First swim of the season
Our pool has a solar heater.
There are a few advantages of having a solar heater. First, you don’t have to pay a hefty gas bill when you want to use the pool. Second, your pool heating is much better for the environment than a gas heater.
The advantages stop there.
The great thing about a gas-heated pool is that you turn on the heater, wait a short while, and your pool is warm enough to take a dip. With a solar heater, you have to wait until the days have enough sunshine to initially heat the pool — and for a pool as big as ours, that’s a lot of days of sun needed — and then pray the overnight temperatures don’t drop too much to cool it all down again.
Most often, we don’t get into our pool until June, but after a string of really sunny and hot days, the temperature got warm enough — not warm, but warm enough — for a first swim in late May.
There is something wonderfully refreshing about that first swim of the season: a lightness that is unlike all the other times you jump in during the months ahead. The first swim is the true harbinger of the summer, a marker that it’s time for lazy afternoons outside, for meals eaten on the patio, for after-dinner trips to the playground, for lightness and play and a bit of frivolity too. Winter can feel severe; the first swim of the season reminds you of the buoyancy of the hot summer ahead.
I like entering the pool by jumping in off the diving board. That way, I immerse myself in the water immediately instead of hesitating upon entry (no matter how hot the pool gets, I always feel cold when I first step in) and I force myself to start my pool time with a real swim, bringing myself up from the depths and front crawling to the shallow end to find my footing.
I only swam five laps on my first foray into the pool this past week, but even that felt exhausting. I am out of practice; I will need to make these swims more of a habit so that my body is once again used to the exertion.
All this to say: the summer has arrived, and with it a new sense of purpose. Ahead of me are new adventures and a season full of plans, big and little, to pass the time in wondrous ways. Like jumping in the pool from the diving board, I am diving into the summer with full immersion, ready for new experiences and small moments of delight.
And now, back to the pool I go for a morning swim before work. I hope the solar heater is working. :)
A poem
Autobiography of Eve
Ansel Elkins
Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
I leapt
to freedom.
Some links
The quiet grief of adult friendship:
There was once upon a time when friendship did not require elaborate planning. We spoke for hours without checking calendars. Entire evenings disappeared on hostel terraces and tea stalls and long walks taken for absolutely no reason. Friendship in youth thrived on excess time – loose, unstructured, and gloriously wasteful. […]
Friendship survives purely through mutual choosing. Nobody has to stay. And yet some people do.
Every year in Amsterdam, fifteen people are buried without anyone coming to the funeral. In 2002, a poet came up with the idea of the Poule des doods — a pool of poets who write and read a poem for the people who have no mourners at their funeral.
“Embracing the Costco lifestyle means accepting the fact that I am, in many ways, becoming my father.” We got our first Costco membership when we moved to London; I still don’t enjoy shopping there, but there is an allure to the chain that keeps me coming back.
“We still have hope for the Internet because deep down, we still believe in each other.” Spencer Chang on the need for “benches” on the Internet and building community online:
We are all so online, yet being online feels so solitary. Social media is designed for content consumption, brand distribution, and prestige broadcasting, not the warm, funny, and weird moments that happen when humans simply exist together.
We've been conditioned to think the Internet can't be changed, but all our current interfaces--infinite feeds, follower counts, black-box algorithms--are features created by social media platforms to optimize their metrics. Just as they were made, they can also be transformed.
Terry Godier on protocols and the “old, boring internet” that can’t be taken away:
The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.
But it has one enormous advantage over the platforms that replaced it in your imagination.
No one owns it.
A beautiful rumination on the books of Sandra Boynton.
How song-identifying services, like Shazam, actually work.
Nilay Patel on software brain:
So what is software brain? The simplest definition I've come up with is that it's when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.
Zillow is a database of houses. Uber is a database of cars and riders. YouTube is a database of videos. The Verge's website is a database of stories. You can go on and on and on. Once you start seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it's a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data.
“How did a basic necessity of American life become a luxury good?” On the death of the affordable car.
Relevant to my work future: “before your organization goes off and fires all of its “glue people” on the assumption that AI can pick up what they were doing, please stop and think about what those people were actually doing.”
A great piece on what it’s like to be on Jeopardy! and how to win.
