March 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.
Do a 24-hour movie marathon
At the start of the month, my mother and I went to AMC’s 24-hour best picture showcase. This is semi-tradition for my mother and me: in 2015 we saw one day of their 48-hour showcase and in 2018 we had planned to do the same but I ended up going alone. We had never attempted the 24-hour version of the event. We ended up thoroughly enjoying it! There's really nothing like it. It deep-fucks your circadian rhythm for sure--with the exception of a half hour dinner break after the second film, we were only afforded ten minute breaks in-between screenings, and everytime we’d peak our heads outside we’d be under a different light. After the showcase, I revised my Oscar predictions in a very Anora friendly direction, which ended up being the correct call.
Walk barefoot in the rain
When you have 222 goals for a year, you need a few whimsical ones. The point of goal setting is not to have a productive year but to have the sort of year that I would like to have, and I would like to walk barefoot in the rain and so I did. I recommend it. The human condition involves various divorces between the body and the elements and the cold and the damp of rainfall has a poetic quality from which we, by our own designs, distance ourselves.
Update my LinkedIn profile
I'm actually one of the big advocates for LinkedIn–except my first job out of college, every job I've had has come from recruiters on LinkedIn. My resume hadn't been updated since 2022 and so I went about rewriting it.
Learn to write with my right hand
I think this is every left-handed person’s dream. It took less time than I thought it would, and I write faster and cleaner with my left hand, but nonetheless I have achieved legibility and so I feel confident crossing off this goal. I practiced in a little notebook, but also using my phone's stylus. I don't think I'll use this in practice, but it might benefit me as a sort of cross-training exercise for shooting pool on my right hand.
Go to a book launch
I went to Skylight Books in Silverlake for the launch of Emily St. James’s Woodworking. I have been a fan of St. James's television criticism since her days at The AV Club and Vox. Jon Lovett, host of Pod Save America, was the moderator for the evening, so I was certainly Internet-starstruck.
See a Lunar Eclipse
Increasingly, I have come to appreciate what I consider the central challenge of photography, which is that because a photograph can only capture the actual behavior of actual photons, and because those photons bounce around a world that is designed not to be photographed but to instead heed physical law, the game of photography is one of discipline and luck. If you capture a good photograph it only means that there existed, at some point, a composition pleasing to the human eye striking a lens and sensor. A lunar eclipse demonstrates this well. Though there is great beauty in the moon she herself does not know her beauty--she orbits and rotates as she must. The human element also thwarted my compositions. Hollywood is built to be Hollywood. It is not built to accommodate lunar photography because it must accommodate the Dolby Theater, nor could it accomodate if it so wished as, the moon can appear and be occluded anywhere in the Californian sky. Clouds can form. If you find, perchance, a composition where a ripe orange visually balances with the reddened moon then that is a gift that you take, because oranges are not grown to dance with the moon and the moon knows nothing of oranges.
Learn Esperanto
As previously noted, a number of my goals relate to reading books in foreign languages and some of these languages are ones that I had only marginal previous experience with. Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed language, established in 1887 by Dr. Zamenhof. The language has a distinct intellectual provenance: originally designed as a language that might unite Europe under an ethnically neutral tongue, it captured the imagination of James Joyce and other European intellectuals after the carnage of the first world war.
Read a book in Esperanto
In this age, there are two reasons to learn Esperanto. One is to attend international Esperanto conferences where attendees are expected to speak the language, and one is to read William Auld's La Infana Raso. Auld, a Scotsman who wrote only in Esperanto, was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, another plume in Esperanto's cap. The poem relates the history of humanity from Alexander the Great to the space age, and was well worth the time spent learning Esperanto.
Revise last year's poems
I wrote 26 poems last year and I wanted to revise them, so I did. I liked most of my poems, and there were at least good lines in all of them. Some of them I “marked for scrap,” because the semantic whole of the poem was unfocused or lacking or misguided, with good lines but incoherent when all strung together. Those I kept saw marked improvement after a touch up.
Rewatch Serial Experiments Lain
Serial Experiments Lain is my favorite television show and I think about it all the time. It's about a girl who may or may not be a piece of software, may or may not ascend to Godhood, and who may or may not reset the universe. Secret societies, aliens, Harry Truman conspiracies, and metaverses. “Dense cult classic” is the correct term of art.
Spire 73
Spire 73 in DTLA bills itself as the highest open-air bar in the Western hemisphere, and I do not recommend visiting it on a cloudy and cold day in March. My waitress was shivering!
Angel’s Flight
My mother is the biggest funicular / cable car fan in the world, so I had to go to Angel’s Flight. This is the most delightful and perfect LA bucket-list item. I had done it before and I enjoyed doing it again.
See The Sphere
I have never heard a negative thing about The Sphere and I can confirm that “jaw-dropping” and “indescribable” are the right words for it. There’s nothing like it. It's a marvel of technology. It was exactly as expected in that it did, like everyone else said it would, shatter expectations. Darren Aranofsky's Postcards From Earth, the first film shot for The Sphere, is the most profound piece of art concerning climate change I have seen because only The Sphere provides the canvas large enough to discuss what we have allowed the rich to do to our planet.
See wonders from 3 different millennia
This was the goal I was most excited to complete! Here are the things I saw:
1st Millennium BC - Cuicuilco: Located just South of Mexico City, this circular pyramid is the oldest known archaeological site in the valley of Mexico, predating the Aztec by over a millennium.
1st Millennium AD - Teotihuacán: As noted in February's update, I took a hot air balloon over Teotihuacan. Construction started on the site in the 1st century BC, but the sun and moon pyramids would not be completed well into the 1st millennium.
2nd Millennium - The Salt Cathedral: A marvel of the 20th century, just a genuinely beautiful place to visit.
3rd Millenium - The Sphere: See above!