Lifestyle
- Two tofu “cubes” as mentioned (the off-white yellowish pieces with a bit of texture)
- 1 mini (Persian) cucumber
- 3 small radishes
- 1 small strip of Violife vegan feta cheese (other brands are also good), cut into cubes
- a handful of cherry tomatoes (yellow in this salad)
- a handful of mixed greens (spinach, arugula, possibly one more thing I forget right now)
- half a small lemon, for juice
Shnatz: Scheduling Mental Afternoon Reboots
Shnatz (שנ״צ) in Hebrew (the tz as the zz in pizza) is an abbreviation of two Hebrew words, שנת צהריים, which means noon sleep. In the US, this is known as Siesta, borrowed from Spanish, because the concept of a noon nap is as alien to Americans as a baconless breakfast, so we don’t have a word for it here.
The photo above by Svein Halvor Halvorsen, “Last day before final exam,” licensed as CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
In Israel, where I grew up, this was a sacred time in the day. You weren’t allowed to play soccer with your friends; you weren’t allowed to make noise. In kindergarten, you’re “strongly encouraged” to take a nap, or else.
This is slowly becoming a sacred time for me too. As time goes by, my struggle with the need for a “power nap” after 4.5 to 6.5 hours of night sleep is becoming something I’m comfortable with, a ritual I’m looking forward to. As a morning person whose creativity mostly takes place in the morning with a cup of coffee, which is why I blog in these hours usually (you’re welcome), it dawned on me last week that with a Shnatz, I get two mornings in one day. When I wake up from my nap, which is usually about 20 minutes, I’m energetic enough to exercise or tackle the more challenging tasks at work.
For too long, I’ve treated my need for an afternoon nap as a weakness or a problem. It’s been an issue I have to deal with, bundled with my insomnia. I started looking for a medical intervention but stopped at the last minute and asked myself for the 100th time: “Is taking a short nap really that bad, or are you just led to believe it is?”
I started to embrace it. It was hard, but I managed to turn off my phone for 30 minutes (isn’t that nuts when you think about it?) during my workday. Why 30 minutes? I give myself 5 minutes to fall asleep and 5 minutes to fully wake up.
No surprise, it’s working well - the difference is that now I feel better about it. I’m going to start scheduling it in my calendar. I’m going to stop being ashamed of it and start calling it a “life hack” instead, even though some of my friends call it “you’re just getting older, ya old fart.” Whatever! The result is the same.
This break is useful for additional things. One of those is to signal the time for exercise, as indicated earlier. I exercise at home, so I can do other things in between sets. I can also use this time to cook for myself, which I enjoy. A quick second shower, especially on hot days, is also a good idea, and with it, a good time to charge my Apple Watch. At the very least, it’s a good time to “reboot” my brain (hmm… a chance for meditation? Not a bad idea) and let my internal programming start fresh, with a new set of priorities.
If you get tired in the afternoon, I recommend you try it if you can escape somewhere for even 10 minutes. It doesn’t have to happen at exactly the same hour on the same day. I take a nap in between meetings or instead of my lunch (don’t need that much time to eat anyway). Sometimes I wake up rested after less than 10 minutes, other times I want to keep sleeping - but I find that 20 minutes or so is the sweet spot, and I usually wake without an alarm. So give yourself a Shnatz. You’re worth it.
A good weekend
Last weekend was good. I came to a realization not too long ago that most of my weekends are good, which is a good thing in itself, but I wanted to ramble a little about why.
My sleeping issues (I should coin the term somehow. “My Sleeping Issues” sounds like a terrible album name stuck on repeat at this point) meant that I woke up at 4, walked around for a bit, and went back to bed around 6. This pattern has been going on since last Thursday, when I pushed myself to be in bed at around 23:00. Seems like I sleep 5-6 hours no matter what I do, so if I go to sleep earlier, I wake up earlier without enough sleep. The good part? Going to bed around 6 again means I’m not a complete zombie the whole first half of the day, which definitely played a role here.
First off, there was a lot of Subnautica. With Part 2 out in early access, I saw Subnautica: Below Zero was on sale on Humble Bundle and snatched it. I never finished the first Subnautica (it was too scary, and yes, I need to get this post over to the new blog moved!), and I wanted to try again. Man, Subnautica is a treat. It was easy to get hooked again. This time around, I watched plenty of YouTube videos to help me out with tips, and building my underwater base was fun in a relaxing kind of way. There’s something about being able to organize a stressful situation that doesn’t let you breathe (literally in this game) into something safe that makes sense to you. And, yes, that’s also a metaphor.
I mentioned before I want to make some video content for gaming, but it’s not easy. Or rather, it’s a lot. I am no stranger to OBS Studio, but I had to re-learn to do a couple of things, and even then, going back and watching an hour or more of content and starting editing takes a lot of time. It’s a serious commitment. I haven’t given up on the idea, but I might change it around a bit toward a mix of writing and video content. I’m not sure yet. There are too many good games out there, and I don’t think there are enough places reviewing them from a personal perspective (by the way, let me introduce you to Laura Michet’s blog. She is a game writer/narrative designer, and she writes often).
Then I had a nice hangout with my partner, who works as an EMT. They are awesome in general (obviously I think so), and they recently got themselves a car, and driving in Manhattan is… well, let’s just say parking is one tough SOB boss. Imagine working a 9-hour shift in an ambulance, driving around (on a weekend, because during the week they’re busy with their other job), just to drive another two hours, the last hour and a half(!) of it is in order to find parking. They pretty much showed up just to crash and fall asleep, but then the next day, we went to the Farmer’s market together and drove around and walked the parks of upper Manhattan. It’s a sort of buffer, a break that makes my brain slow down a bit and appreciate my life outside of work and tech.
Which means that when I got back to my /own/ tech on Sunday, I was refreshed and full of energy. This weekend I installed Harper on my Linux desktop. Working through it but especially writing the post about it requires geek brain energy, which I just don’t have during the week. I really enjoy these projects; I learn more about stuff I’m passionate about, and it’s very rewarding.
I also wrote a lot in my journal, which I’m reorganizing, and it made me realize that, hey, I write a lot. Between my posts, emails to other bloggers, journaling, and experimenting with TiddlyWiki, there’s a lot of keyboard typing going on. This, as usual, makes me appreciate Emacs and org-mode, which has its own dedicated category. But that’s what happens when you can customize everything about a tool you use all the time: it’s a game in itself.
And now, with coffee done and this draft more or less complete, it’s time to get in the shower and quickly get some groceries before the work day gets the chance to kick my ass back into gear.
Lazy Chopped Salad
One of the awesome things that came out of me becoming mostly vegan since August of last year is the farmer’s market.
The walk there, every weekend, takes me about 40 minutes. It’s through the quiet streets and city parks of Upper Manhattan that stand in contrast to its otherwise loud and grungy surroundings. It’s not a particularly big market, just one short street behind a school, but the smaller selection of food (especially since I don’t buy dairy or meat products) motivates me to explore different ways to make food.
One of my more recent discoveries was the extra-firm tofu, which they sell already cut into snack-size, water-free pieces. I sometimes just grab one right from the fridge and eat it “raw”.
Lazy Salad
I call it “lazy” because of how I mix it, and also because I was too lazy to make more food. The tofu makes this filling enough, at least for me.
What’s in it
The cucumber, tomatoes (both not in season yet), and the lemon are from the grocery store. The rest is from the farmer’s market. My local store tries different varieties of cherry tomatoes, but I find the ones I like the most seem to come from Canada. As for the mini cucumber, I grab whatever they have because they often don’t have any. It’s a shame because these cucumbers are tastier, and their size makes them perfect for a quick addition to any meal, or even as a snack on their own, cut into strips with a small dash of spicy salt.
The difference a good knife can make
You can cut all these veggies with whatever knife you have, but it’s the chef’s knife I got not too long ago that makes me want to chop. Vegetables! I mean vegetables, yeesh.
With this knife, it’s easy to cut softer things (like leaves or tomatoes) without a problem. I did watch a couple of YouTube videos explaining a few cutting techniques and how to hold the knife when I bought it. While I’m /far/ from being an expert, I recommend you also watch a couple if you get one. You don’t want any fingers in the salad; this is a vegan recipe after all.
You can see from the picture that I didn’t chop anything too fine. Big enough to stab individual pieces with a fork, small enough that it fits in the bowl you’re going to eat from. Fast and easy.
Middle Eastern salad seasoning
I think most if not all Middle Eastern salads use three main ingredients when it comes to making the salad “dressing,” or as I call it, juice, because that’s what it is. It’s just lemon, salt, and black pepper.
I recommend you find a place that sells black peppercorns that you can grind yourself. You can taste the difference immediately. I get my black pepper at the same place I get my coffee beans (along with the salt, pink Himalayan, which I grind also, but that’s not as important). As for the lemon, get a real one and squeeze it with your hand over a strainer, or get a lemon squeezer. I love my personal portion with half a lemon, but this might be too much for you, so just squeeze it into a spoon and use that if you want less.
Mixing
Add the salt, the pepper, and the lemon on top of the salad. If your bowl is full of salad to the point that pushing a spoon in to mix it means you’ll end up spilling stuff over (as the case was for me), just cover it with another bowl, upside down. Then, above a sink (because some juice will spill out), carefully turn the whole thing over, and back - do this 3 to 5 times, and… it’s ready.
You could make the salad in a bigger bowl and mix it. Actually, you can also use your hands (you washed them, right? And you use them anyway to chop the veggies, so you’ve already touched everything). It is sometimes easier to “massage” the salad gently.
Stuff to change around
You could easily substitute vegetables in the salad depending on what’s available. A red onion (I’d do half) instead of the radishes, or perhaps some Seitan-based meat instead of the feta cheese or the tofu. You could also add almonds or pine nuts to the mix if you feel fancy (want super fancy? throw the pine nuts into a frying pan and heat over low for a few minutes to toast them lightly). You can change the portion or how fine you cut also.
Re: Who Knows That You Blog?
David at Forking Mad + asked: “Do you tell people you blog?” which also made its way to Kai. I saved both posts in my Bookmarks (which is Micro.blog’s take on ‘Read it Later’/Pocket) and planned to answer at some point, but then David emailed me the other day and reminded me of this question.
David’s take is that if it shouldn’t be public, it wouldn’t end up on his blog. Kai is more or less of a similar opinion. For me though, I think the answer is a bit more nuanced.
I don’t use my real name on my blog like Kai or Kev. JTR is totally made up. It wasn’t always JTR: it evolved over the last 15 years or so, give or take, and it stuck.
Back when I started writing, my posts used to be more R-rated, and the places I worked at weren’t the kind of organizations that wanted to associate with R-rated material. It wasn’t anything offensive (I don’t think), just… uncouth.
With time, both my workplace(s) and my posts changed to meet in the middle of that spectrum. I work for a big medical center in NYC, and most of my more mature-oriented posts are philosophical, not the dramatic angsty kind. Some of them can still raise eyebrows probably, but I imagine most people would just shrug and move on if they’re uncomfortable. There’s a lot of stuff on this blog, and these kinds of posts are just another dash of flavor to the overall theme, so I feel it’s not such a big deal.
At the same time, I don’t usually tell people I blog. My partners know, my sister knows (I send her a few links here and there for my thoughts), and while my parents know about my blog, both language barrier and lack of interest (I ramble about tech most of the time) mean that they don’t really read it. And if they do and find something, well, my lifestyle is already unorthodox enough for them to just sigh and shake their head and move on with their lives.
So yes, nuanced is a good way to put it. My relationships with different people and the topics I write about mean that some people know I blog, but most don’t. I don’t keep this blog a secret. If someone really wanted to find out my real name, they could find it easily enough. At the same time, it does require some work; it’s not exactly the kind of information you’d get straight out of Google (at least I don’t think so), but then again, if it happens, not the end of the world.
That’s the other thing I started realizing not too long ago: I stand behind who I am today in a way I haven’t in the past (and couldn’t). My about page says I’m non-monogamous for example, and I mention in a few places I see myself as a queer person simply because I don’t identify as a “straight” man (but I don’t see myself as gay, bi, or all the other fancy labels which I don’t care much for).
While this might sound like too much information for a simple question like “who knows that you blog,” I don’t think so - at least not in my case. That’s because I write about these things, which means I should at least be open to a conversation about them. Maybe not with every person (it is personal after all), but in general, it’s not a blocked off category. By the way, I don’t think this means every person who writes about personal things should be open to a conversation about them. It’s a choice.
While I am generally open about my life (at least what I write about here), it doesn’t mean the people I write about are. When I mention my partners, I have their permission to do so. I can be a bit absurd about how explicit I make it sometimes, because I want and need to be sure they’re OK to be mentioned.
And a final note, in line with my recent posts about emails to other bloggers: I’d like to think of myself as a ‘safe person’ to talk to about these things. If someone is reading this post somewhere and feels a bit alone and/or against the world being somewhat different, be it LGBTQ+, neurodivergent, non-binary, or whatever, and feels like they want to reach out, please do. You’re my people, people. Feel free.
Well, I think that was a rather long and complicated way to answer a simple question, but I do tend to do that. Be good, and have a good night!
Watching 'Her' in 2026: Your Next Relationship Could be With Computer Code
Today we can say Her is a movie of our time, but when it came out (2013), AI as we know it today did not exist. The movie made my mind work overtime, but not because it was an amazing piece of film (it was decent at best), it is more the way it drags in the elephant in the room: can AI replace a relationship with a human being? Well, at the state “AI” is presented in the movie, it’s a given. The concept of “dating an AI” and having an AI as a girlfriend or boyfriend is, for better or worse, a rather popular social phenomenon.
OK, so what about AI at its current state? Well, I guess it depends on who you’re asking. And since you’re asking me, you’d better strap in. I’m going to start with a few strong opinions, and If you want a movie review or a recap, this is not it. If you’re here for the opinions, you might want to watch the movie first, but you don’t have to.
I’m of the opinion that sex is an impulse, maybe even an instinct. It’s a biological need that we have as primates. We’re influenced by sex everywhere, all the time, even if it’s nuanced and unconscious. It acts as a social magnet: both as attraction and rejection, shaping much of what we do, how we act, and how we perceive each other. Sex is also mostly physical. It’s what we see, smell, touch, hear, but not much beyond that. And, importantly, as a need, it has quantity - it can be satisfied. In that aspect, sex is like having a meal: after we have had our fill we feel full, and we don’t usually need more.
Love, on the other hand, is complicated. And I mean it literally: love is a complication revolving around something. When we love someone or something, we are not talking about the immediate existing reality, but also, if not mostly, what we make up ourselves. As such, love is built and based on our memories: some real, some stretched, some completely made up. You know how you love someone for long enough and there’s a moment you ask yourself why you love that person? You realize it’s those little things they do, the same quirks that can drive someone else up a wall. But to you, for some reason, they’re endearing. That’s because you’ve built a meaning around their behavioral patterns (the “quirks”). The patterns exist in reality, but their meaning and interpretation - that’s all you. This is why you can also love each person differently, for different reasons. But, take away this interpretation, the meaning, and you take away the person stops being special: they are just a person. A stranger. This is why I believe Alzheimer’s is so devastating: when someone you love forgets who you are to them, they essentially lose the ability to love you. You alone carry the weight of those memories and, thus, the love for that person. However, you don’t stop loving them because you remember your memories and the meaning of that person is still there.
Indeed, this “finding little things charming complex” doesn’t need to be reciprocated for you to love someone. People have “fallen in love” with celebrities who in turn had no idea the person loving them (the fan) even exists (see for example Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction, a study on attraction toward celebrities, and the interesting case of the “Lonesome Girl” in the 1950s). This phenomenon has only grown stronger with video games (guilty) and sites like OnlyFans during COVID (I don’t have a solid and free study to link to here, but do look it up; these studies exist). The bottom line: you don’t need a reciprocating human being to love said human being. Or for that matter - and here’s where I’m finally getting to it - some thing. It can be anything. If you want to explore this in movie format, Tom Hanks plays it nicely in Cast Away with Wilson. This, in itself, leads to some interesting studies.
So can people be in love with AI for that matter? Absolutely. Is this the kind of relationship you can have with a reciprocating human partner? Of course not. But here we encounter two important limitations in the movie.
For one, the movie has an interesting (and for me, welcoming) take on monogamy and love. Spike Jonze (director and writer of Her) took monogamy as the default for most people when they think about love, and I agree that this is the default for most. As for me, I’m on Samantha’s side - she is capable of loving 641 people at once, and she explains how it’s possible nicely. Remember when I said you love each person differently? I believe that’s part of it. Sure, love comes with the same “butterfly effect” across different people (and objects), but details matter. You can love someone to bits, and it doesn’t change the fact that you can love another for different reasons.
You can disagree, but as a non-monogamous person, that was a “fuck yeah!” moment for me in the movie. I am gratefully experiencing loving connections with several different reciprocating humans (and only humans for now, though my espresso machine does come close sometimes) every day. The notion that love = one and only one person has been false for me for almost two decades, and I’m far from being the only one.
Still, as far as the movie goes, monogamy seems to be a requirement for the kind of love Theodor needs: love in the “traditional” sense, the love that doesn’t develop and move forward the way Samantha’s love does. Love is dynamic. It’s an experience, or rather, a collection of those (memories, remember?) which is similar to what Samantha feels, or I’d say, what Samantha evolved to understand she feels. And yes, since I feel this is going to be the next question, you can love someone and let them go at the same time. It happens all the time. Sometimes it’s even a requirement to keep loving someone, as odd as it may sound. I don’t have kids myself, but I think parents might experience this sort of struggle every day as their kids grow up (feel free to let me know).
Sex is the other limitation in Her. According to the movie, it seems that sex is a requirement for love, and Theodore and Samantha do have sex. Well, first: not true (you can argue it’s a requirement for a “romantic” kind of love, and I’d argue with you there too, but this is becoming an essay I already ran out of coffee for); and second… let’s talk about this for a minute. Adult hats on, please.
I said earlier that sex is mostly a physical need (answered by an orgasm), much like being hungry (answered by food), or tired (answered by sleep), and so on. Sex is a bit unique, since you could satisfy the need for it on your own (masturbation), but I think we can agree that for the most part it’s better with a reciprocating partner. We can probably also agree that a character in an erotic novel or a video game, while not reciprocating, is more rewarding than nothing. So, if we agree here, can we also agree on a spectrum, with masturbation on one end and “a fully reciprocating human being” on the other? And further, can we agree that on that spectrum, sexting is somewhere between masturbation and a reciprocating partner? Alright, so, sex with an AI can probably fit on it somewhere too, probably a bit beyond (“more satisfying” than) masturbation.
Now let’s take this further.
Imagine we have human androids, with silicon skin, soft tissues, and something resembling sexual organs to a sufficient degree to be, essentially, advanced sex toys. If we couple them with AI, which should be better at sexting than half of the humans (an over-simplified statistics: AI is built on samples of human text, including erotica, and it will choose what’s popular and use preferred vocabulary etc, making it a decent (but not great) basic writer), is it so hard to believe someone can be in love with such an Android based on what we said so far? An Android that can make them feel like their feelings and desires are reciprocated? I mean, if we’ve already agreed humans can love volleyballs and can have sex with their own hands, is this so far-fetched? Isn’t this possible?
OK JTR, calm down. Could doesn’t mean should, you say?
Really?
If you had sex androids, the kind that can provide even basic sexual services (glorified and expensive sex toys), which can satisfy the need for sex at least to a degree, isn’t that a good thing, like satisfying other needs? Think, for a moment, about the negativity that happens around the need - the hunger - for sex when it’s satisfied. Think of the suffering. The violence. This destructiveness is based on the fact that sex necessitates, at least to a degree, another human being - a human being who, too often, does not have the same need and wants nothing to do with it. So. Is it so bad to at least have this as an option? Is a sexual android so bad morally, next to, say, a vibrator? or a fleshlight? an erotic novel? a porn film? …Why?
And such sex androids would have additional benefits. No health concerns, for one. They could be used for training (kinks? BDSM?) and for guidance (sex education for adults). You could use them to alleviate depression and rejection issues. You could perhaps reduce human trafficking. Think of it. It could be a good tool, just like AI today could (and often is) a good tool. And like any tool, especially AI today, it can be abused, but that’s beyond the point I’m trying to make here.
The movie Her did not put these thoughts in my head. But it did give me a good reason to talk about these things, and a good medium to do so. You will probably not get the same experience from this movie, but hey, maybe you will. And if you want to talk about it, feel free to email me.
A proper weekend & birthday plans
Happy to have a proper weekend.
Last Saturday, around this time, I was working with my team on an important upgrade at work that included server and client upgrades, which in turn meant logging into individual workstations and performing a bunch of repetitive steps. It didn’t turn out as planned, and the process was (and still is) riddled with problems that are still affecting us.
A little later that same morning, I decided to take a break and walk over to the local Saturday farmer’s market. It’s about 40 minutes to 1.5 hours of walking, depending on how fast I want to go (there’s a park in the way, and I enjoy going through its paths).
I’m glad I ended up making myself take that walk. Work was pressing, but we got to a certain standstill, and I grabbed the chance and used the incoming blizzard as an excuse to get groceries. That walk, which was the shortest one I ever took to the market, made all the difference. I need my walks.
One of the things I determined to do after the weekend ended and our upgrade project started to derail into the following Monday morning was to pay more attention to my personal projects. It sounds so easy, written here in Emacs on a new Saturday morning, while water is boiling (duh!) coffee is brewing, but it’s not. I think that for some of us, work is just a different kind of drug.
What also came out of that decision was to plan my birthday as an event for the first time, I believe, in my entire life.
As a kid, my birthdays were taken care of by my parents or teachers to some extent. Growing up, this was always a headnod kind of event, maybe an excuse to take a day off for myself. This year, however, the number of friends and partners around me, combined with my family (who apparently enjoyed my grumpy company on our recent trip to Disneyland), who also wanted some JTR time, made me realize I need to organize the birthday as a thing. There were simply too many people.
To some of you, this is no big deal - but I assure you, this antisocial hermit who writes in front of you knows nothing of such things. At best, he goes to some small gathering at a friend’s event.
So I did what the cool kids do these days and downloaded Partyful (don’t worry, I planned the whole thing on Emacs as well). Finding a place to eat and a place to drink was easy, and my birthday this year falls on a weekend, which helped. A little bit of calling to these venues reminded me that, in a very normal New York manner, no one takes your reservations seriously so far in advance, and that I’m expected to call a week beforehand, if not just a day prior. What was left was to poke and ask, and I was surprised to see that so far everyone wants to show up, even those who need to travel a bit extra or even take a day off.
I’m humbled by this. I don’t understand how I got to this point of having such a number of caring people in my life, both friends and more intimate partners1. It’s not shocking in the sense of “what the hell happened,” because of course, I know these people and spent time with them, and we keep in touch, so the outcome is that they’d like to show up, logically speaking. But logically speaking is one thing, and emotionally understanding (is there such a thing?) is another.
More than just a birthday or a social event though, to me it’s yet another hallmark of my personal life. I’ve built myself up and improved to the point where I can do this: invite people to an event I’m planning and have enough people to do it with. Some are born with this ability, others gather it naturally in their teen years, but for me, this wasn’t even a struggle in the past: it was just nothing before. An empty space without a definition.
A bit of this has to do with accepting who I am and what people I want to have around me as a result. Again, this sounds simple, but it’s not. A recent self-recording of myself venting and then analyzing just that took about a week of self-reflection, and apparently I still am largely clueless. It’s a work in progress that never stops.
Well then. Here’s to some fun to be had? Hmm.
Footnotes
1 : I don’t really separate those. On a spectrum of friendship, when someone becomes close, they can also become intimate. There’s no line in the sand drawn to define where the “friendship zone” ends and that of a more intimate partnership begins; each relationship is different because each person is different.
About living in Madhattan
Reading through my journal, last year today was when we were officially cleared to move into our apartment. Most of you who read this probably wouldn’t understand what the big deal is, but if you’ve been accepted into a co-op in Manhattan before, you’d be saying, “Why in hell would you put yourself in such a situation?” The answer is even more of the “huh??” kind: I didn’t know what I was getting us into.
Moving is always crazy, but in NYC, it’s pushed to another level. You can’t even look for apartments until about a month before you move, because no one would take you seriously. Apartments are sold within a month to 10-day period, anything older than that means something’s wrong, and then no one wants the place.
So while we eyed this apartment about three months before the move, nothing really moved until about a month before the move itself. And then it was time to get approved. I won’t get into the whole process, but I will say it involved all kinds of bank statements (all must be notarized by a third party), credit statements, official notice of employment, saving accounts, and a bunch of forms to sign that include weird things like the notion that you must have rugs at the place and that you are not allowed into certain part of the building. Everything revolving around these agreements means you also pay more money to have the board look over the papers, and if the move happens to be on a weekend, you’d pay a fine, so you must take off from work. There was even an interview, the kind I’d expect to have when I look for a job, though that part was fun.
This would maybe be normal if we were buying the place, but we were just looking to rent. And the biggest kick in the nuts was the fact that in NYC you can’t rent (sublet, legally speaking, though it would be rent anywhere else) an apartment in a co-op building for more than two years unless special arrangements are made. Why? I don’t know. I still didn’t fully get a satisfactory answer to this, but it seems to be more like a city-wide custom than anything else. So one more year in this place, and then (supposedly) we will be looking for a new place.
I like living in the city, and I love this apartment. I love the neighborhood. We managed to find a place in Manhattan that is quiet enough to recognize the birds by sound and neighbors who are kind and quiet and don’t smoke right outside of your kitchen door when you cook.
If you haven’t caught on yet, you have to be a little nuts and adopt a lifestyle to live here.
To start with the obvious, I don’t think you can have kids and live here unless you make more than a 6-digit salary. Way more. Then, you don’t really have a good quality of life unless you lucked out somehow (as we did). There’s always the constant noise of sirens, helicopters, horns, and people yelling (at each other, their phones, other cars, you, whatever). The filth is everywhere: on the streets, rolling in the wind, in the subways (causing fires on tracks and delays), on the sidewalks when you zig-zag your way around dog-made mines left by their generous owners. Homelessness is a constant problem, especially in the winter, and some of these folks are dangerously mentally unstable (the kind that scream at you at the top of their lungs about Jesus and the devil when you take a subway ride). You can’t live here and not be affected by something, somehow. And I’ve been here for over a decade.
Still, or perhaps because of this, somehow it all works out. The commute to work is impossibly good and lets me not worry about taking a quick power nap throughout the day. I find and go out with awesome people who are all around me, who would require me to drive far and long anywhere else. The contrast between having the city available to you on one hand and the beauty of the parks on the other is unmatched. You learn to appreciate the quiet moments and the nice people here so much more because they are few and far between. It’s an experience that, I think, would be good for everyone to go through, at least for a limited time.
I don’t know that I’ll stay in the city forever. Perhaps I’ll find myself at a bigger house in the suburbs sometime soon, perhaps also behind a steering wheel (I haven’t owned a car in a very long time). For now though… I’m still here.
Took the bus to NJ today to see a new location for work. GW Bridge Terminal. 📷
Things I want to do this year
I’m not big into New Year’s resolutions, but there are a few things I want to start doing again. The first things I’m going to list won’t surprise anyone: I want to work less and spend more time on things I enjoy, and I want to be more physically active.
Over my life, especially the last 10 years or so, I stopped and then picked up jogging time and time again. The last time I picked it up was after I saw a cardiologist half a year ago. It’s nothing too bad; actually, it was better than I expected. But for me, a person who used to be more active, it was a reminder to work on my body and stay in shape.
I achieved my goal back then (running up the street without stopping), but I stopped soon after, for no particular reason. Winter came, and with it, the lack of motivation to be outside in sub-freezing temperatures. I used to run in this weather fine, and folks like Eric (who seemed to moved his blog? Hmm…) make me jealous, but in a good way. There’s also my partner River, who I affectionately call Gastone at times (they can eat six eggs in one breakfast, and it all seems to go directly to their biceps), who makes me feel guilty for not using my bedroom gym more often, again - in a good way.h
The other challenge I have is sleep. I’m a self-diagnosed chronic insomniac. I usually don’t sleep more than 6 hours, and I have two bad nights a week, averaging about 4 hours. While sleep hygiene and a consistent sleeping schedule are not as helpful to me as they would be to other folk, they do help. My goal is to be asleep on the same day I woke up - that is, not after midnight. I can sometimes fix sleep deprivation with naps, but work pressure keeps my brain occupied, even if they don’t message me with some new emergency. I think that if I manage to hold on for a week with the above condition, things will get back to normal-ish. Hopefully.
Another thing I want to do is to get more into music. I got a keyboard last month, and I want to learn how to use a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation, aka the software musicians use to edit and create tracks) to start playing with things. I’m basically brand new to all of this, so I’m learning to read music sheets from scratch, and it’s slow, but it’s going.
Then finally - and this might sound weird - I want to see if I can reach out to younger folks and get them interested in non-cloud technology. This is vague, I know. I see how everyone is dependent on their phones and big tech companies, especially during the AI age we live in, and get lost in it, often spending an arm and a leg on services they don’t really need. I used to teach at some point in my life, and helping out with tech is something I enjoy, so there’s that. Again, not sure how to do that. It’s a big project, and I get a mad rash whenever I touch TikTok or whatever, so it’s challenging.
One thing I managed not to compromise on recently is cooking at home and watching my diet a bit more. Maybe it’s easier for me to do because I already enjoy vegetables, but I took it to the next level after I got my Vitemix. Here’s breakfast with some homemade hummus:
