Good For Me
July 24, 2024
3-Item Status
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: Through the Grapevine by Taylor N. Carlson
Listening: Dance of the Trees by Mikayla Geier (really beautiful choreography in the video for this one)
Quick Notes
Books: I’ve finished up new editions of Act Accordingly, Considerations, and My Exile Lifestyle (the lattermost audiobook is still in the process of being published, but ebook and paperback versions are live, and there’s a new cover!), and I’m about halfway through producing the new audiobook version of Iceland India Interstate, with Come Back Frayed next on the list. (If you’ve bought digital versions of these books before, you get the new editions free—just re-download to see the updates). It’s be interesting going through these older books! Humbling, but also nice to see most of what I said in them holds up (though it’s also been satisfying to finally address some long-lingering typos and similar issues) :)
Buy Me a Coffee: If you’d like to support my work (and don’t need any more books right now), you can make a one-off donation here (becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter does the same thing, but monthly instead of just once).
Poll: Speaking of coffee, this week’s poll is about coffee and tea consumption.
(If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status and/or Quick Notes about what’s happening in your life.)
Good For Me
I’ve recently segued into a new life season that’s defined by enthusiastic experimentation. This follows a period more focused on reassessment, refurbishment, and reinforcement.
I’m familiar with this sort of transition (from previous phases of the same), so I’m aware (at least in the broad strokes) of what it entails, and I’m priming myself accordingly.
Instead of doubling-down on what’s been working, in these sorts of moments I tend to make comparably off-the-wall and orthogonal-seeming investments of my time, energy, and resources.
Rather than craving chilled-out routines and scaffolding-like rituals, I start looking for ways to insert randomness into my life; not because those routines and rituals are no longer valuable, but because I’m keen to see how they might evolve into new iterations, and to test what other kinds of things they might support.
These sorts of interstitial intervals tend to be exciting, but also uncomfortable.
That’s literally true at the moment, as one of the first things I started fiddling with as I began this current segue was my workout routine, and now that I’ve completely upended what I was doing—replacing consistency and stability with something more challenging, varied, and unfamiliar—I’m sore pretty much all the time, and near-constantly googling twinges and impairments to determine if they’re age-related, or if they’re connected to one of the new growth-inducing frictions I’ve undertaken in recent months.
When immersing myself in a deluge newness—portions of my life suddenly alien, my actions toddler-like amidst unlimited potential for missteps and injuries—I try to embrace my naïveté as an opportunity to see things afresh, and to question not just the extrinsic structures of my life, but also my internal self: the fundaments of what make me, me.
I also try to remind myself (because each experiment offers countless excuses to give up or otherwise recoil) that I’m not going to be good at anything I try, not at first, and perhaps not for a while; there’s a chance I won’t ever be good at them.
“Good” in this sense, though, is a fuzzy word, and it’s within my power to define it however I choose.
In general, I find, it’s useful to think in terms of what’s “good for me” and all my personal specifics as an individual, rather than “good” compared to other people, or in the context of the full range of possible outcomes.
This encourages productive self-comparison (doing better than my previous best, over time), while also leaving room for other metrics of success: “good” might mean “I have fun performing this activity,” or “this gets me out of the house and amongst people on a regular basis,” rather than requiring some specific level of competitive performance to be enjoyable and useful.
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If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.
Interesting Links
Ignorant people (like myself two months ago) tend to lump all the Stan countries together because they seemingly exist in a blank impossible-to-remember nebula on maps. So here’s a quick overview of the Stans – minus Pakistan and Afghanistan because everyone knows about them and thinks of them separately – to give a reference point for Tajikistan.
From Infocom to 80 Days: An Oral History of Text Games and Interactive Fiction
“You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.”
That simple sentence first appeared on a PDP-10 mainframe in the 1970s, and the words marked the beginning of what we now know as interactive fiction.
From the bare-bones text adventures of the 1980s to the heartfelt hypertext works of Twine creators, interactive fiction is an art form that continues to inspire a loyal audience. The community for interactive fiction, or IF, attracts readers and players alongside developers and creators. It champions an open source ethos and a punk-like individuality.
The Story Of The Soviet Union’s Monster Mi-6 Helicopter Airliner
Created from a stock Mi-6, CCCP-58647 measured roughly 109 feet long and over 32 feet high. This particular Mi-6 featured relatively large stub wings mounted on the upper-mid fuselage area, which were used to create lift and unload the rotor, improving overall performance and efficiency substantially during the cruise phase of flight. These wings were not specific to this sub-variant, but they made especially good sense for commercial passanger applications.
(If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.)
Poll
The last poll I did was about exercise, and it looks like y’all (or at least those of you who responded) are generally active people!
This week, I’m curious about your coffee/tea-drinking habits. More specifically, how many cups (for this poll, a cup = ~6-8 ounces/~200 grams) you consume per day.
Outro
So I’ve done a few CrossFit classes, and so far they’re kicking my butt in a good, “those are muscles I wouldn’t normally know how to target” sort of way—which is what I was hoping for.
And this weekend, I’m attending my first ballet class (a very intro-level adult class at a local dance school), which should be interesting. I’m fascinated by the seeming technical aspects of ballet, and I think it could help with some posture- and stability-related things I’ve been working on (while also maybe serving as a good foundation for other dance classes I might take in the future), But I’m also excited to take this class because I’m just incredibly ignorant about ballet, so everything I learn will be completely new to me.
We’ll see how that goes. I expect that adding any kind of dance into my weekly routine will only add to the aches and pains I described in this week’s essay, but I’m thinking of this period as a “rearranging the furniture” sort of moment, and the furniture is my muscles, tendons, and bones. So aches and pains are probably to be expected (and perhaps even embraced).
Have a favorite ballet performance I should check out? Trying out/looking into something new that you wouldn’t mind sharing with a stranger from the internet? Drop me a message about that (or whatever’s on your mind), and/or take a moment to introduce yourself—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
I work for a coffee roasting company and often get asked if I drink a lake’s worth of coffee every day. On the contrary, I (and many of my colleagues) try to restrict their caffeine consumption by using very small cups to enjoy multiple tasty samples of a new pour over and the like.