts on my fourth and final New Year's Resolution.

Move my bedtime forward as far as possible

As mentioned in leftovers #1, this is the resolution directly addressing my sleep quality goal. This resolution may have actually retained a direct quality on January 1 ("improve sleep quality") but in practice it made sense to reframe the idea into the current form. What I quickly learned this year is that the best way to measure sleep quality is an honest self-evaluation right upon wakeup, with a sluggish or reluctant start hinting at overnight problems. I reasoned that the combination of early wakeup and high energy from the get-go would define success, but lacking any obvious ways to control the latter I turned my focus to the wakeup time.

The challenge with wakeup time is that there is an obvious answer - just set an alarm. Sometimes obvious answers have a way of discouraging us from thinking through a problem and determining the best path. We know that the solution to smoking is to stop smoking, but if that was the solution everyone would have quit decades ago. Still, I stumbled into this trap initially, setting an early alarm and  deciding that success was equal parts discipline and willpower. In hindsight, a two-fold criteria for success saved my resolution. Sure, I was up early enough at the start of the year, but I was always lacking in terms of those initial energy levels. You could argue that I was succeeding just by waking up earlier, but to me it had no benefit if I sat through a groggy morning or dragged myself through the rest of the day. Why craft a process for enjoying life if you don't enjoy the process?

It helped at this point to return to an idea I had read about a few years ago regarding James Milner, a midfielder with Liverpool FC. Milner's issue was that soccer games would sometimes end at ten or eleven at night, which meant he stayed up until the early hours while he wound down from the energy of the match. He would wake up the following day in mid-morning, which threw him off his usual six-thirty cycle. The adjustment, outlined briefly in this article, was to always wake up at six-thirty. What I applied from this logic was that a consistent wakeup time enabled the body to work more efficiently, which in turn should lead to better sleep quality. I therefore stepped back my alarms to a wakeup time that I could meet throughout the week, which initially meant I was only waking up ten or fifteen minutes earlier than I was at the end of 2021.

Over the course of the following few weeks, I moved the wakeup time forward five or ten minutes per week. I noticed that once I got into this pattern, strength built on strength and enabled me to start beating my alarm clock in the morning. This led to the predictable result of having an easier time falling asleep at night, since I was up for longer during the day due to my early wakeup. At this point the cycle was obviously reinforcing itself, suggesting that getting myself across the finish line for this resolution was only a formality, but I held my horses and let the alarm creep forward on a conservative schedule even though evidence suggested that I could handle larger increments of earlier wakeup alarms.

I think this was a wise approach. Although I am not a professional soccer player, like Milner there were instances where late nights challenged my new routine. I don't have the luxury of catching up on sleep with a nap, so in my mind it was better after a late night to sleep into the morning rather than enforcing a strict wakeup. This at least allowed me to wake up with the right energy. The next trick was returning to the wakeup time. I realized after a little trial and error that the best way was to catchup over two days, with the first day taking on a majority of the burden. For example, if I woke up ninety minutes late one morning, the next day I would set the alarm for thirty minutes late (a catchup of one hour, or 66% of the lost time). The second day I would return to my set time, which was the remaining catchup of thirty minutes. I suspect this worked for me because it seemed to keep my body within the rhythm of the sleep schedule while allowing enough sleep to regain my energy. As long as I'm returning to my wakeup time while maintaining good energy at the start of each day, I'll probably stick to this tactic.

It may also be obvious, but I'll state it anyway since it's important - using this approach means I can't oversleep the schedule on consecutive days. This is fine by me. In some ways, this gets back to a thought I mentioned in the first leftover about food - don't have two bad meals in a row. In this context, what it means is I don't have two nights of oversleeping in a row. However, I'm happy to allow for one, particularly if I sense that I need it. Usually I will have one day in the week (often Sunday) when I don't even bother with the alarm, reasoning that if I sleep past my wakeup time then I must have needed the extra rest. The key is knowing my plan to get back on track within a couple of days. If I step back far enough from these examples and think about it more broadly, I see that this is more or less my general philosophy to life - it's fine when things go wrong, but don't let anything go wrong two times in a row.

The unexpected result of completing this resolution is the way it changed my view on screentime. There is a consensus among certain types that exposure to various screens is a disruption to the body's sleep rhythm. No doubt about it, one of the key tactics for me in terms of sleep quality is to have my phone on the other side of the room, far out of arm's reach (this also makes it hard to sleep through the alarm, but that's not why I do it). However, I no longer have confidence in the idea that screens should be avoided for around two hours before bedtime. It still sounds like it might be true, but it hasn't been true for me at all in 2022. Now that my body is used to falling asleep between eleven and midnight, it seems that being on my phone or computer up until eleven has no effect on my sleep. This isn't to suggest that there is no downside to screentime before bedtime, but for me I think this is a case where the body's rhythm might be strong enough to override the effect of screentime.

Endnote

0) Good idea, but why...?

It's probably important to clarify the inevitable "who cares?" question. After all, there isn't any specific need for me to wakeup early given my current set of responsibilities. For me, the matter came down to when I felt was a better time to be awake. In essence, I compared my latest waking hour to a hypothetical earlier waking hour, then tried to determine which one was my preference. In my 2021 sleep schedule, my last waking hour was usually midnight to one, so the question for 2022 was whether I preferred to be awake at this hour rather than seven to eight in the morning. All I did in those late hours was read, but I can also do that if I wake up early, so to me it was obvious right away that finding a way to be up earlier was my preference.

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

leftovers - hi resolution (part one)

I mentioned in the original post that I had made four New Year's Resolutions. Let's take a closer look at three of them today.

Eat more vegetables before noon and have lighter dinners

This resolution hasn't really gotten off the ground yet but I'm still holding out hope for an improvement in the next few weeks. It may not be obvious at first glance how the two components work in tandem - by moving up the vegetables I would otherwise eat at dinner, I end up accomplishing both parts of the resolution since I end up with less to eat at dinner. So as you can see, the plan is solid, but it's just the execution proving to be an issue. I still feel like this is a good idea, so I think it will happen this spring.

The main idea behind this one was twofold. First, there is a hint of a healthly diet aspect, which I think is true in the sense that eating vegetables early (a) ensures I have at least one healthy meal per day, since my unhealthier meals tend to happen at dinner, and (b) you never see anyone advising late, heavy meals as the route to optimal health (1). However, the broader connection of this resolution to my lifestyle is the thought that my main goal for 2022 is to improve sleep quality. Decisions last fall like buying a new bed set the right foundation in terms of equipment, and one of my other resolutions (to be reviewed in the next leftovers post) directly addresses another necessary step toward the goal. This resolution fits in a less direct way because I understand the digestive process can disrupt sleep quality if large meals are eaten later in the day.

Reread my old book notes and condense the best ideas

In my first few years after college, I read a lot without taking notes. Once I started scribbling down my thoughts, I realized an extra step was necessary to connect the learning to aspects of my routine. I implemented a regular review process where I would collect ideas from my notes, group them under different themes, and then refine the initial lists into reference documents for specific purposes. This was especially helpful in my first job when I was teaching myself how to be an effective manager - I had documents full of curated notes on topics such as organizing workloads, running job interviews, and teaching new tasks, all of which I would reference every few days as I tried to get up to speed with the new responsibility.

I fell off the routine in recent years so this resolution was my idea to get back to my roots. Why not, right, given how valuable it once was? The funny thing is that although I got started this January, I never felt like it was doing much good, so I've given up for now. I think the obvious explanation is that starting TOA back in 2016 was a replacement for this task, and possibly the logical evolution on my reference documents. Whether TOA is to blame or not, it seems that I am retaining information far better than I used to, so the practice of reviewing notes is proving less beneficial than anticipated. I might still get back to this in the future, but for now I'm going to place it on the proverbial "for later" shelf.

Take a few weeks off from exercise

I couldn't resist, really, putting this spin on the classic "get a gym membership" resolution. Who makes "no exercise" their resolution? My specific challenge was that I've run for about twenty-two straight months since the start of the pandemic, often five or six days a week, and I was starting to feel the strain from the workload. I reviewed my long-term exercise history and noted that in the past I had always enjoyed sporadic "breaks", but these breaks tended to be enforced through injury rather than a training plan. It occurred to me that my so-called "workload strain" was a likely precursor to an incoming injury, so I decided to take a few weeks off.

I read a few articles online about breaks and tried to get a sense of what marathon runners did between races. My research was inconclusive but everyone suggested at least two weeks. I've actually taken some two-week breaks in the past without obvious benefit (most recently this summer), so I decided to start with a break of nearly four weeks, which at that time meant the rest of January. As the month progressed, I noticed various aches and pains lingered or even emerged (I remember this happening after basketball seasons, almost as if the routine aches distracted from the deeper issues until I allowed a proper rest to heal the simpler ailments). I felt no interest in running at the end of January, so I extended my break a few days at a time until I got to President's Day. At this point I was starting to feel the need to get back to work, so I've been back on my feet for a couple of weeks now. The idea of a break from early January until President's Day has a nice ring to it, and there was the added benefit of avoiding the sub-freezing conditions that leave my hands and feet in rough shape. I know I'm likely to keep a relatively consistent running schedule from now until the end of the year, so for me a break of nearly six weeks might be an appropriate fit. Of course, what matters is the result - if I have a good running year, you can expect this concept to become a permanent feature of my annual running cycle.

Footnotes

1. Elaborating on point (a)...

By this, I mean that saving vegetables for later in the day puts me at risk for skipping them entirely if I end up having an unhealthy meal. However, if I eat them earlier, then I might still skip the planned dinner, but at least the plan won't include those vegetables. In some ways, what I am describing here is a process that ensures I never have two bad meals in a row.

Sunday, March 13, 2022

toa books of the year (2021, part four)

We resume our countdown toward The Most Irrelevant Prize in World Literature with a look at four of the books on the shortlist.

Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether (May)

TOA Review: not started (likely mid-2022)

Notes: Given how much I read, it's unusual for me to encounter a book that I suspect might live on the shelves of the "one of a kind" section down at the library, but this may be an appropriate description of Meriwether's story about Francie, a young girl in 1934 Harlem. Perhaps "first of its kind" is a closer fit, given that at the time of its release in 1970 a book centered around a Black girl's experience probably wasn't very common. It struck me while thinking about Daddy Was a Number Runner that there is definitely a discrepancy within my own reading list in terms of books about Black young men and boys having far greater representation than those about Black young women and girls, but I don't have much to say on this observation at the moment other than sharing my resolve to find some more reading to bring a sense of balance to my list.

I want to credit this post about the book by Deesha Philyaw, whose writing helped me think through some of the points I mentioned above. In addition to noting her collection as a future read, I also recognized that I would likely reread this book again at some point in the future. Quite frankly, to write such a review of any book is an unstated aim of mine, and in this example Philyaw accomplishes the main objective in my mind of such a piece - to make a reader want to pick up the book.  

Parting thought: There is a certain injustice when relief workers insist on deducting additional earnings from the original relief check.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders (August)

TOA Review: not started (likely mid-2022)

Notes: This book is presented in seven sections, each with two components - a short story (not written by Saunders) followed by an analysis (written by Saunders). The short stories are excellent, but this book made my shortlist due to Saunders's examinations of each, detailing the works from the perspective of how structure, technique, and style contribute to the storytelling. This book finished in my top-three for 2021, so that's all for now - we'll hear more about it in the finals.

Parting thought: A strong structure works as a Q-and-A, where the author must respond to the questions that arise in the reader. A good writer, then, is one who is keenly aware of the questions a reader will have as the story flows forward; a good story knows how to respond to itself.

Parting thought #2: Good revision means constantly revising toward specificity, then allowing specificity to drive the story forward.

Parting thought #3: In a highly organized story, each event is precisely selected to escalate through causality.

Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin (September)

TOA Review: not started (likely mid-2022)

Other notable TOA appearances: in October, I mused on some of the challenges with data collection, including the problem of data collection for the sake of data collection.

Notes: Benjamin explores the role of (recent) digital technology in reinforcing or perpetuating racism. Like with A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, this was a top-three read for me in 2021, so we'll return to this one in the finalist post.

Parting thought: People tend to behave in ways that contradict their stated beliefs - for example, by supporting single-payer healthcare, but resisting all attempts made to enforce higher taxes. The same goes for the tech industry, which claims to support regulation while resisting all attempts made to regulate its own activity. In these examples, political values are revealed more so in the action than in the statement.

Parting thought #2: Algorithms can code inequity, seen in examples such as higher paying jobs being shown to men or real estate ads being hidden from minorities.

Parting thought #3: Much as we use nutrition labels, perhaps regulators could find a way to demonstrate how certain tools or algorithms were created, with the information helping consumers understand the extent to which they may be reinforcing existing bias.

Tenth of December by George Saunders (December)

TOA Review: February 2022

Other notable TOA appearances: in the above review, there are additional links to three prior TOA appearances.

Notes: Wow, two books on the shortlist! I'm sure George Saunders considers this the pinnacle of his writing career (though he may be dismayed that this one does not advance to the top-three).

I think I've written enough about Tenth of December over the years that you might think I have nothing left to say about it. True! But I can steal from others, in this case a friend who pointed out that this was a tough book to read - not in the sense of an emotional challenge, but more so that Saunders uses a style which requires a bit of extra effort from the reader. Fair enough, but I think this is a lot like the situation of buying ramen - you can deal with the $1 Cup Noodles, or you can go someplace where the chef proves that extra effort is usually worth the price (TOA officially recommends Sapporo Ramen in Porter Square). So concludes the first and last paragraph in the history of this language that will mention both Tenth of December and Sapporo Ramen, the writing of which is perhaps the pinnacle of my writing career.

Parting thought: People will sometimes repeat the things they are doing, over and over, even if those things are rotten or evil, until they can convince themselves through repetition that it is normal.

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

reading review - the white album

Didion passed on December 23, but that has nothing to do with why I chose to read her acclaimed 1979 essay collection. The White Album had been on my reading pile for months, even necessitating a quick return/checkout at the library to reset the long-past due date. While I am on this topic, it's amusing to me that since the BPL stopped charging fines, I seem to have become more concerned with returning items on time. I don't think there is any necessity for a deeper analysis of this issue, except to point out the possibility that, having lost the ability to pay my end of the bargain, I find myself filling up with guilt each time an "overdue notice" hits my email. Or maybe, I am simply realizing that paying the fine never solved the issue, and this moment is my struggle to find another story I can tell myself in order to justify hoarding so much of a public resource.

The White Album by Joan Didion (December 2021)

The book opens with "The White Album", and I understand that the first line in the title essay - we tell ourselves stories in order to live - has gone on to become among her best-known sayings. This implies a certain thesis-statement quality to the quote, and indeed as I review my notes I see the way this comment underlies much of the collection. But I also recognize the many ways that the quote might not mean exactly what it appears at first glance - for example, that the act of telling is more important than the contents of the story, or that "to live" should be interpreted in the most mechanical sense. I felt that the latter perspective in particular summarizes the sense of detachment that ambushed me as a reader at various moments in The White Album, as I could do nothing but absorb these snapshots of life stories coming untethered from their respective plotlines.

My favorite essay, and the only one I bothered to reread a second time, was "Bureaucrats", which details certain selected moments from the early days of HOV lanes appearing on LA freeways. Longtime TOA readers will know that transportation discussions are among my favorites, evidenced perhaps by the thousands of words I've written about local cycling, but this piece merely describes details without necessarily immersing itself in them. Didion is far more interested in the people, observing the effect of the change as it was experienced on a daily basis by drivers, who were struggling to articulate exactly the problem they had with the HOV lanes. In my interpretation, they resented the unstoppable gravity of the transportation system, which like the many other faceless institutions of modern society has a habit of exchanging individual autonomy - in this case, a certain freedom of the open road - for the good of some imprecise yet earnestly pursued societal benefit.

This kind of insight comes across in many more ways - for example, the comment that certain people have a way of speaking which precludes further discussion, or in the note about how some avoid the personal or specific like "oratory minefields", preferring the safety of generalities. There is a feeling that if we are eventually going to be pulled under, then better to tread water with an air of dignity rather than thrash hopelessly for the distant shore. I suppose the problem is that in some waters ignorance can masquerade quite effectively as dignity. The passage that keeps coming to mind is when Didion describes the moment of life's previously improbable misfortune finally reaching your door, which is compared to the moment of realizing the oncoming stranger is holding a knife. I get the sense that the collection's overall point is that at some level we all know (or should know) the truth - there is no narrative, no overriding arc, which makes for some kind of saving grace to our lifetime. The theme is no theme. There is no exception to the rule that at some point, the knock comes to our door, and wisdom means we know to greet the stranger as if we've been expecting the arrival. And yet, we are never going to be quite ready for the knife, which creates these interesting interactions wherever unready people, living happily within the illusion of safety, are suddenly confronted by the fact of life's danger.

The comment that I suspect will stay with me from this book describes a moment on a flight, which Didion writes has the quality she perceives in short stories - the moment of epiphany, or perhaps a larger meaning of life extracted from the perfect sliver of a fleeting interaction, often a result of reckoning with a previously unquestioned view of life. And yet, do we really want life reduced to a series of these short stories? It is already too short. Didion suggests that for her the struggle is always a moment of condensing, when another piece of life gets snipped into a neat little lesson, and takes us a step further away from a life with the expansive possibilities of a novel.

TOA Rating: Three lanes out of four.

Sunday, March 6, 2022

hi resolution

Sorry folks, a bit of a self-indulgent one today (or at least, more so than usual). We'll soon be back to the usual business of posting confident assertions about topics I don't understand, but for today I wanted to examine New Year's Resolutions.

Longtime TOA readers will recall my official stance on the matter - New Year's Resolutions are a waste of time. The main reason is that I've always felt resolutions were covered in dust, which accumulated over the weeks and months spent on the proverbial "for later" shelf while everyone waited for the year to end. Is there any worse thing for an idea than saving it for later? If you go to a restaurant and see an enticing menu item, do you say "I resolve to order this on January 1, but until then I'm going to order the same crap that I actually hate"? Goodness me, get out of here. But I think a lot of people fall into a similar trap - they come up with a so-called good idea... then let it wait until the day they recycle last year's calendar. When you put a good idea on the backburner, what it really means is that you've probably only had a decent idea, since good ideas can rarely afford to sit around waiting for an invitation. In my mind, instead of New Year's Resolutions the way to go is a routine of immediately implementing your good self-improvement ideas, whether that be on January 1, December 31, or any of the days in-between.

The problem is that this fails to acknowledge the important contribution of ceremony to the process. The strength of New Year's Resolutions is that it works a bit like the last train - you don't really want to miss it, so you make some extra effort to get involved on time. You could think of the role of ceremony here as a form of safety net for the self-improvement concept. It's possible that circumstances could dictate an entire year's passage without allowing for a moment to consider self-improvement, which means when January 1 rolls around there is sudden importance to the day. What kind of person do I want to be this year? If you only ask yourself this question once a year, it takes on an urgency that I assume would spur additional action, almost like how an alarm clock pulls us out of bed (though maybe only after using the snooze button a couple of times).

I think the experience of the past two years has led me to the sort of scenario I sketched out in the prior paragraph. The response to the pandemic necessitated that a majority of people follow a certain kind of survival playbook, with much of it improvised along the way and very few of us sharing identical experiences. In fact, I assume the only shared feature of the experience for most of us was the loss of sustaining routines as normal life quickly took on the shape that is only now just beginning to feel familiar. For me, a first year constrained by twenty to thirty "close contact" interactions meant I sheltered within an uncompromising routine to maintain my mental health, and then the following year was one of constant adjustment to all the changes that were necessitated by the situation. Looking back, there was no time or energy to implement anything resembling a resolution, which seems perfectly logical given that society itself spent most of the past two years implementing one of the greatest resolutions in its history. To add another angle to this point, the turbulence of the time meant that the warning signals of past years could simply be written off as coping skills necessary in the pandemic, which meant that the bar subtly shifted in the sense of identifying self-improvement ideas - the way I felt at times over the past two years could have led me to conclude that "reduce stress" would make for a fine New Year's Resolution, but stress didn't seem that important when everyone was stressed out.

This all led to an unanticipated moment a couple of months ago - I realized on a cold January morning that despite my best efforts, I had indeed managed to cook up an idea or two in the sense of a traditional New Year's Resolution. This may seem like a truly shameful admission for those who suspect I value my long-term consistency, but for me I feel that I am simply maintaining a consistency in line with the principle outlined above - this January I had a good idea, which was having New Year's Resolutions, so I implemented it immediately.

All defensiveness aside, I ended up with four official resolutions:

  • Take a few weeks off from exercise
  • Move my bedtime forward as far as possible
  • Reread my old book notes and condense the best ideas
  • Eat more vegetables before noon and have lighter dinners

Longtime TOA readers probably already know what I'm about to say - I'll return with a few posts to talk about the above in more detail. But are there any broad lessons to learn from this process separate from the specifics of each resolution? To be honest, not really. As I'll explain soon, I'm doing fine with a couple of those while the others are on the verge of abandonment, but the sum hardly adds up to more than its parts, at least in terms of insightful reflections.

This is, I suppose, the only logical endpoint, where I unenthusiastically fall into the same rut that so many others have complained about over the years - The Land of Failed Resolutions. Yes, it does seem like this is the case, but I'm not sure if this problem is such a big deal. Tim Harford (the official economist of TOA) pointed out in an article I saw this week that if you are in the habit of failing to keep three of your five resolutions each year, then that means you are completing two annual self-improvement initiatives. It speaks to our aversion to failure that some have abandoned the New Year's Resolution concept entirely, allowing the sting of three defeats to outweigh the success demonstrated in the other two initiatives. But for those of us determined to carry on in spite of this fear, perhaps this is wisest way to do it - if we make enough resolutions such that failure in at least one is a certainty, then maybe that gives us a sense of freedom to just do our best. If we are going to fail anyway, why not fail beautifully? I'm not sure there is any other way to make the most of ourselves in each and every one of our new years.

Thursday, March 3, 2022

reading clearout - march 2022

Hi reader,

A few notes on some recent reading.

Reborn in the USA by Roger Bennett (February 2022)

Bennett is a cohost of Men in Blazers, a podcast I've been listening to since its start in... well, I wasn't sure, so I tried to look it up, but I've given up after a few minutes. Shouldn't the internet make it easy to find that kind of detail?

Anyway, longtime TOA readers will know I've enjoyed the show for many years, perhaps a decade, and the show's ever-increasing profile in the soccer world always felt inevitable to me. This book isn't like Encyclopedia Blazertannica, a soccer-focused book which Bennett wrote with his cohost Michael Davies (and led to not one but two TOA posts), but is actually a pure memoir about his days growing up in 1980s Liverpool. I knew this was the idea, but it still caught me off guard to read such an open account of his teenage years. It struck me, as it does in so many other contexts, just how difficult it can be to have your differences highlighted in public before you have embraced and accepted your own individuality, which in this book is described as the specific embarrassment of being both exposed and unseen at the same time. As a teenager or even young adult, the sense of individuality can also be under attack from within, a desperate attempt to belong via the self-sabotage of trimming square pegs to fit social circles. I related to the process Bennett details of working through this aspect of growing up and emerging with a battle-tested sense of self, from which true belonging becomes possible. I don't go so far as to recommend Reborn in the USA to the general audience, but those familiar with Bennett's work should find this a quite worthwhile read.

Chuck Klosterman IV by Chuck Klosterman (December 2021)

No, this book won't rehydrate you - it's just the fourth of his books. I must admit that the sole reason I reread this 2006 collection, which brought together a range of Klosterman's published work from the early portion of his career, was that I recalled a profile about Bono where Klosterman described the experience of sitting in the front seat while the U2 frontman offered to give four teenagers a ride across town, leaving the author to ask - was this something that happened all the time? The profile was inconclusive, so I suppose if I return to Chuck Klosterman IV again in the future it will have to be for a different reason - maybe the column about the time he exclusively ate Chicken McNuggets for a whole week, or to reread "Don't Look Back in Anger", a piece loosely about the perception of US foreign policy that I assume will definitely, maybe, live forever (though I would argue "Whatever" might have made for a better title). In addition to "DLBiA", I also reread "Mysterious Days" (the Bono one), "Here's Johnny", and "Cultural Betrayal". The nugget of most interest to longtime TOA readers is that my joke of giving most books three out of four in my reading reviews came from the novella in this collection, where the film critic protagonist is in a habit of giving all movies two out of four ratings.

Like with the above, I would recommend this book to anyone who is already familiar with the author. I think what you get from the reading is based solely on how much work you want to put into extending Klosterman's points, which sometimes don't seem to have any point at all. The way I look at it is that Klosterman has a certain skill for reframing the obvious so that it sticks with you, but some readers may miss this trick because they assume they knew it all along as soon as they see it, forgetting that they never could have articulated the point themselves without the prompt of the reading. For example, I think most people would agree that being good is more important than being liked, but most of what I hear about foreign perception centers around America's approval rating rather than an honest assessment of our actions. Another example is the insight that technology has created the free time for self-absorption, which is something that a lot of people struggle with, yet I usually hear blame given to the technology itself rather than our inability to deal with the resulting free time.

The note that I will take with me from the reading is the thought that the insistence on being right is at the core of America's issues. This is a particularly relevant consideration at a time when so much debate is centered around uncertain issues. In the American culture, there is a tendency to defend a position as if it's absolutely correct, but in cases where even the experts are unsure it seems like the probable result is dogma instead of productive debate.

Tuesday, March 1, 2022

leftovers - toa newsletter, february 2022 (the 25th hour)

I was sending off a quick email a few weeks ago when a sudden thought popped into my head - you know, just about the worst thing you can do for a blog is to set a schedule. So I typed that in, and off it went. At some moment in that weird limbo between hitting SEND and seeing the confirmation, I realized something - wait, I set a schedule in my most recent post. And it wasn't just that February newsletter, either, which fell afoul of my unprompted burst of insight - using a post to set a schedule has been a persistent bad habit over the years.

So I guess it leads to an obvious question - if I know that this is a problem, then what was the point of doing it again? I think the subtle thing about a project like TOA, or maybe even life itself, is that there is always some idea governing the entire process, a golden rule of sorts, and that such a principle might take a long time before becoming obvious to anyone, especially the creator. I think it's perfectly natural to start something for no particular reason, then to continue along in the flow of its own momentum without ever considering the governing principle. For me, I started TOA in 2016 for one or two small reasons, then continued along for the next few years due mostly to various circumstances that prevented me from such a reflective exercise. The turbulence over the past few months forced me at first to slow down, then pause, which proved to be the moment I needed to consider what truly oversaw the TOA process.

There might be a later occasion to list out all the candidates, but for today we'll just look at the number one possibility. In my mind, the unofficial rule of TOA is that each post should have a point, and I think in most cases this point should be succinct enough to print on a fortune cookie. The point today, obviously, is to share not just that each post has a point, but more so that it should. So what was the point of the February newsletter? I think it's simple, but it probably wasn't evident at the time, so here it is on its own line:

You do things for which you have the time.

It's an easy idea, in fact it's so easy that at this point I fear the (trueon)average reader may offer a token eyeroll before going to do something more productive, like lying facedown on the floor. But I think there is some hidden depth to the point. What I am considering is how we need time to live the way we want to live, and we have two choices for acquiring this time - we can either proactively make time, or we can passively wait for time. Which is the better way? The latter approach, where we sit around hoping for a fortuitous shift in our various orbits of commitments and obligations, at least has the benefit of requiring less work - we just live life, and take it as it comes. There is a satisfaction in the efficiency of the method, and also a self-reinforcing inevitability where you explain the things you don't do by pointing to everything you are doing - I could do so much more, if only I had more time!

But shouldn't we know better by now? If something is always being saved for the 25th hour, then isn't it obvious that we should check our math? I think the process of putting some ideas for a schedule down on paper is a good starting point - for me, it's the equivalent of saying that there is a certain way I want to live, and in the writing context I am falling short. It's the first step to making time. When I sit down and think about how I'd like to incorporate writing into my life, I see myself working on it for a few hours a week. Right now "working on writing" means TOA, so despite my suggestion that the worst thing to do on a blog is to set a schedule, it might still be worth doing if it's the best way to make time, since making time is the best way for having time, which is the only way to live the life you want to live.