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The Devil’s Music

Tadhg — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 06:48:24 +0000

I’ve been listening to Uptime/Downtime a lot again. Uptime is the half of it that I prefer, and I urge you to listen to it if you haven’t already. At the end of “Deeper Sand” and the start of “MKY Da HVN” is a sample of what sounds like a Christian evangelist. He mentions the line “the music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back”—which is a backmasked line from Electric Light Orchestra’s “Fire on High”.

The rest of the sample from Uptime wasn’t there, however, and it didn’t sound the same as the “Fire on High” sample reversed, so I wondered where it came from. The “Fire on High” backmasked sample is relatively well known, and is apparently in there as a swipe at Christan evangelists who had earlier claimed that Electric Light Orchestra’s song “Eldorado” contained backmasked Satanic messages.

This makes it all the more amusing that the sampled evangelist in Uptime, Michael Mills, uses this as an example of hidden Satanic messages in rock music during a 1981 radio show. The Introduction and Electric Light Orchestra pieces are definitely worth listening to; the rest is dependent on how much of it you can tolerate. It’s also scary in that there are probably a lot of people out there who believed it then, and still believe it now, and have made various cultural and education decisions accordingly.

Uptime uses two samples spliced together; the “time is reversible” portion is the second half and comes from the segment on Electric Light Orchestra, but I haven’t found the sections that “there’s no difference between a record like this and a satanic bible” or “because of the beat, they’re mesmerized by the music” are from.

Thanks to Micah for pointng out that YouTube has Hell’s Bell’s: The Dangers of Rock ’N’ Roll.

Tags: culture, humor, music, religion

CrossFitKMSF Weight Training Excel Spreadsheet

Tadhg — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 06:26:39 +0000

As promised, here’s the Excel file.

Tags: CrossFit, CrossFitKMSF, exercise

Another Stint of the Paleo Diet

Tadhg — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 02:23:10 +0000

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to go on the paleo diet again, in preparation for Tough Mudder. This time I’m going to cut down on dairy, although I’m not sure I’ll cut it entirely. I’m hoping to stick to the diet just as strictly as I did last time, although there’s no threat of 100 burpee pullups hanging over me.

I’m actually looking forward to being back on it. I’ve been looking forward to being back on it for a while, but that hasn’t made me start it earlier—or eat much better in the interim. But I’m hoping that it helps with my energy levels and with the endurance that the Tough Mudder will require. I’m also hoping it helps with recovery from injury, and I suspect that minimizing sugar will go some distance towards doing that.

There will be some awkward periods, I’m sure. It’s always harder when travelling, and I’m going to Portland for a weekend soon, a weekend that will probably be fairly tough to find paleo-friendly food on. I’ll have to plan well for that.

I have to get back into eating almonds. I like almonds, but previous paleo periods have made me somewhat sick of them as a snack food.

Tags: diet, food, health, personal

Perfectionism is Hard

Tadhg — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 06:50:46 +0000

I haven’t been that happy with my blog posts recently. It’s not that I think all of them are terrible, or that the quality suddenly dropped off a cliff, but I feel as if there’s been a decline. It’s tough to measure this, of course, with no clear criteria. But that I feel this way is indicative of some problem.

At the same time, I feel as if I haven’t been writing what I want to write, mainly because I’ve shied away from a lot of topics that I’ve wanted to write about.

The general pattern is that I think of something I want to write about, something I usually either feel strongly about, or want to work out my thoughts on, or both. Then I think it over for a little while and come up with some ideas on how I’ll approach it as a post. Then it comes time to write the post, and I resist writing about that topic. Usually because I feel that it will require too much time, or too much effort, or both, to do it justice. So then I try to write about something else instead, something less demanding.

The subsequent search for the less demanding thing often takes more time than writing the original post would have. Occasionally I end up writing about something else equally demanding, which is fine, but usually I find something brief and light instead.

There’s nothing wrong with brief and/or light posts. But there is something wrong with writing them because I’m avoiding writing about something else. Even more so when that something else is actually a topic I want to write about.

I want to write about it, but somehow this desire moves into the realm of theory, and instead of being a motivating force becomes a heavy weight, having undergone the deadening transformation from “want to write” to “should write” to “should already have written”.

That description skips a step, the critical one where the desire to write dissipates but the loyalty to the topic remains. I suspect that this step has much to do with placing high expectations on the finished product.

Originally I was going to title this post “Writing is Hard”, but while that may certainly be true, the current title is more germane. It’s not writing per se that I’m having trouble with, it’s writing in the shadow of my expectations. It’s grappling with the fact that some part of my mind has already calculated (using unknowable metrics) how “good” the post “should” be, and some other part of my mind then blanches at having to meet this standard.

This is perfectionism, hiding in plain sight, masquerading, as it often does, as a heartfelt and genuine concern for quality—not just quality in terms of what the output is like, but of course also the quality of my writing experience, for it feels that it would be terrible if I inadvertently got into the habit of not giving my all to topics I write about. That, it says, would be tragic. That would be a terrible waste, as I would then have not just shitty output but a shitty process as well, the worst of all worlds.

By some remarkable coincidence, the presence of this perfectionism has helped me to my current point, where I’m concerned about… shitty output and a shitty process.

Even after more than four years of regular public writing, a practice I took up in large part to try to get past the perfectionism that I felt was holding back my writing, I still appear to have a lot of difficulty trusting myself enough to just let go and write about whatever interests me. Perhaps the most insidious thing is that this perfectionism creeps in partly by way of my pride in the pieces that I regard highly. After all, if I’ve written them, it’s clear I can achieve a high standard, so less would be a failure.

One of the reasons I write this blog is for practice. Practice so that I can be a better writer. It’s definitely helped, but practice, mere activity, isn’t enough—to really improve, one needs “directed practice”, which I haven’t seen clearly defined anywhere but which I think I understand. It takes a certain focus, a focus that is not always easy to summon. In the time I’ve been blogging, I think I’ve done that for concentrated periods, but I (clearly) haven’t managed to make it properly habitual.

In terms that will sound awfully self-helpy, I think that almost any conscious concern with the quality of the product of the endeavor is counterproductive. At the same time, concern with the quality of the process is quite important. On top of that, though, this concern with the quality of the process cannot be allowed to silence the writing voice. The writing voice must be heard, and respected, but with a recognition that when it drifts away, or goes silent, the conscious mind will do its best to take over and will respect the intent of what that voice was trying to achieve.

If this sounds like vague and unverifiable crap to you, well, it sounds that way to me too, but with an additional maddening conviction that it’s extremely important. There is a balance that must be struck here, and describing it may be even harder than striking it. For me, I tilt so far to the side of inner editorial control that some of that will always be present even when I try to just “write free”, and so my worries about somehow disengaging too much are unrealistic to say the least. Furthermore, I need to keep in mind that even if ninety, or ninety-five, or even ninety-nine, percent of what I write here is crap, that will still result in a few good posts per year, which is infinitely better than none. This is not a new thought, but it is one that I need to remind myself of, and to explicitly write out.

It’s not as simple as just writing what I want to write about. But writing about the things that I’ve recently wanted to write about would be fine, far better than my current approach of letting the ideas die, their dead weight immediately landing on top of new ideas, gradually making creativity in general much more laborious. This is how perfectionism makes things hard—not just in an exacting and demanding and up-front way, associated with much editing and rewriting until things are just so, but also in subtly making creativity and self-expression far less appealing, far less fun.

Tags: Blog, personal, writing

SteamBirds

Tadhg — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 02:00:36 +0000

SteamBirds is a rather cool turn-based steampunk air combat Flash game. If that sounds like a weird combination to you, I’d have to agree. It’s very simple, and is extremely easy to get into, while not being actually easy. In addition, I came across it via a very interesting presentation on the Flash games industry by its creator Andy Moore.

Tags: games

Scott Pilgrim vs. the Matrix

Tadhg — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 05:20:12 +0000

I haven’t seen the movie or read the comics, but I’m still impressed by this:

Tags: film, humor, video

Baseball and Luck in Competition

Tadhg — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:30:51 +0000

Aptly-named Yankees blog It’s About the Money has an excellent post up about luck and competitive balance in the baseball post-season. One of its key points concerns how likely a given team is to win a particular series, and how that translates into their odds of winning the whole thing.

Using methodology I won’t go into here, they use the 2009 Yankees (who did win it all) as an example and give them winning chances of about 70% against the Twins, 60% against the Angels, and 65% against the Phillies. The Yankees were thus favored in every series… but by multiplying those chances against each other, you come up with about 27%, which was their chance of winning everything in the post-season. Thus even the mighty Yankees, with baseball’s best record, had to get “lucky” to win the World Series.

In other words, there’s a lot of luck in a baseball series—otherwise the likelihood of the Yankees beating one of those other teams would have been higher.

If there were less luck in a baseball series, there would be a lot less variation in who’s won titles, as the better team would win more often—and the postseason would also be significantly more predictable. The article compares baseball to basketball in this regard, as basketball is significantly more predictable and also has a smaller pool of teams that have won championships.

I’d be interested in seeing a comparison of sports that have both regular seasons and post-season championships, to compare the differential between winning percentages in the regular season and elimination rounds. Such a comparison could be used to determine the amount of luck (for want of a better term) in the sport. One problem with this is that some setups may allow teams to “coast” in the regular season; it’s often claimed that the NBA has this problem, as shown by the performance of the Boston Celtics last year.

I’m also curious about how this applies to tennis. Tennis doesn’t have a lot of luck in it, and is structured very well to increase the chances of the better player winning. Applying the same math as above, the individual match winning likelihoods for Federer and Nadal during the last several years must really be outrageously high. To win a Grand Slam, a player has to beat seven opponents; if they have a 90% chance against each opponent, their chance of winning the tournament is still only around 48%. A 91% chance of winning each match brings them over the 50% mark, just. Clearly it’s a lot more complicated than that, and the model needs to account for much higher chances of winning (usually) in the early rounds and then lower chances later.

Another area I’m interested in is whether repeat champions in high-variance competition are merely getting lucky, or are so good that they can transcend the luck—and if there’s any way to figure that out.

Tags: baseball, basketball, games, sports, tennis

SF Heat

Tadhg — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 05:09:11 +0000

The temperature in San Francisco hit 101° Fahrenheit today, the hottest it’s been since May 2001. I’m not comfortable at such high temperatures, and was pretty sluggish all day.

I prefer it in the 70s and 80s. I do love it when it’s warm at night, and should really be taking advantage this evening by being out somewhere, but I’m just too tired—worn out by the heat, and perhaps by doing CrossFit and Conditioning today. Doing both might have been excessive, and some people did warn me… but I didn’t heed them. The room we did Conditioning in was incredibly stuffy, and I couldn’t get enough oxygen; I kept having to leave between sets because I had to get fresh air, something that doesn’t normally happen to me.

Cycling in this weather wasn’t as bad as I feared, primarily because I managed to keep mostly in the shade, and also because there was some wind. Walking in it, though, was tough. Going outside felt like entering an oven.

It didn’t help that I wasn’t thinking too clearly this morning and wore long pants instead of shorts.

It’s not supposed to last, and in fact the temperature is forecast to drop to 61° by Friday—a 40° difference over four days.

One of the reasons San Francisco suits me is because days like this are rare. Generally it’s temperate here, and apparently I require that. On the other hand, I didn’t mind the cold in Berlin that much—at least not the cold outside—so maybe it’s heat I have struggle with most. Heat, and the cold damp of Ireland.

At Sectionals in March I also wilted in the heat, and that’s one of the reasons I thought I should do Conditioning on top of CrossFit today—I should take my opportunities to work out in those conditions because it’s the only way to improve. Maybe I need to find a training camp somewhere really hot and go there for a while, something that Agassi and Federer have both touted.

Right now, however, that thought is not appealing at all.

Tags: CrossFit, exercise, personal, san-francisco, weather

Courtney Stoker, Patriarchy, and Geek Misogyny

Tadhg — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 05:26:14 +0000

This is one of the better discussions on prejudice in geek culture that I’ve come across: “Courtney Stoker on Feminist Geek”. I like where Stoker is coming from—perhaps unsurprisingly, for like me she has an academic background in English literature and is also a science fiction fan. But she is far more community-oriented than I am; despite the fact that my geekery goes back decades and despite my involvement in something like Fantasy Bedtime Hour, my engagement with science fiction is primarily either private, or shared through meatspace discussion, or expressed on this blog. None of those things are involvement with large-scale communities such as those Stoker is discussing.

One of the reasons this particular interview with Stoker is important is that she sensibly addresses the influence of anti-geek prejudice on male geeks.

By “sensibly”, I mean she correctly points out that the culture that leads to ostracization of geeks in their teens is inextricably linked to patriarchy, and that by adopting misogynistic attitudes they’re just buying into the value system that was used against them in the first place:

By becoming misogynists, geek men actually reinforce the sexist standards that lead to them getting beat up or made fun of as kids. Patriarchy is still to blame. And the inability to recognize this, not only by the individual geeks who become misogynists, but by critics of geek culture, makes sexism in these communities difficult to diagnose and counteract.

—Amanda Hess. “Courtney Stoker on Feminist Geek”. The Sexist, 29 June 2010.

This isn’t a revelation for me, in fact it’s rather a depressingly obvious manifestation of one of the most despair-inducing human failings: the inability of the oppressed to generalize beyond the injustice of their own particular oppression to a larger rejection of prejudice and inequality. That, and its corollary, the tendency of oppressed groups to seek other groups (internal or external) that they themselves can look down on, in a misguided attempt to shore up the psychic damage they’ve suffered by placing themselves in a position to inflict it on others.

As obvious as it might be, I haven’t seen it formulated as such from the feminist side too often in this context, and am glad that Stoker points it out here. I’m not sure I agree with her analysis of how “Growing Up (Male) Geek” is not equivalent to institutional disenfranchisement, partly because I’m not sure whether she means that the young geeks or their older selves lack institutional power. If she means the latter, I mostly concur, with a pair of caveats: it’s important to recognize the amount of damage that can be done to people when they’re children by bullying and disenfranchisement, and to reject the values that led to said bullying and disenfranchisement; it’s also important for individuals, regardless of their past histories, to take responsibility for their own thoughts and hence their own prejudices, and to do the work to overcome these prejudices.

I have no doubt that I’ll cover this ground again, as I have too many reactions for just one post.

Tags: culture, fandom, feminism, politics, power, psychology, science-fiction, sexism

Nurture, not Nature

Tadhg — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:54:59 +0000

I’m posting a link to this article primarily because the article agrees with me: “Male and female ability differences down to socialisation, not genetics”—I’ve believed for years that behavioral differences between genders (or between other sets of people, really) are due to cultural and social factors, not differences that are somehow “innate”. That article is a good summary of scientific findings that back up my belief.

Unfortunately there are plenty of findings that go the other way, hence the quotation from Simon Baron-Cohen at the end. As I haven’t spent my life studying genetics, psychology, and biology, I cannot claim to know for certain that the articles supporting my viewpoint are more accurate than the articles going the other way.

However, here are some of the reasons why I have that viewpoint:

The “innate” side of the argument always seems to support the status quo. That is, you almost never hear the claim that biology has “proven” something that means gender roles should be radically different from their traditional modes. Quite the opposite. More broadly, it always seems, from that side of the argument, as though our society has magically ended up being perfectly in tune with how our genetic coding says it should be. Naturally, I find that an implausible coincidence.
I know too many individuals who defy gender stereotyping in a variety of ways. This is not mere anecdata, because it would be rather unlikely for me to know these people if they were incredibly rare; the more likely explanation is that in fact deviations from there purported norms are rather common.
The power of cultural conditioning is extremely strong, and from most people arguing for innate tendencies underestimate it. A great example: Shih’s study on Asian-American women in which the subjects were given math tests; on cohort was a control, one cohort took a gender-related survey before the test, and the last cohort took an ethnicity-related survey before the test. The stereotyping of women as bad at math and Asian-Americans as good at math played out: the second cohort did worse and the third cohort did better. Given this kind of impact even in a short term, how can any study claim to measure performance differences as being based in genetics, as the cultural conditioning is clearly so strong?
The predecessors of today’s “innate” side of the argument have repeatedly been proven wrong. One hundred years ago they would have made claims about women that have since been proven false, and many more recent claims based on females lacking certain capabilities have similarly been proven false. An excellent example of this is chess and the Polgár sisters: László Polgár managed to raise three daughters (Susan, Sofia, and Judit) who all became Interntional Masters. If the reasoning ability to play chess at a high level is something that women simply lack (as was the claim), how could the sisters all be so good at chess?
Human beings are extremely flexible, and have taken on vastly different roles and lifestyles in highly varied environments. Given this flexibility, it seems unlikely indeed that each gender would be so behaviorally limited by genetics.

Tags: culture, feminism, gender, psychology, science

Lightsabers are Still Cool

Tadhg — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 06:29:40 +0000

Tags: culture, film, video

Music is Weird

Tadhg — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 03:40:57 +0000

It might just be my musical taste that’s weird, but I prefer the larger generalization.

I’ve never listened to Justin Bieber before, but apparently I quite like “U Smile” when it’s been slowed down 800%.

Tags: humor, music

Andre Agassi’s Open

Tadhg — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 15:58:25 +0000

I read Agassi’s autobiography during a five-hour layover in Philadelphia airport this weekend, and have to say I was impressed—with the book, not the layover. I had expected it to be of interest mainly for its hardcore tennis content, with some celebrity stuff thrown in, but I found it gripping throughout and was very impressed with Agassi’s voice.

I probably should have expected this, because I’ve been impressed with Agassi’s commentary on matches in the past. Open starts with a gripping account of his preparations for his 2006 US Open match against Marcos Baghdatis, and then jumps to his childhood days playing against “the dragon”, a ball machine modified by his fairly nuts father. Much of the book is about Agassi’s relationship with his father, and his attempting to find himself and his way in the strange and highly stressful world of professional tennis—and his relationship with tennis itself, which he repeatedly states that he hates.

Obivously I’m a tennis fan, but I think this book would be interesting to anyone interested in athletes generally, and perhaps also those interested in celebrity, because Agassi spent a lot of his life in the public eye, and this is one of the themes of the book.

When it came out, much was made of Agassi’s admission of drug (methamphetamine) use and his having lied about it to the ATP. In the course of the narrative, it seems almost like a natural progression to that point from where Agassi was, although I’m curious about whether or not he struggled more with getting away from it than he revealed in the text. Since it obviously wasn’t a performance enhancer, I’m not of the opinion that Agassi should have been punished for its use in any case (just as I think that calls to punish Richard Gasquet for his cocaine ingestion are ridiculous), and in terms of his tennis career I don’t think it was a big deal—although in terms of the arc of his life, it was clearly a low point, and a dangerous one. But I think that the much earlier incident he reveals, in which his father gave him pills, apparently speed, to help his performance in a juniors tournament (acting on the advice of his brother, Agassi lost on purpose and feigned illness to ensure he wasn’t given them again), was much more shocking and worthy of attention, but this didn’t get much media coverage.

Agassi’s father is clearly a piece of work, and I find it quite interesting that Agassi eventually ended up happily married to Steffi Graf, whose father is also in the same mold. One of the most hilarious sections of the book describes the meeting between Emmanuel Agassi and Peter Graf, which would seem unbelievable if I described it here but becomes all too plausible after reading the earlier parts of Open.

Agassi’s recognition that his father’s approach to parenting was, to say the least, flawed, and his marriage to a woman who went through something similar as a child, make more disturbing one of the messages he delivers to the children in the charter school he sets up: respect for authority. While I admire his dedication to trying to help others, and specifically children, and his desire to provide to others the education he feels he lost out on due to his concentration on tennis, it’s sad to see him touting authority and rules as things that are inherently worthy of respect. It’s clear that he’s trying to steer kids away from what he feels were the mistaken acts of rebellion and acting out he performed in his youth, but I really wish he had some more awareness of the dangers of authority, which should be more evident to him given his experiences with his father and his recognition of how he and his siblings suffered under it. My suspicion is that he doesn’t see how school authorities can be just as harmful as family authorities.

Media focus on the book also centered on Agassi’s comments regarding Pete Sampras; Agassi regarded him as “robotic” and as cheap. It doesn’t come across as much of a big deal in the book itself, and I don’t see how people can really criticize Agassi for pointing out Sampras’ lack of charisma, which has always been quite evident. As for the accusation of being “cheap”, I think Agassi included it largely because he was genuinely incredulous that Sampras had such a different attitude; Agassi himself seems quite generous (sure, it’s his autobiography, but given his work to raise money for philanthropic projects and his attitudes throughout the book, this is probably accurate). Further, it seems that one of the ways in which Agassi tried to deal with the pressures of his life was to reach for more connections with more people—possibly as a result of attempting to build a functional family that wasn’t the dysfunctional one he started out with—whereas the impression of Sampras from Open is that Sampras dealt with the pressures in a much more closed-off way; this contrast between them again fits in with how they’ve appeared in other contexts.

Incidentally, Agassi’s respect for Sampras on the tennis court comes across very strongly in the text, and he was also very open about how painful his losses to Sampras were, and he’s honest about how there were times when he felt his own game was at its height and that he was going to beat Sampras—only to fall, again, in another heartbreaking loss where Sampras raised his tennis to a phenomenal level. He writes also about how he would see Sampras suffering, from illness or injury, prior to a match and then be astounded at the way in which he would pull himself together and display no weakness on court.

Agassi also mentions his media clashes with Jim Courier, but one of the best things that Courier said isn’t covered: at one point Courier, possibly after a win over Agassi, stated that he was fed up with comments about Agassi’s “talent”, and pointed out that his wins over Agassi came partly because Courier was willing to spend hours and hours on the practice court, which Agassi at the time wasn’t doing, and that Courier’s willingness and ability to dedicate himself in such a way was also “talent”. Reading about Agassi’s struggles to focus and his torment over his relationship to the game, especially early in his career, underscores that Courier’s point was an excellent one.

I recommend Open, even to those not overtly interested in tennis.

Tags: books, criticism, reading, reviews, sports, tennis

This Might Make the Other Writers Jealous

Tadhg — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:46:36 +0000

Not safe for work:

Tags: humor, music, video

Ending a Long Span of No Soccer

Tadhg — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 20:43:26 +0000

Last Friday I played soccer for the first time in almost two decades. I managed not to disgrace myself, and enjoyed it a great deal. It was a variant of five-a-side, although we played first with six players per side and later with four. I was with a group of regular players at SportsCo in Ringsend, and the quality of the pitch there was pretty good. Not that I’m an expert, but it’s the best surface I’ve played on.

I’ve always been bad at soccer. Hand-eye coordination has generally been a strength of mine, but foot-eye coordination is apparently another thing entirely. I played soccer growing up, although just casually—I wasn’t in any sports leagues as a kid, either in the US or Ireland. As a kid and in my teens, I enjoyed the game but didn’t have much skill or creativity (or dedication), and was useful only as a defender because I was persistent. In secondary school I went through a “season” of playing five-a-side in P.E. where I was the only person in the class not to ever score a goal. It was a mixed group of players, so that’s quite a way to stand out. I can still remember some of the missed shots, which include missing open goals, hitting the posts, hitting the crossbar, hitting the goalie when doing so was actually quite difficult, and so on.

Therefore I was quite relieved when I managed to get a goal early on Friday night. That’s the only one I scored, but that’s fine. Breaking the pattern from eighteen years ago quickly was a good thing.

I doubt that my skills have improved any since then. They’ve probably waned with increasing distance from frequent soccer play as a kid. On the other hand, there’s CrossFit, which has made me stronger, more balanced, and more coordinated generally, improved my proprioception, and increased my endurance. That’s why I wasn’t appalling on Friday. I might not be able to control the ball too well, but I can certainly run after it just fine.

I played all-out as much as I could, which wasn’t as much as I would have liked, so I need to add to my exercise routine. It wasn’t a serious set of games, and I had fun with it, and had a good time playing with people I know.

As much as I enjoyed it, and as much as I’m eager to play again when I’m next in Ireland, I won’t be playing it regularly without some other impetus. I still prefer tennis, and I’m leery of the high risk of injury. But it was great to get out there and to occasionally get something right.

Tags: CrossFit, exercise, personal, soccer, sports

Dublin Foxes

Tadhg — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:17:38 +0000

I first saw a fox in a city setting somewhere around eighteen years ago, cycling home very late one night along Woodbine Road. It was about eighty meters away, running across the road. It saw me and was quite skittish, running into a garden for cover as fast as it could.

A few years later, in the same area, I saw two foxes together, again late at night. These two were still intent on keeping their distance, but moved away less speedily.

Since then, I’ve seen foxes intermittently, every few years. Each time they seem to have grown more comfortable around people, and more comfortable in the city. I’ve seen them much closer to the city center than suburban Booterstown. Always at night, until recently, when I saw a fox wandering in early morning daylight outside CrossFit Ireland, in the Sandyford Industrial Estate. It was foraging, unperturbed by my presence, not really reacting when I got out of my car. It wasn’t about to let me get close, but its attitude was that I could be tolerated in its vicinity as long as I didn’t try anything funny.

When I first saw them, the foxes acted as if they were moving through alien territory, a weird and dangerous environment. Now they move as if they’re city-dwellers—and they probably are. I might have seen early immigrants back in the 90s, and now the ones I see are their descendants, generations later, whose parents and grandparents were already accustomed to city life.

Tags: dublin, personal

Swimming: Adriatic and Irish Seas

Tadhg — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:03:35 +0000

I’m not that fond of the water. I can swim, just about, but I don’t generally like to. Before doing boogie boarding for a couple of years, I hadn’t been in the water in a long time. I haven’t even done that since 2006, and as I did boogie boarding while wearing a wetsuit, it’s been a long time indeed since I did much more than just touch the water.

I wanted to change this, and I had an excellent easy way to do that when I was in Francavilla recently. The weather was good, and the water there was fairly warm. I wasn’t in the water for long at all, unfortunately, but I enjoyed it quite a lot, and would have been happy to have spent a lot more time in it.

I can’t say the same about my time in the Irish Sea this week. I went to Hawk Cliff with friends, and got into the water despite my body’s insistence that I was doing something really stupid. Hawk Cliff isn’t a beach, but a swimming spot with steps going down into the water, and as I went down the steps I intended to simply immerse myself without hesitation—as I’d done in the Adriatic—but with the water up to my knees I began to slow down, and when it reached my waist I just stopped. I stayed there for a few moments, as alleged free will fought with the instinctual desire to avoid things that don’t seem warm or safe.

Then I went back up the stairs and jumped up and down for a while in an attempt to warm up. This worked, and I again hesitated on the steps but managed to get fully into the water. I’d been advised to get in briefly and then get out twice before getting in for a longer period, so that’s what I did. I didn’t notice much difference between the three times. Each of them felt extraordinarily cold. I more or less immediately felt like I had trouble breathing, which was both familiar and disturbing—familiar because I often feel that way during CrossFit workouts, disturbing because I hadn’t exerted myself at all.

I swam around a little, and probably stayed in for about five minutes. I never really felt better, and the experience was dominated by cold and fear: the awareness of those things took up about sixty percent of my consciousness, even while I talked to the others, had photos taken, and told myself that things were fine. It was only after I got out of the water that I was able to convince myself that in truth I was pretty safe: poor swimmer or not, absent bad conditions I can probably stay afloat for significant periods of time, and at the least should be able to backstroke with some effectiveness. While I was in the water, though, none of that seemed plausible, and I was very focused on the combination of being in the water and not breathing as easily as I would have liked.

My companions all seemed much more invigorated by the experience than I was. I found it refreshing, but not as much as they did. I found it very physiologically and psychologically interesting, but “pleasant” doesn’t really come into it.

Despite all that, though, I want to do it again. I’m drawn to the moment on the steps, when I had every intention of continuing into the water, and really thought I was going to, but couldn’t. I want to be in the water, feeling that cold, but be able to swim around without being paralyzed by the conviction that drowning is imminent. I want to overcome the aversion to the cold, and to act despite the fear.

Unfortunately, the Pacific around San Francisco is likely to be my next opportunity to swim, and I’m informed that it’s even colder.

Tags: personal

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