Things I'm watching and reading

A few weeks ago I was delighted to hear that Sex Education was back on Netflix for its fourth season. I thought I had watched all of them, but I hadn't. I am now five episodes in and -- having read that the show's creators intend this be the last of them -- I'm husbanding and titrating them. It's just so good. As always, so much of the show is utterly implausible and has to happen at the artificially accelerated rate that lets shows and movies jam through things in short time periods, but I can suspend my disbelief and live with that because the show makes such an effort to develop multi-faceted characters. Maybe there are more shows like this and I just don't let them in, but I do try to watch a bunch of shows and don't find many this good. I will be sad when it ends.

For my top of the morning reading I continue to work my way through the Bible. After having skipped a bunch of the Old Testament, so much of which was just unbearable in its repetition, I have now finished all the Gospels. While acknowledging that the Book of John shows more leg than the other Gospels, I will say (as I'm pretty sure I've said before) that I am just not feeling it. I think maybe growing up going to church just makes it too difficult to engage with Christianity in a way not mediated by layers of sedimented aversion. I think maybe it's time to return to Abraham Joshua Heschel. I sent Natalie a copy of The Sabbath a few weeks back, she should have it by now. I'm eager to get her take on it.

In the car I'm listening on weekdays to James Clear's Atomic Habits, which has some good stuff but nothing as better than the one quote I heard at a conference in February: "You don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." That is good. I scrawled that on a post it note and stuck it on my wall. On weekends I'm making my way towards the end of Deepti Kapoor's The Age of Vice, which probably merits a post of its own.

Back to the notion of systems, though. One of the initial premises of this blog was that I'd write no more than fifteen minutes a day and I've done that now. See ya.