GRIZZLY PEAR
Most everyone has their vices.
These are the ones I spend my money on. The first three are in reality, and the last in aspiration.
Then again, also not so much the first two, since we’ve been living in constrained quarters.
And the third has been a bit limited due to a lack of promising places for going out to eat.
But still, these are nice luxuries to have. The greatest luxury being the ability to indulge in them at will.
I like to follow sports. Don’t have time to watch the action anymore, but I follow the players. Living through the strategy game vicariously.
I’ve started reading Lone Wolf and Cub. It’s a classic, but ultimately still a samurai manga.
Or how about my run of watching Spike Jonze music videos?
Excellent craft is beautiful to watch.
But is worth my time?
If not this then what?
As I got off of the steroids from my bout with pneumonia, I ended up crashing for a long night.
It was quite refreshing to sleep for ten hours straight. As I get older, these occasions where I just sleep for hours on end seem to have become quite rare.
I can’t remember half of what I dreamed, but it felt like I had trawled through the memory banks clearing out the muddle in my head to be rearranged in the morning.
Merlin Mann once tweeted:
Which seems pretty dead-on to me.
The alternate to conspiracy theories is just good old failure.
Most of the time it’s a confluence of bureaucratic negligence aided by individual cupidity.
I want what I want, and if the system lets me get away with it. Or the people running the system tries to get as much out of its individuals (who only have so much to give) that corners get cut.
Eventually compounds until something breaks and then fingers get pointed all around.
I heard this line on the Jocko Podcast and it’s stuck with me since.
The original question is “When should you plant a tree?”
But it applies to so many other things in our life. We can rue the lost time or just start moving.
But it almost creates another moment of paralysis – which skills do I need to learn, what is worth pursuing for the next two decade?
I guess we can never read the crystal ball that well, not if we’re sitting still. But maybe things get a little less murky if you try a few steps here or there.
And maybe the key is to take those first few steps, but then decide whether it is still worth that two decade run. Otherwise, just walk away and try something else.
So get moving, but don’t get trapped by sunk costs.
This was the cold where I in such bad shape that I could not work. Normally I’ll take a sick day out of respect of my coworkers, to let the worst of it blow off before I go into the office.
This time I was in such a general malaise I couldn’t even work at home, even though I had brought some back to try.
But the other big cost of such an extravaganza is the morning habits that have been fully broken for a week. With my impending work deadline, I had started to skip exercising the last couple weeks, and now I had fallen off the blog for a few days at a time.
I can catch up on the blog posting schedule, but daily mental exercise is something you don’t get back.
Just like that physical exercise.
Life decided to greet my entrance into my forties by giving me a bout of pneumonia!
In the past I’ve always beaten back my colds by just waiting it out with some guaifenesin, but when things slowly kept getting worse, and my chest started feeling funny, it was time to go in.
After a couple chest x-rays it was confirmed to be pneumonia and I’m on an antibiotic and steroid for a week.
And this is when you are reminded the value of western medicine. In an earlier era I can easily envision a scenario where it gets worse to the nth degree.
Ideally it would have been preferable to avoid it (a reminder to do those qigong exercise I should have been practicing), but once you need it, goddamn it’s good to have.
A couple days after my birthday, I woke up thinking “time for a new me!”
But every day is a new day.
Every day is an opportunity to shape a newer me.
So yeah, time for a new me.
One day I saw a social media post by one of my consultants at a groundbreaking or ribbon cutting at a local private university.
A few days later I happened to drive by that place. It wasn’t particularly out of the way, but I had never been on that street before.
A couple days after that, I met a security guard who was interested in renting my place. He works on that campus.
The world is invariably smaller than one would think.
Life is funny.
It gives you a visions and dreams of great victories and accomplishment.
But it never really plays out like that in reality.
Even when the accomplishment is earned, it is a fallible human being that made it happen.
Or in this case, finally renting out one’s place, closing out a six year project, but otherwise laid low the whole with with a nasty cold.
Life be funny like that.