A week on Sunday no 42

Swimming (Part 4)

(Part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here)

It has been a year now since Christian and I have taken up the habit of going to the pool Friday night. We once had to miss a week and when I returned to the pool I noticed myself almost embracing the familiarity of the water. That feeling in itself was a reassuring sign of improvement. Although I can’t yet swim and have not graduated to the deep end, there have been milestones worth recording in this self-experiment.

As with the beginning of most projects, I had a lot of enthusiasm. This waned when I felt like my progress plateaued but gradually, the accumulation of practice and exposure lead to increasing comfort in the water. 

I fill an hour in the pool with drills… kicking in streamline position, pulling using a pull buoy, sideways kicking with fins - all while wearing a swimmer’s snorkel; and backstroke and floating and rhythmic breathing in between.

A significant snag in my progression was the fear of being unable to breathe. Fear of water is very common in adults and tackling breathing has been akin to undoing a knot. I started watching videos by Caribe Swim (here). I’ve noticed that when I’ve hit a wall in my progress, I need to find techniques that break things down into even smaller increments. Here’s a recent example. Step 4 of “The Shallow Water Mastery Course” (here) teaches a forward glide, with a head lift to catch a breath. I tried this repeatedly, over weeks. I’d pause to practice breathing exercises and relaxation techniques (here) and still, I could not lift my head to breathe. I realized that lifting my head and breathing was in fact two things. The pressure of having to catch my breath in this movement was preventing me from being able to execute the head lift. Decoupling breath from the movement made it possible, just last Friday - marking the 50th hour in the pool - to glide, holding my breath, then glide and raise my head out of the water, then glide and stop with my feet on the ground to catch my breath. The point was to prove to myself that I could lift my head without having to touch the bottom of the pool. And this felt like the happiest success, because by continuing to practice the movement, I am confident I’ll get to a point where catching a breath will come naturally. 

These small wins, and the growing ease of movement I feel in the water are encouraging signs that this experiment is working, even if very slowly. 

Telephone table / night stand

I found this telephone table on Facebook marketplace and instantly liked the design. I’ve given it a dual purpose in our bedroom as nightstand and as menu planning station… the filing cabinet fits neatly underneath and houses recipe printouts categorized mainly by ingredient. Nearby I have a shelf of cookbooks. Making a “station” for this weekly exercise, complete with its own chair, fills me with content!

Collage

In the spirit of experimentation and making art, this is another batch of little collages… They are for individuals, but also, they are fun, and I lose the sense of time cutting, arranging, and glueing things into place.

In the spirit of this exercise, Brendan Leonard has a video about making art here. What is unique about collage is that I don’t feel pressure to improve. With drawing, I do. With collage, it’s just experimentation. It’s a true hobby!

Cooking and Baking

I made these fruit and nut-filled “crowns” on Thanksgiving as a change from regular bread. They are of the “looks impressive” category of bread. 

Christian brought home such a large butternut squash that not only did I use it for Melissa Clark’s Butternut Squash Pizza, from her cookbook Dinner; I cut up the rest for soup (recipe here) and served a butternut-squash-themed meal. 

Another vegetarian meal we tried this week was Anna Jones’ “Proper Chilli”. I can’t remember how I had access to the recipe from her Substack (here) but The Guardian offers the recipe here. This recipe, like Bolognese, is markedly better on the second day. On the first day, the spices all clamour for attention, and the raucous competition made me second-guess their quantities. On the second day everything calms down a bit. You can enjoy a bowl as if you were a passenger on a train, cupping a bowl in your hands while taking in the scenery outside. 

Finally, I really liked Maggie Hoffman’s podcast episode with Mark Bittman (here). Towards the end, Maggie asks for cookbook recommendations, and Bittman offers a list and concludes “the important thing is that people cook. It’s not really how they cook or what they cook or how they learn how to cook. It’s that they cook.” Maggie asks why and Bittman answers: 

Cooking is just better. I mean, cooking for yourself, cooking for your loved ones, it’s just, it’s better than not. […] Not everybody can cook at home and not everybody has the time or the ingredients. Not everybody even has a kitchen. But for those of us who do and can, I think it’s sort of the first step toward good head and a good life is teaching yourself and your loved ones how to cook and cooking for your loved ones. If you can’t make the time for cooking, first you have to ask if that’s legitimate, I think, if you really don’t have the time for cooking. And if you really don’t have the time for cooking, that is a societal problem that we need to help you figure out how to address. 

At a different spot in the podcast, Bittman says “So much of what there is to cooking is experience.”

To end this… my kids… cleaning up after having made and portioned out a batch of soba noodles with sauce for school lunches…

Enjoying

• Out for lunch with a friend, we discovered one of the best wonton soup spots… it’s Aroma Bistro at 741 St. Mary’s Road, and this picture makes me want to go back for another bowl!

• Enzo being Enzo…

• Sometimes, we just want to watch a rom-com. Love at First Sight made us cry, but it was also a great love story!

• Running errands with the kids… here catching a snack at the many-mirrored KHAB Tapioca near Polo Park!

Walking the dog

Said dog pointing me in the direction he’d like to sniff…

Fall has been mild so far… It’s teasing us with all the pretty scenery…

The display of colour before everything turns white and blue and brown.

Fall teases and says, “wanna collect leaves?”

I say no! I can’t collect leaves! I have no time for a leaf collection! No space!

But fall says, look how sculptural!

And fall says, look! I made a version in pink!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 12/52

Three quotes on writing

There are things that I appreciate being reminded of… I recently opened a commonplace book I had on my desk, to the first page and read the following from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing:

Being a writer is an art of perpetual self-authorization.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorize yourself.
You do that by writing well, by constant discovery.
No one else can authorize you.
No one.
This doesn’t happen overnight. 
It’s as gradual as the improvement in your writing.

I came across this quote by David Foster Wallace, on a page I photocopied from Zadie Smith’s book Changing my Mind (p 257). It feels especially pertinent with the advent of A.I.:

I’ve gotten convinced that there’s something kind of timelessly vital and sacred about good writing. This thing doesn’t have that much to do with talent, even glittering talent… Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one that doesn’t. I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound hip at all… But it seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do - from Carver to Chekhov to Flannery O’Connor, or like the Tolstoy of The death of Ivan Ilych or the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow - is to “give” the reader something. The reader walks away from the real art heavier than she came into it. Fuller. All the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers. […] Maybe it’s as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven.

(The interview can be found here.)

And finally, a little quote from Brenda Ueland:

I have a kind of mystical notion. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. It is so in writing. You are taught in school to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull things on paper too - you can tear them up afterward - for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively. So it is with people who have not been listened to in the right way - with affection and a kind of jolly excitement. Their creative fountain has been blocked. Only superficial talk comes out - what is prissy or gushing or merely nervous. No one has called out of them, by wonderful listening, what is true and alive.

Cooking

This week, we tried Priya Krishna’s “Kaddu” (Sweet and Sour Butternut Squash) and I made a loaf of bread to go along with the meal. Did you know that butternut squash produces a resin-like liquid that can coat your skin almost as permanently? I had no idea until I noticed my left-hand index looking shiny and feeling numb. I wonder if the recipe should not have come with a warning!

Enjoying

1. “Even a moment’s grown-up reflection reveals a very obvious, pretty dull truth to us: most people in the past were not less morally enlightened than us. They were the same — they just lived in a different world, with different structures of oppression.” From an article by Paul Sagar. 

2. Playing Pictionary. I found a first edition at a thrift store last fall and it’s become one of our go-to games when family is visiting. Age doesn’t matter, and we’re either laughing because competition reveals that one of our kids draws something that looks exactly like a carry-on, while yours looks like a lumpy toaster popped a lumpy slice of bread; or else we’re amazed with the other one’s execution of “Middle East”. Rather than using paper, we take a large piece of dry-erase board and set it down on the dining room table and use it from one game to the next.

3. The Thinking Game. I’m familiar with many of the events that form the chronology of this documentary, but seeing them presented as they are here was more satisfying than I expected.  

4. I liked watching how Brook Cormier took a travel experience and made it into a meaningful piece of art for her husband and their home.  

5. I appreciated how The Ezra Klein Show recently interviewed a person who could provide some context for the war in Iran in the person of Ali Vaez.

6. I’m in a season of decluttering, making my way through an accumulation of paper and the organization of an office space. Coincidentally, my mother-in-law is downsizing. Freeing up space and putting things in order is a thing I put off, even though I often enjoy doing it. Learning that Margareta Magnusson of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning died earlier this week made me smile to think that her practical ideas live on… “And people should start early. If your things are in order, then you don’t have to waste time looking for them.” (In my experience, nothing takes longer than paper-related clutter…)

7. I remember first coming across the recommendation for If You Want To Write so many years ago that when I think back to it, the internet by which it was recommended had a different flavour than it does today. Had I thought to google the author’s name to tether the questions she raised in my mind? Was the search unfruitful? Today, I googled Brenda Ueland and came across this article by Alice Kaplan in The American Scholar, (published September 1, 2007) and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Kaplan gives this criticism of Ueland’s writing: “Her biography of Clara (published posthumously under the title O Clouds, Unfold!), a sentimental series of sketches written in the first person, put together with whatever materials came to hand, shows Ueland’s strengths and her failings as a writer. She was headstrong, charming, disorganized, and enthusiastic, without much distance from her own feelings.”  

Postcards

The weather was cold, then windy. There was a snowstorm, then melt. What is enchanting is hearing the songbirds, feeling the glare of a bright sun, and seeing blue skies and impeccably white snow from a fresh snowfall. I can’t quite capture it, but here is a blue sky!

Also… the geese are back! (Since last week!)

Happy Sunday!