99 HEARTS: Unmonetizable

Lucy gave me a guitar for Christmas, and I'm enjoyed picking it back up. I was never much more competent than your typical campfire strummer, and I'm pretty much picking up where I left off in 2005, minus calluses and 90% of my finger strength and dexterity.

Playing music is something creative and fun that I don't feel obligated to be good at. I'm never going to monetize playing guitar. It will never be part of my creative portfolio or a job application. I'm not trying to impress anybody with it, which is a key difference from 2005 Ian, who desperately wanted to impress people—and by people I mean girls—with his guitar skills. Playing guitar now is a great way to unwind, to spend time unproductively, but mindfully, if that makes sense.

I'm also loving how it's rewiring my brain when I listen to music—trying to decipher chord progressions and pick apart multiple guitar parts is super fun.
 

Speaking of music and musicians, I watched the sneak peek for Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary, Get Back. One thing that struck me in the footage: Paul, George, and Ringo look much like you'd expect—they have that Beatlesesque mix of soul and goofiness, Paul has that epic late '60s beard—but John Lennon looks totally fucking bonkers. He's young and scrawny and jittery and weird, an art kid who wandered into a group of rock stars. He makes faces and dances and pulls his t-shirt over his knees like a little kid.

I was excited about this movie before, but now I'm ready to watch it just for Lennon. What a joyful little weirdo.

A good, but scary read from the New York Times about COVID and anosmia, the loss of smell and taste that some COVID survivors experience.

Losing your sense of smell sounds bad, but it's way worse than you think. There are hard-to-predict and long-lasting affects on nutrition and eating habits, and research shows strong ties between loss of smell, anxiety, and isolation. Then there's the fact that we need our sense of smell to survive—what happens if you can't smell smoke or gas leaks?—and to function as social animals—what happens if you can't smell when you just really, really need a bath?

Tl;dr, don't get COVID.
 

I hope you all are doing well. This has been a hard winter for me. My family's in Seattle and I live in New York, so COVID made for a very long-distance Christmas—only the second one I've spent away from family. I miss them something fierce, I miss my West Coast friends, I miss the Pacific Northwest (New York in the winter is a special kind of depressing), and in general it feels like we're halfway through a boring cosmic marathon that takes place entirely in our homes. Here's hoping for a better 2021.

I hope you're safe. I hope you're writing or playing music or making art or just mindfully doing nothing. Love you all,

Ian