February 16. Tonight Sweden.

February 15. Second day of customer escalation. In the evening, 40 minutes of running and 20 minutes of piano. Dinner with J.

February 14. Spent the entire day inside, in front of the laptop, with customer problems.

February 13. Learned a lot during this Super Bowl. I still don’t understand exactly when a down is over, but the lineups and movements of players in a down now seem like chess openings to me.

February 12. When I pencil-mark the hole, center-punch it, then pre-drill it and finally drive the screw in with the electric screwdriver, rather than just holding the screw where it’s supposed to go and driving it in right away, I’m not doing it for the sake of precision. I’m just not that good with wood and screws and drilling, so I break the task down into baby steps that can’t go wrong.

February 11. By all parameters, I’m a surprisingly good crawl swimmer. A movement pattern that has stayed with me since childhood, simply ingrained, never forgotten, like riding a bike. Now I want to learn the flip turn to get through the water even more fluidly, smoothly. There’s a difference: as a child, it never occurred to me to make this extra effort. I just thought the flip turn was unnecessary, negligible. Today I don’t. In a few months, I’ll have learned it, and my turn will look like the fin of a fish flapping through the surface.

February 10. Do it yourself in Newburgh. Intercontinental culture clash. Precision and pragmatism. Home Depot.

February 9. It seems weird to me that one could want to write in a certain way, like with a flashback or in another person’s voice, and then not be able to do it. The problem lies in having that idea or wanting to do it in the first place, but once that is out of the way, actually doing it seems simple to me. Is it not? Is there anything to be learned, and can there be pieces where the same thing is only attempted, only inexpertly carried out, as opposed to simply accomplished?

February 8. So I listened to a little Miles Davis and wanted to know what strange chord that is in his piece “So What”. As it turns out, it is known as the “So What Chord”.

February 7. I watch the State of the Union speech every time, even though I can’t convey to anyone that I do so unironically.