Old Habits

“We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.”

Michael Pollan

Thursday

My pants are getting loose and despite pushing up the calories I have dropped almost a kilogram this week.

I decide to rectify the problem with a mixed grill from Al Jawareh.

This used to be my regular Thursday night meal.

I gorge myself, eating enough for two.

A wonderful feeling for the ten minutes it takes to vacuum up the glorious fatty food.

Half an hour I am bloated, overfull and ill.

I never really change. Neither does my relationship with food. If I give myself the excuse, find the justification, I will always revert back to over eating.

“The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.”

Thomas Hobbes

Friday

Gym and then the groceries while Shell has coffee with a colleague.

We are talking to a financial consultant at lunchtime.

I don’t think about money.

It never comes into my bandwidth if I can do everything I want.

Subconsciously, I know I can’t stay in the most expensive hotels, eat at Michelin restaurants and order gran cru Burgundy, but I don’t really care for these things.

I amble about blissfully unaware of finances.

Sometimes people ask me about retirement, which seems like a dreadful prospect.

Teaching is something I love and it affords me the opportunity to travel the world.

While UAE is hardly the greatest place to live, it is all part of the journey.

Doing what you love and living the life you have always dreamed of. Spare the retirement talk.

“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.”

Sylvia Plath

Pies get beat by the Dogs.

I spend the afternoon reading.

Consciousness Explained is starting to irritate me. Dennett’s love of computers, software and AI has him constantly comparing the brain to hardware. I can appreciate the similarities, but the text has these long, boring explanations on computers that the author seems to believe support his reasoning on consciousness. Maybe it does, but do I don’t really need sixteen pages dedicated to how the Turing Machine works.

I am almost finished and it feels like I understand computers, computer language and AI more than human consciousness.

Well, if brains aren’t computers, what are they? Well, they’re not pumps. They’re not factories. They’re not purifiers. They take information in and give control out. 

Of course, they’re computers. 

That’s almost as good as a very latitudinarian definition of a computer. They’re information processing systems, organs. They’re just not the kind of computers that critics are imagining. 

Daniel Dennett

Why do brains have to be anything? Isn’t it ok they are not pumps or computers?

I am hoping Intuition Pumps and Other Tools For Thinking relies less on computers.

Saturday

Sleep in and then hit the gym.

Memory, or selective memory, can be a good thing.

I have not thought about finance since I finished the call yesterday.

One of the difficulties of being an expat is undertaking simple processes. An example is opening a bank account.

Yesterday we were given a link to a banking company that specialises in expats. I answered three questions to check eligibility. Citizenship, current location and date of birth.

I finish The Passenger.

I sound like a broken record, but McCarthy is all prose. His writing is poetic, concise, and sublime.

The Passenger is a return to his Sutree style of writing and while this is certainly not my favourite novel, it is a beautiful read.

“Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget.”

Cormac McCarthy

There is a companion novel to The Passenger and it is the last book McCarthy published.

The Passenger told the story of Bobby Western. Stella Maris follows tells the tale of Bobby’s love, his sister, Alicia.

“When the onset of universal night is finally acknowledged as irreversible even the coldest cynic will be astonished at the celerity with which every rule and stricture shoring up this creaking edifice is abandoned and every aberrancy embraced. It should be quite a spectacle.”

Cormac McCarthy

I spend the day reading and keeping an eye on the footy.

We have been eating a lot of fish lately. I eat canned tuna every day for lunch. On the weekend we have been having salmon with sweet potato.

I struggle with salmon, not the taste, it is delicious, but the impact of salmon farming. A few years ago I read Toxic: The Rotting Underbelly of the Tasmanian Salmon Industry by Richard Flanagan and evert since eating salmon has been an issue. We don’t get Tasmanian salmon here; we do get Norwegian, which is where the intensive farming practices kicked off.

“We dine on destruction: idyllic worlds reduced to industrial complexes that toil to the thud of dirty diesels day and night keeping millions of tortured fish alive with chemicals and dubious feed products; we sup on people’s lives destroyed by noise and official contempt.”

Richard Flanagan

We have switched to Scottish wild caught sea trout. From what I have read, sea trout is simply brown trout that inhabit salt water. Anadromous, a species of salmon that returns to fresh water to spawn.

I have no idea if these fish are genuinely wild caught or farmed like all other salmon (including trout) species. But I feel better thinking it is the case.

We have now added Coral Trout to the list. Which is not a trout, but a grouper. It is called Alhumur here.

The more I read about this local grouper, I realise it is close to endangered from over fishing.

I better find an alternative.

“One of humankind’s most enduring misconceptions is that of nature’s bounty… the belief that nature is such a powerful force that it is indestructible.”

Mark Kurlansky

We watch No Country For Old Men. Shell is disappointed.

Sunday

“Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.”

Truman Capote

Breakfast and prepare my lunches for the week.

We are moving the canoes from Nikki Beach to Ras Al-Khaimah. The canoe at Ras Al-Khaimah was damaged in the storms a month ago and Nikki Beach is developing the land we store the canoe at in Dubai.

We arrive at 8.15 and the temperature is already 40 degrees.

We have nothing to do. The truck has been loaded by the Nikki Beach security staff.

We head home and there nothing to do but read.

“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

Ray Bradbury