This week as it was to me
(I missed another weekend, gotta get this locked in a little!)
This was a pretty fun but hectic week. I spent a long weekend down in London, mainly to pack up all the belongings that have been squatting my mum’s house since… well since forever for some of it, but certainly a ton of stuff I brought over after selling my flat in 2010. Now it’s in here:
I also hung out with friends and took a fun clown course, and had an outstanding pistachio gluten-free vegan cupcake (I know). No pics, but it did happen.
Building
Turned out this book required a crazy tight turnaround on the edits – you think that this could have been mentioned up-front, but no. So I have been trying to get that done – and an introduction for the book, also unmentioned until this week. So this has all had to be smuggled in amongst all my scheduled and deferred tasks, belongings-moving, etc.
I got some headshots done, which will be handy in all sorts of ways. Here’s one I like:
Also still grappling with identity-check hassles for the new job. With the train journey to the interview, overseas postage, German good conduct check cost and notary fee, it’s the most expensive job I’ve ever gotten.
Art and improv
Took a top-notch class with Deanna Fleysher, performing at the London Clown Festival as Butt Kapinski. I have done a bunch of clown stuff and I think she comes out as one of my favourite teachers: firm and no-nonsense, but keeps things light and rolls it forward. She was all about working from the body, mainly the torso and especially those “personal muscles”. As should be in any good clown workshop, I laughed a lot and at times made others laugh a lot. The purpose of the class is to put clown elements into improv, which is definitely a journey I’m already on and put some cool stuff in my toolbox.
Related: We did another Dreaming show, this time at the London Hoopla Saturday night show, and did a really fun set, although we were missing Alice, and Joe too. And got together in a pickup team at DDG on Monday, one of my favourite laid-back places to play.
Giving
This is just a note to myself that I can’t think of anything generous I have done this week. I’ve been affable but that’s really a cousin of being passive.
Recommendations
Just started watching The Expanse, which I’m late to the party for but what the hey. Really good. And The City and the City too, which is a great adaptation. Maybe I said that already…
Branches outward
I’ve been re-reading stuff recently:
Exiting the Vampire Castle; I read this ages back and didn’t clock it was Mark Fisher, nor did I know that he died. (Related: Understanding Victimhood Culture)
The Black Truths of Jordan Peterson: – one of the better critiques. (My take btw is that he’s too interesting to ignore, wrong on some issues, good on others, certainly doing powerful work in mass therapy. I like him least on politics. The weird non-materialist stuff he says that disqualifies him in most people’s eyes? That’s the stuff I come back for.)
The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review. Paywalled but I’ll be covering this in the coming weeks.
Quote
This is pertinent to me this week 😐
The more we demand of ourselves, or the more our task at any given time demands of us, the more dependent we are on meditation as a wellspring of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul. And – I could if you wished give you quite a few more examples of this – the more intensively a task requires our energies, arounsing and exalting us at one time, tiring and depressing us at another, the more easily we may come to neglect this wellspring, just as when we are carried away by intellectual work we easily forget to attend to the body.
The really great men in the history of the world have all either known how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all failed and were defeated in the end because their task ior their ambitious dream seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective. Well, you know all this; it’s taught during the first exercises, of course. But it is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realises only after having gone astray.
The Glass Bead Game