Jose's Blog

For many, today was the first day of spring. I spent a better part of the afternoon strolling around the Village and the NYU campus, retracing my steps from the college days.

My brain romanticizes those days in college with fondness and nostalgia, even though a part of me knows I would not enjoy reliving my experience as a struggling college student working 3 part-time campus jobs, perpetually worried about budgeting every dollar and wondering if I would be able to make it to the next semester.

I suppose nostalgia works its way through the remembering self, regardless of what the experiencing self encoded from reality. This may explain why veterans look back at those grueling days in combat with a smile, despite all the misery and the pain of the moment. I wonder if this overwriting mechanism has anything to do with Stockholm’s Syndrome.

On the flip side, this mechanism could be leveraged for passing the marshmallow test. You can find reassurance that in pursuing hard and painful sacrifices, you may very well see those very sacrifices with fondness retrospectively. A win win.

Today I attended my first meet with Masters Swimmers. It was quite an experience. Our team won the championship, and I managed to shorten my times for several seconds on all events I participated in: 50 fly, 100 IM, and 100 free. I also participated in 2 relays with my teammates.

That good performance was despite several obstacles: 2 weeks of missed practice during tapering due to a respiratory infection, poor sleep quality the night before, and the impulse to eat a slice of pizza in the middle of the meet.

We won, and I reached my personal goals, and yet I learned several lessons. Here are my takeaways:

• You go farther together with friends. Swimming is not a solitary sport. It teaches you to rely on other people, and to build trust with them.
• Two is one, one is zero. Bring a second pair of speedos, goggles, and towel.
• Mobility and flexibility beat muscle hypertrophy. Vanity muscles will not get you swim faster. In fact, they may become an obstacle since too much muscular volume will reduce your buoyancy. Aim for muscle power and fiber flexibility.
• The pizza is for after the meet.
  Fats and slow-digesting carbs will slow you down when consumed in between events. You need to induce glycolysis in your metabolic system to support those explosive turns and kicks.
• Choose your gear wisely. I shaved my entire body and wore a speedo. It would have been better to swim with jammers and a customized swim cap that represent the team.

Today was a really good day.

I am getting hyped for Saturday. I will be swimming at the annual Delaware Valley Local Masters Swimming Championship. We will be driving to a high school pool at Fort Washington, Pennsylvania –a 40 minute drive from Center City. It will be my first master’s swimming meet. I have signed up for the 100 SCY IM, 100 SCY Free, and the 50 SCY Fly events, and the relays. This is also the first time I have partially conditioned my body to tapering, which involves fine-tuning my training, sleep, and diet in the days leading up to the meet.

It feels good to be part of the group of swimmers, to join their ranks, to learn about their habits, and to breathe the competitive air. This will be a good weekend.

Yesterday evening, after swim practice, I spent about an hour watching attentively a portion of a 3-hour long animation on the sinking of the Titanic. The documentary depicted several birds-eye view of the ship, with snippets of statements from survivors, helping create a cohesive narrative that complemented nicely the animated walkthroughs. I was beyond impressed by the level of detail and accuracy, from the accurate display of constellations in the Atlantic sky to the carving of the acanthus leaves from the column capitals at the Grand Staircase. The slow pacing of the video, a result from following the timeline of that night, introduced a degree of eerily calmness. It was almost like a visual meditation.

In that meditation, I started to daydream about building a large scale model equipped with LED lights and intricate 3D printed furniture —a dream I longed when I was a kid. I started browsing for scale model kits on eBay and community posts on Reddit about building scale models. All I was doing was chasing those childhood moments of creative building. I was chasing a state of mind that psychologysts now call “being in the zone”, where the ego vanishes into a state of deep immersion with your craft, where you find yourself nurturing a childlike wonder and unbounded creativity.

I suppose genius in adulthood is nothing but rescuing those moments of childlike wonder and nurturing an unbounded creativity —all free from the worry of being judged.

Last night I ventured into Brooklyn to go clubbing at Basement. There was a tent set up at the top of the ramp for the bouncers to triage who could get in. The line for people without ticket was deceptively short: only 20 or so individuals waiting underneath a tent. I was surprised how the line for people with a ticket, even though it ran all the way to the sidewalk, was moving fast. The ratio of access between people with ticket and without ticket must have been 20 or 30:1. I ended up standing in line for almost 2 hours. The sunk cost fallacy really sinked in that night.

During that 2 hour sunk-cost period, I tried to distract myself by catching up on some Substack posts by the poet David Whyte. One of them, Burnout, really resonated with me. This paragraph characterizes a state of mind I am usually in after a typical workday:

The exhaustion of burnout always recalls a previously felt internal fire, one from which our unquenchable energies once emerged. Burnout denotes a kind of amnesia: not only in the forgetting of our very personal priorities but the inability to locate a source inside us that previously seemed to run through all the seasons of our life.

Another passage that resonates with me:

Burnout is diagnosed by exhaustion, often caused by calling on energies in work or family life, that are not native to my way of being: the necessity of having had to use my will to keep going hour after hour, day after day; of assuming goals that actually belong to other people and which I have stolen to my detriment.

That last part about keeping going hour after hour, day after day working for other people’s goals nails it. There is something therapeutic about being able to describe an emotion, to give it contours, color, and relief. It helps in managing it, and eventually change it.

Today I woke up to a harrowing headline when I reached my phone. I could not grasp the magnitude or the implications of this event. My first instinct was to downsize, to minimize, to contextualize, to rationalize, to adapt.

An unauthorized foreign war will justify a future state of exception at homd. It will change the context of the upcoming elections. It will accelerate the corrosion of institutions that are supposed to provide checks and balances. It will put a nail on the coffin on the world order that emerged after the Second Eorld War.

I fear for the future of sovereignty and national self-determination.

Today I watched an episode of Steven Spielberg’s 6-episode Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero, a documentary on the rebuilding effort of the World Trade Center. Each episode centers on a component of the new 16-acre site. It brought me back memories when I first saw it as a high-school kid and was fascinated by the cool 3D visualizations that dbox rendered. In rewatching the episode, I felt a passion for building that I have not felt in a while. I reconnected with that teenage dream of becoming an architect of skyscrapers. This is what led me in a path of applying to colleges in the United States, and my drive to live in New York City.

I have been sick for the last 10 days with a viral respiratory infection that children usually get. These would have been very miserable days if not for treating myself with Vietnamese soups. There is something so warm, comforting and soothing from enjoying hot chicken broth. Pho is such a nutritious meal, especially if you add those veggies and lime that are given on the side. I feel so much better after having a chicken pho. It is one of those meals that make you pause, concentrate on nurturing your body, and feel yourself in the moment. I can now understand the phrase “chicken soup for the soul.”

I have been thinking about how different lecturers leave an impression in my mind when they choose not to use slides. The eye contact, the heightened awareness of communication with our bodies, and the increased engagement it is asked of us in this format.

Timothy Snyder reflected about this in his book On Freedom:

I never use visuals, and people report that, to their own astonishment, they actually remember what I have said from year to year. i once had the rare pleasure, at Davos, of taking part in an event with two other historians, both of whom shared my attitude and refused to use slides and screens. The outcome was a rapt audience. In boardrooms as well as classrooms, elite and less so, machines stupefy. When the lights dim and the first slide goes up, we relax into zombified calm, knowing that nothing lively is expected of us.

I wonder if the future of instruction belongs to those who rely less and less on technology.

The Chinese-American freestyle skier Eileen Gu is a freak of a human being. The 24-year old reminds me of what Sherlock Holmes would sound like if he were a woman. Eileen is a prodigy: a scientist, model, politician, student, and athlete.

In a recent interview she was asked, “can you take us into your brain?” Eileen revealed that she is a very introspective woman. She journals. She has an analytical lens to her own thinking, breaking down her own thought process–like an engineer who breaks down a machine and tries to put all the components back together to really understand its inner mechanics. “You can control how you think, and therefore you can become whoever you want.”

Eileen approaches her brain like a scientist: experimenting with it. She enjoys monitoring every thought, tinkering with her thinking patterns, and leveraging neuroplasticity to improve herself. She does all this optimization so she can become the younger person of herself would be proud of.

Now that is powerful.