124 posts tagged with "in-English"

[14–20 Feb]

We don't believe in Valentine's Day here. But just in case, on the 14^th I bought a Häagen-Dazs, “Belgian chocolate” flavour. Think Pascal's wager! It lasted a few days (we love chocolate, but we never eat a lot of anything like that).

On Tuesday evening I rode my motorbike to Avenida de la Ilustración to meet someone who stumbled upon my post about “Mein Kampf” and had the kindness to write me an e-mail. He's D., a fellow admirer of many of my own intellectual heroes (Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Jonathan Haidt, Christopher Hitchens, etc). We had a coffee/tea, got to know each other a little bit, and found a lot of common interests. I think we were both excited to discover another human being who had listened to the same podcast interviews, watched the same debates on YouTube, read the same blog posts, and fallen in love with the same ideas, in Spain. Later I introduced him (virtually) to my rationalist and EA circles in Madrid. So, a new friend. In that way, this new old blog has served some purpose already!

[7–13 Feb]

Stuff that broke last week: the washing machine. Moderate consternation ensued — we use it more than once every other day, because we're four at home and it's not one of those machines with large capacity. Fortunately we managed to get it working again on the same day by cleaning a water filter that was easy to remove without taking the whole thing apart.

Wife and I went to yet another car dealer to see the electric Volkswagen ID.4. It's kinda what we need in size, cargo volume, and range. But we still have to polish our spreadsheets to see if the gains in the long term are worth the “100% electric” price tag. (Spoiler alert: at the time of writing this, we've made some progress with those estimates, and it looks as if a ~€13,000 gap between the prices of an EV and the “equivalent” internal combustion car would cancel itself out after seven years of usage or so, given our consumption patterns, etc.)

[31 Jan – 6 Feb]

Last week we had a couple of appointments to go and see apartments for sale in a town nearby. We had to cancel the first one in the last minute because my wife was too busy with work to jump in the car, drive there and do the visit (not that it's too far from where we live now). The day after I went to see the other one, only with Breaker of Horses this time. I liked the quality of the construction materials and the finish, and the residential area was very pleasant and well equipped (every corner was spotless). But when I told my wife about all the pros and cons, we agreed that it was too small for us: with two little kids growing up, and both of us working from home most of the time, we really need some room.

The problem with the ubiquitous five-star rating system is that you cannot assign negative value to things. (What would the opposite of a “star” be? A “black hole”? Something that sucks light instead of emitting it…)

I mean a negative rating as in this entirely fictional customer review:

“My rating: minus-⭐!
I bought this power drill back in August and I was so excited to use it.
Well, it drilled backwards and it trepanned my skull!
Very painful. Avoid this product.”

Or this one:

“My experience at the première:
The film was so disgusting that it made me dizzy first, then gave me seizures, and finally a voice in my head somehow convinced me to devote the rest of my life to gently tapping with a teaspoon the forehead of every person around me, incessantly.
That was six years ago.
Writing this from the madhouse now. Not too bad in here, actually.
(I still give the film five black holes for the damage caused! Four black holes, tops.)”

[24–30 Jan]

Now that I'm writing these notes (based on my daily pages, as usual) I realise that last week we met several people many times, and did lots of things (by our boring standards, anyway!).

[17–23 Jan]

The highlight of last week was my wife's birthday. She became a round number above 37 and below 41. Child-rearing, The Unspeakable and this 110% WFH have conspired to serve us two very humdrum years, with very little in the way of travel, social gatherings, cultural events, and the other serendipitous offerings that life usually has in store. All that is to say that this birthday deserved some fanfare.

We got to celebrate thrice over the weekend: with my family, with her family, and with a couple of friends; and so she got to blow three sets of candles, and received birthday gifts in all three occasions. Family and friends rock; table talk and home-made biscuits and hugs and friends' news and fabada and roscón de reyes for twenty people are A Good Thing. It's too easy to forget that.

[10–16 Jan]

The week started with Miss Entropy recovering from a mild fever (she skipped “school” on Monday, out of precaution), and finished with her little brother having a couple of peaks of temperature himself for a day or two. Nothing serious; mostly one tiring night for him and for us two. Thank Paracetamol.

It is exhausting to spend so much time with two small kids — at least for me. There are tantrums sometimes, and moments during the day when the two of them are crying at the same time, or simply demanding your attention insistently. In so many situations, kids are amazingly incapable of understanding opportunity, proportion, or balance.

Still, almost every day presents one or more opportunities to discover something new with them, make them laugh, enjoy their crazy words and associations of ideas, squeeze them, dance with them, and take cute photos and videos… There are also the “diaries” my wife and I are writing for each of them (for when they're adults), and even these public weeknotes for posterity.

Inspired by Paul Battley (whom in turn was “inspired by Tom and Nat and Chris”) I’ve decided to start writing weeknotes. Specifically, around the end of last year I decided that I would write brief weekly notes and share them online.

To make that easier, and because I stumbled upon a nice 2022 calendar-diary template on Reddit (and because I'm usually eager to find new use cases for my loyal reMarkable 2) I would also start writing a page about my day, every day.

Unrelated to all that, I had been meaning for a long time to have a blog again (I have been “blogging” and “microblogging” on third-party platforms, but I always missed owning my content and being part of the IndieWeb like in the good old days).

Last month it all came together, and eight days ago, on January first, I finally managed to (re)launch this blog. (I started doing other new things, but those aren't relevant now, or I won't share with the world.)

So here go my first weeknotes for week 1, 2022 (plus a few more days, for context):

Last night I went to watch Inception. I quite liked it. Before last night, I was feeling a bit sceptical about the film. Is it just me, or so many action/fantasy films from Hollywood lately are remakes of The Matrix, Mission: Impossible or something of the sort? There is so much creativity (or lack thereof) spawning from the trunk of inspiration that goes from The Matrix to Blade Runner, all the way through Dark City and Ghost in the Shell. Bullet-time, martial arts, alternative realities and simulations are cool. Those representations are also rich in suggestive images of urban decay and dark hypertrophied cities. I'm all for that, you know. But aren't we overdoing it? There's a bit of that in Inception, too. Fortunately, in this particular case Christopher Nolan has managed to write a story that is both entertaining and provocative. And the intense soundtrack by Hans Zimmer fits very nicely.

I write about Inception first as an excuse. Truth is that, at the risk of becoming definitely a bore to my family and friends, this post is about Japan and my appetite for Japan. Again. My emotions about Japan are difficult to explain. Even before I visited the country for the first time (and long before I told anyone close to me about this interest) I felt strangely attracted by it. In some sense it is only logical in my case, for I get easily bored with the environment I live in, and in Europe Japan (still) represents one of the most extremely exotic, yet reachable, places in the world. Today it dawned on my that my image of Japan, and Tokyo, isn't but an imagined, personal place that is utterly unattainable. My own particular vision of that part of the world is at risk of becoming a sort of personal “limbo” (in the Inception meaning of the term): an unreality that grows the more sophisticated and tempting the more you indulge in it… and one that can destroy you if you aren't able to tell reality from dreams. Japan is to me a perfect land of material progress, urban development, money, rules and the future. Of course not. I'm lying. I am well aware of the imperfection of anything that exists, by definition. Italy wasn't my panacea eight or nine years ago, London didn't make me happy either, and so far I don't feel as comfortable as I would wish living in Madrid.

At times I find myself on the streets of Madrid, idly watching people talking and walking around me, when suddenly that particular smell I found in some hidden residential area of Kobe hits me out of the blue. There is a little girl skipping happy ten meters from me and I can't help swapping the setting, so now she's in a pier in Yokohama at dusk. There are wild colours in the sky all across the bay and silent old people on bicycles gently pass me by as they ride home. Or maybe it's raining like hell. It doesn't matter, because it's beautiful and different and surprising anyway. Why do I keep on seeing Japan all around, like Dominic Cobb sees his dead wife in every corner? It is also a permanent contradiction for me: I'm pretty sure I could be in Japan by now if I had started working hard on it three or four years ago. I long for it, but I don't seem to be able to commit to it. I'm procrastinating and writing posts like this one instead of directing my efforts towards that goal. That contradiction is the more annoying at times when I'm confronted with alternatives and need to make bold decisions. Did I mention I just became 30? I won't deny the influence of such a symbolic date in this post (it's such an stereotype), but I think there is more than that. That contradiction of mine is another hint telling me that that Japan is not real, is not what I want. As if somewhere very deep I knew that it's just an imagined alternative reality. As if I knew it will be disappointing at the end. Or maybe I'm just scared of trying.

Steve Sanfield is a great haiku master. He lives in the country with Sarah, his beautiful wife, and he writes about the small things which stand for all things. Kyozan Joshu Roshi, who has brought hundreds of monks to a full awakening, addresses the simultaneous expansion and contraction of the cosmos. I go on and on about a noble young woman who unfastened her jeans in the front seat of my jeep and let me touch the source of life because I was so far from it. I've got to tell you, friends, I prefer my stuff to theirs.

— L. Cohen, “Book of Longing”.