Weeknotes 13

Shoulders back and down.

E, C and I went to see “Uncut Gems” at baby cinema. As the stress and tension in the film grew relentlessly, I thought of my last two trips to the dentist about the burgeoning “vertical cracks” on my teeth from grinding.

For that reason, I found myself curled up in bed, a neoprene wrist support velcroed to one arm and a remouldable mouth guard separating my long-suffering molars. Not so dissimilar to Bart in “The Last Temptation of Homer”, laden with orthopaedic shoes, hair matted with medicated salve and voice hoarse with throat spray.

A friend caught me describing a room as “roasty toasty” and successfully deduced I spend most of my time in conversation with a four-month old baby.

Following Tom Stuart’s recommendation, I started watching Chris Morocco’s “Reverse Engineering”. In it, Morocco attempts to recreate dishes in two days after only tasting them while blindfolded.

From Gordon Ramsay’s Beef Wellington to Guy Fieri’s “Trash Can Nachos”, he does consistently well despite never having made these dishes before. There’s a mastery in his ability to quickly recognise various components and techniques in dishes, e.g. a Mornay sauce or a roux. Just don’t ask him to identify a specific cheese.

In an attempt to improve my posture, I’ve been doing yoga every morning under E’s tutelage. Naturally, I made the ritual my own by struggling to use Spotify to find appropriately soothing muzak on our aging iPad and ended up replacing our entire music setup with a Raspberry Pi running Shairport Sync. We can now stream any audio of our choice over AirPlay and I’m no longer allowed to procrastinate.

Speaking of which: shoulders back and down.

Among our desperate attempts to improve C’s sleep, we use “Rain Rain” and a small Bluetooth speaker to play the sound of running water throughout the night. When we’re not accidentally increasing the volume or fast-forwarding to the sound of a raging thunderstorm, I hear the strangest things in the white noise: snatches of a distant news broadcast, the wailing of some audacious post-rock and the hiss of Icelandic death metal on an AM radio.

The self check-in at my GP was out of order this week. After speaking with the receptionist, I settled in the waiting room and looked up to see a display showing a “Your Windows 7 PC is out of support” screen.

Watching Claire Saffitz soak toast and popcorn in water to flavour jelly beans has inspired me to get back into making ice cream. I enjoyed making Christina Tosi’s “Cereal Milk ice cream” but now I’m wondering what else I could steep.

People are never impressed when I talk about my collection of not one, not two but three types of WD40. Only I will know the deep satisfaction of spraying WD40 electrical contact cleaner into sticky game controllers.

One more time: shoulders back and down.