The Art Of Not Asking Why

On my way back, I always enjoy crossing east to west through central park. How can you not?

My morning sandwich is one slide of bread cut in half with vegan pesto, one slice of vegan Gouda cheese, one sliced cherry tomato, and Dijon mustard (Grey Poupon).

Washing it down with fancy Borjomi carbonated water.

Today was a good day for a walk. I stopped for a sandwich from one of my local favorite stops, sat in the park to enjoy it with some water and cake, and continued to cross over the newly dubbed “we love you” bridge.

Love me some hot sauce 🔥

What a beautiful day today. It was the first real spring day for me: walking around in a t-shirt, smelling flowers everywhere (and sneezing), I captured a photo of these small buds:

April Photo 📷 Challenge 15: Small

Last Friday I woke up from a power nap and the first thought that pooped into my mind was, “It’s time to get an Apple Watch.”

I thought about this several times before, especially since I started exercising with Co-Pilot. Over several notes in the journal and Emacs, I convinced myself not to opt for the Apple Watch mostly because of my love-hate relationship with privacy. After all, buying a GPS-tracker-personal-information-sharing-device for your wrist from a company with most of its infrastructure invested in China is not exactly a good pro-privacy argument.

But in the last couple of years, as I slowly started opening up about my lifestyle (here and elsewhere), I stopped giving shit. Privacy at this date and age is impossible, at least with current technologies. In the meantime, what an Apple watch can offer is very appealing.

For one, it puts my exercise routine on another level. It’s one thing to exercise with the iPhone and watch the screen; it’s another to have a watch telling you to slow down or speed up or have it pause and continue sets without me needing to clumsily try to touch the screen while holding a weight is excellent. Then there’s running, which I plan to get back to more seriously again, and I want to track my progress.

The other thing I hope the watch will assist me within the well-being department is meditation. I meditate whenever I finish my exercises, but I need to go longer and deeper. I might consider something like Headspace (if anyone reading this has opinions, please share!), but for now, I’m still getting adjusted. Meanwhile, I appreciate being reminded to meditate (Breath in Apple Health) daily on top of the one at the end of my exercise.

Then there are my sleeping issues, and I want to keep track of those. While it’s pretty easy to know how well I slept (do I feel like a zombie or not?), having a long-term insight into this with all the information the watch provides would be helpful.

Outside of the health department, there are many more implications, like taking notes and reminders consistently, knowing when someone important messages me, the ease of taking the subway and paying without taking out a wallet (especially during the winter), and even taking selfies from a distance with the phone is a plus.

There’s the magic-wow factor (I can’t get over the pinching to open menus on the watch, or just raising it to ask Siri something, and it’s all right there), but that will probably fade away.

It will take the watch a few more days before I get all the data I want to see and a few more days for me to get adjusted anyway. In the meantime, please let me know if you have any useful tricks/routines you use your Apple Watch for or even useful Shortcuts!

You shall not… Exit! This store. Nope. Not happening.

April Photo 📷 Challenge 8: Prevention

The foliage of April is not exactly that of October, but there were many of these

April Photo 📷 Challenge 4: Foliage

Pick a monkey, any monkey… or an owl?

April Photo 📷 Challenge 3: Card

An older photo from the archive of a… Hyacinth? Did I get that right? Right here at a nearby park

April Photo 📷 Challenge 2: Flowers

Hmm I don’t know that I’ll do the challenge, but this was just looking at me, so…

April Photo 📷 Challenge 1: Toy

Goofing around at the park

Snow at the shore 📷

An NYC corner 📷

This morning, I finished my first written journal 📓 in around 20 years.

I started writing in it in 2013 and at some point I switched full-time into digital journaling (it was TiddlyWiki at the time if you’re curious). I’ll probably start my next written journal at some point this weekend. Here’s a picture 📷 of it:

Good morning 📷

Last week, I stopped in front of a place I must have passed a hundred times before in my neighborhood. In front of me was a closed fence leading to the backyard of a building, and inside it, a smokestack that I assume belong to a heating furnace of some sort.

Two thoughts collided in my head at the same moment. The first is how I had passed this place so many times before without noticing this tall smokestack; the other is that I had to take a picture to convey what I saw in my mind.

This is not the kind of picture you put on Instagram because Instagram is a social place for the masses, and the masses expect pictures of smiling babies and cute cats. Who wants to open their Instagram and see… this?

The fact remained that I took this picture to express an idea, and as a photographer and a person, that’s the point. The why might be more elusive, depending on who you are and what goes on inside your head at the moment (I am reading Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl 📚 right now). Not every photo is meant to bring smiles, even if “the people of Instagram” (who are just an idea I have in my head as guilt) say otherwise.

Who was I, though, when I took that photo? Not the same person who passed this building 99 times previously, if to judge from the fact that I didn’t even realize this structure existed. At that time, I was a descendant of holocaust survivors and a Jew. Tomorrow… who knows? But a part of me will always be in this picture. After all, it’s just a smokestack, and it’s just a fence; It’s me who made it into something else and then into this picture.

A walk in the neighborhood with my camera 📷. These photos came so different, it’s hard to believe the locations are minutes apart.

Had a “photo itch” when I went to get coffee this weekend. Took the camera with me.

Two pictures 📷 from around Bleeker Street, near Washington Square Park.

Good morning all!