No. 85 Land + Cholesterol + Hibernating Humans
No. 85 • 11/4/2022
I’m experimenting with a new newsletter platform that I’m very excited about. I’ll spare you the nerdy details of why, but please let me know if you encounter any issues, if it shows up in your spam (mark as “not spam” if it does), or if anything else just feels “off”.
I wanna talk about the land, but I’m afraid of jinx
Well, it has (almost) been accomplished. (See final scene in The Last Temptation of Christ). We have a signed contract, a title/deed that needs some fixing, and a potential closing date on a great big massive upstate property that will (and has already begun to) put all of my project management skills to the test. So far, I am stoked at what I’m seeing. The system I use is fly af. I’d love to teach it to you some day. For now, let’s call it a “(Nearly) Stress-Free Project Management System.” I’ll explain why later.
What I really want to talk about, though, is the property. But, being a strong believer in “jinx” and not wanting to wake the trickster wrath, I’m gonna hold off until we have officially closed. Let’s just say it’s gonna be a journey.
Here’s a list of the main aspects of the property that we are currently populating with projects, most of which are already underway:
- Pre-Sale
- The Cottage
- UTV
- The Forest
- Utilities
- The Barn
- The Spartan “Manor”
- The Driveway
- The Main Cleared Site
- Pickup Truck
Under each of these is a handful of projects, amounting to about twenty active projects. In addition, we’ve got folders for Resources and Logs. Logs are the best. If you log your email exchanges and phone calls you will be on the straight and narrow to feeling like master of your domain.
Leveraging laws and Black surfers
Both of these are awesome:
- Two Black Americans went ahead copyrighted (copywrote?) “White Lives Matter,” and now they can file lawsuits whenever some fuck-head makes a shirt with that bs on it. link
- Help fund a new doc on Black surfers in Rockaway link. This look awesome. Side note: the first thing I noticed when I started surfing in Rockaway was the relatively high number of women surfers and Black surfers. This is important to me.
Community is reading books already highlighted
The banality (and gate-keeper mentality) of New Criticism, which posited that the meaning of a text was a unique and accessible nugget of truth that only the most diligent of readers had access to was blown apart when reader-response theory came on the scene. Reader-response theory sees the text and its meaning as incomplete until a reader engages with it. Different readers bring different contexts, which means different meanings are always possible in any text. This is the basis for almost all the work I do.
And, wouldn’t you know it, but a comrade in the PKM scene spoke to some of this in a roundabout way in a short rumination on reading a book when someone has already highlighted the hell out of it:
“It starts to form a three-way dialogue: the author, the anonymous annotator, and myself. As I’m reading, I’m not just engaging with the thoughts of Anthony Grafton, but also of this reader before me. It’s like a book club.”
I love that.
The Human Predicament
One of the many lawsuits I imagine Google is involved in:
“The complaint targets the Google Photos app, which allows people to search for photos they took of a particular person; Google’s Nest camera, which can send alerts when it recognizes (or fails to recognize) a visitor at the door; and the voice-activated Google Assistant, which can learn to recognize up to six users’ voices to give them personalized answers to their questions. Mr. Paxton said the products violated the rights of both users and nonusers, whose faces and voices were scanned or processed without their understanding or consent.”
Basically, I have very strong negative feels about surveillance capitalism. More so even than my very strong negative feels about regular ol’ generic, boring capitalism, which at least has some semblance of righteousness hidden deep within its recesses (Down with the Feudal Lords!). And yet, here I am rooting for Mr Paxton to take Google to task, while at the same time considering Nest security cameras for our soon-to-be property.
I think what I have the most strong negative feels about is the situation big tech has put us in.
What I’m loving
This piece by the developer of the wonderful Minimal theme for Obsidian, Stephan Ango:
“Some of my favorite people to collaborate with are T-shaped. They tend to be natural leaders because they understand how different responsibilities overlap, and how to construct effective teams and processes.
“Being U-shaped requires bravery, because it’s so unusual. U-shaped people tend to be subjected to greater skepticism, because no one else really understands what they alone can see. Yet these intersections can lead to the greatest breakthroughs.
“My hunch is that we need a lot more U-shaped hybrids because they are the plateau-breakers.”
You’re lost, I know. Click on the link below and peep the graphic. That’ll explain it.
What I’m tracking
My cholesterol. I take in very very little bad cholesterol, and yet my levels have been breaching the high mark this year for some reason. So, now it’s 30–50 min of cardio 5x a week to see if the uptick in heart rate will lead to some cholesterol crunching. I will be logging this in my “Health Log”, don’t you worry.
Why I’m Vexing
Projection, transference, and entitlement. Oof… That’s one dastardly combo to navigate.
PS: The customer is almost always wrong.
What I’m practicing
This week’s lectio divina practice has been all about the limited perspective that comes with living in a fleshy body with eyes in front of our head (blind spots in the back and sides) and a proclivity toward self-centeredness. This human predicament leads to a lot of protecting of the self: our curated and projected image of who we want others to think we are. This constant protection takes a lot of work.
My practice this week has been asking for guidance in moving beyond the protection-first impulse, to let all non-emergency affronts and indiscretions be noises, happenings, and energetic shifts. Something to note. But, nothing to get my balls all in a twist about.
With whom I’m connecting
Thanks to Ran Prieur, I’m connecting with the idea of the hibernating human.
“In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. … The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.”
I find this radically fascinating, and especially so in the context of our day-to-day capitalist work-production models. Questions I have:
- What would crime be like in a society that hibernated?
- What’s the first thing you would say to your neighbors and friends upon waking?
- Is this even healthy? Minimal movement for half a year?
- How is labor and “hard work” valued in a society that sleeps, like a lot?
What I’m reading
Not sure this piece gets at all of what’s going on in conversation dynamics. But! I like its challenging the assumption that it’s rude to formulate what you want to say while someone is speaking, as if doing so means you’re not listening.
Now, I get it. Being a sensitive spiritual guy (who realized in group therapy the other day that he has very strong feelings about most things) I get the whole “reserve your thoughts until it’s your turn to speak” vibe. But, I get it mostly if we’re talking about a Quaker meeting. But, regular ol convos??? C’mon. (Ever talk with someone who takes three minutes to respond to everything you just said cuz they were so busy listening to you? Was it fun?).
“Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).”
What I’m hearing
“Chant Down Babylon Kingdom” by Yabby You. I’m two skankin steps from just throwing it all in and becoming a 12 Tribes member.
What I’m watching
Buckin’ Billy is my new wood cutting guru. I think of him as the Bronner’s of choppin’ wood.