It’s nearly the end of my first month with the trainer and while I’m so much stronger than when I started, I’m still working my way up to doing anything with the bar and real weight. This week I struggled, I was frustrated, I forgot my form, everyone else in the gym was stronger than me and knew what to do already, lifting was hard and was (by design) never, ever going to get easier.

Then my work bro, who also lifts, sent me an essay by Henry Rollins (yeah, that one) and oh look! We have another post about doing a hard thing in a sport that is really about doing hard things in life and embracing the struggle, not fighting it. (If I get nothing else from learning to lift, I will have gotten so much blog content from it.)

Joking aside, though, it’s a pretty great essay–kind of a “Zen and the art of lifting.” From Iron and The Soul:

I used to think that it was my adversary, that I was trying to lift that which does not want to be lifted. I was wrong. When the Iron doesn’t want to come off the mat, it’s the kindest thing it can do for you. If it flew up and went through the ceiling, it wouldn’t teach you anything. That’s the way the Iron talks to you. It tells you that the material you work with is that which you will come to resemble. That which you work against will always work against you.

Via Swiss Miss:

“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river—small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

-Bertrand Russell

I picked up Eve Babitz’s first book on a whim–someone on Instagram was talking about her and her Wikipedia entry was just eye-popping, so I thought, “Let’s see about Eve.” I’m only about a third of the way through Eve’s Hollywood but so far it’s a delight. She loves L.A. the way Raymond Chandler loves it–passionately and ironically–and it shows:

But when the sky was its occasional non-smoggy, dry, clean, cloudless self, Hollywood High made sense, and even teachers would gaze quietly out at the shining palm tree tops blowing in the breeze. And when summer came and we went to the beach after a dismal morning of summer school, the palm trees high above the sea on the Palisades would look black against an aggressive sky which drained away all color of anything that was forced to silhouette against it […] We were hot, the sea was one long wave to be ridden in, our skins were dark, and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.

She also reminds me of M.F.K. Fisher, in the sense of someone uncannily insightful:

Gary [asked] me if I were going to the dance that night.

“No,” I said, my eyes narrowing. So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing what you liked. An odd thing for power to be.

There’s gossip about famous people and descriptions of taquitos and memories of being not-quite-popular enough in high school, and, like I said, it’s a delight. Highly recommend Eve for your summer reading.

Kottke.org has been posting about Mr. Rogers a lot lately and pointed me to this video, where he tells people about his mother making his sweaters. This quote really stood out to me:

It’s a lot of work. But that’s one of the ways that she has of saying that she loves somebody. 

Never forget that crafting can be someone’s love language.

“We are constantly trying to hold it all together. If you really want to see why you do things, then don’t do them and see what happens.”
― Michael A. Singer

Via Swiss Miss, who says it’s “from The Untethered Soul, a book that is changing my life.” I’m not currently in the market for another life-changing book but it’s something to ponder.

(Cf: Mark Strand on existential housework.)

From Harold Kushner’s introduction to Man’s Search For Meaning: 

“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you respond to the situation.”

(Quoted in this long piece about a writer’s health issues and recovery, found over at Kottke this week.)

From The London Review of Books, an essay by Rosemary Hill about “frock consciousness” in Virginia Woolf. I think the essay really wants to be a book, as it’s a little rambling, but it’s a fun (scholarly) read:

The correct answer today is that we dress for ourselves, but that isn’t quite true either. We dress to say something about ourselves and the question is: to whom are the remarks addressed? […] The effect on other people is…one end of an arc, the point where it comes to earth in the outside world. The other end, the spring of the vault, is in the interior world of the wearer and it is somewhere between the two that frock consciousness happens.

There’s even a quote from Virginia, which is pretty much how I feel planning sewing projects or ordering something online:

‘Happiness is to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves. For example, going to my dressmaker in Judd Street, or rather thinking of a dress I could get her to make, & imagining it made – that is the string, which as if dipped loosely into a wave of treasure brings up pearls sticking to it.’

How about some Surprisingly Deep Life Advice From A Cookbook for today?

On grey January days we must make our own fun. Today is a flat day that only seems to come to life when I go shopping, returning with bags of Italian lemons complete with their bottle-green leaves [and] craggy lumps of Crockhamdale and snow-white Ticklemore cheeses from Neal’s Yard Dairy…People get down this time of year, but even today there were clementines heavy with juice and bunches of narcissi to cheer us up. There is good stuff if you are prepared to go and find it.

-Nigel Slater,  The Kitchen Diaries

Maybe this will help me face the scrimmage at Trader Joe’s tonight. Maybe I’ll even buy lemons!

This is a wonderful quote from Agatha Christie’s autobiography (via the always-interesting Swiss Miss). I’m still reading what I now refer to as The Book and the final chapters boil down to making your time your own again. Like this:

“There is nothing more wonderful to have in one’s life, than time…You wake up in the morning, and even before you are properly awake you are saying to yourself: ‘Now, what shall I do with today?’ You have the choice, it is there, in front of you, and you can plan as you please. I don’t mean that there were not a lot of things (duties, we called them) I had to do–of course there were […] but they were all things that lay in my choice, to arrange as I pleased. I could plan my day, I could say, ‘I think I’ll leave my stockings until this afternoon; I will go down town in the morning and I will come back by the other road and see whether that tree had come into blossom yet.’

Always when I woke up, I had the feeling which I am sure must be natural to all of us, a joy in being alive. I don’t say you feel it consciously–you don’t–but there you are, you are alive, and you open your eyes, and here is another day; another step, as it were, on your journey to an unknown place. That very exciting journey which is your life. Not that it is necessarily going to be exciting as a life, but it will be exciting to you because it is your life. That is one of the great secrets of existence, enjoying the gift of life that has been given to you.”