This is the permanent version of a "Now" update from 2023-03-21:

You can see my About Me page for general information about me and below for what’s going on now.1

  • ⌛️ Career Sabbatical: I’ve been enjoying some time off from my professional life since October 2022. You can read more about it on my Sabbatical page.

  • 🧘🏼‍♂️ Exercise: Right now I’m on a pretty good schedule of doing yoga 4-5 times a week, including a Yin class which I’ve really enjoyed. My upstairs neighbor also put a rowing machine in the basement over the holidays, and I’ve started to use it for about 30 minutes each morning. Between these two, I’ve seen a marked decrease in back pain, increase in upper body strength, and improvement in balance during yoga which is pretty great!

  • 📚 Reading: I’m currently reading The Illiad. I somehow graduated with a B.A. in Classics without having read it (🤷🏼‍♂️)️, which I think was largely due to my 8th grade teacher saying it wasn’t really worth it. I’ve been alternating between enjoying finally getting to read an important part of Western Literature and being horrified with the casual violence of all kinds.

  • 👨🏼‍🍳 Cooking: We’ve been trying out recipes from Melissa Clark’s Dinner in One, which we received back in September. Fun fact: It was supposed to arrive in March 2022, but the container it was on fell to the bottom of the ocean on its way from East Asia.

  • 🎮 Video Gaming: After sinking a bunch of time into Elden Ring, I realized that it was bleak and gross and I just wasn’t enjoying it. Instead, I made a donation to Trans Lifeline and started on Hogwarts Legacy. I really enjoyed Harry Potter while growing up, so it’s been fun to explore the universe in game format. It’s also been weird and unsettling to revisit parts of the universe now that I’m an adult. For example, seeing the protagonists benefiting from the house elves that they’ve enslaved with little to no critical commentary on this relationship is pretty awful. Likewise, there’s some narrative about some groups of characters being irredeemable and so deserving of death and that doesn’t sit well with me either.

  • 🎲 Board Gaming: I haven’t played any recently! Though – I did get a copy of Love Letter: Princess Princess Ever After, which I’ve only played once and would love to play some more. It’s very cute. I’m so happy that queer stuff like this is readily available now.

  • 🪵 Woodworking: I took a woodworking class through the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and learned how to use a tablesaw, jointer, planer, and router and some hand tools. While I didn’t finish the Shaker Hallway table I started on, I did learn a lot along the way, both about woodworking and about my default approach to dealing with uncertainty. I’ll be taking the class again in the Spring so that I can finish it.

Footnotes

  1. Thanks to Jeramiah Lee for the inspiration of the Now page, which was an idea from Derek Sivers


Permalink: 2023-03-21
You can check out an archive of my "Now" updates in the Now Archive.