Aging

Today I feel a sense of my own aging. I’m to have a colonoscopy this afternoon, which is a weirdly intimate thing to admit even though it’s pretty normal. A special time in life. Like a mid-life bar mitzvah. I wonder if there is a Hebrew prayer for colonoscopies. Blessed are you oh lord our god, king of the universe and keeper of the cancer-free colon.

We like to think our relationship to our bodies gets more connected with age but that isn’t quite right. It’s just that our body is the place we see the difference in our age. The look of age is more decisive and scarier than the way you feel or sense you have changed. Memory plays less of a role.

Last night I watched another film by Lam Ngai Kai. This time The Peacock King: a pretty insane fantasy about an evil witch and a hell virgin trying to unlock the gates of hell while two long lost brothers fight to save the day. After watching Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (I love that nonsense title) earlier in the week I just had to get to that director one more time. I haven’t gotten around to writing a review on Letterboxd yet. I’m getting behind on those again. When I’m feeling stress I have a hard time reviewing movies and I also have a hard time logging them without reviewing them. At the moment I’m 11 films in the hole.

As for my reading life, I’m hoping to finish The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes this afternoon. I like his use of first person to create a mystery over time. I also like the time scale of the piece. Very clever technique.

That is all for today’s post. If it feels scattered and preoccupied then I have put myself on the page.

New Year, New Writing Practice

I’ve been wanting to write a humble online journal for a while now and since it is my birthday and since I have this website with very little user traffic there really is no better time than the present to start up the practice. So what do I have in mind? Something very much like a public diary for anyone who would like to get to know me better. I’ll discuss what I’m reading and watching, and I’ll comment on all the little things that make up my days and weeks. I’m not sure who you are, reader. Maybe you are only me. I’m not going to announce this blog exists to anyone so if you are here you are likely an accidental audience or someone related to me. Either way, my goal is to be as candid as possible. I intend to write messily and often. There maybe typos or awkward sentences. A polished, perfect, front facing presentation of my thoughts is not the goal here. No, here is where I just want to let it all hang out and hopefully record thoughts of some worth.

So as this is a first post I will tell you one thing about my weekend. Saturday night I went out to dinner here in Oviedo (Spain, not Florida) for my birthday. The kids are young but they can more or less handle themselves when we go out, even though this country really pushes the boundaries of bedtime. An early dinner here, meaning you are the only one in an empty restaurant that is still more or less setting up for service, starts at 8:30pm. Most diners will come in for a first seating around 9:30 and sometimes there is a second seating at 11. This has probably been the most challenging adjustment we’ve had to deal with living here. Spanish kids just stay up so much later and I still haven’t figured out when they actually sleep. It’s possible they just don’t.

The restaurant was a new one for us; it came from a recommendation. At first I imagined it would be a stuffy place with a very traditional Asturian menu - fabada stew, cachopo, arroz con leche, that sort of thing - but I was wrong. The menu was fantastic, creative, and had much more to offer than the standard fare. Lots of fresh, in season mushrooms in nearly every dish. We ordered grilled vieiras (scallops) with a walnut pil-pil (a Basque sauce using olive oil, garlic, a chili as a base), truffled risotto with mushrooms and Iberico ham (of course), tuna tartare, and steak tartare. With that we had a bottle of Ribera del Duero but I don’t remember the name or the year, just that it was the perfect complement.

The kids ate none of that. Instead they had bites of the risotto, delicious fried calamari and small flank steaks with fries. My daughter fell asleep in her chair after eating and my son got into a lively conversation about his classmates with my wife. She is trying to memorize all of their names.

So there is one thing that happened this weekend.