TPO#17: The Password is Waking Up Early
TPO 17
This is the Issue 17 of The Purposeful Object, a newsletter by Navneet Alang about living the good life amidst the miasma of the techno-modern. I’ve slightly revamped the format this time ‘round, pushing longer thoughts to the bottom.
This issue: yet another standup reccomendation!; a few helpful digital tools; and finally, some longer thoughts about how hard I find watching new movies and TV, and the related anxiety and stress of starting new things.
~Good Things~
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I talk about standup comedy a lot because it’s a form that somehow works for me. A good set, particularly what comics will call a tight five or ten, is like a song: I like to listen to it over and over, the rhythm becoming familiar, jokes revealing nuances over time. I can usually tell straight away when I like something — and Celia Paquola’s “Live at the Apollo” set was one I immediately took to.
It was thus nice to see that she had her own special on Amazon Prime which is not only great, but also includes reflections on both relationships and getting your asshole lasered. But what also stuck out is that is that Paquola talks about her depression, and uses language that felt very familiar to me — about a self that hovers in front of you in potentiality, and another pit of dismay and despair behind you. It’s very insightful and all the more surprising to find it in a funny hour of standup comedy.
As for a TPO wine pairing: I’m on an extended dry January, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Ravine Vineyard’s Patricia’s Block Reisling may be my fave Riesling ever. Alas, it is $35, so it might be a once a year treat. Apologies non-Canadians, but I’m pretty sure it’s only available here.
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Ludo might be my fave Bollywood film in a while. Yes, Abhishek Bacchan is way over the top (does he think it’s still the 70s?), and fans of Tarantino might find the overlapping and intersecting plot lines a little too familiar. But it’s funny, profane, cute at times, and the old song Qismat ki Hawa they use is catchy af. Also, this is an excellent intro to how great actors Pankaj Tripathi and Rajkumar Rao are.
Wine pairing: you want something in-between for this, so I’d say a rosé or a lightly chilled pinot noir or gamay.
~Helpful Things~
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Interesting thing from The Washington Post: one of their new newsletters, “What Day Is It?” is based on the idea that the pandemic has ruined our sense of time, and claims that over 7 days you will “learn how to recover it, fill your days with new experiences and stay connected with the world around you.” I'm intrigued?
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Password managers are essential - seriously, use on - but my go-to LastPass seems to be ruining their free offering. A good alternative appears to be Bitwarden, which is not only free but also open source.
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For the past year or so, I’ve used TickTick as a to-do app after The Wirecutter recommended it. But I switched to Todoist recently, and it’s better, for reasons I can’t really explain (it’s less ugly?). But it’s particularly good if you’re on Mac/iOS and if you use calendar app Fantastical. As a scheduling workflow, it is pretty great, and I think I might actually stick with this one for a while.
~A Longer Thing~
I have a problem with movies. And TV shows. The problem is that I can’t watch them.
I sit with Netflix open, or Amazon Prime, or Disney+ — or in my more adventurous moments, Kanopy — and look at the dizzying array of offerings. Roma! The Lighthouse! Another Oliver Assayas film! Some critical darling or revelatory documentary, a comedy I know will be light and fun.
And almost always, sitting there alone, I can’t watch any of them.
In the moment, I am overwhelmed by a strange feeling of anxiety — an almost physical resistance to watching something new. I can watch a John Mulaney special for the fourteenth time. I can skim through snippets of The Fellowship of the Ring or Infinity War, can happily sit through most or all of Sicario or The Social Network. But presented with the endless list of new things I know I not only should watch, but would enjoy, I am paralyzed.
I posted about this on Twitter once, and the response was surprisingly sympathetic. The general sentiment that it was the tyranny of choice at work: there is much to choose from, and so much potential FOMO looming around the corner that it’s easier to just watch something familiar. A quick Google reveals that others with anxiety experience this too — both the reluctance to enter into a novel thing, but also the guilt at not being able to as well.
One imagines this is the kind of thing only therapy might address, particularly the cognitive behavioural sort. Yet symbolically the whole strange phenomenon feels significant, if perhaps obviously so: that it indicates a reluctance to start a new thing, to be challenged by something novel,or to be faced with feelings and ideas one might want to avoid.
Something the pandemic seems to have done, though, is give people an opportunity to try something new. A couple of examples come to mind. The Cut has been running a series called “Turns Out It’s Pretty Good” on how the pandemic has seen people reconsider things they had once resisted.
In one that I quite enjoyed, Sarah Hagi about the virtues of waking up early, a thing that prior to Covid she avoided like the plague:
For the last few months, I’ve been trying to wake up as consistently at or before 8 a.m., and I realized what finally clicked. It’s not about enacting whatever I perceive to be type A behavior, it’s now about having control over one thing in my life after finally understanding how little control I have over basically anything else that happens to me. When I wake up early, I’m less likely to be self-destructive because I have one thing to feel good about.
I have experienced something like this too since the start of the new year, and what I love about this idea is the sense that feeling good isn’t a state of being, or even an achievement, but something that arises out of what you might call “cumulativeness” — that good feeling accretes rather than emerges out of singular behaviours.
Another excellent local writer, Carla Ciccone, reflects in a piece in the same series on going outside, and that it’s having other choices available to us that help us make our default ones:
This dreadful year has made me rethink my reclusive tendencies. My fellow homebodies are not in their element right now, because no one is. Of the many hard lessons the pandemic and its lockdowns hath wrought, my main takeaway is that a love of seclusion wholly depends on the contrast of having other things to do and places to be. For those of us not going into a physical workplace, especially those who’ve been laid off or put careers largely on hold to raise kids or care for loved ones, there is nowhere we need to go but exactly where we are, and this soporific sameness is akin to riding a carousel, forever.
What I like about this sense of self-development — I used to think this thing sucked, but it’s actually pretty good! — is that it’s gentle. No hectoring, no insistnece that you should be writing King Lear, no guilt-inducing demands that you maximize your time. Instead, just a soft nudge that says “hey — if you do this thing, who knows? You might feel better.”
I don't think my aversion to watching new films will be fixed merely by me typing this out. But I do think that trying some small new things - for me, getting out for walks; setting aside time to read; even just having coffee in the mornings - can be tiny, cumulative steps to an ever-so-slightly better version of life.
And that very modest goal is the purpose of this newsletter. Until next time, friends.