Reader, I lol’d.

magit-wip-mode

magit WIP modes:

“Git keeps committed changes around long enough for users to recover changes they have accidentally deleted. It does so by not garbage collecting any committed but no longer referenced objects for a certain period of time, by default 30 days.

“But Git does not keep track of uncommitted changes in the working tree and not even the index (the staging area). Because Magit makes it so convenient to modify uncommitted changes, it also makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot in the process.

“For that reason Magit provides a global mode that saves tracked files to work-in-progress references after or before certain actions. (At present untracked files are never saved and for technical reasons nothing is saved before the first commit has been created).”

I wander back and forth machines a lot and this seems like useful insurance, so I turned it on.

accurate but not good

Luke prompted a half-response this morning:

I replied in a spirit appropriate to me, which is to say “disappointed idealist who should learn to either quit being disappointed, or give up on being an idealist, or get a new sense of humor.”

Because that article feels like a bookending, illustrative underscore of this column, which I went into sort of nodding along in a “checks out” sort of way, then sitting up straight when it got to:

“Expect more antiracist action plans, more vaporous decolonization, more mandated training, more huckster consultants, more vacuous reports, more administrators whose jobs no one can explain, more sleazy land acknowledgments (“Sorry I stole your house!”), more performative white self-flagellation, more tokenization of minority faculty members.

“And amid this great tornado of race chatter, if you take a moment to plug your ears and look around, you will probably begin to notice fewer and fewer brown and Black kids reading on the quad and, down the line, fewer and fewer brown and Black doctors in the maternity wards. It will turn out that all those initiatives will have next to nothing to do with actually combating structural racism. We may well find ourselves teaching Toni Morrison to rooms that get whiter and richer by the year.”

The biggest change I noticed at my job from 2019 to 2022 was that HR managed to edge everyone out of anti-racist work, and suddenly anything that seemed like it could be meaningful and engage senior managers was ruled “performative.” Mentorship programs? Performative. Sponsorship programs? Performative. I came to realize that “we don’t want to be performative” was just a thought-terminating cliché meant to shut down the conversation.

What were you supposed to do? Basically, fill low-stakes associate positions, maaaaaybe send a manager out to specific recruiting events, but otherwise just hand the entire hiring process over to recruitment and forget about it. If you looked at any demographic information that suggested perhaps the lenses you were supposed to use — ratios that ignored role or level — were problematic, you were asked how you got the information you were using because they thought they’d locked it all up. And I watched a good leader driven out by someone who weaponized the whole topic.

When I helped interview HR business partners, it suggested to me that what I was seeing wasn’t just local. One of them got uncomfortable when I asked about their experience with ERGs, and preferred to discuss how happy people were with a local soccer team ERG they’d sponsored. I honestly didn’t know what to do with that, but just marked “strong no,” explained why, and was relieved the hiring team went another direction. For all I know they thought that — as an older, white, male interviewer — I wanted to hear about a soccer ERG instead of an identity-based one, but I didn’t feel like playing eight-dimension chess. Including soccer fans seemed like an odd DEI triumph.

So if I’m coming off a little mordant about an NYT piece that manages to both report and perform a certain weird forgetfulness in the summer of 2023, it’s because I’m struggling to understand what we got besides a new consultant class, a new slice of territory for HR departments, and vague commitments to “work on ourselves.” I can’t get mad about the reporting itself, because it seems accurate. It’s where we all are. What do we want to do about that?

New loom on the Himalayan

I stuck the new loom on the RE Himalayan today. It was a 20-minute process, from taking off the side plate to figuring out where everything was, to disconnecting and reconnecting all the connectors.

The net effect is that it puts the gear detector behind the ignition instead of straight to the battery, which I hope will stop the parasitic drain I’ve been dealing with. It’s a weird thing to have to do, but I read a few rumors online that some dealers have been putting them on at sale. It’s just a bad design decision with a $25 fix.

Al and I took a ride for groceries this evening. When we got home I took a reading off the battery then set a reminder to myself to check back in 24 hours to see whether the drain seems reasonable. Since I put an Antigravity battery in there the stakes are a little lower if it drains too much while I observe.

Not related to the loom, the bike is running really well now. It sounds good, feels smooth, and I’ve appreciated how manageable it is. I had it out twice today and just enjoyed driving it through a few curvy parts of southeast Portland in the sun. We’re thinking about taking a camping trip down in Clackamas County and going out separately so we can bring the Himalayan along and enjoy some forest service roads and rides along the river.

Still considering trading it in or selling it, but it’s growing on me again. I just wish RE was just better at QA overall. I’ve got $125 worth of dongles hanging off the thing to get it to just do what it should have done out of the factory, I’ve spent four hours sitting around the dealership while the mechanics grudgingly fixed stuff like pinched vacuum hoses and weirdly tuned electrics, and I spent a bunch of my own time hand-tightening connections and digging overpacked grease out of connectors.

With all that time and effort invested, it’s behaving. I don’t know if I’d recommend these bikes to a newbie. I have some patience and don’t mind having to do a little work — it’s sort of educational and interesting. Someone new to the hobby shouldn’t have to think about that stuff when they’re trying to just learn the basics and wondering if stalls or glitches are their fault.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was trying out Golden Ratio, an Emacs package that dynamically resizes windows inside the frame as you switch between them. I saw a few warnings here and there that it had a few bugs, but for the past few weeks it seemed fine. I finally came across one a few days ago that I couldn’t quite isolate — it broke the way org-insert-structure-template worked — and finally took the time to narrow it down this morning.

Golden Ratio isn’t being maintained anymore, so I decided “not enough time in the day,” marked that part of my config :tangle no and installed Zoom,, which does much the same thing.

Minimum config:

(custom-set-variables
 '(zoom-mode t)
 '(zoom-size '(0.618 . 0.618)))

Post-reddit

Golden Ratio made me think about reddit for a bit. I learned about that package from one of the Emacs subreddits. I don’t recall a ton of discussion about it, so it must have been one of the quiet link aggregator subs, like /r/planetemacs. That was the other half of my reddit experience: Grazing steady feeds of interesting stuff. I’ve learned a lot about assorted interests — motorcycling, longboarding, Emacs, ruby — from watching a subreddit scroll by and just grabbing links.

That part of my experience is largely unaffected by the third-party app shutdown. I don’t follow or participate in discussions much, so I can do that from a browser or reddit’s own, terrible app.

But while I’m not, like, boycotting mad, I’m irritated. I don’t know how spez managed to press so many buttons at once with me — ordinarily tech dude stuff rolls off my back, and C-level tech dude stuff barely registers as language or thought, but the combination of smarm, Ralph-Wiggum-esqe “I’m a business man <eats paste>” posturing, deceit, and bizarre turn into trying to make the whole thing some sort of identity politics issue just … wow.

Like, look: Even at my most business-like — my most “jacked director” — I’m pretty much just one of those vintage-looking prints you see at mall restaurants of little kids dressed in adult clothing sitting at a desk on an old-timey phone or whatever. If I have a philosophy of business communication or governing principle for “how I show up,” it is probably “best to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool …” etc.

But when I read the clown-like attempts at businessing going on over the Apollo debacle — the appalling, weak blithered promises that everyone was gonna be cool here — I was sort of appalled and a little embarrassed for them. It was like when you ask one of your managers “so did you give them that feedback about promotion?” and they swear to God they laid down the law but their report took it like a champ, then you actually read the check-in and it’s, like, “Joe Grudd was stellar this year. Recommending for immediate promotion. Top notch ace contributor. Indispensable.”

And then, after dithering around and failing to just sit up straight and deliver the damn message, they let themselves get clowned. Nobody covered themselves in glory in whatever negotiations were going on, but table stakes for people who’re busy ruining the customer experience on a beloved website because They Are Serious Business People Who Get How This Works is pretty much “don’t look worse than the one-man cottage industrialists who’re hoping you’ll get them to go peacefully if you just buy them out ha ha only serious.”

But somehow they couldn’t even do that.

Anyhow.

It just sort of shades the whole experience now. Perfectly nice, sometimes emotionally violent shitposters just getting on with their days, the occasional incel breaking cover and going down in a hail of gunfire under the helicopter spotlights of the moderation team, no longer ad free, forcing you to remember that when someone says “have some gold, kind stranger” that gold was sold to them by the Ed Rooney of web publishing. There’s just this lingering fart smell wafting through it all. Where do you go from here?

Lemmy

Well, I decided to look around at Lemmy.

I get it, more or less, and am assuming that all the weirdness I’m seeing is down to the same thing that happened with Mastodon last fall: Lots of little instances struggling to keep up with the newbies, plus different configurations, plus the codebase itself. Most of the instances I skipped through were either slow or glitchy. The most solid Lemmy instance I’ve seen — sometimes slow but usable — is the unfederated hexbear.net, and I don’t think it counts.

So I signed up for a couple of more normal ones and will revisit as things calm down.

Himalayan Day

Today is “work on the Himalayan day.” My new Antigravity self-jumping battery is here, the mounting base and passenger back pad for our Givi topcase are here (which will make it easier for Al to ride pillion), and I did some reading about how to test for that parasitic drain. So I’m going to give it all a few hours out in the driveway with a wrench and a multimeter. It’s sunny and beautiful, so I’m looking forward to the ride after I’m done.

I’m kind of wondering if this small round of “get ready for sale, but also make it a little nicer” investment will change my mind about selling it.

My strong impression of Himalayans in general is that the user base is split between people who just drive them off the lot and love them, never really having much trouble that doesn’t get addressed during early service; and people like me, who get a badly QA’d one and more than their share of glitchy components.

I like riding the thing. It’s a manageable size for city riding, and it does really well anywhere you’d want to go in the Portland metro area. Holds its own on 205/84, fine for runs up to St. Johns or Sauvie Island, great down to Estacada. With the panniers and topcase it’s fine for groceries. There’s just enough power to two-up in town on date nights. I don’t think I’d ever take for a run down I5, but I could see running downstate on the back highways.

I’ve done so much to it at this point that there’s some sweat equity I don’t want to part with. If I could nail down the parasitic drain I’d have a bike that I feel more than a little attached to, because I’ve put a lot of time into getting it dialed in. Knowing there’s a dealership up in St. Johns that spends most of its time selling RE’s, vs. the sort of crappy “RE’s are a weird loss-leader for broke Harley wannabes” dealership out on the west side I had to get early service from, makes me a little more hopeful, too. It was frustrating having to go do my own research about assorted RE glitches then convince the service team to try fixes. I get the impression the St. Johns people are a little more into REs and would be a little more proactive.

We’ll see. If I get it into a place where it just feels good and I don’t have that “poorly shimmed table leg” feeling every time I turn the key, maybe we continue another season.

Anyhow, that’s the plan for today, so I’m gonna save and ship this.

Thorns game

Oh … going to a Thorns game tonight. Our first. Kathleen and Amy had extra tickets, so off we go.

Evidently RE Himalayans have a widespread problem with parasitic drains owing to a few things, including weird wiring of the gear sensor. The net effect is batteries that get chewed through in a week of sitting. People do a bunch of things to address it, from finding third-party components to replace the factory stuff from RE, to rewiring the gear sensor, to even putting mechanical bypasses on the negative pole of their batteries. A battery tender is enough to help, too, though I sort of hate having one sitting out in the driveway.

There’s also a cheap dongle you can order from Hitchcocks to do the rewiring for you. I ordered one hoping it’ll address my Himalayan’s particular issues. If I’m to sell it, I’d like to say “no need for a constant tender!”

I also ordered an Antigravity battery. Those things are cool: They keep some reserve power back. When they sense drain on the battery taking it below its ability to start the bike, the battery shuts down. Press a button and it recharges the main cells enough for a couple of starts.

There’s a newer RE dealer up in St. John now, and I want to go up and talk to them. The service I got at the dealership I bought the bike from was pretty bad and sort of grudging. They had a real “if you wanted it to all work perfectly, why didn’t you spend more” attitude, which helped me realize that what they want to do is sell you a Harley, but it’s useful to them to have some RE’s sitting on the floor for when people come in and can’t countenance sixteen grand. There’s the RE for less than $7000 out the door, and the way motorcycle fever works is that you’ve rolled into that dealership ready buy something no matter what. (Well, not me – I got it all out of my system with my first 170cc scooter, and am probably on a local dealership blacklist for filling out quote forms then never returning calls.)

The “H” is for “Hideous.” Or “Horny.” Take your pick on what the “D” is for.

Trying to look up the price for a Harley Street Bob I ended up on the product page. Jesus Christ.

Raising a kid I was sensitized to the aspirational nature of children’s television/marketing. Like, was iCarly about teenage kids? Yes. But Nickelodeon didn’t think fifteen-year-olds were watching. It knew eleven-year-olds were watching. The ads told you what the real viewer demographic was.

Harley is doing this in reverse: The male model is “good-looking guy, a little salt and pepper in the beard.” The female model is younger. Plausibly-deniably younger. Not enough to be lurid. Not enough, in a marriage where decisions about things like motorcycles are made jointly, to trigger too much anxiety, and possibly even aspirational for the spouse who’s okay with a t-shirt that reads “If you can read this, my old lady fell off.”

It’s not marketing for 30-year-olds who aspire to be 45-year-olds. It’s marketing for 60-year-old men who aspire to much younger women. Wow it’s a fine line between “plausible deniability” and “feels icky.” The local Harley dealership where I got the Himalayan picks up the slack with a “Summer Solstice Bike Night” that includes a bikini bike wash. I guess that’s for the very rare instances where merely riding around atop your new Hog didn’t magnetically lasso an old lady onto the pillion. And if all they’re doing is rolling up to the bikini car wash a few times between June and August, it’s probably keeping the mortality rate down.

Obsidian Actions and Shortcuts

You can do a lot with the Obsidian URL scheme and Apple’s Shortcuts, but it’s a little less fiddly with Actions for Obsidian, which offers a bunch of Shortcuts actions that handle things like appending text to notes, making new notes, etc. I dusted off an old Shortcut I had that used the URL scheme and refactored it to work with Actions for Obsidian and it is much cleaner.

The workflow:

• Pops up a dialog with all my appointments for the day
• I check the appointments I want an entry for in my daily page
• If there’s no daily page, the workflow creates it
• Appends my appointments for the day to the Notes section of my daily page

I currently just have a simple template for those meetings:

# Meeting Name 
(attendees)

## What's the most important thing about this meeting?

## How do you want to show up? 

It’s at slight cross purposes with my static “Today” page, which I developed thinking I wasn’t going to do daily pages. During my layoff, daily pages and journal entries were sort of the same thing, and I was doing all my journaling in encrypted org-journal files. I decided to keep my journal in org-journal, where I have a safe space for writing whatever I want. Daily pages are a little more “look ahead and log things I don’t care about other people reading (much).” So, I think I’ll move some of my Today page templating into my daily pages so they become a record of activity: Notes and tasks created on that day and that loose “looking ahead” calendar forecast I automated.

Camera bags

Looks like Moment is coming for Peak Design. The product names are pointedly similar. I was briefly confused by the promo mail.

Because you can

I had an item for today’s post I decided wasn’t quite ready. Using org-mode to blog, I would have done a quick org-refile to move the heading into a drafts section where I can work on it later. But I’m writing in Markdown so that was off the table. I just made a file called drafts.md and committed it, then added the heading to it for later with good ol’ fashioned kill/yank.

But I did briefly think “oh, see … good reason to go back to org-mode for blogging.”

Except it’s not. It’s a terrible reason. I just counted how many keystrokes it took me to collapse a heading, kill it, switch buffers, and yank it. It was … not a lot? 10? How about an org-refile operation? Yes. Fewer for sure. About half as many. The not-org-refile approach incurs some cognitive load, I suppose. When I was blogging in an org-file monolith my refile target was the only choice for that file. The Markdown version requires me to remember that I bookmarked my drafts.md file.

Probably seems like a weird thing to care about, but when I think about how ADHD shows up for me, it often takes the form of trying to do everything quickly to get on to the next thing. But I’ve also got the hyperfocus thing going on, which finds a lot of expression in automation challenges I get lost in, trying to shave a few more seconds or keystrokes off a process. When everything is wired up to drive down friction, I don’t give myself time to think. I’m just moving. I end up living in either a closed off, hyperfocused space where I’m grinding out incremental improvements, or I’m flying along the treetops.

It’s about the thing I’m doing with the Obsidian/Things division of labor. I wrote about this a few days ago when I mentioned the way I’m blending todos into my note text, but only long enough to leave a reminder to myself to go back and turn something into a real action in my system of record for todos. I think it’s bad for me to have everything in the same system, because the less friction there is to record and remember, the more stuff just gets shoved into what eventually becomes an old shoebox full of receipts with purple crayon scribbles and grease stains.

Today, for instance, I had five meetings. Three of them produced things that I needed to remember to do later. I dropped todos into the text as I was taking notes. At the end of the day, I went to my Today page and looked at the Todo section, dynamically created from todos in any notes dated today. A few were “just do it now” sorts of things that I knocked out before they could even hit Things. A few, it was helpful to jump back to the note to see things like “why did he tell me to ping Felix?” A few, it was helpful to write a more thoughtful plan in Things (and drop the Obsidian URL in to link back to the more complete notes).

There is some friction in that workflow. It does require a “clear the decks” item on my daily calendar at the end of the day so I can make sure to go back and consolidate. I feel a lot more composed and certain of the quality of the things I’m actually putting into my todo system, though, when I have those liminal tasks to go back to, reconsider, and rewrite after revisiting their context.

This is not, I guess I should add, something unique to Obsidian. You could do this in any of the org-mode using tools, or any plaintext system where there’s an easy way to create TODOs and find them later. Obsidian’s dataviews and Tasks plugin makes it easy. org-mode similarly can do it with agenda views, Denote dynamic blocks, etc. The value is in slowing down, stopping the high-speed accumulation of stuff that’s stripped of context and crammed into a digital shoebox, and providing pointers back to useful context for when the time comes to turn a quickly jotted todo into a meaningful action.

You don’t even, I suppose, have to spread it out over multiple apps. But I do find that the act of putting Obsidian and Things side-by side and having to transpose prose to lists is a useful exercise. It’s a bit of deliberation and rethinking that’s clarifying.

Comments

… I’d love to add ’em, and I was looking at some recipes for doing it using Mastodon, but half the examples led to 404s, one of them swore to god it was working then said it wasn’t and then said it was, and was also leading to 404s. Not enough time in the day. The ones that did work had a very awkward, high-friction energy to them.

Given that I push posts out over one channel, and that almost all my inbound traffic is coming in from Mastodon people, I’d be happy for just the part where you can visit an announcement post. But that part seems to be harder than it needs to be given the federation stuff.

Not enough time in the day to worry about this stuff. Definitely do not want to pay anyone. Definitely not interested in sticking Disqus in there. Think I’ll table it.

Apple News does this thing where you can block a news source, but any time that news source turns up on the Today page the space the story would have taken up is replaced by a notification that you blocked the source. It was annoying when I was just blocking CNN and other TV news outlets, but it got more annoying when I started blocking subscription-based channels I don’t want to subscribe to. My mind goes to what sorts of compromises and deals are made to keep, e.g. the Washington Post on the platform, with its mix of freebie loss leaders and subscription content.

Evidently:

“Blocking is not supported in Top Stories or other groups curated by the Apple News editors, who vet each story in those groups for quality and accuracy.”

I think where my acceptance of Apple’s whole “let go and let us” is concerned, I’ve found my demarcation line.

RSS is the way.

On a wider note: It feels like so many things that are bad are because we’re struggling to stay on top of all the things in the digital era. We’re delegating aggregation, curation, etc. to platforms that are worse decision makers than us because their bad decisions cost less and are more convenient than our good decisions. The tradeoff we make is that we get the ease in exchange for a quantum of financialized badness we’re meant to either ignore or endure.

Two decades ago, my impulses were super democratic, but I wanted to share my technical expertise with people that had less of it so they could participate in the Web as full citizens. It’s weird to me that I felt a little impatient with people about how slowly they were adapting to it all in, like, 2003. The Web wasn’t even old enough for middle school at that point.

When the big platforms started to roll in, I’d mellowed a lot and my thought was “this seems to be how people are going to participate.” It was super weird to me that friends were ceding basic connectivity to Facebook, and using work addresses for personal mail when forced to send an email, but I’d also lived through a cycle of hosting other peoples’ stuff, helping people who decided to self-host unfuck their little Red Hat servers, etc. and I didn’t like the responsibility. So whatevs.

Now? I don’t know what to say. I’m tired of the big platforms, I don’t care for the tradeoffs you have to endure for zero-interest-funded services, and I’m pretty happy with the little base of operations I have set up. I sympathize with people who don’t have the cycles to commit to things like figuring out RSS readers or mail hosting, or making an identity in the Fediverse, or building a blog, and who have to live with more acute tradeoffs. But I also don’t care to have much more emotion about it than I would about a friend whose mac-n-cheese recipe doesn’t involve a little extra effort in the form of a tasty mustard roux. Like, enjoy your mac-n-cheese, friend!

I think the thing that might have finally beaten it all out of me was the Muskification of Twitter and the Mastodon migration wave I came in on. People kept trying to turn the whole thing into this epic, moral, world-historical twilight struggle. That’s perfectly in line with the very neoliberal, very postmodern, very consumption-centric view of the world that would have us believe that no, actually, posting is praxis.

End on a positive note? Sure. My friend and former coworker Gene has a cool podcast about volunteering technical skill. That’s praxis. He reminds me that now that I’ve got some basics covered again, it’s time to go out and do something to help somewhere. Posting isn’t that.

Ugly but they work

A few years back when I was in the market for new hiking boots I ended up with Hoka Anacapas. They were still a relative novelty, and they stood out for their “neon pontoon boat” aesthetic. People were concerned about preserving trail feel with such a built-up, cushiony boot, but they worked pretty well for me and I’m glad I have them.

What wasn’t working so well were the lighter day shoes I was wearing as Al and I ramped up how much walking we did during the week. They were wearing out fast, blowing out in three or four months, and my back was noticing, so I gave Hoka Speedgoats a try. They’re classified as “trail runners,” but I found they worked really well for getting around on long walks in the city. They weren’t at all to my taste in terms of appearance, but I also didn’t like the whole whole “brown suede and mesh” aesthetic, either. I think, in terms of Hoka’s lineup, that they’re considered a more neutral build, so they look more “normal” compared to the more built up ones.

I got used to how they looked pretty quickly because my back and hips did a lot better with them, and because I could get six months of heavy use out of them instead of three or four. And even when they wore down to the point they weren’t great for long urban hikes they had a second life as longboard shoes. My one complaint was that the toe box was a little narrow and took a few weeks to stretch out.

When my last pair came due for a reup, I looked around at Hoka’s site and noticed the colors I’d gotten used to were gone and the ones that were available were somehow even more bright and un-me. So I went to the local outdoor store and shopped around and got some Merrell’s, reasoning that the Vibram sole would provide some of the stiffness and shock absorption I was probably getting from the Speedgoats.

It’s not lost on me that a minor back thing I would have walked off in a day turned into a multi-week ordeal at exactly the same time I started wearing those around. So … off they go. I just got my new pair of Speedgoats in the mail today: I went with a wide size, so they feel great right away, the color is definitely not my favorite but it’s not that much worse now that I see them on my feet. Since I know how much life I’ll get out of a pair, I just got normal ones instead of the Goretex version: These’ll be dead about the time the rainy season comes back.

Getting a good shoe is a joy. One of the bad things about getting older and caring more about these things is how you come to see the bigger product cycle. I have no idea how long Hoka Speedgoats will work well for me. It’s a matter of faith that they’ll do something to revise the line that’ll make them not work. They all do it, to the point that when I found an outdoor hat that worked for me I just bought three more and put them on a shelf in the closet. I’m grateful every time I see the newer, less breathable, worse version on the rack at REI. If I play my cards right, I may never buy that particular kind of hat again.

Time to sell the Himalayan

I’ve written about my Royal Enfield Himalayan. Just noting here that it is time to be rid of it. If you know anybody interested in a bike:

• Low mileage
• Cargo racks and metal panniers
• Improved rear view mirrors
• After market adjustable brake and clutch levers
• Booster plug

It runs pretty smoothly, and the booster plug does a lot to help with rough idling it arrived with from the factory. It mostly comes down to taste. I’ve got another trail bike — my Yamaha TW200 — and I’m looking for something better for two-up date nights.

$3,500 firm.

Band of Brothers

When I was recently recounting Great Prestige TV, I left out Band of Brothers. I don’t know what put it back on my radar, but I rewatched it over several days last week. There are a few things about I’ve got a problem with, and a few more things I suspect I would have a problem with if I dug in more, but it’s pretty effective television.

If you went to jump school then ended up at Ft. Liberty (formerly Ft. Bragg), the show can’t help but have an effect: The streets are named for the battles and places. You were surrounded by the lore. You’re watching a show about the people you were told you had to measure up to. It’s not SpecOps or high speed stuff — it’s just rigorously trained, determined people dropped into battle, expected to take hideous losses.

Watching the show, feeling a sort of resonance during the jump sequence as they run through the pre-jump ritual, thinking about what they did … it put me back in touch with the feeling I had the first time I saw it, which was a sense of kinship, but also an awareness that I had no frame of reference for what they did or endured. I went to jump school because basic training was a disappointment and signal school was boring. People told me it would be hard, and a training sergeant who bought me a lemonade one night when I was on fireguard duty told me he thought it would help me make sense of the decision I’d made to enlist at all.

“You think you’re outsmarting someone, but you’re here for a reason.”

I was proud to earn my wings, but I still didn’t think jump school was as transformative as I’d hoped. It took years and a lot of distance to realize that the pride was still there.