#9 - A Sentimental Feeling
Come on, Jobbo; Balcony Scene; A Battle of Sentiments
Hello, my friends,
This newsletter is almost two months old and I won’t pretend like I haven’t considered it’s purpose — what am I even doing here? I told a friend this week that it’s like talking to me for five or six minutes every Friday morning while starting your coffee, and then spending the next five minutes reflecting on our conversation while you finish it. Tea is fine, too!
Some of HMF’s purposes that have occurred to me over the last while have been that it's a public journal, a surrogate memory, a place to explore my thoughts in short expository bursts. There are other possible ways to describe what I’d like to achieve, but probably truest of all, is that this is a moment and place to literally talk to my friends. There is a feeling of contentment and well-being, maybe akin to mettā meditation, in spending an hour or two every week focused on a group of people I like. Hopefully, some of that loving-kindness I conjure in myself when I’m writing passes through the pixels and into you.
Come on, Jobbo
Earlier this week I interviewed for a job. It’s not exactly awkward to mention it in public since it’s for an internal transfer and to a position that combines areas in which I have a sustained interest. The main hesitancy I have in bringing it up is the mild embarrassment I’d feel if I found out in a few weeks that someone else was selected, a real possibility with the strong candidate pool within LA County Library. But it’s been on my mind so I wanted to release it into this confined space so it would stop bouncing around inside my head.
The irony is that for the past few years I’ve been running a workforce development program for the library called Work Ready for which I’ve been producing and hosting near-weekly live virtual events on all aspects of job searching and beyond. After listening and presenting on the subject for so long I feel something like an expert, or, at the very least, an enthusiast. And yet, for all that knowledge, interviews have become no easier! My problem is that I’m a talker; I get asked questions and I’m off, particularly if the topic is also an interest…Ask about my experience with customer service? That’s like 20 years worth of material. It's a real pickle!
The challenge, I suspect, is that an interview is such an unnatural setup. It’s like a game where you only advance if you correctly guess what the other players are thinking based only on a vague job description. My master strategy is to cast a very wide net; so if it’s a situational question I’ll ramble about some general ideas concerning these kind of situations to show them I’m familiar with literally all of the possible scenarios, then I’ll provide a Talmudic analysis on a story of having actually been in that situation starting with what I had for dinner the night before and ending with a detailed discussion of the circumstances under which Jews can light candles on a Saturday. Soon we reach question 4 of 10 and there’s only seven minutes left in the interview. And don't even get me started on multi-part questions!
Balcony Scene
Some people claim to be unconcerned by aesthetics. I’d just as well be one of them, but it’s impossible — beauty matters to me! Last weekend, I went to Ikea and purchased some RUNNEN tiles for our balcony and in a matter of an hour it went from a drab gray wasteland to an inviting woodsy oasis!
A Battle of Sentiments
This past Wednesday evening was my final class at Orangetheory Fitness and I’d like to pay tribute to this mix of cross-fit and High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) session that somehow reversed my lifelong aversion to working out. I say somehow, but I do have a sense of what happened, simply put: My disdain at the drudgery of exercise jumped switched lanes into my admiration for struggle. As some put it, “I embraced the suck.”
At Orangetheory, the workouts were different in every class which added variety, and they moved fast enough that my mind didn’t have time to wander. I could show up and shut my brain down for an hour, only booting up to encourage myself to get the splats! Over time, I began to look forward to that moment where I had to choose: Slow down or stay the course. Making the latter decision made me feel good even if my body was sore afterward. Really, it’s that the satisfaction I got both logically and emotionally from the process of pushing myself in every class became stronger than my boredom; I felt proud that I lifted a little heavier than last time and kept running even when I felt like giving up.
So then why quit? Well, it’s not Orangetheory’s fault. It's that we got a family membership to a YMCA with a nice gym and, get this, two hours of free childcare! Going there feels like visiting a resort! I drop the kids off to play and go work out on a Saturday mornings. A year ago I would have said no way, but now I say yes, please! Thanks, Orangetheory!
