February 2025 Update
This is a brief summary of the goals that I accomplished this past month. This is part of a monthly series of such posts so that I can track my progress and relay any insights therein gleaned.
Ride a Hot Air Balloon
A hot air balloon ride leaves one naked to the elements. The evening prior, the company running my flight gave me a warning that 20% of the time the hot air balloons would not fly anywhere near the Teotihuacan archaeological site. Yet, downside risk often finds itself well compensated by upside gain, and my expedition was no exception. We flew directly over the Moon Pyramid, which had a particular meaning to me since the last time I visited Teotihuacan you could walk to the top of the pyramids, a practice suspended post-pandemic leaving this stunning view available only to those willing to take the 20% risk of seeing nothing.
La Brea Tar Pits
The La Brea Tar Pits are a classic LA bucket-list item and a number of my goals are just LA bucket-list items. Unlike some of these goals, I had been to the La Brea Tar Pits, maybe when I was eleven. The actual pits themselves have a kind of brutal and primal quality: here, time liquefies eternal, time shimmers or cowers beneath a light patina of dust. The museum attached to the site, well, it's for children and even when I was last there, at eleven, it seemed too babyish to me. There is a wall of wolf skulls, which I liked, and I do appreciate the few exhibits dedicated to how humans once hunted mammoths and other megafauna. It's good to remember, and a good natural history museum remembers this for us, that we are parts of nature and that historically we were more so ensconced in the ecological and geological mechanisms of our planet than we are today. At one point, we hunted mammoths.
Go to a Poetry Reading
I went to beloved LA bookstore Book Soup for a poet whose name I will not reproduce here because I found her to be very annoying.
Make a Vision Board
I like self-help and I meditate every day so I am at least somewhat sympathetic to the more woo-woo iterations of self-help. Vision boards, to me, were a bit far out, but pots call kettles: I do visualization meditations, so why not concretize these visions? I did this in about an hour on my tablet, using clip art and AI images built into the whiteboarding software I was using. I won't tell you what's on it, but yes, I do the important vision board thing of looking at it every so often, and I think the board aligns with my vibes, and that by looking at it I can reestablish my vibes when I’m off my element. I feel quite envisioned when I look at it. I enjoy envisioning with it.
Attend a Ceramics Class
My ceramics class was slow comedy. Whenever I'm single I solicit my lady friends for advice on how to meet women, and with a strange consistency women say that I should go to a ceramics class. In 2023, three separate women suggested this as my meet cute strategy. There is something appealing about the idea of meeting someone outside of an app, and ceramics classes are fun and attract an arty crowd, and this is basically the logic that women present to me when they suggest this stratagem. I attended one and my classmates were: a mom and her eight year old daughter, a mom and her nine year old daughter, a mom and her eight year old daughter, and two high schoolers with their dad and grandparents. At some point they will fire my piece and return it to me and it was a fun way to spend an afternoon, but having done it, the skepticisms I had voiced to well-meaning women who had suggested the activity seem validated.
Make a Jam
I made a delicious raspberry jam. A perfect kitchen goal! I had never made homemade jam before and I loved the results. I made it again in March, which I only bring up to show that even small goals and small steps can beget long term change, and here’s a picture of that March batch.
Yamashiro
Yamashiro is another LA bucket list item. An LA institution and popular sushi restaurant, I had never gone there before and I can report that it’s just as beautiful and ritzy as a restaurant nestled in the Hollywood hills ought to be.
Volunteer with Animals
For a few weeks in February I volunteered at a rabbit shelter. For the most part, I washed veggies and then I socialized with them for a bit.
Attend a Group Meditation
I had wanted to do a group meditation and I found one that slotted into my schedule. I meditate daily but have always done it and seen it as an individual practice–a group meditation seemed both an authentic means of honoring this individual practice and a way to expand and try something new. I didn't really like it: we were singing hymns to the guru who founded the temple hosting the event and I don't know the guy so I don't want to sing hymns unto him.
Attend a Film Screening w/ Q&A
I got to see an advanced screening of The Monkey with a Q&A by Osgood Perkins, the director. The one thing I took away from the Q&A is that his producers told him he could do anything with the monkey except for giving it cymbals, the ominous instrument that it wielded in the Stephen King story on which the film is based. That's because Disney owns the copyright to that cymbal monkey toy due to its inclusion in Toy Story 3. Movie magic!
Read a Book in Spanish
I'm a serial language learner, and as the rest of this blog post will attest, I have a whole suite of goals dedicated to reading books in the tongues that I have learned. I wanted to ease into this, so I reread a short memoir by Sergio Pitol called El Viaje. One of the advantages of learning a foreign language is that you gain access to a number of books with no cultural presence in the anglophonic world, and El Viaje is such a work, written by Pitol, winner of the Cervantes Award and Mexico’s ambassador to the Czechoslovakia Socialist Republic. This is a book I had read before, and I enjoyed it just as much this time: during Gorbachev's glasnost, a number of previously censored authors were made available to the Soviet public, but as these works were once verboten, there existed no native Russian scholarship to contextualize this Russian literature. This is where Pitol and his viaje come into play: during the 80s and glasnost, he was invited on a brief literary tour of the Soviet Union where he gave lectures on these censored works, written in the mother tongue of that collapsing empire, that no native speakers had ever really read.
Read a Book in French
I read Candide in French which is great because I learned the French word for spanking: fessée.
Read a Book in Portuguese
I reread one of my favorite books, probably a top ten, Uma Aprendizagem by Clarice Lispector. There really isn't a book more beautiful, but it's a tough book, especially the first thirty pages which I feel represent some of Lispector's densest prose. I had read it in Portuguese before and had found it challenging and rewarding, and it so remains.