San Francisco: exercise in vigor

This is one of those posts about someone’s day, with no particular point. If you are a future historian wondering what kind of stuff random people got up to in the late 2010s, lucky you! (Unless you care about representativeness at all).

I woke up at about 7am even though there was little reason or precedent for this and I hadn’t been asleep for long enough to make it a good idea at all. I didn’t open my eyes yet, because first I wanted to rethink my prioritization of some basic things in my life that I have been interminably struggling with. That quickly resolved, I meditated and made coffee, then reorganized my food cupboard and ate a previously-forgotten breakfast bar in the dining room sun. 

Then I remembered that my new noise-blocking wireless in-ear headphones mean that I can listen to yoga instruction in the living room without waking anyone up or being encumbered by headphone cords or headsets, so I downloaded an app and did that. Then I ran to the park to various rousing running tunes. And ran to the pharmacy, for a thing I had been putting off. Then I danced in my room for a bit (with intense abandon) and did pushups, and sit ups, and other floor things, and lifted some weights I found in the garage, and did things with a pull up bar that were not maximally unlike pull ups. Another housemate came along and mentioned that he likes DDR, so we played a bit of that.

Then I thought, if I’m going to shower, maybe it would be efficient to cut my hair first? That way I can cut it with dirty scissors I find in the dishwasher, and still end up clean. Probably people say you shouldn’t cut your own hair on a whim. I was somehow aware of this but not moved. Hair isn’t that great anyway, so how badly could it go? I found the dirty scissors and lopped off bits of hair I wasn’t totally satisfied with. I didn’t really like the outcome, so I did it more. This seemed to again make it worse, but I figured I had some space to experiment with different angles before I ran out of hair. The left side wasn’t getting much better, so I did the right side, and that actually seemed good in short order. 

Cutting hair is weird in that it can look kind of fine, then you just grab a handful from somewhere near the back and cut it off, and then it still looks kind of fine. One explanation would be that I have a low bar for ‘kind of fine’. Happily, with more cutting, the left side at last reached and surpassed this standard. As it got to about chin length, I vaguely remembered a recent conversation in which my friend thought I would look bad if I got a chin-length haircut. Eh. I vacuumed the bathroom and showered and put on clothes and was pleased with the overall effect.

Another housemate woke up and invited me on a run and gave me his half-frozen broccoli and asked what I would do this week without he and so many other housemates who are traveling (answer: relate the inane details of my day to the internet?) I was tempted to go for another run even though that would be completely unreasonable, but decided against because I had four employees and a virtual-employee showing up shortly to work with me.

It was one person’s first day working with us, and another started two weeks ago, so an exciting time (not to mention a great one for showing up at work reliably). The others are also relatively recent additions, so managing a small team is a newish pursuit for me. Most of the rest of the work day was meetings, which is, if I understand correctly, a thing that is meant to happen. One meeting was in hammocks, one wandering nearby hilltops and overpasses, and one sipping coffee in the street, so I think things are going well, in ways.

My workplace now has an AI risk themed reading group, so we met and chatted about a series of blog posts we are reading about search algorithms that find different search algorithms instead of finding simpler stuff. I was confused by various things, and the confusions among us seemed to be more powerful than the non-confusion that some people started with. I felt like everything would be more straightforward if we stuck to talking concretely about ten kinds of snakes we might meet, and either ten or a million potential snake-killing actions we might take, but neither my colleagues nor the blog post authors seemed to share this sense, so I may be confused about what we are even doing. I was quietly having a panic attack for a large part of the reading group, so also may have missed some subtleties on that account. (No, you haven’t missed some kind of context for why I would be panicking, I just panic for no reason sometimes.)

My room is mostly beige and brown things—a wide expanse of rug, a single bed, a reclining deck chair, a tiny desk. I made myself a dinner of half-frozen-half-cooked broccoli, cream cheese and almost-cooked quorn nuggets and retreated there. I wanted to use my new headphones to watch a YouTube video about history while I ate. I started looking for some random thing in recent history, but felt that it would be better to know something more basic, like about the Bronze Age collapse, early and big that it was. The first video about that wasn’t getting to things I didn’t know fast though, and videos aren’t as fun as games, so I looked for relevant Sporcle quizzes, and tried to name extremely old groups of people. There were a lot of them, and I knew almost none, and I felt like I should go back further. How did writing start? I learned about the progression of written thinking aids to ‘true’ alphabets, and the family tree of alphabets leading to ours. That didn’t seem close to the start though. What happened really early? I learned about the earliest human artifacts we know of, and tried to figure out why someone was so confident that these broken shells were 100,000 year old beads that they would substantially update estimates for when humans developed that kind of thing. When did humans actually start again? Not unambiguously until after a lot of early technology apparently. I tried to get a feel for the various scales of time and came across this logarithmic timeline of everything that has happened, which is just the kind of thing I wanted. I stared at that for a while and struggled to grasp it, even in this excellent form. I felt like I should understand how human history fits into earlier events. So I looked at the rest of the timeline, and learned about dawn-bears and tusk-jawed elephants and lungfish and eukaryotes, and the Gaia Sausage stars and so on. And then it didn’t mention the Milky Way coming to be—just drops it in there, without introduction!—so I looked into that. And learned about all the aeons and eras and periods and epochs and ages. 

Somehow it got disappointingly late, and I ran out of enthusiasm for this. However I did find myself curious about what Jainism entails, because I remembered for some reason that I had a book of religions when I was a child, and I liked going through books and choosing which things in them I preferred, and I decided that in that book, Jainism was my favorite religion. Then I never really checked it out as an adult. 

So I read about Jainism. (What follows is an extremely ignorant account based on skimming Wikipedia.) They seem to be into various things I am also into, or at least sympathetic to, such as non-violence (including to insects), thinking the world can be seen in many ways and isn’t very amenable to perfect description, honesty, asceticism, not being too attached to stuff, meditation, the fundamental importance of other people somehow. 

Do they have things to add that I won’t find in my non-Jain explorations? It sounds like they may have some kind of interesting concrete model of karma and souls and how they physically interact. And even if I don’t think there is magical karma, there is some reason people came up with, and continue to use, any particular story about what is going on. I’m interested in people’s efforts to conceptualize their mental, emotional and spiritual lives. I feel like my own culture hasn’t offered much in the way of useful ways of thinking about psychology, from the perspective of being a mind and wanting to wield oneself well, rather than being in the business of suggesting broad depression cures, say. 

If I think of activities as adding or removing something like physical dirt from my soul, does that fit with my experience? Not sure. 

A big reason I chose Jainism as my favorite religion as a child was the thing where they don’t hurt any animals, to the point of sweeping the ground for insects before stepping on it (Wikipedia says they also avoid hurting potatoes, if they are really serious..) I still like that bit.

I sort of wanted for there to be several more hours in which I assiduously worked on things I should work on, but being utterly powerless in the face of time, whatever that is, I decided to eat ice cream instead. My house has four different kinds of vanilla ice cream, so I took some of each, to see if I could tell them apart. I found that they were mostly more delicious than I realized. I could taste changes from one ice cream to the next, but not sure if I could tell whether #3 was the same as #1 say.

Now I’m going to bed.