ice water and ocicats

I got pretty discouraged after handstand class today because, honestly, I am going through just huge paradigm shifts about how handstands work and nothing feels the same anymore. Not only did I totally break my jump-up, it's making me feel like I've been wasting my time until this year.

If I wasn't learning this then what the hell was I doing? Preparing my tissues for the load, I guess.

( Three insights. I really want to draw this out as a comic, but for now you get words. )

So now some of this is very actionable and has given me a whole new set of cues to try, but everything feels unfamiliar. Stuff I slacked on before suddenly feels intensely critical, and I have no idea if I can put these new understandings together into a functioning body movement. Like: what the hell have I been doing all this time? I've never in my life, until today, focused on trying to keep my scapulae wide during a jump-up! But when I do, the freedom is uncontrollable. I've fixed something critical in my understanding and completely destroyed my intuition.

Sigh.

It's a sleepy sleepy Monday, which it probably is for a lot of people because a) it's a holiday and b) we are having a nor'easter here, which means rainfall. Many cozy feelings are thereby created.

Weird number of postponements and rejections this week:

• Major News Outlet said no to my first crossword puzzle submission, although they did it in the nicest way possible. Not a form letter. They gave real feedback about what they liked and didn't, and encouraged me to try again. Joke's on them, another is already in their queue and I have two more in progress with different collaborators. One of which made a ton of progress this week!


• I was supposed to meet with my financial advisor. It got postponed, but in preparation for that I did my numbers for the year so far and looked harder, especially, at my latest six months of spending. Insert some annoyance, here, with my budgeting program... but I fixed things up until I believe the data, and the good news is that I'm spending less this year than I have any year since 2021. Even with all the circus lessons. This stands in contrast to the returns from the market so far, which don't feel real or make sense to me at all.


• I was supposed to close on my stupid new condo tomorrow. Guess what got delayed again. This time it's most proximally the town's fault. *shrug* At least other people (Unit 2 buyers in the same building) are providing urgency on it now; they can wake me up when the sale is actually happening.

Some other happenings:

• It's been... six months since I retired? I think I'm planning to do a 6-month update post on LinkedIn, but my biggest lesson is that six months aren't enough. I never expected it to be, but now I know it's not, and that's conceptually a little worrisome. The larger milieu of politics, finance and tech seems messed up, and apparently all I can manage is dropping out and playing dead.


• My neighbor suddenly got rid of all the ivy that used to cover our front yard! I knew she wanted to pull it back from the house, but didn't realize she was going to remove ALL of it until it was already done. I was startled. But I also remembered telling her to do what she wanted in the front, and the time (at my last address) that I was trimming hedges only to have the older woman upstairs yell at me in the street. So I simply expressed mild surprise. Maybe it was time for a change anyway.


• I had coffee with my walkover coach, who is pregnant with a donor egg, and talked her through some of how it went with me and Birdie and E&V. I need to do more follow-up on that since, weirdly, E is going to be in town next week, and probably my coach would rather talk to the egg recipient than the donor.


• Went climbing with jadia, which was super fun except when I confidently failed the belay test by engaging my circus rope-pulling circuits (in circus you NEVER let go of a rope entirely but it is considered OK for it to slide through one's hands; in rock climbing it's the opposite; and both endeavors consider it a significant safety concern). This spun off a conversation on a Discord server I'm on, in which apparently belay technique maybe has also changed in the last 10 years, but my particular cross-wiring was almost certainly circus. We were prepared to fall back to the auto-belay routes which were really fun, and I also got to be belayed on a nasty no-hands-section climb that made my legs all shaky.


• More social: dinner with a bunch of Zillianaires, which... was honestly pretty exhausting. Overall positive, but way out in the boonies in a house that made me slightly twitchy.


• Backbend progress -- both a contortion class and a walkover class in which I did New Things and my body graciously put up with it. I've been working out twice a day, most days this week, which is on the high side.... but there's a lot of joy happening and I'm not injured, so I got a tub of creatine and am going to carry on as long as coach availability is this good. There'll be downtime later.
  

It's a lot, right? The time I used to spend on "work" has exploded into a lot of smaller things, and I know that what is important can get lost in here's the pile of random shit that happened. But if nothing else, this is true to my experience too. I think life is good. I miss my squirrel, who's been away for two weekends running, but that will end soon.

Continuing to feel super burned out at the mere thought of working, or constraining my schedule too much. I know this makes sense. I know it takes more than six months to recover from 17 years of cortisol flooding my system. Gotta drift along and observe the whirling world for a while, and have faith in neuroplasticity.

In the meantime, physical workouts are only getting better. In some ways, there's joy in recovering ground I've lost before, because I can be confident in the path to gaining the skill again; for instance, I know that once I can bop my chest against the wall in a backbend, my kickover isn't too far away. And I know that once I have a dropback (check) and a kickover (as of today, check!), a back walkover will be coming along. This is easier on me in some ways than the -- exciting, for sure -- improvements into things I've never had before, where I don't know what comes next or where I'll max out, or how much faith to have. Anyway, in the last week or so I've gotten a set of 5 chinups back, and my kickover back. (The week before, also in backbend territory, I touched each toe to the top of my head in turn; that's a maintenance marker not touched since last December.) There was a cramping episode that made me think I should carry some runners' salt chews, but overall I'm doing really well.

Today in open studio, Birdie and I and another friend set up a station for walkover drills (tick-tocks) and worked on them for about an hour. It was so fun, and useful to really work on one thing for quite a while.

Also this week I ordered some organization stuff for our IKEA cube unit and for the freezer.

I spent a whole day helping a friend move (third one this fall, for anyone counting). She had a lot of the same Zillian swag as me, from working in the same office and, for a few years, in the same group, and I had all kinds of complicated feelings about seeing those items. Mostly sadness and a desire to avoid them. Neither she or I sees a way back to working the way we did when we got those things.

I floofed off to Portland Maine for the first time ever, with the squirrel. On the way up we listened to a podcast about fear, anxiety, exposure therapy etc, and had a good conversation about fears... later that day a tiny not-very-scary spider got onto my hand in a park, and I said "wait! exposure therapy!" and let it crawl around a little before putting my hand on the ground to let it get off. The squirrel was proud of me for letting it live, I was just proud of myself for doing something I'd literally never done before.

I'm sure there's more, but the sleepiness is rising fast, and I must succumb.

Knock knock.
( I promise, I like dark humor! Let me see it. )

So for those who aren't local, Be It Known that the vast majority of apartments here have leases beginning on or around September 1. Simultaneously and relatedly, the streets fill with U-Hauls and the sidewalks fill with random boxes and pieces of furniture marked "FREE". This last phenomenon is called "Allston Christmas" after a local suburb, but it happens across many towns in the area. It's like a big, disorganized Everything Swap.

• I picked up two new kitchen pots from the squirrel, and ended up giving him an onion chopper device that he loves... amusingly this was not as a direct swap, but it worked out well.


• Tuesday I spent about four hours helping a distant-ish friend pack stuff intended for a storage unit. I learned how to vaccuum-bag, which was cool, and MacGuyvered some garment-hanger boxes, and then was able to ferry a bag of stuff to the ballerina. And... silently I judged, because there was so much stuff. I came home, and the next day I got rid of a big bag of clothing and put out my own "FREE" stuff on the sidewalk and reorganized my kitchen. LOL.


• Friday I spent nearly 8 hours helping my acro base unpack and organize. Our goal was to get all his boxes open / broken down / gone, and we did it. So satisfying. We took a 2BR place from a giant pile of boxes to a place that looked like he lived there (and had had a messy week). We also got to see a couch left on the sidewalk disappear within an hour, and the same for a few other things that just didn't seem to have a place in the new apartment. He has different hobbies and different stuff than I do, but his attitude about objects is so much more like mine that it made for an interesting contrast with Tuesday.


• You are wondering: well, miss minimalist, did you get any free stuff this Christmas season? Yeah, I did. The two pots (I got rid of one), a pint glass, and a pair of parallettes from R (good for doing pushups without having to warm up my wrists first).
  

Overall a very domestic week. If you count the intended-to-be-final walk-through for my new condo, I put serious time into four different places. Then I went kitchen-feral on Saturday and made both quatre quarts cake and sushi. Workouts did go okay as well, but with less to specifically report.

I groused and griped about the final outcome of the Google-vs-DOJ antitrust case, which of course Google lost. ( If the powerful can be found guilty but then nothing happens to them, what good are the courts? ) The judge could have hurt browsing a bit, and instead he hurt all of tech. Maybe all of the country.

I learned a good new insult from an otherwise so-so book. The insult is "fish drowner", and I am taking it to mean someone who fucks up the apparently unfuckable. The person who snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, the person who manages to drown a goddamn fish. The person who maybe had one job, and had the power in his hands to break up a known monopolist, and... simply didn't do it.

This last week's theme, if there was a theme, was "staying up until 1AM reading". Also, half-assing my workouts, which is something I'm explicitly working on fixing. (Half-assing my lunches is strongly related; I'm not quite eating enough early in the day.)

Fun thing: playing Öoo from end to end. You play as a cute caterpillar who looks like the game title, and it's just an inventive little puzzle-platformer that doesn't overstay its welcome.

Also fun: reading The Witch Elm with the bug as part of our two-person book club. I am starting to feel a little torn on Tana French; she writes wonderfully about deep friendships but also has a lot of idiotic male main characters, and wanting to wring their necks while I'm reading isn't always pleasant. She also writes smart women, and sure enough, my favorite book of hers so far has the smart woman as the narrator. Looking over her books, I think there's one more of those.

Confusing: spending a few hours pulling black swallow-wort (or sometimes just its pods), on the nicer days and while listening to Alien Clay on audiobook. It's a pleasant enough endeavor, and I'm up for an hour or so when it's nice out, but it's hard to know whether I'm doing any good.

Slow: the buying-a-condo project. I spent time on it last week, measuring windows -- they're all the same -- and ordering window blinds, privacy window film, coat hooks. Also applying for homeowners' insurance for the thing. And informing the closing agents that the way I'm taking title is Sole Ownership, thankyewverymuch... of the options they offered me, all of them were for joint title. Feeling the burn of being a single person in a world designed for couples, I guess, and I'm not even single!

I submitted my second crossword puzzle to the NYT, this one aiming at much earlier in the week. It's easier; the theme is simple but cute. Construction of the puzzles is a little bit dangerous for me, in that it can be very distracting and engaging. In terms of feedback loops, dynamism and discovery, the "fill" part is midway between a video game and programming... both of which are known to bring on flow states, and make people wonder where the last 2-3 hours went. So, while I think this is a fun creative thing and suits my needs in a lot of ways, I also should be careful with it. (With that said, I have a proof of concept complete on my third puzzle. My plan is to take a break from filling to re-score a bunch of words, and give the poor flooded NYT staff a chance to accept or reject the first two puzzles. They have a limit of 3 in the queue per constructor, anyway).

All of this is in the continued context of wanting to wind down the big projects and do a better job with smoothly running my days. In particular, I want to be exercising differently. Lots of things are going great, but some are not. It's been pretty easy, over the last few weeks, to start addressing the various bits of joint jank that had built up in my body -- and this is part of the "going great" -- but it's been less easy to regain some of the strength moves I used to maintain as an absolute minimum a few years ago. So I want to get more regular about those. So far the Turkish Get-Ups are on their way back, just the way I used to do them, and I am LOVING that; but chinups are much slower to return, and I probably will need to get back to 3x/week to get real gains there at this point. Pistol squats too. In general it's always been harder for me to gain than to maintain, and standard strength moves haven't been my #1 fitness priority for the last few years of handstand obsession, but I miss them. I know it might be harder to get them back now that I'm older, but I also let them go for a while, so who can tell? I want to pick them back up. And as mentioned earlier, that means I need to start eating better lunches. Back to basics, as a true priority, is likely to feel really good. So with that, I'm getting on the elliptical machine like I meant to an hour ago. :P

1. PEAK RIPENESS
What’s something that is feeling purely delicious, ripe, messy, and juicy?

My entire extended family-ish situation. I am so happy with it, and there are lots of combinations of humans that can all be fun. The polycule is so great, Birdie being here is awesome and provides all kinds of ideas. Even the 'rents are being pretty okay right now.

2. COMING IN HOT
Your phone overheating. Being told to “simmer down.” How are outside forces communicating that you need to cool off?

I pulled a muscle or something while in contortion class on Thursday, and then I was trying to be super gentle today when I did the same thing again. Weird snapping feeling, no real pain, but some stiffness and soreness afterward. Whatever's happening in there, it's too sudden to be a good thing.

3. HOT HUES
Sun-bleached turquoise. Overripe watermelon. Green grass after a thunderstorm. Roadside wildflowers. Summer makes everything brighter: What color are you craving more of right now?

I don't know that I've ever craved a color!

4. PLUNGE
What’s the last thing you said yes to without hesitation?

Tiny Person's upcoming press handstand miniseries.

5. FEVER DREAM
Admit one thing you probably shouldn’t do, but lowkey want to?

Attend Somergloom alone and in a very altered state, with no preview or research. (What I actually am doing is making a playlist based on all the artists, to see if I like them)

6. BEACH SUB
Summer hunger hits differently. What’s your go-to simple, satisfying, hot weather meal?

Chickpea salad on a bagel, maybe.

7. MELTDOWN
When was the last time you totally lost it?

2021 when I suddenly could not, could not, go back to work as planned after a day or two off.

8. BURNING YOUR TONGUE
Texting your ex. A hot take. Unsolicited advice. When was the last time you took a sip too soon (metaphorically speaking)?

I heard that someone had basically lost their group in a coup at Zillian (and cried in the associated meeting), and reached out to that person before thinking to actually let them save face by asking how they were doing. The person was quite adamant that they'd chosen the new direction (though from what options, I can't say) and were simply emotional about the transition. OK OK, fine...

Only two of this weeks' houseguests have come and gone, but I'll take a little moment out anyway. The top line is that I'm pretty well back on kilter. I thought my condo sale had hit another hiccup, but it turned out to be momentary, so all proceeds smoothly there.

Fun times:

• Brunch with motorcycle-friend turned out to be super fun. He vroomed me out to the middle of nowhere, swearing that there was a good brunch place out there, and... I learned that every little airfield where rich people fly their Cessnas to is the location of a good cafe. Yes! It was an airfield! We chattered about life while watching the baby planes land and take off. I also got to wear a Klim mesh motorcycle jacket that's probably the most badass garment I have ever donned in my life.


• My old acro partner, the Monk, came in on Monday night and we had tons of fun reconnecting and trying some of our old tricks. One of them came right back after just 3 tries even though neither have done it in the meantime and we aren't used to each other anymore. So fun. Also, so very sweaty.


• Superman at the theater with a six-person group (polycule, visiting friend, and apfelsingail) last night was surprisingly feel-good. It's a "no animal left behind" movie -- and for reasons well beyond the squirrel rescue. There's a dog, there are turtles, there are monkeys. They also highlighted the immigrant/refugee aspect of Superman's backstory, which felt very relevant to the present day while also being original canon.

Interesting conversation on the crossword construction discord eventually led to my moving my old Harry Potter and Sandman books from the living room bookshelf to the back room; a small, literal re-platforming.

And... I'm wrapping up this month of my coaches being gone, and I want to get stronger again. I got a bit lazy and soft in July -- no, not a lot, but I miss strength work. Just getting back to doing banded chinups most days in my office has been nice, and doesn't really take any time, but I've realized I'd like to do a lot more.

...sounds like something you'd rather not get stabbed with, doesn't it? Though at least the wound would be freshly scented. At any rate, the bug and I flew and drove to get to the amusement park, rode roller coasters for two entire days, and came back. I had various new experiences:

• First time at Cedar Point, and actually my first time in Ohio. We stayed in Hotel Breakers, which is right on the island about 5 minutes' walk from the amusement park entrance gate.


• First time going to a hibachi grill place! Loud but fun, with the chefs squirting stuff into people's mouths and having fun making fire. We had shrimp and salmon that came out really good.


• First time on a tilt roller coaster, Siren's Curse, which opened just three-ish weeks ago and may have been my favorite. So smooth and sinuous, with great music and gleaming new everything.


• First time going up over 400 feet on a roller coaster, Top Thrill 2, built last year and currently the tallest roller coaster in the world. My extremely honest notes on that one say: Throat hurts from screaming “oh fuck yes”, or maybe some other scream.

There was a bit of physical misery from heat and sun, and iterating on the best thing to wear. I'm pretty sure my dream outfit would consist of capri-length cargo leggings with zip pockets, and a quick-dry sun protective T-shirt with flutter sleeves (for lots of UPF on the shoulders, but ventilation for armpits). But I also did pretty well on the second day with long athletic shorts with no pockets, plus a small waist bag. Minor sunburn, despite running myself out of both the kinds of sunblock I bought. Sore feet each day.

But we rode roller coasters, which I love! We had twelve on our list, and managed to knock off nine of them the first day despite a) wasting most of our early-entry time and b) the park closing down the rides two hours early for rain. The next day we hopped right on the early entry, and used it to get onto the remaining coaster that had always had a huge line (Millenium Force). Listening to others in the line around us, we learned it was only running one of its three trains -- the yellow one, while blue sat on a side line and red lay in pieces somewhere under maintenance. I daydreamed then about having deep deep knowledge of the place, and all the coasters and their cars and the various modes of operation; knowing what a good day and a bad day look like for the park maintainers. And then we rode the yellow train.

That particular ride had a really good drop, and here's the funny part about coasters; the way the train is plummeting toward the ground, yeah, but as that happens there's also a lightness and floating that happens between the rider and the train. Once I'm feeling familiar with the overall sensation of coasters I actually like to relax during the drops and feel the float, before bracing myself for the curve at the bottom. Some coasters give a lot of this same float at the top of hills, where negative G is scary as hell to me but zero G feels cozy and floaty and loving. Some corkscrew rolls / heartline rolls do this too (and loops hardly ever do it, though I also love a good loop). And this is why I only hold on tight for the first big drop or two of the day -- after that, it just wastes a good floating opportunity.

Did I mention that coasters just make me HAPPY? In nearly all the photos from rides I look the same -- hunched forward, sunglasses in place, mouth open in a big smile. After a while we started calling it my "avid turtle" thing. It's a little dorky, and also pretty much the happiest I ever get to see myself... so we bought two of the pictures, and I have brought out my old "racing turtle" icon for this post too.

What else? We had good teamwork, staying in sync for food and bathroom breaks, taking time out when the bug had a back spasm early on the 2nd morning. I did take one ride without him -- Steel Vengeance, which sounds mean, but the line was short and it let me report on how rough the ride was so that he could decide about it. But aside from that hour or so, we were really well matched as park goers. We had food deals built into our tickets and, thus, ate fairly horribly for a couple of days. I even ate a bag of Cheetos, and was reminded how hyper-palatable junk food really can be (must try to forget again... but oh, that crunch). Even so, there were salads and fruit cups, and I don't know about the bug but I don't seem to have gained weight. I guess 13 hours of being outdoors and mostly on one's feet will burn some energy.

I did lots of people watching. It's not often I see so many people of all ages in small groups, being fairly unguarded. So I saw a whole lot of play-fighting among the young males of the species, and a lot of teenage girls getting used to having breasts to display. White girls in Lululemon running shorts or skorts, black girls in yoga pants and assertively false eyelashes. Kids wearing band/album T-shirts from way before they were born. Different accents. Lots of sports teams on T-shirts, but also some serious roller coaster afficionado gear (If it's not Intamin, I don't care). The dad with missing teeth saying to his teenage son, not too unkindly, that you can't be scared forever, it's just a roller coaster. Middle-aged folks like us, quieter, being able to see the young'uns and knowing we're essentially invisible to them. Ah, and we also watched birds -- the pretty ones turned out to be grackles.

It's good to be home with the cats again, typing this on my new monitor. We had minor delays in getting home, but nothing that still matters today. I'm grateful that all the driving of the rental car went smoothly, and that we were able to sync the entire trip with my squirrel's trip to the island he visits every year.

Some interesting (to me) progress on understanding my longstanding spiderweb phobia; not surprisingly, it isn't exactly and only spiderwebs. Back when I went to Norwood's birthday party, the subject came up of random things that gave us heebie-jeebies, and I mentioned spiderwebs as usual. His other ex asked me "Is it a texture thing?" which nobody had ever asked me before. I said maybe, or maybe in part, because the texture of having a web on you is pretty gross. Even though I also remembered trying one time to explain that a strand of web, once clinging to me, isn't exactly doing the web thing anymore... so I said that beyond texture there's also something about an invisible unknown structure in the air, holding stuff up, but whose extent is not known. I'm not particularly scared of cobwebs that are covered in dust or in dew/fog/moisture, or not in the same way -- though I'm still not about to go putting my hand in them, maybe that's the texture part.

So then more thinking. Looking at a dust-covered cobweb in the Esh bathroom, thinking "I could touch that and it would be gross, but I'm not getting much of a fear response." (Maybe I should touch it tomorrow).

Then in someone's backyard, there was some netting over an enclosure, and it looked invisible in some places because of the shade and the angle of the light; I could see leaves caught in the netting, and looking at that made me uncomfortable in a recognizable and related way. As if the leaves, hovering there obviously in a plane and supported by something, were stuck in a giant spiderweb. Weirdly, having become aware of it, I even got a ghost of the same feeling with bubbles in a coffee pod later (there were little bubbles on the surface of a big bubble -- annoyed, I made myself poke it with my finger to pop the bubbles).

Unless I'm surprised by something, or there's a web I have to deal with, this is all more a matter of discomfort than real fear.

I'm not the only one. There's some recent-ish discussion on Reddit lately, sometimes calling it "araneophobia", sometimes talking about things stuck on webs and "floating in the air" as a trigger (I identify with that). There's an article on Medium too, discussing it as a sensory "fear of touching" thing. For me, I think it's useful to realize that the sensory thing exists but is largely separate from the fear thing. And, I guess, nice to realize that I can still learn more about myself at this point in life.