I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
People are always training for something, says Peter Sloterdijk, in his book You Must Change Your Life. He uses the term anthropotechnics to describe the practices through which human beings form and transform themselves. This word derives from the word anthropos for human being and technē for art, craft, or technique.
What kind of training do people do? Artistic, religious, writing, consumption, professional, physical.
Whatever you do repetitively determines what you become, says Sloterdijk. You create yourself not through one-off choices (though of course they can have major impacts) but rather through what you do again and again, weekly, and daily, and even hourly.
Sloterdijk likens this ongoing training to askēsis, the Greek word meaning exercise or training, and from which the word ascetisim derives. You can be an ascetic in the Sloterdijkian sense by your repetitive practices, not necessarily by any kind of physical denial.
My daily blogging here is my training. What am I turning myself into? A writer, a practitioner of the vita contemplativa, and, increasingly, an everyday philosopher, a term that has been rising in my consciousness as a way to describe what I do, and who I am becoming.
Lately I’ve been training at something else: modern calligraphy on acrylic paintings. I took a course in it at a nearby rec center about a year and a half ago with my younger daughter. We used a brush pen to do the lettering, but I am teaching myself to do it with paint brushes and acrylic ink. I have in mind beginning a painting series I’m tentatively calling “Beyond Kitsch,” in which I take the stylistics of domestic word art signs but add back in the unacceptable and painful via words you don’t normally see in such objects. I’ve recently been reading Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being in which he deals with the problem of kitsch. Meanwhile, I’ve recently completed an assemblage for an art show in which I did something similar: took the smooth unreality and positivity of word art signs and added in the reality of human life.
So I’m becoming an artist, a (sort of) calligrapher, an elucidator of what’s not kitsch.
training to be a better dog foster
I welcomed foster dog Daphne this week and she is challenging me to get out of the basecamp of comfortable dog handling. She is reported to be almost three years old, but she acts more like a one-year-old puppy. She isn’t housetrained. She chews on household items (shoes, plastic combs, dishwasher parts). She can’t settle down during settle-down times.
She’s extremely sweet and affectionate — or is that fear? — and I really feel for her. I wonder what situation she came from to be almost three and not housetrained, not aware of any commands like “sit”, not able to comfortably settle into a household. Now, I note that she has been here for only a few days, so I’m not really seeing her true personality.
She goes to her official foster household on Tuesday. That will be a great relief. But meanwhile, I’m practicing being the foster mom she needs right now, taking her for lots of walks, tethering her to me while I do household chores so she gets to get around the house without using it as a potty, sweetly baby-talking her when I need to guide her behavior.
And practicing my options trading
I’ve been pleased with the latest iteration of my options wheel trading, in which I’m leaning now towards wheeling ETF tickers only (to avoid idiosyncratic single-stock risk) and only those sectors or factors which have strong charts (which means not much tech right now, as the air is coming out of the AI hardware trade).
I’m building my own web app to manage the trading. It’s read-only so only tells me what my situation is. It doesn’t allow me to trade because I don’t trust Codex’s coding skills and other actions enough to allow it to muck with actual orders.
Last week, I equipped it with various capabilities including computing profit and loss for different accounts and different time frames, noting whether each short put has a corresponding buy-to-close order to exit it at 55% profit, and showing my allocations across broad buckets so I know what I might want to add more of.
This week, I’ll continue making small changes as I see what I need for making my trade management as smooth and profitable as possible.
What else this week?
This article in The New Yorker makes me want to read more of Rachel Cusk’s work, but probably the earlier rather than the later. Will start that this week. In other reading, I have yet to finish The Unbearable Lightness of Being and might quit that.
I’m going swimming with my daughter today for the first time in many months. I had been prevented by my ski accident and surgeries.
And I’m going to push forward with plans to create a place of practice in my town for everyday philosophy.