Built to Last

This morning, I stumbled across an interesting Twitter thread on the half-life of content on the internet – how long it takes something to reach 50% of its total lifetime engagement:

  • Twitter: 20 mins
  • Facebook: 5 hrs
  • Instagram: 20 hrs
  • LinkedIn: 24 hrs
  • YouTube: 20 days
  • Pinterest: 4 mos
  • Blog post: 2 yrs

I am, admittedly, a bit of a dinosaur. While I’m just slightly too old to be a Millennial, I’ve been online for thirty years, dating all the way back to when that meant dialing in to BBS’s at a walloping 2400 bits per second and risking the wrath of my parents for tying up the phone line. Similarly, I’ve been blogging for 23 years (!!!), 18 of which right here on this site.

So, while I was an early adopter of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, my posting on all three (and a slew of others along the way – MySpace, Friendster, Path, we hardly knew ye) has been spotty at best.

As a content consumer, I actually truly love Twitter; it’s a firehose of interesting links and takes and ideas from people I think are particularly smart. (Even if the signal-to-noise ratio sometimes leaves a bit to be desired.)

But, as a content creator, I just have trouble with the ephemeral nature of that site and the others. Perhaps, as the philosopher Ernest Becker would have it, that’s because my writing is simply a subconscious raging against my own mortality, a drive to deny my eventual death by struggling to create a legacy (even if just of words) that persists beyond me. More prosaically, perhaps it’s a consequence of my painfully slow writing speed, and the disappointment of my posts disappearing in even less time than it took for me to draft them in the first place. Or, perhaps, it’s because I’m far too long-winded to cram my thoughts into the saner word counts that most social media sites’ designs encourage.

Still, whatever the reason, and even after some relatively long hiatuses, I inevitably find myself winding my way back here, to longer-form blog posting. Sure, a lot of my posts are garbage. But it’s nice to think they’re at least garbage that people can find, and slog their way through, years – or, apparently, decades – down the line.

January 29, 2020

Cartio

Despite my crazy work schedule, Jess and I have been trying to cook more. And, living on the Upper West Side, we’re lucky to have a slew of good grocery stores – Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Fairway, etc. – nearby. Or, at least, sort of nearby. While a seven to ten block walk seems relatively quick on the way over, hoofing back ladened with armfuls of heavy bags feels decidedly less so.

At one point a year or two back, Jess did the sensible thing, and purchased a rolling grocery cart. But, in New York, the ability to stagger along with a half-dozen full bags in your hands is an unspoken point of pride. For the most part, you just don’t see anyone below the age of 80 rolling their groceries home.

So, each shopping trip, I’ve let pride get the best of me. I do head out with an empty Go Ruck GR1 backpack, which makes it far easier to handle a case or two of seltzer and other particularly weighty items. And, having switched entirely to reusable bags for the sake of the environment (we’re now even using reusable produce bags, to avoid the piles of plastic we otherwise return home with and quickly discard), I’ve been pleased to discover that totes both hold more (reducing total bag count) and have handles long enough to carry (only semi-painfully) over your shoulders. All of which has made even large, food-for-the-entire-week shops substantially more feasible.

Still, those walks home are inevitably some of my toughest workouts each week. I’ve found I count down the blocks remaining each time I cross a street along the way, so I can will myself the full distance one small chunk at a time.

Which is why, this week, I finally sucked it up, suppressed my ego, and rolled the cart along when we headed to Whole Foods on Sunday. And, frankly, I’m glad I did. Even with its large capacity, we still completely filled two additional totes. And though the cart itself was heavy to drag behind me, and navigating foot traffic, street construction, and winter puddles was a bit of a challenge, it still made for a wildly easier trip.

So, going forward, the cart it is. I’d always heard one advantage of advancing age is caring increasingly little about what everyone else thinks of you. Turns out, for me at least, that’s true. For better or worse, it seems I’m ready to roll.

7.5

From both direct experience, and a huge amount of published research, I know I should be sleeping about seven and a half hours a night. But, all too often, I don’t.

This week, I’ve had to be up at 5:00am daily. Yet the idea of conking out at 9:30pm just seems untenable – especially as I’m often at work until 8:00pm, and still want to wedge in dinner and some time with Jess once I make it home.

So, instead, I’m just wildly sleep-deprived. And, as a result, my productivity slowed yesterday, and today more or less screeched to a halt. Fortunately, with my newly pared-down to-do list, I at least now feel behind on a shorter backlog of tasks. But I’m still less than thrilled. And I’m doing my best to rally. Including writing this blog post.

Arguably, my time would be better spent right now on a quick nap. But I’m worried I’d wake up groggy enough with sleep inertia that I’d still be garbage at working, yet nonetheless more likely to stay up tonight past a sensible bedtime. So, for the moment, I’m just doing my best to slog ahead. As they say, no sleep till inbox zero.

This Stinks

For years, Jess thought that she didn’t like fish. Turns out, what she actually doesn’t like is the taste (and, even more so, the smell) of oxidizing fat. Growing up, the primary fish her parents cooked was sautéed salmon. Which, especially when cooked skin-on, is about as oxidized-fat-heavy as food gets.

In more recent years, Jess has discovered that she in fact really likes pretty much all raw fish (sushi!), as well as less fatty fishes (ed. note: the correct plural for multiple species) even when cooked at moderate temperatures – Amelie‘s seared Atlantic cod was a recent hit.

But, at the same time, she’s equally sensitive to a slew of other theoretically inoffensive fats once sufficiently heated. Especially in a small NYC apartment, where kitchen smells quickly suffuse the entire place. Even vegetables pan-seared in olive oil, for example, will sometimes set off her disgust response.

To mask the smell, her fallback is to light a stick of traditional Nag Champa incense, which is strong enough to cover pretty much anything else. The only problems is, I kind of hate Nag Champa in turn.

So, cooking is a bit of a crap shoot. As a culinary nerd, I often spend far more time than reasonable shopping for, prepping, and cheffing up our meals. But I do so with caution. Sure, as the excellent Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat makes clear, fat and heat make up half the secret to tasty food. But, at least in my own home, too much of either is a sure road to pungent mutually-assured scent destruction. Browned butter with a side of ashram is a win for nobody at all.

January 22, 2020