August 2014 Review

Do you know that feeling when your state of mind shifted, but you’re not sure how and with what results? I took a week off in August, and that happened.

For one thing, I deliberately stayed up late, so I’d lie in (07:30 is a lie-in for me) each morning. I noticed it made me feel... calmer? more mellow? less desperate? the next morning. I still got 6-7 hours sleep. So I do that Friday and Saturday night.

I decided to go to the gym every other day, so I do the spinning and yoga classes every other week, and get a decent run of weight-training in the other week. I get to go straight home and have quiet evenings with a clear conscience, which is restful as well as giving me a day’s recovery in between training days. Then I resurrected the brisk 5-8 minutes or so of very light weights exercises first thing in the morning - and I mean before coffee. Gets me moving and stirs up the hormones. Shower afterwards.

I decided to experiment with what I eat, because it’s still a little too much, and I’m still doing that. I went back to eating meat at the weekends, stopping the fish thing I’d been on since reading a book on nutrition. I feel better.

The To-Do list got busy, as I ordered a pair of Fat Gripz - comments later - and started looking at watches - my take on that later. I found a gardener to do the heavy work involving fences and shed roof, and he will start sometime way later. Gardeners are always busy in autumn. I added a bunch of dance events at Sadlers Wells to the dairy as well. And changed up the work shirts: I have been wearing plain blue and slightly heavy regular fit shirts, but started getting a unhappy with the look, so I spent a while in Tyrwhit and found some fitted, single cuff, cut-away collar shirts with thin vertical stripes in blue, green and red. Nice change of look and it makes me look slimmer (it’s all about my vanity, oh yes). The idea of a subscription to the Economist suddenly seemed sensible, though it took awhile to get it past the purchasing committee, and I’m now a subscriber. Why? Because I’m fed up with even the online broadsheets: they’re free for a reason.

There was also the eye-test thing, triggered by an arm on my Silhouettes breaking: this is expensive. The updated replacements, which have amazing lenses, are even more so.

I started taking more photographs with the Lumix, though I still need to read the whole of the manual. I found the line that turns green when the camera thinks it’s level, and that helped me adapt to the hold-it-at-a-distance manner of digital cameras. That was before I got the shots of the steam train at Hammersmith station, which just happened to be there on my way back from breakfast in Notting Hill. Unlike the dozens of overweight and weird-looking Trainspotters taking pictures, for whom it was the highlight of their week.

I made excellent progress with the cohomology section of the Riemann-Roch paper, and I’m back in the groove with that. I read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, John D MacDonald’s The Key To The Suite, Warren Ellis’ Gun Machine, Peter Pettinger’s How My Heart Sings: Biography of Bill Evans, gave up on a lousy Kindle edition of Hegels’ Science of Logic, did the first 450 pages of Sergio de La Pava’s A Naked Singularity and Alex de Campi’s Smoke / Ashes. At the movies, I saw Step Up: All In, and Lucy at Cineworld; All This Mayhem, The Congress, Welcome to New York, Finding Vivien Meyer at the ICA; and Art Party, Two Days and One Night at the Curzon Soho.

You see what I mean about changing things up?

Sis and I had supper at the Union Street Cafe, and I ate at Picture, Rowly’s, House of Ho, Clos Maggiore and Arbutus during the week. All my holidays start with a visit to the guys at Picture. 

Delayed 19:20 to Reading, Platform 20, 31st July

Pictures of July

Bishopsgate road works; excellent haul of DVDs from Fopp, Covent Garden; Flag; Garden Chair on my back patio; Signs in Covent Garden; Stansted Express on Bishopsgate.

More Editorial Models (NSFW)

I have written before about how it's all about the editorial models for me. Here's another ten from the posts of various blogs and flickrs. Mica Arganaraz and Helena Severin join Eniko Mihalik as Girls I'd Most Like To Find Myself Sitting Next To On A Plane.

Freja Beha Erichsen

Helena Severin

Jenna Klein

Larissa Hoffman

Lola McDonnell

Majorie Levesque

Melaine Smith

Mica Araganraz

Raquel Zimmerman

Sabrina Ioffreda

Thanks to fashioncopius and GoSeeMag.

Esther Perel's Secret to Desire in a Long Term Relationship

This talk has about 5 million views. I love this bit

I want you to be my best friend, and my trusted confidant, and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence, and mystery and awe, all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge, give me novelty, give me familiarity, give me predictability, give me surprise, and we think it’s a given and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that

There’s a lot of applause at the end. What they are applauding is the mood music that she creates with her upbeat manner, ten dollar words and nifty juxtapositions. They are not applauding what she actually says about the secret to desire in a long-term relationship. It starts around 18:00 and the key quote is this:

They have demystified one big myth, which is the myth of spontaneity, which is that [desire] is just gonna fall from heaven while you’re folding the laundry like a deus ex machina, and in fact they understood that whatever is just going to happen in a long-term relationship already has. Committed sex is premeditated sex, it’s wilful, it’s intentional, it’s focussed, and it’s present. Merry Valentine.”

Read or listen to that at least three times. If you want to keep the sex going in an long-term relationship, it needs to be premeditated, wilful, intentional, focussed and present.

Sounds wonderful. All those exotic words. The nice thing about exotic words is that they drift loosely above the ground of actual actions and materials. Ms Perel wasn’t troubling anyone with the details, and the details would have spoiled the music.

Take away those fancy words and use some more mundane ones. LTR sex needs to be planned - that’s what calling “spontaneity” a myth means, and it’s what “premeditated” means. It means Nookie Nights go in the diary. You both have to show up ready to do your bit. No moods, no headaches, no bad tempers, no rows to give you an excuse to avoid it. You have to show up as agreed, and you need to put yourself in the mood, and help your partner get in the mood. That’s what “wilful, intentional” mean. It means she leaves her work-and-family yakkity-yak at the door of the “erotic space” (aka “bedroom”, usually), as well as any resentments she may have about toilet seats being left up or lawns being left uncut. That’s what “focussed and present” means. It means they are thinking about nookie, not the bullshit of their lives outside the Nookie Zone. Earlier Ms Perel says “responsibility and eroticism really butt heads”. There’s no discussing the family finances, children’s school problems, or any of that nonsense.

Who on earth is capable of this? If I had to guess, I’d say that at a deep level such a couple regard themselves as co-conspirators against a crazy world, that both of them can achieve orgasm fairly readily, and that it is a pleasant but not crazy-intense experience for either of them.

How many people does that leave out? Every couple where she settled for a good provider after a few flings with Exciting Boys. Every couple where one of them can’t trust, or for whom orgasm is difficult or over-intense. It leaves out at least eighty per cent of the population: forty percent who get divorced and therefore never were trusting co-conspirators, and another forty per cent who aren’t either but prefer the awfulness of a “settling” marriage to what they think is the awfulness of living alone.

But that’s what all those erotic exotic words are for: to tease you and hide the realities. There are some thinkers, Heidegger for one, where the language, the way its used to look at the world, is as much part of the philosophy as the insights, if not more so. There are others, J L Austin for example, who use a plain and simple language as a rhetorical trick, as if to dare us to believe that complicated metaphysics could hide behind ordinary English. And there are some who use exotic words to hide the realities that, if stated baldly, would dampen the applause, reduce the book sales and reduce the consultancy gigs by half, as people realised they had no chance from the start. For all her obvious sincerity, and for all the truth of her insights, that’s what Ms Perel is doing. She’s not going to be the one to break the news to you.

What Do I Do If I Don't Have a Vocation or a Vision?

I ran across this article about managing a career as a freelance photographer and especially staying in it for a long time. I don’t know, but assume from the subject of the article, that the turnover rate for freelancers is quite high.

The advice is along the lines of “follow your artistic instincts, develop your own style that people will pay for, and make up a proper business plan, with five-year financial projections.” There’s a lot more than that, and it is worth reading.

It turns out that the author, Doug Menuez, is a superstar. Stanford University hosts a collection of his photographs, which is superstar enough. So his advice is fine if you happen to be a superstar photographer, or indeed, a superstar anything. What about the rest of us? What does an ordinary working stiff like me do?

I’m going to riff on this quote:

"There are many [photographers] who do this exact thing [try to second-guess and follow the market, rather than their own artistic taste] and end up with a middling level of success, stuck on a financial and creative plateau, slowly starting to run out of gas. After a few years they hate their their work and life in general. They are getting divorced or leaving the business or pursuing whatever diversion eases the pain. They are not living the dream. They are not challenging themselves creatively because they did not give themselves permission to be who they are as photographers in the first place. This is the road to being a burned out, bitter hack. Boring."

That’s what everyone should want to avoid, though most don’t. But how do we do it if we don’t feel a strong sense of vocation and have an inner artistic direction? Aren’t we then condemned to go along to get along and get burned out? Before I set off on this essay, I would have said, well, that’s the assumption. Now I’m not so sure.

Most of the time I have been employed to run and improve some kind of process, to gather, process and disseminate facts, and I’ve been paid for what I do, not to put in the hours. Sometimes the office was grotty, perhaps by being stuck out in some ghastly suburb, and sometimes the people were not my speed, and sometimes there was outright crookedness going on. But I rarely felt it as “hard graft”.

Am I following any kind of “passion”? Is this work satisfying to my inner soul? Am I a reputed member of some serious professional group? Am I part of a professional or industry community? Do I get my identity from what I do? This is a string of NO’s. I call it “my day job” for a reason - it’s my day job. There are people who would answer many of these questions with a YES: they have reputations, published books and papers, consultancies, and make some kind of contribution. I am, by contrast, the quintessential lurker. I do what I do to make a living, not because I have an interest in the Great Cause of Data or any other darn thing.

But nor am I a burned-out hack. I know what those men and women look like: the building I work in and the trains I commute on are full of them. How have I dodge it?

The companies I have worked for did something that was useful to their customers, charged a sensible price for it, and were reasonable places to work. I’ve never worked in a company where they have to lie to the customer and any passing regulators (Big Pharma anyone?) about the usefulness and desirability of their products. I’ve never worked anywhere there was a sense of treating the customers with contempt. (Okay, there is one exception to this, but I never bought into the mind-set, and the organisation now thinks a lot more like I do.) I’ve never had to con myself about where I worked and what I did.

My idea of “working for a living” is doing a job where a) there is a constant stream of work coming in and my productivity is being measured, and / or b) I have to use a certain formula, method or script to handle the task, and c) it is not possible to zone out and do the thing on muscle-memory. Actually a) and / or b) will do, c) turns it from “work” to “sheer hell”. You and I may have totally different reactions to a job: my idea of hell might be your idea of a terrific challenge. I have worked for a living a couple of times. Once for about eight weeks when I was credit controlling / collecting debts for a building company. That was hard grind, and the slowest-moving clock I ever watched. The other was during teacher-training. Not one moment to take as time out. Washing-up in a staff canteen over the summer holidays? Now that’s what I call a doddle. Except when I was in the deepest throes of drinking, I pretty much arrived on time and left on time. I’ve never had to clock in.

Now this is a surprise to me. It turns out that I have been working in accordance with some basic values I have, in reasonable places, and leaving on time so I can get on with whatever passed for my life at the time. This is not the vocation / vision -driven idea that Doug Menuez talks about, but it will do for those of us who don’t really have vocations and visions.

Only work at honest companies that treat you reasonably well, arrive and leave on time, have a life outside work, and work in a manner that suits you (I’ve described mine, but your preference may differ). Hmmm. I’m not sure that isn’t as tall an order as finding and following a vocation. How many companies are like that?

If everyone decided that was where and how they were going to work, a lot of companies would lose their staff pretty much overnight. Maybe this is a more subversive message than the vocation / vision one?

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