my mum used to always give me a row for saying ‘i was just sat there when….’ ’no,’ she would say, ‘you were sitting. earlier you sat down, then you were sitting. sat is the action,’ and i would say, ‘ok anyway so i was just sat there and then the doorbell rang so i just ignored it. and that’s why i didn’t pay the window cleaner.’
am i obsessive? maybe compared to the average person. i do love to indulge myself in my special interests. working on projects on the macbook. cycling. blogging. hoovering. sourdough bread.
the love epochal is becoming a bit of an obsession. well, i’m having fun anyway. i hope you are too.
continuing my thoughts on education and inheritance from yesterday… here is another view. perhaps the dominant view in history. by keeping people in the dark, you can better manipulate them. and this is probably why trump wants to shut down the department of education. why the right declare war on universities and academia. accuse anyone who disagree with their brand of fascism as a dangerous leftwing extremist.
demagogues stalk our polity, offering miserable, racist tidbits, with the explicit aim of preventing independent thought. resist! learn to fish!
can you teach me how to fish?
i was preparing a training session about pivot tables and data analysis generally. feeling a touch of the anxiety butterflies pre performance. and then i got to thinking about the merits of education. how each generation has a duty to pass on knowledge to the next. but does the generation coming having a duty to learn?
i feel like we are wary of talking of duties these days. we have grown up with the ideology of bourgeois individualism, the celebration of wealth and beauty, and tolerance of massive global inequality. we privatize success, and we leave the rest to struggle.
so maybe the generations coming need to learn not from the words and actions of the generations before them; but from the reality of the world they will inherit from them.
we live in a time of people who do not believe in history. we live in a time of tin-pot tyrants. the vulgar celebration of wealth. ebitda bear markets and deportations without due process.
well the stock market is jittery now as i write. is the ai book more like the dot com crash? or is our current circumstance more like the great depression of 1929? if anything, things seem worse now. we have massive poverty and excess government debt, despite the fact that the stock market still booms.
more than ever, we are polarized between a paltry class of billionaires, and a class of impecunious billions.
just because something is, does not mean it is right. we can and should change the world.
what change do you want to effect in the world?
first – it was originally ‘a lifestyle glistens’ but i just couldn’t fit it into the song. so i took the britney spears approach and worried about how it sounded rather than what it means. i like the assonance of the repeated ess sounds.
i was trying to evince a sense the temporary nature of the things that feel permanent in our lives, our culture. the way we live feels, and literally is in some ways, governed by rules. but they are not universal. the way one behaves in, say, new york in 2025 ce is very different from the way one behaves in the fertile crescent in 2025 bce. probably.
oh and i love the word ‘demonstrably’ as it conjures a thought of both demons and monsters.
which raises the age old questions, which is better: demons or monsters?
ineluctable is just a good word. fun to say. loggerheads, similarly. and diaristic is a useful word if you are a poet (or a diarist.) and i liked the multiple meanings of plane at work – aeroplane, on a holiday in the future; or is a future plane a dimension in space time that i have created (by wrestling?)
i like booking a holiday. its a little vote of confidence in the future. we all need to believe in the future really.
what is your holiday philosophy?
i remember once i was at a temp job. i was in my 20s. i was a runner at this point but just a slow one. it was before we knew about polarised training and how important squats and deadlifts are. anyway, two older women were talking. and i’m not being cheeky or judgemental, but they weren’t in good shape. less good than me, a skinny but not very toned slow runner.
anyway, on says to the other, ‘you know what’s the sexiest bit on a man?’
‘six pack?’ the other woman guesses.
‘no, the v bit sort of below the six pack.’
i’m wasn’t in bad shape when i was 24. slim and pretty active, daily exercise. but it was nice to be made to feel inadequate like that.
what do you find sexy on a man?
what goes up must come down? i’d been busy clearly, pushing myself hard in my work outs, socialising, caught a bug. i’m just getting over one as i write now actually. it’s been hanging around for ages. almost two weeks of low energy and blocked up tubes.
for me, when i am sick, i get depressed. i am prone to depression anyway due to my autism, and sometimes i won’t know i’ve got a cold (i also have alexithymia) but will just feel really down and miserable. and then it is a relief the next day when my nose is blocked and i realise life will be fine in a couple of days when it passes.
i find that i have the appetite for this less and less lately. those workouts that bring the taste of blood to your mouth. i’m in a bit of a slump today as i write this. so far today i have cancelled a vo2 max workout, an easy run, a gentle climb, and tomorrow’s social ride as well. i’ve had the cold for over a week and i’m just done in.
i used to be obsessed with my training program. i kept spreadsheets. i tracked the numbers. a rise in my resting heartrate to 52 would cause panic. i spent a lot of time learning about training zones. heart rate zones. power zones. i became obsessed with the match between the two zonetypes. any drift would cause alarm.
anyway. i guess i decided to write poetry instead of doing that. and, of course, poetry led to learning piano, music theory, videography, instagram, blogging. i have a habit of finding a way to keep myself urgently busy.
the love epochal. n.n. benn 