Category: People

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Value of (boring) blogging

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I’ve been wondering, why daily blogs, vlogs and photo logs are so popular. For example, when I decided to learn about making videos, I started following Casey Neistat on YouTube. His vlog, which he used to update daily (now – once in every couple of days), is tremendously popular, and it shows how much effort it takes to publish something like that consistently. But surprisingly to myself, I also find it quite entertaining. Large part of the reason for this, I am sure, is that Casey is a great storyteller and a skilled and talented videographer. But another part, I think is the consistency of his vlog updates.

The individual episodes are often not particularly impressive, in my opinion. Mainly, because the subject matter is rather mundane. After all, with all the skill and talent you can make opening mail exciting only to a certain degree. But taking together, the many individual episodes make up something that is much more compelling than the sum of its parts. It’s a fantastic example of quantity being converted to quality.

So what is it about consistency that’s so valuable?

In a recent interview, Gretchen Rubin mentioned that she noticed that sending regular updates on her daily life events to her relatives had a tremendous positive effect on their relationship. In fact, they send each other update emails with the implicit understanding that these emails are allowed to be boring and that no response is necessary. The surprising effect is that even though the individual events described in these updates are often mundane, the overall cumulative affect of staying in charge is profound.

According to Rubin, relationships thrive on the mere act of showing up. For example, when two old friends, who were out of touch for many years, meet, they often have nothing to talk about beyond “How have you been?” – “Fine.” But if people are “caught up” on each other’s life details, no matter how insignificant, they have all these little things to chat about.

I think blogging is also a kind of relationship: a one-way communication between the author and the audience (it can be two-way, if comments are enabled, which I am currently experimenting with). To maintain this relationship, the updates need to be regular. The flip side of this is that it is sort of expected that some of them would be pretty boring. So my apologies in advance to anyone who is reading this and is considering returning.

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Running with my daughter

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Today, my daughter and I went for a bike ride/run to a nearby ocean-side park. I ran and she biked. I remember that the first time we did this was last Spring in Milan, where we were on a six-months sabbatical. We would run/bike along Naviglio Martesana. She could handle about 15 minutes of non-stop pedalling on her bike, which we borrowed from my colleague. In that time, we could get to a playground, where she would play for about half-an-hour, spending most of that time hanging on monkey bars. We would eat an apple and some pretzels, which was her go-to snack over there, much like “fishy crackers” are consistent favourites here in Canada, and head back home. It was hot. We strategically chose the path to stay in the shade, as we ran/biked along the canal.

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Today, it was cold (by Victoria standard anyway – about 0 degrees C) and windy. My daughter is stronger now and she has a bigger bike, so she can ride 30 minutes non-stop. Still, I ran at a pace, where we could talk without breathing hard. It was fun to run with her, but it was no question about playing when we got to a playground at the local park. It was so cold, that even stopping was uncomfortable. This is the thing about Victoria: the running trails around our home are some of the best I’ve tried anywhere in the world. The air is unbelievably fresh – I was really missing it in Milan. The nature is spectacular. The people are friendly and polite. Yet, it is just not quite warm enough to be truly enjoyable.

To be fair, though, I would need to compare apples to apples, or rather, winter to winter. The very first time I ran in Milan was in the winter, in the cold, in the dark, along a busy Via Melchiorre Gioia to Piazza Game Aulenti, which was the closest place to our apartment (that I knew of), where some stores were open late at night. I wanted to buy a thermos for my daughter to bring hot chocolate in to her ice-skating lesson the next morning (the irony of the fact that she came to Italy from Canada to learn skating is not lost on me, by the way), so I decided to make a running workout of the shopping trip. It was slippery with ice, windy, dark, noisy and generally quite unpleasant to run that night. But at that time, when we were without a car for the first time in many years, simply bing able to cove some distance on foot and explore the new city was liberating.

Today also, the simple fact that my daughter and I could on the whim put on the runners, jump on a bike and be in a forest, by the ocean in less than 15 minutes, chatting all the way there, was definitely a gift, cold weather or not.

Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.

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Late dinners

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We came across this difference in European and North American lifestyles when we were on vacation in Spain two years ago. We were in Nerja, on Costa del Sol, in the middle of summer. The days were so hot that the restaurants stayed closed until about 8 pm. So even though our daughter was only three-and-a-half years old at the time, we were forced to abandon our precious daily routine and have dinners at 9 pm or so – a time when she would typically be in bed for at least an hour.

The same thing is happening now in Milan. As the temperatures climb well above 30 degrees (C), people around us adjust by shifting their activities into the night hours. Last weekend, we went to explore the Navigli district. It is a very neat part of Milan, the main feature of which are canals (navigli) built between 1179 and 1209 to transport marble that was used for building the Duomo. Even Leonardo da Vinci contributed to Milano’s canals by designing a system of dams. There are junk antique markets and some junk unique art for sale along the Naviglio Grande. We also visited some real art galleries, where the owners and the artists were incredibly nice, eclectic and chatty. They spoiled our daughter with little souvenirs, let us pet their dogs and spoke to us in Bulgarian, which they learned in school, thinking that it was Russian.

The restaurants open for ‘aperitivi’ around 6:30 pm. It’s a happy hour – type arrangement, where for the price of a single alcoholic drink (approx. 8 Euros) the customers get the drink and unlimited access to a buffet. The actual dinners start quite bit later. This schedule is very logical and has a lot of built-in common sense. The days are so long now that it would be difficult to go to bed at our ‘normal’ hours anyway. What we are missing is a siesta in the afternoon that we really enjoyed on our vacation in Spain. Our five-year-old is still in school, but she still needs her 10 – 11 hours of sleep every day day, any cultural nuances aside. Basically, we like the European late-night lifestyle, but we are ready for a vacation with a lot of afternoon nap time.

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Homemade pizza

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Some experienced travelers say that in order to fully experience the benefits of long-term travel, one needs to live in the new country for longer than 3-4 months. This initial period is needed to learn the rhythm of the community android establish new routines. I think we are getting to the point of settling in Milan only now, after living here for five months.

Our daughter’s school has a fantastic lunch program. We are certainly going to miss it when we come back to Canada. The menu, which is catered in from a restaurant, is healthy and diverse, but pizza Margarita is her favorite item. They had it for lunch today, which our daughter told us on the way from school. And then she added perhaps the best compliment my wife could hope for as a cook: “But you know, mum, I like the pizza that we make at home much better.”

Making pizza at home is our daughter’s favorite pastime. She always insists on picking up some pizza dough when we go to a supermarket. Ever since reading Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bébé,” I have been convinced that cooking is an excellent educational activity for kids. Apparently, the quantity of our practice is starting to convert to quality, if such a discerning critic as our daughter thinks that our homemade pizza rivals one from a real Italian restaurant.

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A new orbit

I have overheard an expression regarding a sphere of someone’s interests: “being pulled into a new orbit,” which I think is a near-perfect analogy of how our children expand our horizons. It resonated with my own experience, and I was compelled to draw this cartoon to illustrate it.

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The analogy goes like this: when you don’t have children, you have a familiar sphere of interests, which develops under various influences throughout your life. If you were a planet, this would be your personal orbit, shaped by your parents, friends, teachers, and other “celestial bodies”.

Then, a major cosmic event occurs, and you have a child. Paraphrasing Neil Armstrong, it might be a small step for mankind, but a giant leap for a man (or a woman).

At first, this child is like your satellite. Her life revolves around yours. But as she grows, her interests and inclinations shape what you are interested in as well. You are being pulled out of your orbit. This implies a certain level of instability, so it can feel unnerving and uncomfortable. But even if you don’t settle into a new (wider and more exciting) orbit and instead get slingshot into the space, think about the alternative – going around and around along a familiar path year after year. So have no worries and enjoy the ride. Maybe that is the reason we have kids – so they can shake our universe apart.

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Here is my personal example. I studied art as a child, and have been painting occasionally in my adult years, in addition to doing photography. I think that might have affected my daughter’s early interest in art. Now, next to her, my own sphere of artistic interests is expanding. We now sketch and paint together regularly, and I even took a sculpture class last fall – my first art class since the high-school years. Isn’t it wild? I think it is.

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A flashback to colder months

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The weather in Milan has so rapidly changed from “jackets-and-pants” to “shorts-and-T-shirts” over the last couple of days, that it felt strange editing this video about a cold January weekend that we spent at the Children’s Museum, about which I wrote earlier in this post.

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Laughing out loud

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Recently, I heard about a psychology study that counted how often children laugh in a typical day (by the way, the study of laughter is called gelotology, apparently). The number is something around 300 times a day for a typical four-year-old. The striking thing is that the researchers found that an average forty-years-old adult laughs only about 4 times a day.

The hypothesis for explaining such a huge difference is that children acquire language skills at that age, and the English language (similar to most other languages, I suppose) has many expressions that are funny or absurd when taken literally (e.g. “to pick one’s brain”). The adults have heard these expressions so many times that they immediately perceive their implied meaning, without stopping to think, and to laugh at, the actual words.

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Here is an example supporting this theory. After leaving in Milan for a few months, we are starting to pick up a few Italian words, and I find myself if not laughing out loud then at least chuckling when my daughter cries “Mamma mia!” when I drop a piece of pizza on my lap.

So my personal extension of the theory is that going on sabbatical makes us younger by forcing us to be child-like when faced with new languages, custom and everyday situations. We just need to come back home when things stop being funny.

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Physical fitness

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Before spending three weeks traveling around Italy with my parents, I read somewhere online that the key aspect of sightseeing with seniors is adjusting the itinerary so that they are not exceedingly stressed physically. I can now confidently say that this goes beyond taking an elevator instead of stairs or a taxi instead of public transport whenever there is a choice. Accommodating the entire family, from five- to seventy-years old meant taking things much slower and doing fewer activities in any given day than I could imagine, even though I thought I was making adjustments for age in my mind.

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Fitness is a huge part of it, and here our daughter had a clear edge in terms of physical toughness and mental resilience. Every day, I am amazed by her cheerful attitude at whatever the traveling lifestyle throws at her – different weather, food, entertainment, etc. Sadly, my parents can no longer keep up with our and their own image of themselves and what they can physically accomplish in any given day.

Throughout the trip, I saw images of divinity represented by human body by the Renessanse masters. They were definitely onto an important message – our body, this machine, as Dorian Yates puts it, is the only vehicle we have to go through life. If it doesn’t function properly, the best intentions and aspirations don’t mean much.

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Thankfully, my parents are doing alright for they age in terms of health. But when the world is so big, and there is so much do and see alongside one’s children and grandchildren, ‘alright’ seems not to be enough. So I will remember this next time a need a bit of motivation to exercise, the all-important ‘Why?’ question – I hope to be able to do more with my daughter as I get older. I also hope that I will be content with what my abilities will be in reality. In this, both my daughter and my parents are great examples.

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Janus, Carmenta, past and future

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In the gift shop of the Coloseo, we bought a children’s book called “Roman Myths”, which I started reading to my daughter on our way back to Milan. It is difficult to say how much of what we are reading sinks in for a five-years-old, but I am enjoying the stories and the references to the ancient Roman civilization that we still encounter in modern life.

The story starts with Janus, who transformed Chaos into order and created the world. I find it insightful that even at the time when these stories were created, people were greatly concerned with the past and the future (Janus had two faces – one looking forward, to the future, and one looking back, to the past), while not really dwelling the present. In the book, there is even a reference to Carmenta, a far-sighted goddess, who protected childbirth and had the power to look forward and backward in time. According to the myth, her special ability was writing, and it was her, who gave people the Latin alphabet. “Yes, this alphabet, the one I’m using, the one we use even now.”

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It is curious and somewhat discouraging that we, humans, still largely fail to comfortably live in the present moment, even now, thousands of years after the myths of Janus and Carmenta were created. When our daughter became upset that her grandparents were leaving home after travelling with us for three weeks, we consoled her by recalling the nice moments that we had together with them and planning how we would get together again soon. For our daughter, as the world that she became used to over the fast three weeks started to crumble, the emerging chaos transformed back to order when she connected the past and the future.

Even at my age, the sadness of saying ‘goodbye’ to parents, even for a few months, is still very real. My remedy is this writing. It makes me think about the past and hope that someone, perhaps myself, would find it somehow insightful in the future. Quite fitting the context of Roman mythology.

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A day at Lago Maggiore

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With my parents, who are visiting us for a few weeks during our sabbatical stay, we are taking every opportunity to spend time with them. Our daughter’s school holiday starts tomorrow, but we decided to go into the sightseeing mode early and took advantage of a beautiful Spring day.

My wife, daughter and I already visited Lago di Garda a month or so earlier, so we wanted to explore another lake. Last night, we were deciding between lakes Como and Maggiore. We didn’t want to rent a car, and the five of us do not move very fast on foot, so island hopping at Lago Maggiore was a perfect agenda – maximum of sightseeing with minimum of exercise. Still, it turned out to be a long day.

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After wondering through the palaces and the gardens at the islands of Madre and Bella and having lunch at Pescatore in between, we were just in time to catch the second-to-last boat to the mainland. If this sounds like a rushed day, though, this was not the case. Full of impression – yes, but not rushed. I even had a chance to sketch the terraces at Isola Bella sitting on a bench next to my daughter, who was drawing a mermaid (she was inspired by one of the statues).

Perhaps, we were able to go through the entire three-island route because it was a workday. There were no crowds or lines, even though Spring is the prime time for visiting the gardens.

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