On this day 15 years ago. A park across the river with a wide assortment of waterfowl. We were testing our duck identification skills, ah, the enthusiasm of new bird watchers…
It is wet and cold but above freezing. We had sleet on New Year’s Day. I didn’t go out at all. Today I am going to see if I can motivate myself to go to the gym. Maybe with the weather so uninviting there will be fewer folks working on their intentions, resolutions, determinations. I wonder too with the weight loss drugs if fewer people will be pushing themselves at the gym overall this year.
Mrs. Sherlock is contemplating taking them but there is the problem of the extra skin. She is 77 and has clotting issues so surgery is not a great idea. We talked about taking a low dose so she can lose a modest amount of weight to help with her heart but not be a burden. She has a cold and is exhausted. I am encouraging her to rest but I know it is challenging after a stint of intense all-consuming care giving.
It took a long time to understand that for me in terms of weight loss how much I worked out didn’t matter. It is good for so many other things, hello heart of mine, but not taking the pounds off. It means I am exercising less but more strategically.
And I feel self-conscious about even writing here about something as pedestrian as fitness goals at the New Year with the mad man and his (greedy drunk with power and fueled with a sense of totally misplaced victimhood seriously damaged) booster club bombs a foreign country and kidnaps its leadership. What the heck?
People I know are hanging onto the feel-good vibes of the inauguration of the new mayor of New York and yeah, I am on board with that but this… ugh.
So far so good with the bathroom leak. At this point things are drying. I might try to speed that along. I do have a dehumidifier in there anyway. It is a relief (yay word for the year) to have this addressed.
During the holidays when my regular favorite podcasts are either off or cross posting other podcasts I am not interested in, I have been immersed in literature and philosophy. Part of this is inspired by the “Coffeeshop Philosophy” discussions I have been having and part by the conversations that spring up around the poems I read to my morning class. I splurged on a subscription to “Close Readings” which is a podcast series by the London Review of Books on History, Philosophy and Literature and sometimes all of the above.
There is one I listened to in the Philosophy track about Virginia Woolf’s book To the Lighthouse, which I read in my 20’s. It was fascinating and they mentioned the allegory of Plato’s Cave. I asked the guys about that and got a take on it and then when we had Walt’s special dialogue group completely out of the blue someone else brought up Plato’s Cave to start the conversation.
And yesterday after I relistened to the episode on Virginia Woolf (it was even better the second time as well as having those plummy British accents us Americans love so much) I was listening to another podcast about teaching in the world of AI and the three guys there were talking about Plato’s Cave. The cave beneath the cave.
It is kind of like taking up birdwatching. All of a sudden you realize amazing, weird and truly wonderful birds are all around you.
Apparently, we are living in Plato’s Cave.
Just to reinforce that, on New Year’s Day I remembered to pull a tarot card for the year and I had done a little reading a few weeks ago and left “The High Priestess” card on top of the deck face up and when I went to grab the deck to pull the card I said, oh, that would be a nice card for the year and then put it back shuffled the cards wandered around shuffling them thinking about what I want to manifest and experience this next year and…
I pulled “The High Priestess”.
Ha.
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