Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • Frictionmaxxing in the Age of Ease

    Frictionmaxxing in the Age of Ease

    In “Our Longing for Inconvenience,” Hanif Abdurraqib diagnoses a modern sacrilege: we have streamlined the sacred. Love, once a slow collision of timing, nerve, and chance, has been repackaged as a swipe—faces flicked past like clearance items in a digital aisle. Courtship now resembles an online shopping spree, complete with filters, wish lists, and the quiet suspicion that you’re not choosing so much as being A/B tested. It raises an unflattering question: are we still falling in love, or have we become compliant participants in a well-designed experiment? Convenience has done what convenience always does—it removed the friction and took some of the humanity with it. What remains is efficient, scalable, and faintly hollow.

    The backlash has a name—call it frictionmaxxing. People, starved for something earned, are reintroducing resistance on purpose: analog rituals, delayed gratification, tasks that refuse to collapse into a tap. There’s nostalgia for the Before Convenience Times, when the self felt hammered into shape rather than 3D-printed from preference settings. The mythology is simple: meaning requires effort; effort requires inconvenience.

    I’m not moved by the usual props—turntables, VCRs, the museum of obsolete plastic. That feels like cosplay. But I do recognize the pull in two places of my own life that refuse to fake it: my acoustic Yamaha upright piano that answers only to touch and time, and my kettlebells that don’t care about my feelings or my notifications. Both demand presence. Both punish distraction. They’re small, stubborn antidotes to the screen’s narcotic ease.

    Abdurraqib’s warning is less about gadgets than about posture. Convenience doesn’t just lubricate life; it reclines it. We become passive, distractible, pleasantly numb—a polite version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man, optimized for comfort and allergic to striving. The tragedy isn’t that we have tools; it’s that the tools quietly train us to avoid anything that resists us.

    Here’s the confession that ruins the tidy narrative: I don’t need to blame screens for my preference for ease. I came that way. Given the choice between puttanesca and a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder, I will choose the path that requires fewer verbs. I love puttanesca in theory—the garlic, the brine, the argument it makes on the tongue. I do not love it enough to perform the liturgy required to summon it. Convenience didn’t corrupt me; it recognized me.

    The same instinct flared when at forty-eight I became a father–twins, no less. The prospect of nights broken into fragments, of diapers and pacing and the long choreography of care, filled me with a very modern dread: the dread of interruption. I complained. My cousin Garrett, who has the inconvenient habit of being right, told me that the friction is the bond—that the lost sleep and the repetition are not bugs but features, the forge where attachment is made. I believed him. Belief, however, did not improve my mood at three in the morning.

    None of this is going away. Convenience will continue to refine itself into invisibility, and our hunger for something earned will continue to nag at us like a conscience we can’t quite uninstall. The only workable response is not purity but partition: carve out blocks of time that refuse assistance, that insist on effort, that return you to the body and the task. Live, briefly, off the grid of your own habits.

    The irony, of course, is waiting for us with a smile. Give it six months and there will be a frictionmaxxing app to schedule your inconvenience, optimize your resistance, and remind you to be authentic at 4:30 p.m. You’ll tap “confirm,” and somewhere a server will congratulate you for choosing friction the convenient way.

  • My Life, Annotated; My Dinner, Missing

    My Life, Annotated; My Dinner, Missing

    Last night I dreamed I was back in a college dorm, the kind that confuses scarcity with philosophy. The place ran on grievance and empty shelves. The communal kitchen looked like it had been looted by graduate students—half a bottle of soy sauce, a fossilized lime, and the lingering odor of arguments. The factions were loud, doctrinaire, and permanently aggrieved; the refrigerator was quiet and permanently bare. I kept my mouth shut. Hunger is easier to manage than other people’s ideologies.

    A short walk away—dream geography is generous like that—sat my mother’s second husband, Baron, who has been dead since 2018 and therefore was very much alive. He wore a white football jersey and the expression of a man auditing eternity. He’d set up on a patio with a notebook and a stack of my YouTube videos, which he was mining for a college project. The topic: my life, the false stories I’ve told about it, the false stories about those false stories, and the small industry I’ve built turning all of it into myth. He watched, paused, rewound, took notes with clerical devotion. It was flattering in the way a tax audit is flattering.

    Part of me admired the rigor. Another part of me bristled at the freeloading. There he was, piggybacking on my past like it was a group project I didn’t sign up for. Still, the man was thorough. He unearthed old footage, journals, drawings—artifacts I’d misfiled in the archive of things I no longer had the energy to remember. If diligence were destiny, he was on his way to a summa.

    I wished him luck and went back to the kitchen, where luck goes to die. As I left, Baron called out that he’d put a beige bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the top shelf of the fridge. Help yourself. The promise of protein felt like a minor miracle. I elbowed through the crowd—everyone arguing, no one eating—opened the door, and there it was: the beige bowl, perfectly placed, impeccably empty. The eggs had been converted into theory.

    So I stood there, starving, while somewhere behind me my life was being reduced to footnotes. In the dream, as in the waking world, the analysis was abundant. The food was not.

  • The Travails of Horological Identity Drift

    The Travails of Horological Identity Drift

    To have a hobby is to cultivate an identity. The longer you grow in the hobby, the more you learn about yourself, your likes, dislikes, and inclinations. If you’re a watch collector, as I am, you gravitate to certain types of watches and retreat from others. You cannot explain your inclinations. When fellow watch collectors notice you share a proclivity for a type of watch, there is both a bond and a fellowship. When the fellow watch collectors notice your tastes clash with theirs, disappointment and even hurt feelings can ensue. Within the larger watch hobby, there are subcategories, where collectors branch off and form tight alliances, tribes, and deeply-forged bonds. A sense of loyalty ensues. We call this Taste Tribalism: the formation of tight-knit subgroups within a hobby, bound not by logic but by shared aesthetic instincts. These tribes generate loyalty, belonging, and, when challenged, a surprising capacity for disappointment.

    Woe, however, to the watch collector who, for reasons he can’t explain, departs from what was once his favorite watch type and ventures into fresh waters. Such a transition can bring disorientation and confusion. To abandon one watch category and embrace another creates what is called Horological Identity Drift: the slow, almost imperceptible shift in a collector’s taste in which objects once central to identity begin to feel like artifacts from a previous self. The watches haven’t changed; the wearer has. What once signaled meaning now feels like a costume left over from a role no longer being played.

    While this new adventure from “watch drift” gives fresh blood to his hobby, it leaves his fellow collectors feeling betrayed and abandoned. What offends them is their sense of Aesthetic Apostasy: the moment a collector abandons a once-defining preference—crossing from one horological faith to another—provoking confusion, quiet resentment, and the sense that something sacred has been violated.

    In my case, the “drift” occurred two months ago when I started wearing G-Shocks at the exclusion of my Seiko divers. I did all I could do to return to my mechanicals, including the act of putting steel bracelets on them, in the hope that giving them a luxury look would make them more appealing, but this measure failed. The Seiko divers remain in the box, largely unworn. As a result, I am a watch drifter. 

    What does this “drifting” collector do? Retreat to his old watch type and return to his fellow collectors? What folly. He would simply be betraying himself to please others. Such an act would be a violation of a hobby that brought him joy and authenticity. He must therefore let his true tastes govern his watch journey and the desire to please others take a back seat. Otherwise, his hobby will be a superficial affair, a desperate act to belong while his authentic self withers on the vine. 

  • The Dos and Don’ts of Being Flabbergasted

    The Dos and Don’ts of Being Flabbergasted

    If I had to pick my favorite word from the English language, it would be flabbergasted. It’s officially a word for a state of shock or astonishment, but as I’ve heard it used over the years, there are some important caveats. Usually people are not flabbergasted by a tragedy like an earthquake or a remarkable display of cruelty. The word is usually reserved to describe a human failing that goes beyond the realm of normal expectations. This failing could be surprising because of the specific skillset and character of the person who surprised us. Or the failing could simply be so large on scale that regardless of the person’s character, we are left flabbergasted. 

    Another use of flabbergasting is when a person commits a moral inconsistency that contradicts their spoken beliefs so that the irony behind their hypocrisy is simply flabbergasting. It is somewhat flabbergasting to me, for example, that many of us love dogs and cats so much but we compartmentalize so that we eat cows and pigs, savoring these dishes, while being blissfully unaware of our inconsistency. 

    Another use of flabbergasting is when we witness someone’s obtuseness that is so lame that it strains our credulity. For example, I called Kaiser to get an appointment to discuss switching a prescription because my current one had left me extremely exhausted for twelve hours. I told the member services rep my symptoms, but assured her I was fine. The incident was five days ago. I had been working out intensely every day since then and felt fine. As if not hearing a word I said, she seemed to be reading from a script: “Do you have shortness of breath? Can you stand on your own?” Flabbergasted, I interrupted her. “As I just told you, I am physically fine. I am exercising with great intensity, and I feel great.” I wanted to add, “Please put down your script and listen to what I actually have to say.” I was flabbergasted.

    One of the appeals of the word flabbergasted is that it seems made up of the words flab and blubber to create the hybrid “flabber,” which I love because “flabber” jiggles and vibrates like the elephantine upper arms of the cafeteria ladies of my youth. Such jiggling and vibration is part of the body’s paroxysms that occur when one is flabbergasted.

    If I had a rock band, I would call it Flabbergasted. If I were to have a nom de plume, it would be Flabber Gasted. 

    I suspect that to be in a flabbergasted state can be dangerously addictive. I’m thinking of Tom Colicchio, one of the principals of the reality show Top Chef. I have a theory as to the one reason above all others the show is successful. It’s Tom Colicchio’s flabbergasted face when he cannot believe how crappy the food is that was prepared for him by one of the world-class chefs. No other judge can make such a severe expression. I don’t know if Colicchio is authentically flabbergasted or if his facial contortions are performative for the ratings. What I do know is that his flabbergasted expression has begun to chafe at me. For many seasons, I took his expression for granted, but after he started taking GLP-1s and losing forty pounds, his flabbergasted TV face looks more extreme. He has eaten a dish that is so egregious that he is in a state of shock and strained credulity. He can’t believe anyone, let alone a successful chef, could make such an abomination. The implication is that surely he could never be so incompetent. And this is where I get annoyed. These chefs have been taken out of their environment, they are working in time constraints, and are working with remarkable pressure from the competition, the TV apparatus, and the judges. That they could stumble or let anxiety get the best of them is completely understandable and is not a situation that calls for being flabbergasted. Therefore, Colicchio’s is out of line. He is disrespecting good, talented people, and I take offense to it. I am flabbergasted.  

  • Confessions of a Reluctant G-Shock Convert

    Confessions of a Reluctant G-Shock Convert

    Yesterday I put bracelets back on four of my Seiko divers, restoring them to their native steel—links clicking into place with the confidence of expensive machinery. They looked the part. Between one and three thousand dollars’ worth of brushed surfaces and tight tolerances, the watches radiated competence. On the wrist, though, the spell broke. The weight announced itself immediately, a small, insistent gravity that felt less like substance and more like obligation. I admired them the way you admire a well-made chair in someone else’s house: respect without attachment.

    I had hoped the bracelets would add some pizzazz—some latent charisma waiting to be unlocked by the right configuration. Instead, they exposed a mismatch. The watches belonged to a former version of me, a man who equated heft with meaning and steel with seriousness, a man I barely recognize. That man, it turns out, has been quietly replaced.

    In his place stands a convert to G-Shock—not the entire circus, but a very specific order of monks: the Frogman, the Mudman, the Rescue. Resin instead of steel. Solar instead of ritual. Atomic time instead of romance. These watches don’t ask for admiration; they deliver accuracy and get out of the way. After them, the Seikos feel like cufflinks with pretentiousness.

    I’m aware this confession offends the faithful. Mechanical devotion runs deep, and there’s a certain etiquette to pretending you still feel it. I don’t. The G-Shocks have recalibrated my wrist. They’ve made lightness feel honest and precision feel sufficient. The Seikos now read as formalwear—appropriate, occasionally necessary, but fundamentally performative. I’ll wear them when a formal event demands it, the way one wears a jacket in an expensive restaurant to satisfy a dress code no one quite believes in anymore.

    Call it heresy if you like. I call it clarity. In my head I’m a collector; on my wrist, I’m a G-Shock guy.

  • The Seduction of Self-Cancellation

    The Seduction of Self-Cancellation

    You may have reached the unflattering clarity of seeing yourself as a Broken Misfit Toy. Strip away the syrup of self-pity and the diagnosis might hold. You’ve audited your habits, your relationships, your blind spots, and the balance sheet isn’t pretty. Fine. Accuracy is not the problem.

    The problem is what you do with it next.

    The moment you stamp yourself BMT, a seductive logic appears: If I’m damaged, I’m disqualified. Who am I to speak? Why should anyone listen? What could I possibly offer besides a cautionary tale? This is the mind trying to turn honesty into a muzzle.

    Let’s dispense with the melodrama. Self-pity is a terrible strategist. It doesn’t help you act; it helps you narrate your inaction with a certain tragic flair.

    Now the real question: Does a Broken Misfit Toy have anything to offer? The answer is a qualified yes—qualified by one thing only: insight. If you can look at your fractures without flinching, you can extract something from them. Loneliness, alienation, the habit of substituting art for connection, the long improvisation of living slightly out of tune—these are not rare conditions. They are common currencies.  What feels like private damage becomes public language.

    That doesn’t redeem the damage. It repurposes it.

    So call yourself a Broken Misfit Toy if you must. Just don’t use the label as a permission slip to sit out your own life. Idleness will not preserve you; it will concentrate the very defects you claim to recognize.

    And beware the neatest trap of all: the Broken Credential Fallacy–the belief that your flaws revoke your right to think, speak, or contribute. It’s a clever maneuver. It dresses up as humility while quietly ensuring you never risk being heard. It turns self-knowledge into silence and files your experience under “inadmissible.”

    You’re not disqualified. You’re on the record. The question is whether you’ll say anything worth hearing.

  • The Perpetual Convalescence of a Stolen Childhood in Ariel Levy’s Memoir “An Abbreviated Life”

    The Perpetual Convalescence of a Stolen Childhood in Ariel Levy’s Memoir “An Abbreviated Life”

    At the age of six, Ariel Leve’s mother said, “When I’m dead, you will be all alone because your father doesn’t want you. You know that, right?” This was a warning her mother gave her to ensure that her daughter would treat her nicely. That same year Ariel was so traumatized from the death of her caretaker that she could not speak for six months. This was the effect of Existential Hostage Conditioning: a form of psychological manipulation in which a parent binds a child’s survival and identity to their own approval, issuing threats of abandonment (“you will be all alone”) to manufacture obedience. The child is not merely disciplined but conscripted into an emotional hostage role, where love is contingent, fear is instructional, and autonomy feels like a life-threatening gamble.

    Writing about the effects her mother had on her in her memoir An Abbreviated Life, Leve chronicles the desperation to free herself from the shadow of her mother. A manipulative narcissist with no boundaries and treating her daughter’s life with reckless disregard, the mother inflicted the urge in daughter to commit her life to seeking escape from the psychological demons her mother implanted inside of her. 

    Being raised by a narcissist with dramatic mood swings was so chaotic and disorienting that Ariel describes childhood as a scary carnival ride, one of those cages that whirls in circles at a super speed, spins mercilessly, and spits you out so that you’re so dizzy you can’t stand on your feet. The world is still spinning. Up is down. Down is up. You don’t know what reality is anymore. Leve is describing the Narcissistic Gravity Field: the invisible but inescapable force exerted by a boundaryless, self-absorbed parent, pulling the child into a distorted orbit where the parent’s needs eclipse reality. In this field, the child’s inner life is bent, stretched, and often erased, replaced by a constant vigilance to anticipate moods, avoid eruptions, and survive the next shift in emotional weather.

    Leve wasn’t just affected mentally but physically. Her brain actually was warped by her mother’s constant abuse, which she compares to the way the constant winds will disfigure a tree trunk. We could call this the Trauma Topiary Effect: the slow, invisible reshaping of a child’s psyche under relentless stress, much like wind warps a tree over decades. What emerges is not natural growth but survival-shaped architecture—twisted, adaptive, and permanently marked by forces it could not resist.

    As she writes about the trajectory of her life, she realizes her entire existence is a convalescence from her mother. Being in a prolonged convalescence makes it hard to live life as an adventure, to be spontaneous, to embrace change, and to invite new challenges. The inclination in her case is to turn inward, reduce variables, and seek predictability. This turning inward makes intimacy, self-discovery, and living life fully nearly impossible. In many ways, Leve’s memoir is one that captures the misery of Perpetual Convalescence Syndrome: A life condition in which a person is never fully “well” but always recovering—structuring their existence around healing rather than living. Risk is avoided, spontaneity feels reckless, and the future is approached not as opportunity but as something to be managed carefully to prevent relapse.

  • The House at the Edge of the Woods

    The House at the Edge of the Woods

    I dreamed last night that I was lost along the California–Oregon border, swallowed by those lush, overconfident woods that seem to grow not just trees but disorientation itself. Out of that green excess, I stumbled onto a large house. It was too warm, too lit, too certain of its place in the world. Inside were people I hadn’t seen in decades: my old high school acquaintances. They had aged on paper–engineers, doctors, the usual résumé parade–but at the dinner table they wore their adolescent selves like a second skin. The same faces, the same postures, as if time had added credentials but declined to age them physically.

    They kept arriving from side rooms, as if the house were a memory with too many doors. Soon there were a dozen of them seated at a long table, the surface crowded with platters, tureens, and bowls exhaling fragrant steam like a benevolent fog. They welcomed me with an ease that felt rehearsed by kindness itself. Dishes appeared, were passed, insisted upon. They asked what had become of me. The question was polite on its face, but they implicitly felt sorry for me. 

    For a while I occupied the heady seat of attention. Then, as naturally as a tide recedes, their focus shifted back to one another–the practical side of their lives: projects, patients, schedules, mortgages. I felt the small withdrawal and, in that petty reflex one hates to recognize, tried to reclaim the floor. I blurted out a macabre fact about how some ordinary food, under the right conditions, could turn lethal. I pitched it as a funny tidbit, but it landed like a dropped utensil. They didn’t rebuke me; they simply continued, the conversation closing over my interruption as water splashes over a stone.

    Ignored but not injured, I watched them. What struck me wasn’t their success; it was their wholesomeness and innocence. No guile, no ambient spite, none of the low-grade cynicism that passes for sophistication. Their intelligence didn’t sour into cleverness; it steadied into clarity. They had chosen this life—steady, decent, bounded—not because they were naive, but because they had measured the alternatives and declined them. That was the unsettling part: their goodness was not accidental. It was willed.

    I felt a quiet melancholy then, a recognition as clean as it was unwelcome. Between us stood an invisible partition—no hostility, just difference. They were the children of light. I was the man who had wandered out of the woods and discovered, too late, that I was still lost.

  • The Weight of a Ringing Phone During the Landline Era

    The Weight of a Ringing Phone During the Landline Era

    I remember the Landline Era with a kind of reverence that borders on disbelief. Back then, I inhabited a different self. Those heavy rotary phones were not appliances; they were portals. You dialed into a world where connection had weight, where conversations stretched for hours until your ear burned raw against the receiver. When the phone rang, it didn’t interrupt life—it elevated it. The call carried you from ordinary time into something charged and consequential. Someone wanted you. Someone chose you. That alone conferred meaning.

    Even the timing of a call had its own grammar. A phone ringing before dawn meant dread. I was eleven on December 31, 1972, when my best friend Marc Warren called early to deliver news that felt too large for our age: Our beloved baseball hero Roberto Clemente had died in a plane crash while bringing aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. The call itself became part of the tragedy—a ritual of shared shock, proof that grief demanded a witness.

    In my late twenties, after I moved from the Bay Area to the California desert for my first full-time teaching job, the phone remained a lifeline. Friends scattered across Denver, Eureka, and back home would call, or I would call them, and we would talk—really talk—for two hours or more. We told stories not just to report events but to interpret them, to make sense of who we were becoming. The underlying message was never spoken, yet it saturated everything: you matter enough for this kind of time. Your life deserves this level of attention. I never questioned my worth because it was constantly affirmed in the currency of sustained conversation.

    By the early 2000s, the erosion had begun. Calls shrank to thirty minutes, sometimes less. You could feel the shift before you could name it. Texting arrived first, then the slow takeover of online life—relationships diluted into fragments, attention splintered across endless digital surfaces. The word “engagement” was repurposed into something thin and transactional. It came to mean clicks, likes, metrics—fleeting signals that mimicked connection without ever achieving it. No surge of digital attention could rival the steady gravity of a two-hour conversation in which your existence was never in doubt.

    In what I think of as the Parasocial Era, self-worth became unstable, tied to numbers that refreshed by the second. Real relationships receded as people adapted to simulations of connection. You watched others contort themselves to stay visible—posting constantly, performing outrage, dispensing optimism like a drug, chasing relevance as if it were oxygen. It was easy to recognize the pathology in others and harder to admit its presence in yourself. That recognition, uncomfortable as it was, pushed me to step back from social media, though not entirely free of its pull.

    Around 2006, I started a blog about my obsession with radios. It wasn’t really about radios. It was about reaching out, about recreating some version of the connection I had lost. When I joined social media a few years later, I found myself tracking engagement numbers with a vigilance that bordered on compulsion. Each fluctuation felt like a verdict. For the first time, I didn’t take my self-worth for granted; I monitored it, measured it, doubted it.

    Meanwhile, the practical demands of life closed in. Raising twin daughters, managing time, keeping everything afloat—these became the organizing principles of my days. Friendships didn’t end so much as they withered. Meeting someone in person required planning, travel, coordination—all the friction that digital life had taught me to avoid. Plans were made and then canceled. Illness intervened. Weeks turned into years. Absence became normal.

    I understand now that these simulated connections cannot supply what they promise. They offer stimulation, not sustenance. They mimic affirmation but cannot anchor it. I wish I had protected a handful of friendships with more stubbornness, more intention. Not out of nostalgia, but out of necessity—for myself, and for the people closest to me. A man with real friendships is a steadier presence at home. Deprive him of those, and something essential erodes.

    I don’t pretend there’s a way back to the Landline Era. I don’t see myself as a casualty either. I made choices. I accepted the bargain of convenience and efficiency, believing I could preserve deep connection while embracing frictionless substitutes. I believed I could have my cake and eat it too. That belief was naïve. The system was designed to flatter that illusion.

    Still, I return to that Sunday morning in 1972. A tragedy had occurred, and my friend needed to tell me—not broadcast it, not post it, not signal it to a crowd, but tell me. Because I mattered. The call was the message.

  • G-Shock Atomic Time Is Too Perfect to Talk About

    G-Shock Atomic Time Is Too Perfect to Talk About

    I’m reluctant to make a video about my G-Shock saga and how atomic time cured me of my restless quest for timekeeping.

    That’s not a boast. It’s a problem.

    In a hobby that runs on dissatisfaction—the faint itch that your mechanical watch is almost right but not quite—content thrives on unrest. There’s always another model to chase, another micro-adjustment to obsess over, another reason to believe the next acquisition will finally close the gap. Discontent is the engine. It powers the reviews, the comparisons, the late-night rationalizations dressed up as research.

    And then along comes atomic time, which does something unforgivable: it removes the gap.

    My G-Shocks are correct. Not “close enough,” not “within spec,” but correct in a way that leaves nothing to argue about. The second hand doesn’t drift. The numbers don’t wander. The watch does its job with a kind of quiet authority that makes further discussion feel like talking to fill the silence.

    That silence is the problem.

    Because what, exactly, am I supposed to say now? I can’t keep making variations of the same video—“I’m still happy,” “Still accurate,” “Nothing has changed except my continued satisfaction.” That’s not content. That’s a man reporting, week after week, that the sun rose on schedule.

    Making such a video would amount to a confession: the story has reached its logical conclusion. The quest for perfect timekeeping—the narrative arc that justified the channel—has ended, not with a triumphant crescendo, but with a polite, digital beep.

    And endings are bad for business.

    The only way forward would be to pivot—to talk about something other than watches. But let’s be honest: people didn’t subscribe for my thoughts on life, philosophy, or the alarming moral implications of oatmeal. They came for watches. Leave the watches behind, and you risk discovering that the audience was never there for you—only for the object you orbited.

    So yes, making such a video is terrifying.

    Not because it’s difficult to make, but because it points, with uncomfortable clarity, to my limitations. It suggests that I’ve solved the very problem that made me interesting to watch. It hints—quietly but persistently—that the channel may have been a story with a natural endpoint all along.

    And I’m not sure I’m ready to film that ending.