3/11 Back to Manhattan, with an unexpected variant of the wheelchair procedure in Amsterdam: We are picked up by a service bus on the tarmac, but after getting off at the terminal, J is not allowed to use the wheelchair, she first has to walk 60 meters up a ramp. Hours of anger about that humiliation over the Atlantic. The Uber driver from JFK plays dancefloor covers with pimped up beats. I smell partly like airplane and partly like the cologne from the morning in Gothenburg, twenty hours earlier.

3/10 “The way it is on these weekends, I want it to be always like that.” He tries to say the unspeakable. I have no answers.

3/9 Some progress with the telescope. Much of it is all about me and my son learning to give and take orders from each other.

3/8 I would assume that 99 percent of telescopes owned by families never get aligned properly. One basically turns the knobs a little here and there and hopes that some star eventually appears in view. This, at least, is where we are right now. 

3/7 Did not sleep on the plane, but watched the State Of The Union, for which there surprisingly was enough bandwidth over the Atlantic.

3/6 Sweden tomorrow. We wanted to fly via Munich, because they have by far the best wheelchair service there, but we were caught by the strike. I saw the news before our Lufthansa flights actually got cancelled, and that may have been the only reason I was able to catch the last few seats on flights via Amsterdam.

3/5 We are not special in the philosopher’s group, or the writing group. We are all very average people. And it makes no difference: Meeting with anybody on such topics is exactly as challenging and enriching as if sitting with a nobel laureate. It’s because you are meeting with the world itself.

¾ The eclipse glasses I bought came with a certificate. There’s nothing printed or engraved on the glasses though. No product name, no certification seal, nothing. And the certificate, it turns out, has nothing to do with their optical properties. It only refers to standards about the absence of toxic materials. You’d be wary at this point, but only until you read that in the weeks before the eclipse of 2017, the market was flooded with glasses that had all sorts of official certifications printed on them, and all of them were fake. So the American Astronomical Society has put together a website listing certified vendors, and the vendor of our glasses is listed in the section of those who did not initially provide convincing certificates, but after being contacted, allowed their glasses to be actually tested, and passed. So that’s that. Also, I can indeed not see anything through those glasses, except a very faint trace of bright LED lights, if I look directly into them. Which is how it’s supposed to be.

3/3 These age-simulating filters haven’t been around long enough that we could tell how accurate their predictions are.

3/2 Economy of motion. My skill at freestyle crawling is something I mysteriously carried over from childhood. I’m surprisingly good at it – at least it feels so. My body lies flat on the surface of the water, rather than hanging in there awkwardly with my legs down, as so many other swimmers do. And once I get going, it feels like my arms turn into wings, with these long, wide strokes, coming all the way out of the water, no splashing, just strong, effective movements. I have no idea how I’m doing that. 

The only thing I can’t do is breathe to the right. Or well, I couldn’t. Early last year I decided I wanted to add this one missing piece. To teach it to myself. Yet it feels hopeless. My body is so awkward at that one. The movement is not right, I cannot keep my head up, I swallow water. I almost unhinge my arm every time, it literally hurts. I try to compare, consciously, how I’m doing it on the left and then do the same on the right – without success. I can’t even tell what the difference is.

I had tried it, half-heartedly, during he first three laps of my routine. Not worth it, no progress. Except now, after a whole year, there is indeed the tiniest bit of progress. So I’m doing more of it. Can’t believe this is actually happening. But if I shall eventually get as good on the right as I am on the left, it will be just as mysterious as everything about my swimming is now.