last day of november

 25 more posts to reach 300 in 2025.

We'll be analyzing a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre, he allegedly said once

“That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.”

What's ol JP up to here? Draining one's own self dry? So like applying yourself, right? Giving all your time and energy and attention to something. Putting your all into an endeavor until there's nothing left. Everyone's felt that, right? Or a time you tried harder than you thought you could? Maybe you had a liminal experience and things you used to think didn't matter as much. Your priorities changed in a moment of clarity. 

But then what's he saying in the second half "without the sense of thirst." So to exist is not just to give your all but to be so caught up in it that you wouldn't bother with a biological need. Normally, in a survival mindset or going about your regular life, you have all these checks and regulators on the machine of your body. But to really exist, to really do the thing, you have to have a purpose greater than that. It's like a test to be overcome. You can't just give yourself over to anything willy-nilly. It's got to move you in a way that is greater than survival. You're not just a chain in a biological process you're a thing that exists and is doing something. 

That's all I got. 

If you want to exist I suggest you write a letter to your past self and cut out the individual letters and wait for it to rain and stomp around in the slush until you make a big mud puddle and scatter the letters in the mud and watch them swirl and wilt and disappear into the slushed earth and think I am the mashing maker of muck much mud mostly a morass of mottled missives. And then take off heading NORTH as fast as you can

did you know moths have evolved to use ultrasonic clicks to disrupt the echolocation of bats hunting them?

does anyone want to get into an evolutionary arms race with me where we both push each other to the extreme?

I hit 230lbs for back squat!

And then I loaded up 235 and failed it! But was somewhat close!

The road to 300 rolls on! There's a decent chance I get it in 2026. 

I hate the game Simon Says

 what is Simon Says trying to prove?

That if you speak really quickly and in a way that is intended to confuse you will confuse people? The winner is the person who is best able to overcome the actions of a person with ill intent? A moral travesty of a game.

social media doesn't make any sense because why would you want to seem better than you are?

that's not right. there's no upside to that.

in as many things as possible be better than you seem.

be stronger than you look. be smarter than you look. have more money than you look. I feel like nature figured this out a long time ago. 

but then you'd say, "well what about animals that look like predators and what about looking scarier than you are?"

well you got me there but that's not going to make you any friends is it?! yeah. making friends is important. and a good way to make friends is to utilize surprise competence. so there. 

I was scrolling around on wplace and I found the Mississippi River and it was yellow and I thought

 'No. No surely they haven't. They couldn't have."

Sure enough. They did. They made the whole Mississippi river pee-pee colored. Except one part near Quincy and Hannibal where they made it poo poo.

 today I was coaching at the climbing gym and my sister was there and the guy I coached with said, yeah I knew you guys were siblings because earlier I saw her do the same little goofy run on the mats that you do

my impression of a guy who has recently been promoted and now has people working under him AND has never been absolutely sure what people are saying when they say the phrase "nip this in the bud"

 

"Well we're gonna have to, uh, ʟɪᴄᴋ ᴛʜɪs ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴜᴛᴛ"

if you go to the Galapagos Islands in wplace it's nothing but Snoopy.

 and I think that's great.

on the eve of getting sick

a lot of sickness has been going around the gym and I held it off longer than most but a few hours ago I could tell from some scratchiness in my throat that it has finally taken hold of me.

I'd like to take this time to reflect on the time I spent healthy. It was a time I will remember fondly. Before I slip into the bowels of unwellness it would be appropriate to recount some of the great things I could do with my fit and able body. No longer though. Now that I have been ravaged by communicable disease.

I could throw planes into the sky. When airplanes wouldn't start right they would just have me throw them up into the clowns. It was easy for me. What with me not being sick at all.

I could smell blood in water from over 200 miles away. Back when my nose was congested it could smell every smell smell-able and I would compete with sharks in a Who Can Smell a Wounded Whale the Fastest Competition.

I could print in color. Just upload a jpg or a PNG or pdf into my consciousness and I could recreate it with near perfect accuracy. Not anymore though. My white blood cells have sequestered my brain to fight the scourge that seeks to destroy me from the inside out.

I once picked up everything. Very briefly. And a lot of things were just strapped to my back. But I did it.

Teeth like iron. And bones like iron. And hair like iron. And lungs like iron. And fingernails like iron. And freckles like iron. People used to say that iron was made of me. 

But not anymore. Now I am a frail human. A shadow of what I once was.

And I now I am truly in the animal soup of time.

 sometimes in coaching you see someone unlock potential that neither of you ever imagined. and then sometimes in coaching you're sitting on the mats with someone who is biting at the singular fake nail left on their hand until they accidentally inhale some of the nail glue and start coughing and spitting and then they get up, go over to the wall, pick a wedgie in front of everyone, give one of the worst goes on a climb you've ever seen and say, "no way that's not possible."

how I thought about running 10 years ago and now

 10 years ago (but really more like 11 years ago) I was in school to become an English teacher and I wrote this post on here about how English in classrooms was being taught in this very abstract, atomized, fundamental sort of way that I thought took all the joy and interest out of it. There was little to no attention given to words and phrases and ideas that really move people and inspire them and make them think and feel. Instead it was all zoomed in to the point where it was hard to imagine that any of it would add up to anything beautiful or worthwhile. The point of speech and language isn't to follow the rules. The point is to communicate. To share the human experience. And in my opinion at no point do you really need to know what a predicate is to do that. There are lots of things that anyone that speaks intuitively understands and by trying to catalog and dissect we've created confusion and frustration out of understanding. 

Anyway, at the time I likened it to trying to teach someone how to run with the idea of "perfect form". If all you cared about was perfect form it's hard to imagine that you'd ever fall in love with the feeling of movement and actually doing the thing. Running has always meant a lot to me and it's partially because it's a thing I did on my own that I explored and grew with.

All that to say that it's funny to me now that I'm currently taking video of myself and doing jumps and bounds and drills in a parking lot and lifting and not actually doing much running at all to try to improve my form and learn how to sprint "properly". Or to get faster. Is a better way to say it. 

But I'd argue that's the right order to do it in. Maybe not for absolute performance but at least for my enjoyment of it. For it to feel meaningful to me. I've gone out and done adventures and had the highs and the lows and run miles year round and at all hours of the day and night and gone on that physical and spiritual journey and now I want to step back and really focus on all the minutiae of it. To learn how to position my hips and knees and ankles to be springy and powerful. That stuff is boring, or at least a different kind of boring, and I'm ready to be boring. 

My opinion about teaching English hasn't changed at all though. Grammar is stupid. Pedantic. 

clean things critter mode

 sometimes when I cook beans the bean guts get stuck to the pan and I soak the pan but then I get bored and want to clean the pan anyway so I take my fingernails and just dig into the bean guts while the water runs and I call it 'cleaning critter mode' cuz I feel like a lil squirrel or critter getting in there

all-time great day of climbing: keep showing up!

 this weekend I went on a really good walk and was partially lamenting the fact that I felt like I hadn't made much progress lately. And then outta nowhere had a great day today!

A mini-goal of mine for the past few months has been trying to pull as hard with 3 fingers as I can with 4 fingers. Some people can pull harder with 3 fingers than they can with 4 but when I started I was about half as strong. For the past few months or so I've been stuck at around 70 to 75 lbs and today it moved easy. I ended up pulling 105 lbs with each hand. About a 50% increase in one day. CRAZY! And then I set an all-time best with my left hand. And then I sent my moonboard project. And then I got a weighted pull-up PR.

One must imagine that occasionally Sisyphus reaches a plateau and gets to turn around and admire how far he's come before resuming the pushing.

the word 'petty' comes from the French 'petit' meaning small

the word 'pet' comes from the Gaelic 'peata' meaning tame animal

so just know that when you say

give my little petty pet a petty pet on its petty pet head

that's two different etymologies. 

when I started this blog I was really into writing words that turned up zero Google results. I have also since archived a lot of those posts so they probably still don't turn up any results. I have also forgotten the words. 

If you want to experience what this is like for yourself, the next time you're at the beach pick up a handful of sand and say, "I bet no one has thrown this exact handful of sand before!" and throw it into the ocean and think to yourself, "yeah. I did something today."

a lot of people have been wondering

 Andy. We are about one week into November and your blog will sit at 260 posts for this year. You are on pace to break the 272 posts from 2017. Will you make a push for 300 posts?

I have not posted more than 300 times since 2016, the only year it's ever been done. And this is what I had to say on this day, November 9th in 2016:

These are sections of comics from November 10th, 2016. I didn't actually post anything on November 9th.

Dang. I really don't make em like that no more.

Anyway, the other day I saw this lady on Instagram and she was talking to this guy and she was like

Never say hi how are you doing to someone or say what's new with you because that bores people and causes them to engage in social scripts and that limits the interactions you can have with people and the reason why extroverts live so much longer is they have engaging meaningful conversations and that releases dopamine and dopamine is involved with so many things but it's mainly an energy molecule because it gives you motivation and so that's why you should never ask someone "how are you"

And then I stopped and went to the account and blocked it. 

Being hopped up on stimulants and saying a lot of words doesn't make you an interesting person or good at talking to people.

thoughts on YouTube commercials

 I'm sure this has already been said but this happened to me just now and I thought about it.

You know how with the TV they cut to commercial at a moment of anticipation? But they set you up for it. They create a moment of tension and kind of linger on it. Maybe also had in a musical cue or sting or something. There's care and work and attention that goes into raising your interest and then gracefully leaving for ads. 

YouTube don't do none of that. But it still knows when you've gotten to the point you really care about. It's not just random. It knows, somehow, 'hey this is the good part' and then it just rips you away from it to launch into an annoying ad. It shocks you. The immediacy of the cut. In a way, a very minor way and not to undermine the use of the word, that is cruel, I think. At the very least cold and uncaring. 

AH WE'VE GOT YOUR ATTENTION OK GREAT WATCH THIS AD IDIOT!!!

I think you owe the audience a certain amount of respect if they're giving you their attention.

Anyway check the comments to see what crab thinks.

He'll probably be sitting on a pile of money bags with a top hat and a monocle and a cigar and say, "Pay for premium, peasant hahaha" and then stick the cigar out in my eye.

Ha. classic crab antics.

today I voted and outside the polls these nice people stopped me and asked if I would be willing to fill out a survey

 And I was in a good mood that I had done my civic duty so I said yes and one of the questions in the survey was,

"How qualified do you think you would be to hold public office?"

And then it gave like Very Qualified, Somewhat Qualified, Not all qualified, stuff like that.

And, you know, I thought about it, and put Somewhat Qualified.

Do I have the know-how to be a politician? No. But I have principles. And Nietzsche said "He who has a why to live for can bear any how."

I went in wplace and put HOME in a heart near where I grew up and a heart and Maw Maw by Maw Maw's house.

going on and on about who knows what

 I think a big issue people have, and this is nothing groundbreaking or new, is that there's a disconnect between how they perceive themselves as the self behind their own eyeballs and how they are perceived by others. Well, duh, Andy wow so astute. But I'll give you this example because last week there was a piece of paper in the gym that said someone had the record for the longest time kneeling on a yoga ball and I wondered if I could beat it and I did and now maybe I'm the yoga ball guy. The kneeling yoga ball guy. Oh at character creation he must have put in all his points for balancing kneeling on a yoga ball, that's where it all must have went. 

And no. I didn't do that. I never set out to be the yoga ball guy. If you can believe it. You probably can't. Surely, you think, he's lying to try and make his accomplishment seem even more impressive. Surely he trained and trained to reach the mountain top and when he got there he realized it was the top of Mt. Stupid and he cursed the fact that from the bottom it seemed so beautiful and from the top it seemed so needless and empty. 

A man goes to a doctor and says, "Doctor! I am so depressed! Nothing brings me joy. I haven't laughed or smiled in weeks. I can't go on. You must help me." Doctor says, "Solution is simple. Kneeling on yoga ball record is easy to break. Go to gym and break the record." Man says, "But Doc! I am the man kneeling on the yoga ball!" Everyone laugh.

The second worst thing you can be is the guy with the kneeling yoga ball record. The worst thing you can be is the guy without the kneeling yoga ball record.

I like to imagine that if I was an ant that when I was in ant heaven before I was born and given my deployment instructions

side note: in Ant Heaven there's kind of a reverse pearly gates situation going on where the last thing you do as you're leaving is talking with Ant St. Peter and he's telling you what you're going to do when you get to the colony

I was given my ant instructions and they were like 'worker ant. collect food. bite enemies. don't balance on anything.' but then I got to Earth and knelt on the ant equivalent of a yoga ball and was the best at it and back in Ant Heaven they were like "noooooooooo!" and it's that age-old paradox of how can ants have free will if the ant god is all-knowing and all-powerful

Here's what I think. Here's what I really think. A lot of life, most of it, is being handed a metaphysical egg and the question is: how do you hold it? And the answer is: hold it gently.