Look, I’ll get down to brass tacks: I have covid. Tested positive on the 21st, though I’m 99% sure I got it at the company holiday party the Saturday prior, because a bunch of other employees have tested positive as well. It sucks, and I am incredibly grateful for the vaccine and the boosters at helping me manage what would absolutely be a much worse illness if I hadn’t gotten them.
My symptoms align with most others: low grade fever, sore throat, fatigue and aches, cough. At inopportune times I will suddenly hack up an egregious amount of phlegm, such as the time my friend Ryan dropped some much needed groceries at my door; the moment I said hello I suddenly had to cough, and then the phlegm was so intrusive that I couldn’t even speak to him. I don’t think I’ve ever coughed up so much phlegm I thought I was going to choke on it. Again, this feels like it would be worse if I wasn’t vaccinated.
I thought I was doing better yesterday, but that was just the cortisol talking. I knew I had covid when I went to bed on the night of the 20th and, despite it being 40°F outside and much warmer in my apartment, I was freezing. I decided it was time to Install the Duvet, which I almost never use because I’m a warm boy. I put it together and went to sleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I was encased in molten lava. It was at 4:30am that I woke up, got out of bed, ran a comb across my head–no, sorry, I went into the bathroom to check my temperature. Sure enough, I was at 100.6°F. I took a covid test then and there and it was positive.
It’s kind of amazing the different a degree or two of temperature can have on the human body. Last night I was freezing again, though I chalked it up to the frigid temperatures hovering over Portland. I took my temperature and it was 97.6. So this is what my body is like one degree cooler? I bundled up, and again woke up in the middle of the night on fire. Took my temperature: 99.6. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a fever and I forgot how much your body reacts to even a small increase like that.
That’s about it. Covid sucks, don’t get it. I started watching Earth: Final Conflict on YouTube for some reason. I guess because it’s from Gene Roddenberry? It’s very “of its time” but I kinda like it. It feels like Gene had an idea for a Vulcan “first contact” Star Trek show but for some reason it didn’t get picked up. It feels like what would happen if we had a show about humanity dealing with the Vulcans. Also, Majel’s in it and I appreciate that. (She put the show together from Gene’s notes. I didn’t realize he died in 1991!)
Anyway, I’m playing Valheim and trying not to choke on my own phlegm. What are you up to?
Here’s the story: a couple months ago I missed the signup for the December Holiday Half. At the time I thought, Oh that’s alright, I’ll just run my own 5k in December. So I’d have a 5k every month, right? Ain’t no progress without repetition.
In between then and now, my leg was giving me some serious guff. What with the hurting and the muscle seizing up and whatnot. By the end of the November my revised thought was, You know? I think I’ll just rest my legs until next year.
Then, a week ago I decided to incorporate strength training into my exercise routine. Specifically, I started a bodyweight routine I found on the goddamn Red Bull website. To be fair, these were exercises you could find on hundreds of websites, but the fact that I found one I liked on the Red Bull site was funny to me.
So cut to yesterday: I’m up, I’m feeling energized, I think, Hey, let’s go to the track and run a couple of laps. I figured I would run a mile or until my leg started hurting, then call it a day.
This is not a shot from that day. That pole is where I start my runs.
I get to the track. There are always soccer games happening on the weekends, I think high school games? So there was a nice gaggle of people to make the experience feel wholesome. And I ran. And I ran two laps entirely (three laps is about a mile). The third lap I ran 75% of. At that point, after hitting a mile, my leg was feeling a little stiff, but otherwise fine, and I decided to keep going, splitting the track 50/50 for running and walking. When I got to mile two, I realized I could do 5k. So I did! That’s the end of the story.
My time was a full five minutes (and twelve seconds) faster than the Turkey Trot. I am amazed by this. My pace was 1:47 faster. I attribute this to the 50/50 splits, because when it got to the running portion, I pushed myself to run as fast as I reasonably could. Definitely going to incorporate this into future runs because I think it was very successful.
I also side note own a Pixel Watch now so I was able to track my BPM as I ran. I was, as you might say, running a bit hot, especially with those running splits. I think my highest was around 170, going down to about 130-140, then back up, etc etc. Not terrible but I’m hoping to lower that a bit as well. I’ve got some work to do.
All in all though, strength training! It’s good for you! Building muscle helped my body protect the parts that weren’t doing as well. Ice and rest helped too, of course, but I truly think the squats and stretches were the key factor. Felt good, bro.
Anyway, next year hopefully I’ll A) get to do the Holiday Half and B) actually do a half marathon. (This is a 2023 resolution.) Until then, it’s 5k races and getting my pace down.
I’m seriously considering turning off/deleting all of my social media for 2023, with one exception: BeReal. The concept of not being able to see what I’m up to other than once per day at a random time is funny to me. The problem is that not enough of my friends are on BeReal, which is a shame. It’s fun! I genuinely like being able to scroll through people’s random, sometimes boring lives. I’m sick of stuff being curated, presenting the “best” of us. That’s nice on occasion, but gimme some real shit too.
Also, logistically, it would be two exceptions: the aforementioned BeReal, and Reddit, culled down to just the D&D related subreddits, only because there’s a treasure trove of battle maps there. I just did that, in fact, because it sounded like a good idea regardless, and it’s been a fine transition so far. I don’t miss any of the other subreddits I was subbed to, and whenever I need information about X I just google “X” + “reddit” and go read comments. I’m done with Reddit comments. I’m just sick of reading comments in general.
In truth, I’ve already started the Great Social Media Cleanse of 2023. I deleted TikTok and am surprised at how little I desire it back in my life. I miss some videos, but not enough to redownload it. I also hated posting videos that got no traction. I’m sick of not gaining traction with apps anymore. I’ll just be tractionless now, okay?
My Twitter account is officially gone as well and that feels fine too. I sometimes miss having an outlet for tiny thoughts, but it’s not a big deal. Twitter tricked me into thinking I needed to air every bit of jostled nonsense that popped out of my brain.
I deleted my presence from dating apps except for Bumble. This was a decision born out of MatchGroup. I signed up for Match and its interface and general vibe were so goddamn annoying that I went to delete my account, only to have to jump through a bunch of hoops to do that. Hey, app developers: the harder you make it for people to delete their accounts, the more likely I am to delete my account.
So anyway I deleted that and OKCupid. I have had virtually no success with dating apps, and am constantly reminded of that when I’m on them. Out of, like, fourteen years using OKCupid, I had one short dating session with a woman who ended up being a catalyst for my pent-up homesickness and loneliness from moving to Portland, which ended up getting me into therapy, which I guess is a win overall. The second was a much more recent short relationship that I ended because the pandemic hit and I wasn’t sure I was into the relationship enough to continue it over Zoom.
Anyway, this isn’t a dating post. OKCupid was cool and then Match bought them and now MatchGroup owns EVERY dating app including Hinge, which I was planning on keeping. Dating has become a capitalist scheme which is like a nuclear apocalypse for the human soul. Bumble is the only dating app that I’m aware of that is popular and is not owned MatchGroup. (Except Raya, but I’m not a cool celebrity and also Raya is Apple only which is INSANE.) In general I don’t think dating apps are good but I feel like I have to have at least one of them, just in case a miracle occurs.
I’m debating over Instagram. I need some tether to friends and family and that appears to be Instagram. Plus, I like sharing pictures and stuff. Despite Facebook/Meta’s insistence on ruining things, Instagram still at its core feels like a photo sharing app. Yes, even with reels and all that shit. It really feels like nobody is ready to transition to a new social media app in any case. I think we’re all sick of them, and we stick to IG or Facebook because we don’t want to deal with anything new.
For now, my social media has been whittled down to:
BeReal
Instagram
Strava
D&D subreddits
Bumble (not a social media app but still)
Discord
I put Discord but that’s basically a glorified friends chat at this point. Instagram is the real stickler of the group. I just like sharing pictures with friends. I really wish IG was just that and not the incessant explore and ads and influencers and hot tattooed models that I like! don’t get me wrong! but also could do with like 75% less of. This is a problem with The Algorithm: you click on one hot tattooed model and suddenly your feed is full of hot tattooed models.
So anyway, if you don’t see me on social media next year, it’s because I’m doing my best to not be on social media. Follow me on Strava, so we can talk about exercise. Or just read this blog! I’ll definitely be here.
So, I am attempting to fix and update my 2011 Dell Inspiron laptop, codename FIRGADOR, The Ceaseless Reverberance. It’s a nice little laptop, works alright as-is, but with two glaring issues: 1) the battery does not charge/is dead, and 2) it has an HDD instead of an SSD, so it’s slow as hell. (Also, 3) only 6gb of 1333 Mhz DDR3 RAM, which I’d like to upgrade to 8gb 1600 Mhz, but that’s for another time.) This whole debacle started because of my dad. Or, moreover, because he’s sick and I’d like to see him. I have two laptops, this Dell and an Acer Chromebook that is even slower than my Dell laptop and has the ChromeOS thing, which is fine except I want to have a laptop that I can use for work purposes, on the off chance that I have to remain in Idaho for an extended period of time.
I thought briefly about buying a new laptop, but decided I didn’t want to dig further debt into my Best Buy credit card. Thus, this project.
The biggest problem is the charging issue. One day, several years ago, the laptop just stopped charging. For the life of me, I could not figure out why. I think it’s ultimately just a battery issue, due to a recent battery test. That is, I just think the battery stopped holding a charge for some reason. I didn’t think it was this at the time, because the laptop was still new enough that I couldn’t imagine that the battery would die like that. But I have scoured the internet for answers, mostly to discover that many, many other people have had this same problem and nobody has a definitive answer. Bad adapter? Bad battery? Loose AC connection? Central pin broken/bent? Etc etc etc. I’m working with the simplest answer (the battery is broke) is the best.
Eventually the battery drained to 0% and since then it has not charged. In fact, until recently I couldn’t even get the damn thing to power on with AC power, but then, in my attempt to find a laptop for travel, I plugged it in a couple days and it actually started. A good start!
Then came around EIGHT HOURS of installing updates, including a grueling Windows 7-to-Windows 10 upgrade which took almost all night. This is completely the HDD’s fault. It is slow as hell. It was slow as hell ten years ago. My idea was to get it fully updated and then create a system image, which I would transfer over to an SSD I pulled from my home theater PC (which, by the way, I barely use anymore because Big TV does pretty much whatever I need) to boost the computer speed by a significant amount. I knew the process would be slow but I didn’t think it would be eight hours. And that was last night; I’m still installing updates this morning!
The next issue is that while it’s easy to upgrade the RAM on this thing, installing a new hard drive requires me to take the entire thing apart. I can do that! I already did it last night, after watching a YouTube video of someone else doing it (side note: there are tech YouTube videos of EVERYTHING) to check and see if the AC adapter connection was in fact working properly. (I think it is.) It’s a pain in the ass but it’s also, ultimately, just about unscrewing stuff and removing cables. I am about to do this now so I will let you know how it went in the next paragraph.
I did it! I took everything apart and then swapped the SSD in and put it all together and it still works. I am now in the process of reinstalling Windows 10 so I can install my system image because it won’t let me do it from my external hard drive.
UPDATE: I didn’t even have to do that! I didn’t have to do ANY of the updates, I could’ve just installed Windows onto the SSD, because it recognized my laptop and activated my copy anyway because of the internet and stuff. I wasted all these hours! Aaaaaagggghhhhh
Anyway, SSDs are amazing. Completely upgraded the speed on this laptop. It’s certainly not as fast as my desktop PC, but it’s not a sluggish beast either. Windows 10 works fine on it, though Dell does not have any drivers for Windows 10, which has made software upgrades a little weird. I’m pretty sure Windows is doing it all for me, save for a couple of things (like Dell Touchpad, which makes it so I can actually use all the little fiddly gestures and stuff for the touchpad).
I forgot this but the Inspiron back cover can be removed and replaced with a more artsy one, so I’ll add “buy a new cool back cover” to my list of things to do as well.
My dad’s been in and out of the hospital since last week (around 11/22). The issue (according to my mother): a gallstone had lodged in his bile duct and began backing up bile. My dad already takes a lot of painkillers for his feet; the nerves of his feet and legs were damaged over 20 years ago due to a lack of blood flow (and a wrong diagnosis from a doctor, but that’s a whole other story). So the pain, he thought at first, was indigestion, as he was dealing with nausea and vomiting. But it got worse and eventually he had to go to the hospital, where the discovered and subsequently removed said gallstone. Just one, it seems, plus a “lot of gunk,” which refers to inflammation from infection. See, the bile had backed up so much that it was seeping back into his liver. That’s not good. There was so much that they had to install a drain to get it out. Doing so caused his gallbladder to spasm as it returned to its normal shape, which my dad was not a fan of.
Since then, he’s had some issues with his blood pressure and some fluid collecting in his lungs and around his heart. It sounds mostly like his body just working to get itself right after the gallbladder draining. The fluid’s been drained and his BP has returned to normal. He also had a water leak in his hospital room, an errant fire alarm, and a woman in a nearby room whose fall protection alarm kept going off. Plus having to wait to even get into the hospital due to the rampant RSV infections around the country. The American healthcare system in action.
He’s doing better since and my mom believes he’ll be able to go home today (haven’t heard from her yet). My understanding is that he’ll have to keep wearing the gallbladder drain (which, I think, it’s kind of like a smaller ostomy bag for his gallbladder–a gallostomy bag, we’ll say) until his gallbladder is healed enough for them to remove it. Dad is vehemently against surgery, and I don’t blame him, he’s been through some big ones. But it’s either that or a constant concern that his gallbladder will back up and become infected again.
My dad is 80 years old, my mom 75. They’ve been married for 56 years. Back then, you got married in your late teens/early 20s. During that half a century they’ve experienced all the ups and downs and trials and tribulations. And that’s not even mentioning me and my two brothers compounding those trials x10. Eventually everyone and everything dies. It’s the only constant in the universe. It’s inevitable, and yet completely unique each time. My dad’s told me numerous times that he’s at peace with dying. He knows it’s coming. But in moments like this I realize that there’s a difference between being at peace with the concept of dying, and actually dying, which I think, no matter what, is going to be scary. But it’s not a contrast; it’s a complement. The peace and the fear. There’s something kind of depressing about not being afraid to die, you know? Life is so weird and miraculous, and then you’re just going to leave it at some point. Why wouldn’t you have some trepidation about that?
In all honesty it’s a miracle that my dad’s been alive as long as he has. Or rather, it’s a miracle of medicine and doctors and surgery. It’s no miracle of God. If anything, God had his grubby paws out, waiting to snatch him up over 20 years ago. Or when he had throat cancer about a decade later. Science is the thing that keeps him around. I’m more thankful for science than I am for some deity in the sky.
Anyway, that’s an update on that. Dad’s doing alright, mom’s hanging in there. Still waiting to hear on if he’ll be released from the hospital today. It sounds likely.
‘Twas a foggy November evening at the Portland International Raceway when a gaggle of people gathered together to do a run. I was one of those people! The Turkey Trot is one of the Hood to Coast-affiliated races and despite being a bit of a pain in the ass to register for, the run itself went swimmingly. I mean, I ran, I didn’t swim, but you know what I mean.
I had signed up for this the same day that I finished the Tar’n’Trail 5k race at Mt. Tabor. I don’t have a blog post about that, but I did write about it in Ye Olde Newselettere, which you can read here, along with some other stuff about my life, including my (now failed) attempt to do a Movember fundraiser. In short: the Tar’n’Trail kicked my ass because of a variety of reasons, but mainly A) that I was in the middle of my Couch to 5k training program when I ran it, and B) IT WAS VERY MUCH UPHILL. Look at these stairs!
Stairs from the Tar’n’Trail run. I HAD TO GO UP THIS. It was required!
The race vibe itself was awesome though. A smaller group of chill people, one of the race volunteers prior to the start acknowledged the Native American land on which we were running, and afterwards I got sugar cookies and booze. A++ in that regard.
Following that race, I took a day off, and then the day after, I started Couch to 5k again, right where I had left off. I am determined to finish this Zombies, Run program, even though I honestly don’t think I need to keep doing it. But anyway: running so soon after running a mostly uphill 5k was a bad idea. My feet were seizing up in a weird way–not like they were constantly curled, but the opposite, they felt like they were seized upwards? I don’t know how to explain it. But my shins hurt a lot about five minutes into the run and so I had to stop. Thankfully, my shins felt better a few minutes after stopping, which meant that the pain was muscular and not any sort of stress fractures or things that would be More Bad.
So, I took a couple of days off (still walking though) and then tried to run again. Shin splints. I took a few more days off, tried to run: shin splints. At this point, I was a week away from the Turkey Trot, and I thought to myself, “By gum, Josh, you’re going to have to not run for a whole damn week.” So I didn’t, I just walked.
Then I had to go get my Turkey Trot bib. This was a pain in the ass. First, the bib was at a running store in Tualatin. For reference:
The southwest section of the Ross Island bridge in Portland is an absolute nightmare to navigate by car. It’s one of those places where sometimes in order to get to where you need to go, you have to merge from a far left lane into a far right lane when three other roads are bringing cars into that whole road. Plus one street has two roads right next to each other, heading the same direction, with a stop light at EACH of them which alternate I think for merging into one road. If that sounds confusing: it IS confusing. I ended up taking a wrong turn because I was trapped in my lane and had to double back over the bridge and drive over it again so I could finally get out onto I-5. The I-5 part was fine. THEN, I got to Tualatin and my exit, which was another absolute mess. It’s times like these that I honestly kind of miss Boise roads, because Boise is such a sprawling city that the roads have room to breathe. The Connector is a dream compared to the intricately and confusingly packed roads of Portland.
But, I got there, finally, and entered the building. A woman at the front of the store handed me a coupon for the store, but only for right then. Like, once I leave, the coupon ends.I suppose if I went back into the store immediately after leaving, the coupon would still be good, but why would I do that? I get my bib; no issues there. Go to get my shirt and the guy there looked me up and down and sheepishly said, “Sorry, but the largest men’s size we have now is Medium.” I said, “Maybe I could get two and stitch them together.” He laughed politely and explained that everyone sized up when they got there for some reason. He gives me a Medium sized shirt. Great.
I grabbed a couple of free protein bars (which were as good as protein bars can be) and a free can of Celsius energy drink (which was actually pretty good). A woman next to me was lightly complaining about, I think, the shirt situation. I wasn’t really paying attention because I still get weird remnant covid anxiety in public indoor spaces.
As I’m leaving, the woman who gave me the day-of coupon said, “Good luck at the race!” I barely glanced at her and replied, “Thaaaanks” in a way that wasn’t meant to be sarcastic or mean, but feels like it in hindsight. There was a Best Buy in the shopping center area; I genuinely thought to myself, Is there anything I need from Best Buy? The closest one to me at home is in Clackamas, so, you know, it was an honest thought.Side note: Firefox wants me to correct Clackamas to “Blackamoors,” which sounds racist and (looks it up) might actually be racist? and (looks it up some more) oh god is definitely, absolutely racist.
The traffic back to Portland was a mess because it’s always a mess, but more importantly, I left at around 4pm and so it was rush hour time. I ate a protein bar on the drive; maple donut flavored. Not too bad! Protein bars are always, at max, about 80% good. This is just how protein bars work.
The next day, work, work, work, and then after work, I drove to Portland International Raceway up at Historic Vanport for the race. I should mention that while I have GPS on my phone and all that, I don’t enable mobile data, so I oftentimes just have the list of directions from Google Maps, rather than a voice telling me when and where to turn. This, it turns out, is annoying, but whatever. The place was packed with cars trying to get in. Moreover, people were trying to park at the main lot, which was farther away. I, on the other hand, parked at the Delta Park & Ride Trimet stop, which was closer to the venue as far as I could tell. I suspect some people wanted to park farther away because they were WASPy types who were afraid of their car getting broken into by nefarious types who use public transportation.
Once parked, I chug my Celsius energy drink, hoping that the 200mg of caffeine within will help my body race while not absolutely destroying my sleep when I get home. (Spoiler: it kind of wrecked my sleep a bit.)
Every time I go to the Christmas lights display out here, it’s foggy, and this year was no different. It truly is lovely, though my camera didn’t do a great job of showcasing this.
The race is a run/walk situation, so there are food carts selling things like pizza and beer and stuff that you probably don’t want to eat right before running. There are musicians, which, props to them for playing in the cold. A keyboardist, a drummer, and then after the race I noticed there was a third guy playing drumming on buckets. I don’t know. It felt very much like a “Oh shit we should have musicians for this” type of last minute concept.
Then, I unlocked a serendipitous achievement: the 5k was supposed to start at 6:45pm, but was pushed back to 7pm due to traffic. In that fifteen minute span, my stomach began to rumble, and for the first time ever running a race, I took a shit beforehand. My stomach had been weird all day and I was joking to myself on the way to the race that I was going to get the “turkey trots” at the Turkey Trot. And then I DID. Serendipity! If the race started at 6:45, would I have pooped my joggers on the raceway? In an alternate universe, yes, probably. There is nothing like navigating a porta-potty shit in the cold, damp, foggy evening though, I gotta tell you.
And then, the race! It went well! Most importantly: my shins did not explode. I was shocked. I expected them to give out on me about five minutes into the race, but I guess the adrenaline of a race plus the 200mg of caffeine kicked my body into high gear. The track was a joy to run around (even if it was a bit slick). Lots of festive lights, including the whole gamut of “Twelve Days of Christmas,”Brief tangent: the Genius lyrics page for this song has a representation for each verse. Are these for real? Am I to believe that “Eleven Pipers Piping” refers to the eleven apostles? What do pipers piping have to do with apostles? Why do Christian songs always have this weird-ass symbolism? where each one was a visual display of each verse of the song, except for Ten Lords a-Leaping, which for some reason they had the visual display of a lord leaping and the words “Ten Lords a-Leaping” above it, I guess so that people knew for sure that this display was Ten Lords a-Leaping. There was also some dinosaur lights on display for some reason. (That’s the Keep Portland Weird that I like.) Also, I forgot to get a photo of it but there was a display of a reindeer that looked like A) it had shapely women’s legs and B) it was giving birth. I’ll let you fill that image out in your mind’s eye.
At the start of the race I ran a solid 7 minutes straight, without stopping to walk, which is a big improvement. I also was able to get in several shorter runs in between walking. My end time was 48:56, which is a :48 second improvement from the Tar’n’Trail run. Granted, this run was completely flat and didn’t have a section with a million stairs to climb, but still. Improvement is improvement, and I’m proud of what I accomplished.
After the run I got a medal that looks like a punkin pie!
mmm, can’t wait to eat this medal.
I then went home and nursed my pinky toe, which now has a big and terrible blister on it.
Lastly, the next day (today) I signed up for yet another 5k. This one’s in February so I have some time. My plan is to take the next couple of weeks off from running just to recuperate, though I will continue to walk often. And then, back into regular runs until January, when I’ll either just do my own 5ks or sign up for a virtual race, since there doesn’t appear to be any official 5ks in the Portland area that month. February will be the Providence Heart to Start, and then March is the Shamrock Run, which I will be returning to after six years away.
This is another post about coffee. What did you think it was about? Pervert.
In order to really appreciate this post, you’ll first need to watch this video:
As I stated in my last post about coffee, I use pour over. I dabbled a bit in French press and wasn’t im-pressedkill me now, but that’s mainly because there is a surprising amount of technique involved in brewing French press, including timing and all that nonsense. Pour over is easy: you just put the grounds in the top thingy and swirl hot water around in it and it makes coffee. Easy, right?
Well, yes and no. Yes, you can make coffee that way, and if you buy good beans and don’t grind them too fine, you’ve basically made a decent cup of coffee. Which is what I’ve been doing for years now. I’ve been purposely “diluting” my coffee because I don’t want to drink too much caffeine (sort of, keep reading); thus, 15g of coffee in my big Powell’s mug, which holds about a pint of liquid. Every so often I would check websites to see the ideal coffee-to-water ratio, and it seemed more or less like I was spot on, except for doubling the water.
In my mind (which, to be honest, works poorly sometimes), adding double the water just meant that I was extracting more coffee. Perhaps not as much caffeine, but perhaps more than you would get in a typical 8oz mug. Right?
Then I started down the James Hoffman rabbit hole. Lots of intensely noodly nerding out about coffee. Things I hadn’t really considered. Using a scale to measure your water! Testing the best scale! Hell, he even has a video about making coffee soda. The man does it all, coffee-wise.
But this most recent video was sort of an eye opener to me. First, because I use a plastic V60 (or whatever cheap equivalent mine is). In the video, James says to heat up your V60 with hot water beforehand for a more even extraction. What! I had never thought of that. He also says to rinse the paper filter; I know this is in part to get rid of the “paper” taste but I’ve never really tasted paper with a dry filter, but whatever, I’ll do it now anyway.
Moreover, that video has a surprisingly detailed time scale for brewing a good pour over, and I just had to try it out. At first, I thought I would scale it up for my 16oz Powell’s mug, my beautiful, beautiful baby. But the calculations meant using around 30g of coffee, which was too much, both for preferred caffeine content, and for my coffee bean rationing, which I try to keep at around 15g/day because specialty coffee is expensive. So I decided, instead, to scale down to an 8oz mug.
This morning I brewed a cup using James’sI want to go on a brief tangent here: for most of my life I thought you shouldn’t put an ‘s after a word that ended in s, and that it should just be an apostrophe alone. But that’s not the case! An apostrophe without an s is for plural possessives. The difference between “The whale’s day” (singular possessive) and “The whales’ day” (plural possessive). James is singular (as far as I can tell) so you have to put the ‘s even if it means you are saying Jameses. English: very annoying. method and the results were excellent. A much fuller, richer, and nuanced cup of coffee than I was brewing previously. Yes, a large part of that had to do with water and over-extraction, hence the title of this blog post: bigger is not always better.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Josh, ‘bigger’ usually refers to comparing the size of things, like, say, ‘That elephant is bigger than a bicycle.’ I think what you mean is ‘More is not always better,’ because ‘more’ usually refers to volume, like, ‘There is more water in this mug than in that mug.’” Well listen here, you little shit. “Bigger is better” and it its inverse are time-honored phrases, plus there’s alliteration in there which people like! Okay! Get off my back!
So anyway, if you brew using a pour over technique, I recommend trying out James’s method. His “pulse” method of water introduction I think is what makes the whole thing work. If anything, it feels more … kind to the coffee. I’m getting a little new agey here, but one of the things I genuinely appreciate about making coffee in the morning is how it feels like a little ceremony, one that involves patience and repetition, and one where it honestly feels like being kinder to the beans makes for a better tasting coffee. I like to think that concept can be extrapolated to the world in general.
I’ve been meditating for a week now, using Medito’s 30-day challenge. It’s been pretty great. For me, meditating can be difficult not because I’m easily distracted (I am, but not when I’m meditating), but because meditating tends to dredge up whatever energy I’m holding onto or trying to push away. So when I’m done I often feel melancholy or sad, which makes me feel like I’ve failed the meditation, which is trying to get me to acknowledge and let go of thoughts and emotions.
But lately I’ve come to realize that this is all part of the plan. Some things are easier to let go of while meditating, while others require some purging, so to speak. And lately I’ve been finding myself both feeling depressed and acknowledging my depression, almost as it from a third person perspective, which feels different than normal. Normally I feel bad about myself when I get depressed; now I am able to compartmentalize it, in a way. Not the right word — I give compassion to myself for how I am feeling.
After I meditate I write a little bit in a journal which is meant just for after meditation. It’s another one of those notebooks I’ve had forever (2016 in this case) but barely write in. Another acknowledgement: I have to stop buying notebooks. But I write how I feel or just whatever thoughts come to me, and then I write down three things that I’m grateful for. That part is the hardest, because for some reason I decided in my head that the three things have to be different each morning. A couple of days ago I realized I was doing that and very kindly told myself that they don’t have to be different things and, in fact, they could all be the same three things if that’s all I could think of. The idea is not to think about it or give that many rules to it; I only picked three things because it seemed more beneficial than one, but writing ten things every day sounded like a chore.
Anyway, the holidays always tend to make me depressed for reasons that go to the therapist, not to my blog. Suffice it to say, it’s nice to be able to acknowledge that without wallowing in it. I can’t say that every day will be like this, but it’s good to know that they do exist, and that the feeling of them will pass. My higher brain telling my lizard brain that things will be alright. It’s good.
I’m getting tired of people having strong opinions over things that one should not have strong opinions over. It feels like trivial opinions are competitions now, and having the loudest argument for your opinion means you won. There’s something about today’s society that makes people should “PINEAPPLE DOESN’T BELONG ON PIZZA” from the fucking rooftops as if they were trying to appease Jesus Christ himself. This is the de facto thing people are writing on their dating apps. Pineapple does/doesn’t belong on pizza.
Dudes: who gives a fuck? Who actually cares?
Having strong opinions about banal shit is the new “small talk.” People claim to hate small talk but don’t mind arguing about pineapple on pizza until their face turns red.
I think it’s the internet’s fault. More specifically, I think it’s content creation’s fault. Content creation has given people this concept that they must be making content all the time, and then paying them just enough to make it seem lucrative to have content. The byproduct of that is that everyone makes videos about everything because there’s a chance it might go viral and suddenly you’re making lots of TikTok money. It’s the new lottery: if you play long enough, there’s a chance you might become rich and famous. That chance is astronomically small, but playing it absolutely and always benefits the company that is providing the service. Your TikTok video may not go viral, but people will scroll past it to the juicy advertisement that nets Tencent about … ten cents.
Thus, it is ultimately worth it for corporations for you to have the biggest, dumbest opinion possible, and that plus the need to generate content constantly means that you will scrape the bottom of the barrel trying to come up with something that is appealing enough to a viewer to net you another viral lottery ticket.
We’ve coined this “the hustle,” but it’s really just making money for big corporations and them (potentially) giving you a sliver of that money back. Yes, a precious few people make a lot of money on Twitch and YouTube. But the signal to noise ratio is astronomically low. And yet, since we see people being successful, we assume that being on Twitch or YouTube will make you successful eventually. It won’t, not just on your content alone. A lot of those successful people had contacts or networked their way into success. Or were just rich already and bought it.
All of that is to say: please reconsider your strong opinion on bullshit. Nobody cares if Marvel is better than DC. That is not an opinion that should raise your heart rate. Pineapple on pizza? Who cares. Dogs on the couch? Who cares. Just live your life and worry about the bigger stuff.
Side note: I encourage every single one of you who may happen to read this to please curate your social media feeds and try to weed out overly negative people. The video game content industry is a big offender for this. Your life will be better if you don’t surround yourself with constantly negative people. I promise you.
Look at the absolute monstrosity I made this morning for breakfast:
What you’re seeing here is:
hashbrowns
cheese (taco seasoning flavor, it’s the only shredded cheese I had)
deli sliced honey ham
two eggs
MORE hashbrowns
toast with blackberry jam
I have notes. You have notes, I’m sure. Turns out, two small potatoes make more than enough hashbrowns. I won’t make that mistake twice.
I woke up at 6am todayJowers was a big fan of this. An hour earlier for food? Count me in! She seemed to say. as part of my new scheme to see if I can survive off of seven hours of sleep at night, and actually did things instead of lay around in bed until 8:30.Side note: I’m trying to refrain from apologizing for the good things in my life. Like this, for example. Sleeping in. Being able to work from home regularly. It’s a privilege and I’m glad to have it, but I won’t apologize for it. I know other people have it worse; other people have it better, too. Life is life, enjoy what you have and don’t envy what you don’t. Cleaned and organized my bedroom up a bit, started laundry, meditated and wrote some positive intentions, and then, an impromptu decision to make hashbrowns. I haven’t made hashbrowns in ages and I am always bad at them. This time was olive oil, maybe too much for the first batch and too little for the second. Yes, I washed the starch off of the potatoes. Yes, I drained the starch water out. Yes, I dried the potatoes afterward as best I could (with a paper towel pressing the raw potatoes in a strainer). In the end I still had a bit too much moisture but they were still fairly crispy and tasted better than they looked, except for the second batch (the one on top), which I put too much salt on. The entire thing was overly salty. Salt should not be white so you can see it better on things, you know? Like pepper, pepper is doing good work. Pepper’s like, “Here I am, mister!
Over the years I’ve gotten slightly better at cooking. Not a gourmet chef by any means, but good enough to make myself breakfast. I make myself a lot of breakfasts (as opposed to just pouring a bowl of cereal, which I also do often). The best breakfasts are potato-related, usually fried up chunks of potatoes with garlic salt. Simple and effective. I cook in olive oil now instead of butter, just for health reasons, and olive oil is not but not the same. Butter is where it’s at. Bacon grease? Even better. But a doctor told me once to stop cooking in bacon grease because my cholesterol was a little high. She told me this as I was cooking bacon. So I switched to olive oil, except for eggs; I’ll be damned if I ever cook an egg in oil. Take that, Gordon Ramsay.
The truth is, I cook because I’m broke most of the time. Like now, I had to pay a few bills that pop up every year (like the hosting for this very site!) and after that I had just enough for some groceries. I’m at that fun point where I’m not broke enough to need food stamps or anything, but I don’t make enough to live 100% comfortably. American capitalism in a nutshell. It’s ultimately good though. Learning how to cook is good. I haven’t done any baking though because baking scares me. Baking requires preciseness. At least with cooking I can burn the hashbrowns but they still taste good and like hashbrowns. You put one extra teaspoon of baking soda in your bread and suddenly it’s … well, I don’t know what. Extra poofy? I really don’t know baking very well.
Re: meditation, I highly recommend doing it. I use the Medito app which is free, but not paywall free. Totally free and supported by donations. This, to me, is the way to go. There’s something about a meditation app that has a free bit that you can use but pushes you to buy the full app that irks me. It feels very … not meditative. Thankfully Medito does not do that, and comes with lots of meditation practices. Thank you very much, The Netherlands, for bringing meditation to us in a way that feels good and not like icky capitalism.
Meditation is great. I started meditating in grad school; I needed two extra credits to be full time, so I took a weightlifting class and, immediately after it, a meditation class. We sat in a gym room used for jiu jitsu and the instructor turned off the lights and we just sat in there for a whole hour. Some people slept; the instructor was fine with that. “That’s just your body telling you you need to sleep,” he would say. I learned later that we were basically doing vipassana meditation, which is apparently one of the hardest kinds of meditation as it doesn’t focus on anything besides your breathing. It’s not like a meditation where you focus on peace or destressing yourself or things like that. Instead, you just sit and experience your breath and let the thoughts and feelings you have come and go and, most importantly, you don’t attach judgment to them. It’s harder than you think. I oftentimes find myself feeling fine and then realize I’m in some thought spiral about something. But the point is to, if you get to that point, just realize you’re there and re-focus on your breath. It’s all about the breath.
I used to meditate at night before bed, but that just made me sleepy, so now I’m trying it in the morning after I’ve woken up and had a glass of water. That’s another thing I’m doing: glass of water right after I’ve woken up. I hear about this one a lot. Helps wake you up and whatnot. I’m down for that. You can never drink enough water.This is untrue in the technical sense, but you should still strive to drink more water. It is very difficult to drink enough water to develop water poisoning. This footnote is just for the pedants out there who like to be right about stuff.
I often think about people who don’t meditate, or go to therapy, and when you ask them why not they give you a reason that is the very reason why you should meditate, or go to therapy. “Oh, I can’t meditate, my brain is too all over the place, I’d never be able to concentrate,” they say, as if the moment you start learning to play guitar you should be expected to play a flamenco.
The point of anything is to be bad at it at first. Jake was right:
So do yourself a favor. Meditate, five minutes a day, for 30 days. Do it at work on your break. Put your phone down and close your eyes and just listen to your breathing for a while. Listen to the constant breeze of life that enters and exits your body. Be thankful that you exist. Because you deserve to exist, to be here, to be present, and to be counted.
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve been writing something in this blog every day. This is to keep up the habit. Don’t expect constant daily blog entries. Again, I’m using this to stave off my Twitter addiction. It’s going well, although I’ve found that without something like Twitter to mindlessly scroll through, I’m not sure where to go to see things. My brain wants to check Twitter/social media because it’s constantly infused with content, and I’m trying to remind myself that I don’t need to do that every five minutes, especially when I’m watching a movie.
