🌊 S02 E04: Aquatic Confessions
🌊 S02 E04: Aquatic Confessions
smart notes, a new job, and swimming
🗺 Personal Updates
Switching to a bullet-point format here:
Currently thriving in SF with Tech Bro Summer in full swing. I don't even think in roundtrip anymore.
Transferred to WhatsApp and made it "LinkedIn official".
Taking ~2 weeks of time off between jobs 👆🏽 spending it mostly writing, reading, walking, sauna-ing, and booling with friends.
🎨 Artifacts
I finally worked my way through How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. Reading a book about the ideal way to take notes is peak nerd, as Mack never fails to remind me. This book, however, has changed my approach to note-taking for the better. Taking "Smart Notes" is all about turning inputs into insightful & actionable outputs through writing. Expect a write-up in the future that deep dives into my overall knowledge management system.
My website is starting to feel stale. Every year or two, I feel like tearing everything down and starting from scratch. Though, I now have a good foundation so the plan is to augment its functionality by migrating my book reviews over from Goodreads and maybe add some more 𝘢𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘴 to my site overall.
🤿 Reflections
I have a... confession to make. I'm an adult that doesn't know how to swim. I spent the majority of my childhood in one of America's wettest states: Florida. As is tradition in the swamp, my parents put me in swim lessons. Though, my 8-year-old self decided that he preferred video games on land and my parents didn't fight it, not knowing how to swim themselves. If only they knew the depths of fear & fomo that this decision would instill within me.The following is an account of my swimming journey up until now.
Throughout middle & high school, I avoided friend's houses with pools, social outings at the beach, and water parks like the plague. It wasn't until college that I decided to dip my toes in and recruited a friend of mine who was on the swim team to teach me how to swim. That old Aristotle quote rang true in this case — knowing how to swim ≠ being able to teach it.
"Those that know do, those that understand teach." — Aristotle, probably
I kept at it and eventually learned how to freestyle in the shallow end of the pool for ~25m thanks to YouTube and a healthy glob of anxiety. I learned how to use the kickboard and bought myself a dapper pair of goggles (and a pair of speedos, before promptly returning it once my 25m-freestyle-high wore off). The summer after my sophomore year of college, I interned in South Florida, just 15 minutes from Miami. I had decided that enough was enough and scoured the local area to find a swim instructor.
None of the instructors I found had much experience with adults because for someone growing up in Florida, learning to swim is synonymous to learning to walk. Eventually I found someone that seemed friendly and open to teaching someone over the age of 8. I went to the local YMCA twice a week to flounder in the pool and she attempted to teach me the basic strokes & how to tread water. After a month of this, I felt much more comfortable and added lap swimming to my comfortable repertoire of exercise.
My internship ended and I felt much more confident in a pool, assuming I could touch the floor. Unfortunately, the confidence to swim in the ocean or dive into the deep end still eluded me. After this promising start, my swimming growth took a backseat to school and the internship hunt. A few more summers of missed opportunities in the Pacific Ocean and Lake Tahoe flew by, and I gave it another shot and signed up for adult swimming lessons at my University during my final semester.
It was comforting (minor schadenfreude?) to see grad students and professors that were far more fearful of water than I was — one even struggled to dip his toes into the water. I remember what it felt like to be in that position, and I feel for him and respected his tenacity as a tenured professor with glittering accolades that should have it "figured out". Unfortunately, the lessons weren't that great and yet again, I learned that an excellent swimmer does not make for an excellent swim instructor.
I continued to practice and pushed my boundaries whenever I could, occasionally venturing into the deep end and practicing my treading. My school had a program at a nearby lake (Lake Wauberg) that gave you a sailing certification after a few classes. The only caveat was that you had to be able to swim 50m in open water and tread for at least 3 minutes. I made it close to this amount but alas, was swept away from my practice yet again by the demands & vibes of the semester.
Since then, I've managed to jump into Vietnam's Ha Long Bay (albeit with a life jacket on) and surf in Hawaii. Though, Covid-19 had other plans and the public pools of the world closed down for about 1.5 years. Things are opening up, and I'm swimming again at the pool in my local Crunch Fitness. It's a slow & steady process but between tread-offs with Mack in the Scottsdale public pool to learning how to breast-stroke at Crypto mansion parties, I'm getting there. More importantly, I'm realizing that learning to swim as an adult doesn't have to be scary — it can even be fun. I have a feeling that this is the last summer that I'll be a landlubber.
Why does any of this matter? I thought that I was an anomaly (and maybe I am as far as Floridians are concerned) but it turns out that > 50% of Americans say they cannot properly swim. That's an insane metric, and considering how nourishing the water can be, too many people are missing out on the healing that time spent in water can bring. I hope to learn how to swim confidently as an adult and document my experience along the way for anyone else that struggles with this. It's possible, and I will show you the way.
From Melon Dash, the creator of the Miracle Swimming School for Adults:
...
"Panic doesn't happen in my class," Dash said,
"because I start by saying 'Your job is to have fun.' It's not that they need to learn how to tread water, they need to learn how to be here."*
Here are the skills & milestones that I am focusing on:
Learn all of the major strokes (freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly)
Master the breath control necessary to be effective
Be able to tread water indefinitely
Swim comfortably into deep water and feel at peace
Venture into open water — waves, sea critters, and all
Above all, I think Mary Roach from the New York Times Play Magazine sums it up best:
"... I don’t care about form. All I want is to be one of the people who can jump gleefully into deep water and remain there, splashing and laughing."
🍯 Best Finds
🧴 Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? by Rowan Jacobsen: One of the first questions I had when hitting the pool this summer was "do I need sunscreen?" — I've long been skeptical since the idea of buying a product to slather it all over my skin seemed a bit sus, especially since my ancestors in hot & humid India have been fine without it for generations.
This post is a look into the science and economics of sunscreen, and has given me a more nuanced opinion on sunscreen and its relation to Vitamin D. tl;dr time spent in the sun is important and considering my skin color, I don't plan on wearing it beyond hours of exposure in a very high UV-index environment.
📑 Studying Studies by Peter Attia: Reading scientific literature (especially health & medical papers) is a skill in itself. There's a lot of jargon and its surprisingly easy to lie with statistics. This series gets to the heart of it and explains a lot of the common ways people misinterpret these studies, and some strategies to better understand what's actually happening.
Check out my Twitter Thread on the series for a nice summary & more context.
🔮 Mini Lectures in Probability by Taleb: Like him or not, Taleb is a polymath with a gift for breaking down complex concepts. Like Attia in Studying Studies, Taleb goes through fundamental concepts in the realm of statistics and probability to give us a more intuitive understanding of things like standard deviation, fat tails, power laws, etc.
Alas, even with all that knowledge he has yet to learn how to put a sweater on.
📓 PediaPress: Have you ever wanted to turn Wikipedia pages into a book? Me neither, but it's cool to know that it's possible! I found this as I was researching for my upcoming mega-post about Anime and found this 563 page book with its contents fully sourced from Wikipedia articles.
👋🏽 Conclusion
That's it folks! A friend told me over coffee that there wasn't a clear call-to-action in these newsletters. I genuinely love the feedback & thoughts that I get from ya'll so here's a reminder that you can interact with this newsletter by either Tweeting at / DMing me or just replying to the email.
Au revoir!
— Thot