Days 3 and 4 of my journey saw me wake up in Jacksonville and hang out with my parents at their facility. Every day my Dad wakes up, has coffee, then goes and gets my mom out of the memory care home, brings her home, we would hang out for a while in the house, then go get lunch at a restaurant, hang out for a while, then he would take her back up there to eat her meal, come back and get me, we would go have dinner, then go visit her for half an hour or so before she went to bed. It’s a very odd routine. Some parts of it feel very normal while other parts feel extremely odd. I was asked often if it would be hard to see my Mom this way and the answer is, of course, yes, but not all the time and not equally. Parts of it felt almost like regular life, and other parts felt bad and very weird. The home is pleasant and safe but it doesn’t feel like a place to live. And I was surprised at just how…disturbed…some of the occupants are. There is the “TV lady” for example who is quite healthy and walks around very fast and aggressively asks you to do things like fix her TV or find her socks. She only goes away if you are very firm and basically yell at her to get out. That part I didn’t enjoy. But the weather was great, and it was awesome to just sit with my Dad and talk about our lives, and even the parts with my mom were good in some ways; she still knows who I am and wants me to stay all the time. She even still gives me a hard time about getting married. :)
As I mentioned, before jetting off to Europe I’m spending a few days with my parents in Jacksonville. It makes geographical sense anyway because I’m headed east towards the Atlantic. Stopping in here always feels restful, which is a nice break before the chaos. We ate lunch at Seafood Kitchen, I swam in the pool and the hot tub, and my Dad and I watched The Hunt For Red October (RIP Sean). Things are starting to feel Christmas-y; we watched the Army-Navy game over at the bar because the facility my parents are in caters to ex-Navy, so it was a big deal. It also is helping me get used to the time change; I can deal with the first 3 hours of it here, like a mountain climber pausing at base camp.
We also went and got a Christmas tree; tomorrow we’ll decorate!
I am going on a grand adventure! Most of you who know me in person know this already, but it’s time to let blog-land know: I am going on an adventure to see some friends, rediscover some roots, and a lot more. The adventure starts today; as I sit here I am in the airport in San Francisco ready to hop on a plane. Don’t get too excited; my first stop is Jacksonville, to visit my parents, before jetting off on Monday to points East. After Jacksonville, I’ll be heading to Poland, then Germany, then back to Poland before visiting Ukraine and returning on or around New Years Day, a trip of about 3 weeks or so. In Germany I’ll be visiting my old cycling friend Matt Garza, and then back to Poland where I’ll visit my pen pal Domi and my friend Kaska at her parents’ home, as well as just hanging out in Poland. Then it’s on to Kyiv, where I hope to get a sense of what the war has been like and visit the Maidan and the other sights of Ukraine’s capital.
But first, for today, some basic domestic travel. The American Express lounge is closed, which is a bummer.
I’ll be updating various social media: you can follow me on Facebook, here on this blog, and also on my YouTube channel, which is at (58) Adam Hunter - YouTube. I’ll be trying to post (almost) daily updates there. You can also follow me on Instagram at @calmofinfinity.
Well, I finally buckled down and listed my basement on AirBnb. As some of you know, I bought a house that came with an unfinished workshop-style basement which had some potential but was in really bad shape. It had the remains of a bathroom down there and some power outlets, but most of it was pretty ratty, the concrete floor leaked, etc., etc. But over the last 9 months, I got it fixed up and now I’ve been renting it and the response has been great! I’ve had 3 folks book it; one is down there right now, and someone has it booked through the weekend. It’s been really easy so far, cross my fingers! I priced it very low so I’m sure that’s part of the reason; I plan on upping the price until it doesn’t get booked 100% of the time. I need to do some more improvements, like installing a keypad - but so far so good!
As some of you can tell from my recent Facebook posts, I’ve gone back into trying to get my 5k times down. As part of that, I looked for a gym locally that could help me with that goal and I ended up deciding to go with Planet Fitness, and i’ve been so far very happy that I did. I think for some reason I had been looking down on them, but actually it’s a great gym for me. They have a ton of locations including one very close to me, they’re absurdly cheap and they have nice, clean equipment and plenty of it. Yes, they lack some of the perks of higher-end gyms, but that turns out to be stuff I don’t care about anyway. They have very clean showers, too. The only thing I miss honestly is the hot tub, but I bought one of those for my house (more on that when it shows up).
Anyway, if you have one in your area and you need a nice clean safe place to work out for cheap, give it a shot. I was happy I did.
(And you get used to the purple).
Every since my bike accident almost two weeks ago, I have been in chronic pain. My shoulder is having difficulty healing, and even more so my right wrist. I’m likely to be in this situation for at least another month to come.
The pain is never unbearable, but it’s there all the time, and it gets worse from time to time. It’s been an interesting experience; it makes me really feel a lot more empathy for those who have back pain or other chronic issues. There’s a few things that I don’t think I ever realized about this kind of pain. One is that it just sort of makes you tired all the time. I’m not surprised that pain would be annoying or make you irritable, but I am surprised at how physically tiring it is to be in pain.
The other thing which is much more insidious is that the pain - and in particular the kind of pain I’m experiencing right now - serves as a sort of “tax” on doing anything. Some things I just can’t do yet, like swim. But for those things I can do I’ve made an active decision to keep living my life and to push it a little bit. But everything I do I know will incur a cost of pain. Even typing this blog post hurts, and I will have to take a minute and let my wrist “cool off”. And so the inevitable temptation is to just stop or slow down doing things. And that sucks.
I don’t have any deep conclusions here. It just sucks.
Every now and then, I like to highlight one of the channels that I watch on YouTube that I think anyone who is reading my blog might also be interested in. I’ve been back lately to binge watching all the new episodes of a YouTuber I find fascinating by the name of Steve Mould. He’s sort of an edutainment person; his videos always teach you something, usually something about some kind of real-world phenomenon, often but not always involving simple physics. The last few I watched were about the way a stream of water from a faucet ripples when you touch it and also about how to hack into your own car if it’s old and uses a digital key. I always get the sense that he’s genuinely interested in the topics that he covers and his style never feels condescending but always teaches me something. Anyway, check it out, you might like it!
https://www.youtube.com/c/SteveMould
Today I rode my new electric motorcycle for the first time. Ever since I bought my current car, I’ve been somewhat bothered by the fact that it was gas only and also didn’t get the greatest gas mileage. As some of you know, my last car was an electric car, the BMW i3, and while I loved it, I just couldn’t support it with my lifestyle. It had very poor range and I had nowhere to charge it so I was constantly filling up the small auxiliary gas tank. which is annoying and defeats the purpose.
I’ve been looking for a while at the hybrid version of my car, the Subaru Crosstrek, but given the current used car market, I would need to spend almost 20 thousand dollars just to upgrade, which is absurd and not worth it. So I wanted to get a second vehicle for getting around town that was electric. As some of you also know, I am a big scooter fan and used to drive one for years, but the thing is that the electric scooter market is kind of lame and the scooters are really goofy looking.
Which is what led me to the wild and wooly world of the under-$5000 electric motorcycle market. There’s a surprising number of Chinese knockoff comanies making weird sort-or-probably-legal motorcycles in this price range that go about 30-35 mph and get about 50 miles on a charge and, well, I bought one. For $2500 including assembly I now am the proud owner of a Venom e-Vader, described as an electric Grom.
It was delivered a while back, but because of my gimpy arm I couldn’t drive it. And really I still shouldn’t be, but this morning I took a chance and drove to breakfast, and it was great! It’s obvious they cut some corners, and I doubt a real motorcycle enthusiast would be too happy, but it’s a peppy little thing that reminds me of my old scooters but looks like a cool motorcycle. For the price I paid, I’m happy.
Well, as Forrest Gump likes to say, life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get. And Saturday, what I got was a bike crash. I’ve only had a couple in my life, thank god, and after this one, I’d be OK with waiting a while before another. This was the worst crash I’d ever personally been in; the bike was totaled, and although I walked away, I was extremely lucky. My shoulder took a really solid beating and my wrist as well, but I’ll be fine, which was a close thing. Several bystanders said they were surprised I walked away.
And this one was well and truly not my fault. I was riding down MacArthur street on my way to my brother’s place when - completely out of the blue - I hit a downed cable that was drooping between two poles on opposite sides of the street, hanging at about 3 feet off the ground. I only saw it at the very last minute. It threw me from the bike, the front wheel came off, the front fork hit the ground and cracked, and the top tube bent. It was a carbon fiber frame, so it’s done.
To answer your questions: Why was a cable hanging in the road? Why didn’t somebody else hit it? Are you going to sue? Answers: A) I have no idea, the infrastructure in Oakland must be crumbling, B) I must have been the first unlucky person to pass by, and C) no, it’s not worth my time.
Honestly, I feel lucky. Lucky that it wasn’t worse, lucky that it is just a bike and i can afford another one, and lucky that i hit it instead of some little kid. I can take it. The main thing that sucked was that I had a triathlon scheduled for the next day and I had to cancel, which was sad.
But I’ll be back.
A couple of days ago I put together a plan I called the Reverse Triathlon. I’ve been running triathlons for years, and a question I always get is what order the sports go in. The order, for those who don’t know, is always the same: swimming, followed by biking, followed by running. I’m often asked why that is, and the stock answer I’ve always given - which I read somewhere - is that organizers are worried about people drowning during the swim and so they want to make sure that folks do the swim while they are still fresh. But I decided to actually see how big of a deal that was by doing a little exercise. So I went out and biked, and then ran, and then swam. Admittedly, I didn’t quite do a full triathlon because of logistics. I biked about 16 miles, then ran about a mile and a half (I know, short, but I was short on time), then rode about 8 more miles, changed at home, got in my car and drove down to the lake where I swam about 800 yards.
And I can report that - at least at those distances - it really wasn’t a big deal.
Of course, I understand that for a full ironman, or a half, or even maybe an olympic, people might be extremely tired. I’m not saying swimming should come last. However, it would have two huge benefits: one, you wouldn’t have to do the rest of the race wet, and two - and more importantly - it might cut down on deaths. You see, the one thing that does actually get people killed occasionally during a triathlon is drowning from being kicked in the head. This comes about because of the group starts. With so many swimmers in a tight space, it’s more likely that someone will get kicked in the head, go unconcscious and drown. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Modern races try to deal with this by doing things like age groups and staggered starts, as well as beach starts. But if the swim happened, say, in the middle, that wouldnt’ be an issue because everyone would just start swimming when they showed up and it would naturally stagger folks.
Just a thought, at least for the sprint triathlons.
Today I had to go in to get some blood drawn. For those of you that don’t know, I have a pretty terrible phobia of needles. It rarely comes up, but usually it’s in a health context where I need to have blood drawn, maybe twice a year or so. Every time it happens, I have the same issues: sweaty palms, fear, anxiety. I am aware, intellectually, that this makes no sense. I know that every time I’ve had it done it went fine and was easy. And yet, I hyperventilate a little bit every time.
I find this fascinating because it goes against everything we’re taught in the American, protestant, scientific approach. Being aware of the reality of the situation has precisely zero effect on the part of my brain that wants to be anxious and fearful. Isn’t that fascinating?
I think the human mind is the most fascinating thing on the planet.
Anyway, the blood draw went fine. As always.
Yesterday Nataly, myself and one of Nataly’s friends Meredith went to Oaktoberfest, which is exactly what it sounds like. It was a street festival in the Dimond district centered around beer. I saw Nataly drink more beer than I’ve ever seen her drink before (she’s not big on beer generally). The weather was perfect and it really reminded me of why I love Oakland; it was a great crowd. We ended up stopping to watch a street performance of some guys doing breakdancing and I got picked to be a volunteer and stand there while they jumped over us, so enjoy that video below. :) Anyway it was just a really pleasant day to be around.
Last night my brother and I got together to play some of a new game called Return to Monkey Island. It was a throwback evening in a lot of ways; hanging out with my brother, in my “gaming basement”, felt very 2015 or earlier. Not least of which because the game we were playing is a sequel to one of our favorite games from a long time ago, Secret of Monkey Island. I just looked it up, and that game came out in 1990, when I was 23. Crazy. Anyway it’s a throwback to the days of point and click adventures. While those were never my favorite genre, Monkey Island in particular has a soft spot in my heart for its hilarious aesthetic, slapstick comedy, and most importantly the “cartoon logic”.
For those not familiar, cartoon logic is the sort of thing that allows the Road Runner to paint a hole on a wall and then run through it. It uses puns, homophones, tricks of perspective and other techniques to convince you that something absurd is real. The added twist of doing this in a game is that you can make the player part of the experience by asking them to solve puzzles based on cartoon logic. So for example, at one point you have to make a mop, and all you have is a stuffed animal and a stick - et voila. It’s the sort of thing that you would do in Saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid, and it makes me really nostalgic.
So this isn’t really a game review because we’re only about 10-15% done with the game, but I will say that it successfully reminded me of my youth and it’s well made.
Yesterday I participated in the Santa Cruz triathlon. There were two options, sprint and olympic, and I did the olympic distance, which means that I swam 1500 meters, biked 40km and ran 10km. It’s not the longest triathlon I’ve ever done - I did a half ironman - but I haven’t done one in many years and so it was a great re-introduction to the sport. The weather was perfect for this sort of event - slightly overcast. I got up way too early because I was confused/concerned about the schedule, so I ended up standing around before the race but that was OK because I met some really nice folks, including a guy who had been to a wedding the night before.
The swim was interesting - the water was very choppy and the waves were high - the Santa Cruz boardwalk is known for having a community of surfers, so the waves are pretty intense and one of them took me and slammed me right into another person before the race even started. The bike and the ran were just simple out and backs along the coast and the up on Highway 1. It’s a great course, very flat, very beginner friendly. The only thing I wasn’t crazy about is that they broke us up into lots of different age brackets and started the sprint and olympic at different times and also ran the course a bit oddly with overlapping routes. The net effect was a bit of chaos especially near the transition and the two different finish lines (for the full tri and the aquabike). You had people coming and going every which way and - especially on the bike - I really had to pay attention to what was going on not to either go the wrong way or hit a runner (yes, the runners and cyclists were very close to each other).
I was very happy with my overall time - 2:59:41, so just under 3 hours. I had no time goals for the event, just to finish, but I think that’s a good time. I was expecting the bike to be my best event and the swim second and to really struggle with the run, but actually in the end, all 3 of my times were basically just average. I actually probably did best in the run with a time of 57 minutes, which is under a ten minute mile. Surprisingly I never really had to walk for any significant amount of time, which I definitely was expecting.
So all in all, a great event, a good result, and I’m ready for more!
Yesterday was a big party for my company. I work for a company called Visual Concepts which is part of Take 2 Interactive, and we primarily make a game called NBA2K, which comes out every year. We released it recently and so yesterday was our launch party. I used to go to parties like this all the time, but it felt very odd to be back there after COVID and after all the changes in my industry. You don’t really see too many parties like this anymore, and even this one was relatively muted by th epast standards. It was in the middle of the day for one thing. But I had a good time; it was great to meet my entire team in person, since for most of them I’d only ever seen them on Zoom. It’s interesting to me how incredibly different people look over Zoom versus in person; it’s hard to put your finger on why, but some people are honestly barely recognizable.
Speaking of things that look nothing like you, I got a caricature made of myself, and I honestly don’t think it looks much like me, but you be the judge!
In one singular act of largesse reminiscent of the past, they gave away a Tesla Model 3. I didn’t win, sadly.
But yeah, it was great to see everybody and get dressed up.
Last night I watched a really interesting movie; as some of you may know, I don’t watch a lot of films, and when I do, I prefer documentaries, but this was based on a true story, so it checks out. It’s called The Zookeeper’s Wife, and it’s the story of the zookeepers at the Warsaw Zoo during the invasion of the Nazis, who are non-Jewish Poles that end up using their zoo as an underground sanctuary to help Jews escape the Warsaw ghetto. It would have been a powerful film regardless, but in the context of the current war it wasn’t hard to draw the parallels. The film actually, I believe, tried to pull its punches in terms of the depiction of war; it was fairly sanitized. But for all that, the atmosphere of claustrophobia and the culture of deceit came through strongly. One of the subplots involves the wife trying to fend off the advances of the German zookeeper that takes over their zoo, and you can feel her personal sense of despair as she is trapped between highly unpalatable options, just as the Jews in her basement are literally trapped. What comes through strongly is how desperate these people feel and the quantity of lying and deceit that otherwise honest and straightforward folk were forced into. At one point one of the characters explicitly calls this out, saying that they are part of a new world, and there are new ethics and morals. I thought of this in particular in the context of the liberation of some of the Ukrainian cities that happened recently, and the challenges of identifying collaborators. Of course some Ukrainians no doubt genuinely collaborated and took the Russian side, but I also imagine a huge gray area of those who just wanted to get on with their lives and felt compelled to do some unsavory things.
Of course, the only real takeaway from any of these movies is the terrible inhumanity of war. And when I say “inhumanity”, I literally mean that it causes people to act in a way that I see as un-human; the lying, the deceit, the misery. It is the most inhuman thing we do.
Today I swam in the Keller Cove Swim for Kids, an organized Masters swim of 1 mile. It was awesome, I had a great time and I felt really fast. And I guess I was because I finished the mile in 35:06, which is by far the fastest I’ve ever swum a mile. Granted I was wearing a wetsuit, which helps a ton, but still; great result. Also I finished second in my age group, which sounds exciting until you hear that there were only 3 people in my age group (because only wetsuits were considered and most people didn’t wear one; I think for most folks the water was too warm). Nataly also got an award, for 3rd in her age group.
And then we ate snacks and hung out with dogs. So, yeah, a pretty awesome day all around.
As I mentioned, I’ve been going down a rabbit hole with this lecture series by Timothy Snyder about Ukraine, and there was a new one last night that I’ve been listening to, part of which I found fascinating for reasons that have nothing to do with Ukraine. in his recent lecture he talks about the subject of what he calls Deep Geography, and he spends a lot of time on the naming of things. He talks, for example, about the linguistic change from “The Ukraine” to “Ukraine” and how it has to do with certain languages such as Polish which allowed the use of prepositions in referring to Ukraine that were the ones you used with uncertain or ambiguous locations. I think of a little like the difference between saying you are going to “Colorado” versus saying you are going to “the coast”.
Anyway, he also made reference to the fact that he was in Ukraine recently listening to their local news and noticed that the newscasters regularly referred to Russia as “Moscovia”. Now, “Moscovia” is a real thing (a fact which I did not know until recently). What exactly it refers to is, of course, dependent on who you ask, but essentially it refers to a region of what we now consider Russia which coalesced in the 9th century (maybe) and laid claim (maybe) to all of what we consider “Russia” around about the 14th century (again, maybe).
The point is, the use of this word Moscovia is very intentional by the Ukrainians, and it refers to at least two things: rejecting the automatic assumption that the borders of modern Russia should be what they are today, and rejecting the assimilation of the term Rus’ (which has historical connotations that include modern day Ukraine). This word is specifically chosen to reject claims Russia has to Ukraine and, furthermore, insinuate - at least gently - that Russia does not even have claim to, well, Russia.
More succinctly, this word is chosen to piss off Russia. Specifically, that aspect of Russia that believes in imperial Russia, or the “Russian World” idea. Of course, why they do this is self-evident. But what I find interesting is how well it works, both to boost Ukrainian morale and to irritate and enrage Russians. It really works. And what I find interesting about that - way beyond Ukraine - is what it says about who we are, as humans, and how much we enjoy clinging to our ideas and myths. Our personal stories are so important to us that few things will piss us off as much as having someone casually mention that they aren’t true. This is just as true for Imperialist Russians as it is for me, a suburban American. I would not enjoy, for example, having someone refer to America as “The Colonies”. I don’t particularly enjoy having someone point out that America is named for an idiot who got lost. People got pretty pissed when it was pointed out that we had a whole holiday named after an explorer who committed genocide and, uh, also got lost.
Point is, we like our sacred cows, and language is one of those core areas that can hide some of our deep-seated assumptions.
Yesterday evening I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole that I wanted to tell more folks about because I found it fascinating. I’m always so intrigued by people who actually know what they are talking about and can explain it well. I had run across Timothy Snyder before; recently there were pictures of him actually sitting down with both the President of Ukraine and the First Lady, so I knew he was a big deal. I didn’t realize he was actually a functioning, working professor at Yale. But not only is he that, he also decided to open up all his new class lectures to the world online; and his new class is all about Ukraine, and a historical context for the current war.
In a sense, nothing he says is particularly new, but the depth and clarity with which he explains the history of Ukraine - and, in doing so, the history of Europe, democracy and the existence of nation-states - makes everything such a joy to listen to. I’ll attach 3 videos that I particularly admire; the first two are the lectures from the class, which is ongoing; the third is a great interview he did for a UK news station. They are, admittedly, long, but they are worth every second if you truly want to understand why Putin and Russia did this, why the Ukrainians are fighting back, why they are doing it successfully, and what that means for the rest of us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJczLlwp-d8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LaEmaMAkpM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qdvjslwvIU
An extra special mention goes out to that third video because, despite being on a mainstream news channel, the interview is well-composed, the interviewer asks actually intelligent questions, and overall the quality of discourse is so high compared to what we’re used to.
Today I participated in the first official race in the WTRL racing league as part of a team that I joined, Lightning Velo. WTRL stands for World Tactical Racing League and they help Zwift run online cycling races. It’s an official organization now that runs most of the racing on Zwift. So essentially we’re talking about me riding my bike indoors.
My team had some organizational issues - I won’t hold it against them, they’re all volunteers after all - but I didn’t really know that I was racing until about 10 minutes before the race started, and I had no idea what the race was actually going to be. Because I didn’t know I was riding, yesterday I jogged/walked 14+ miles, and so I was destroyed just to begin with. And then it turned out that the race was 28 kilometers and 670 meters of climbing. So I was in trouble right from the get go! But I decided to do it anyway. Better to have loved and lost, etc.
Adding to my anxiety was that I was hanging out with somebody today who was telling me about. their adventures with muscle rhabdomyolysis a few weeks back and ended up spending a couple of days in the ER, just because of over-exercise. So that activated the hypochondriac part of my brain for sure. :)
There’s an interesting aspect to Zwift races which is that they start out with this balls-to-the-wall pell-mell super intense effort right out of the gate, and if you get dropped from that, you’re basically stuck. And I got dropped from that. :). But other than that, I had a good race. (So other than having a bad race, I had a good race :). I came in 71st out of 79. :0. Anyway, exercise is always good for me, and now I will sleep well.
As an editorial note, I recently started listening to a particular meditation from my app, Ten Percent Happier, that is all about removing writer’s block by just practicing the art of writing without judging or self-editing. So that’s what I’m going to start doing, trying to blog every day for 15-20 minutes or until I run out of things to say. I won’t say too much about that here because I think I’m going to make it its own blog topic.
