Weeknote 37: Two-Thirds of an Avocado
Until last week, I’d never eaten an avocado. I’d devoured salads, burgers, dips, and spreads in which it was a key ingredient, but I’d never eaten it in its stand-alone, fleshy, fruity form. Therefore, in order to expand my culinary horizons, I purchased an avocado last Tuesday. Sadly, not only did the fruit fail to live up to my expectations, it also rocketed up to the very top of my “Do Not Eat” list. Why is a stick of unsalted butter masquerading as fruit? Why are we as a society allowing this to happen?
After forcing myself to eat a third of the avocado, I could no longer bear the assault on my taste buds. I banished it to the darkest depths of my refrigerator, where it could never hurt me or anyone else ever again. Incidentally, I’m giving away two-thirds of an avocado. Any takers?
I’m falling in love with रेत समाधि. No, scratch that. I’ve already fallen in love with रेत समाधि, even though I’m only on page eighty seven.
On Saturday, I went to Church Street to meet a friend. We walked from bookstore to bookstore, ocassionally stopping at coffee shops and restaurants to refuel ourselves. Lost in conversation, we traversed the length of the street several times in the span of two or three hours. We must have walked four or five kilometers in total, which is not a huge distance by any metric. However, when I got home in the evening, I was so exhausted that I felt like I’d run a full marathon. Even after two days of rest, I still feel tired today. Whether this is a result of COVID or my sedentary lifestyle, I don’t know. All I know is that my body feels fragile, as if it will fall apart if something so much as brushes against my skin. Not a great feeling at the young(ish) age of thirty-two.
To make it easy for my friends to subscribe to this blog, I set up an RSS-to-newsletter pipeline using MailerLite. I plan to expose a subscription UI for the newsletter after I make sure it works as expected.
When I sit down to write an essay without a good idea of its structure, I get so lost in how I should say something that I lose sight of what I want to say. I find that drawing up an outline before I start writing helps me finish essays faster and with less hand-wringing. It separates the task of figuring out what I want to say from the task of deciding how I want to say it, reducing the number of things I must mentally juggle during each step of the writing process.
Outlines are not just useful for creating new work, they can also help refine existing work. Last week I took the first draft of an essay I’d been struggling to finish and converted it to an outline. This helped me see the bones of the essay, making it clear that I was obscuring its core message by adding irrelevant details and diversions. Once the problem became apparent to me, I was able to discard parts of my original outline that did not pertain to my core message. I can now use the edited outline to write a more focused essay, a task that I’m planning to attempt this week.