Friday Flames: The agony of victory
The wheels on the bike go round and round! And other news about sleep training, the bergs (Zucker and Sand), butternut squash, Harvard, sham weddings, and giving birth with your sister's womb.
Hello! And a solemn and peaceful Good Friday to all who observe. It’s Doug here, and my Friday has been very good so far, mostly because I’m still alive to write about it.
Earlier this week, Pete and Todd invited me out for a bike ride. And I knew this ride would be momentous because Pete and Todd are enthusiasts. They collect bikes and ride them all year long. I do all but two of those things.
In fact, the pattern of my life dictates that, after a winter of inertia, every April I am in the worse shape of the year. And since I bask in the inertia more each winter, every April achieves an incrementally new low in what this busted chassis can do.
Tl;dr, I’m in the worst shape of my life.
I’ll get better as I bike more often in warmer weather, but now is waaay too early in the cycle for me to attempt an extended bike trek. I spent all week convinced I’d dip out early and stagger home looking like one of those near-dead cowboys who rides into town slumped over his horse.
But readers, I survived all 29.06 miles, complete with the “biggest climb Lifetime,” the “2nd fastest 40K,” and the “most urgent longing for the sweet release of death”:
Pete and Todd are a couple years younger than I am. Pete rode a vintage bike with just two gears and likes to pedal standing up. Todd rode his e-bike because he ganked his back playing in a soccer league. So as we rode through the woods on the B2B Trail, it was clear which of us was the gimpy wildebeest in the herd that the lions would eventually take down. But Bike Season is on, baby! (At least until this latest Fake Spring dissipates and I have to turn the heat back on.)
When we settled into a coffee bar for Après-Bike, we bumped into three members of the Michigan women’s lacrosse team, who were all looking pretty knackered. They had just gotten off the bus from Northwestern and were pounding caffeine before practice, because they play Rutgers tomorrow and then fly to Maryland on Monday for the Big Ten Tournament. When I reflected on the day and realized I was older than all three of them combined, I felt pretty good.
Embers in the News
Here are some of the links that peeked through the noisy news cycle:
Look to the flamingoes One of the best ways to determine how well your body and brain are aging is to stand on one leg.
Can we be sleep-trained as well, please? Learning how to get to sleep is a skill that every age group needs to learn.
Where to retire (as if that’s a thing) If you’re one of the 11.2 million Americans aged 65 and up who are still working, here are the best states to work in.
A womb of one’s own After the UK's only successful transplant, Grace Davidson gave birth to a 4½-pound baby girl from her sister’s donated uterus.
Currently reading
Hoo-boy. Magda stayed up way past her bedtime to finish Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a memoir of her time working for Facebook from 2011 to 2018. Turns out, the horrors Magda thought she knew about Zuckerberg and Sandberg were just the tip of the iceberg. It really makes you realize how readily people get away with degenerate, violent things simply by doing them without asking permission.
When Doug spied Miranda July’s All Fours on his library’s express book shelf, he pounced. He’d read a lot of glowing reviews (which it deserves), and he knows a lot of his friends relate directly to the story of an artist who learns how to lose her fear of aging and accept the “descending arc” of her life.
Currently watching
Hoo-boy, part 2: Doug thinks season 3 of The White Lotus was … not great. Same characters, same formula, but with glacial pacing and silly, unearned endings. Doug is, however, enjoying the fearlessly weird comedy of ”Evry Bdys Live” with John Mulaney (or “as it will be known at [his] conservatorship hearing, Exhibit B.”)
Magda and Mike might actually go to an actual movie theater this weekend to see Bowen Yang in The Wedding Banquet, a remake of Ang Lee’s classic comedy from 1993. This will be their first movie theater experience since they got together during the pandemic.
Currently cooking
It has been a banner culinary week at Chez Zarin, with three new recipes that were all winners. They started with this olive and onion quick bread, moved on to this kung pao chicken (the air-fried tofu they substituted was chewy and perfect), and finished up with Ina Garten’s lemon chicken.
The way that Instagram/TikTok chefs condense a long, convoluted cooking process into 90 seconds is infuriating. But Doug likes the way this guy cooks, and his butternut squash gnocchi with creamy squash sauce is very much worth the effort. And he’s right: rolling your own gnocchi is very therapeutic.
Thanks for reading and veri-TAS, motherfucker.
Magda and Doug