Some days feel perfect.
Fresh from a great slumber, I almost enjoy my workouts (almost is doing some heavy lifting here). Energy surges through me like a wet man holding a live wire (but in a good way) as I walk to the cafe to write. I make notes even while walking, my giddy brain coming up a hundred ideas per minute. I even manage to work for 8 full hours in the day!
Monday was such a day.
Then, there are the off-days. I wake up from shit sleep, push my demotivated ass to do some workout and when I sit to write, my arms ache like I carried heavy lumber the day before. I end up doomscrolling social media like a zombie as words feel like sludge trying to ooze out of me.
Tuesday was such a day. Go figure.
It’s all chemistry. There’s a million things happening inside you everyday - sleep, working out, hydration, the food, the weather, temperature, etc. Sometimes they all align perfectly and sometimes none of them do. When they don’t, I just let it be.
In the words of Walter White from Breaking Bad,
“I simply respect the chemistry”
The good news is that most days are average - neither that fantastic nor that lethargic. Which is great. What’s not so great is days slipping by at breakneck speeds so they all become a blur.
Which leads me to my first question.
Is the simulation speeding up or am I slowing down?
Do you know what day it is every single day? I’ll confess - sometimes I don't. For those that float in a similar kind of abstraction, today is the 19th of January.
Technically, today (as in the day I write this) is 17th Jan. But it’s reaching your eyeballs on the 19th. The point of all this belaboring is this - you’ve lived through 5% of 2024 already. Here’s something crazier - just in the process of writing this post over last week, I’ve spent 1% of the year!
This is nuts. I don’t remember percentages being this crazy before.
Feels like my three-year-old Samsung kitchen-sink ultra phone again. I unplug it at 100% but by the time I start my day, it’s at a staid 80%. Drops to 79% even as I stare at it in disbelief. A new phone can solve this problem.
Can I buy a new year where the days don’t leak as fast?
This scares me - time running faster and faster.
My theory is that we are living through an epoch of ‘Quickening.’ Since they invented cars and rockets, we’ve strapped engines to time and it’s been more than happy to settle in, strap on and push the pedal.
Remember 2000? Now you’re more than two decades away from it. Blink thrice and you will be in 2025. Blink again, and it's 2030. Sentient AI has unionized. Blink again, and it’s 2040 and you are part human, part robot trying to upgrade your ears to the latest firmware. Blink again, and you are living as a floating consciousness in a simulation.
“The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I'm glad it did, because I owe my existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.”
- Exhalation, Ted Chiang
This Ted Chiang short story was both mind-bending and deep. We are all vessels of entropy that the universe created and time is merely our very limited way of trying to make sense of entropy.
I concur but with one small deviation. The universe isn’t as meditative as this quote makes it sound, is it? It emerged from violence - a massive ‘bang’. And since then, everything’s been running helter-skelter from there.
It’s frenetic, and getting inexorably faster and faster. An exhalation that’s accelerating.
My question is: Is it just a perception of mine or is this a collective one that years seem to be running faster and faster?
Can a reader check with someone young (like below 22 years) to confirm this since I have read that, as one grows older, the neurons in the brain fire slower, and therefore time feels shorter?
But if a young person is also feeling this ‘quickening’ then it confirms a theory I have, which is this:
The masters of the simulation we live in have speeded it up, you know like in those world-building games where you can run it at 2x speed because they got bored at 1x. And they will keep speeding it up until they get completely bored and press “End Game”
How do you eat a croissant without looking like an idiot?
Let’s move from the universe to…croissants.
Foods take on the personalities of the cultures that created them. Sushi is meticulous and precise. Spaghetti swirls in sauce passionately. Taco explodes like a flavor fiesta.
And then there’s the Croissant. Airy-fairy, high-maintenance, and judging other pastries on the shelf for being over the top.
I jest, of course, but the Croissant is a marvel of pastry engineering. A flaky, golden exterior with a buttery soft heart. It crackles with each bite adding a whole new aural atmosphere and as you do so, the aromas that are released are better than any VR device man will ever create in transporting you to another place. It’s a place of summer, butter, coffee, and good times.
But my question is How do you eat a croissant without looking like an idiot?
It’s not a flippant question.
I have put in Gladwell’s ten thousand hours trying to perfect the art of eating croissants. But the more I do it, the worse I get at it. Kinda like working in a corporate setting.
My point is that Croissants are tasty but are so damn hard to consume in public and still look like you belong to civilization. I keep discovering this again and again.
Less than ten days have passed since my latest mishap. I was in a cafe trying to write and eat a croissant at the same time. [Does one send a text message while walking a tightrope over the Himalayas?]. The result was, like many of my bad choices, social embarrassment.
So here I was, trying to eat this devil’s food using a fork and knife, between bouts of typing things on my laptop. Flakes flew thick and fast like I was putting the croissant through a tree mulcher. And then I hit resistance. One last shred of croissant tissue stood between me and a piece of flaky deliciousness in my mouth and it just wouldn’t separate. As I kept grinding the knife, my frustration kept growing.
And then I did that thing - the last refuge of the cutlery-clumsy.
With my fork embedded into the pièce je désire I tugged. Softly, and then with more force. The result was spectacular (Alternative usage: The car crash was spectacular).
The piece came off, alright (that’s a +1 on the results column) but I had underestimated the effect of Newton’s law here (as I have many times before including the time when as a kid I hit a powerful cover drive into a glass cupboard at home).
The croissant exploded.
Buttery, flaky shrapnel flew at me at a million miles per hour. Time slowed down (that’s one way to slow down the simulation) and so did all the hubbub in the cafe as everyone stopped to witness this pastry harakiri. With my face flushed in embarrassment, I did the only sane thing I could do at that point which was to laugh at myself and pretend like it was just another day at Maison Tyag. I dusted off the croissant dust nonchalantly and put the hard-earned piece in my mouth trying hard not to reflect the panic of my thudding heart.
I then chewed that piece like I’d never chewed anything before.
So, I guess it’s never too late to ask around - can someone here teach me how to eat a croissant without looking like an idiot?
Could be Worse,
Tyag
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I choose to not comment on the first, beautifully written part, because I am not ready to admit time is slipping by way to fast.
Instead, I present you the end boss of difficult pastries: the tompouce (using a fork just flattens out the whole thing onto your plate, using no fork will leave you with cream up to your eyebrows). In fact, it has proven so difficult to eat that a new and improved variant has MORPHED IT INTO A CROISSANT (google 'crompouce'). Yeah. I can see you tremble from across the screen.
Can't be done. Get the scone instead.