Time Capsule Treasure Hunt

Time Capsule Treasure Hunt

In the summer of 1996, my cousins and I buried a time capsule in my parents’ backyard. My mother is the oldest of seven sisters. Five of those six sisters got pregnant within about a year of each other. I was the only boy in that batch. Due to our close proximity in age—and one of my aunt’s early passing—we spent a lot of time together in the summers. I loved the summer. On the rural dirt roads and sandy private beaches of Colonial Beach, Virginia, for three months every year, I felt less like an only child and more like a sibling. I have brothers, but they were out of the house by the time I was ten. Colonial Beach gave me peers my…

A silhouetted yoga practitioner prepares for a jump-through with slightly bent elbows, facing two glowing doorways representing different teaching approaches.

You’re Practicing the Picture, Not the Pose

A student once asked me whether a quadriplegic could do chaturanga. She meant it as a trap — obviously not, so stop being precious about “functional” versions and admit some poses require certain bodies. I said: it depends on what chaturanga is for. She looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Chaturanga is that low push-up position. Four limbs, chest hovering above the floor, elbows at ninety degrees. Everyone knows what chaturanga looks like. And that’s exactly the problem. We’ve confused the pose with the picture of the pose. Chaturanga creates specific joint actions: shoulder extension, elbow flexion, scapular protraction, trunk stabilization. That’s what it’s for. The aesthetic — the specific arrangement of limbs we call chaturanga — is one body’s solution to creating…

Silhouette of a person with sunlight reflecting on tranquil water.

Who Is Your Honesty For?

“I’m just being honest.” This sentence has preceded more cruelty than almost anything else I know. It’s used to justify whatever someone wanted to say, frame unkindness as virtue, and make the person on the receiving end feel small for minding. The speaker’s conscience clears. The harm still lands. There’s a distinction worth naming, because most people never make it: honesty as information versus honesty as punishment. Honesty as information: you say something true because the person in front of you needs it to move forward. The content matters. The timing matters. The relationship matters. You’re trying to transfer something useful. The measure of success is whether they could actually use it. Honesty as punishment: you say something true because you’re frustrated, because you’ve decided…

The Comeback Was a Business Model

The podcast host said something about aspect ratios. That’s what got me. Not the feminist reading of Valerie Cherish, not the bit about the laugh track—something about the way the camera in Room and Board, the show-within-the-show, was always slightly wider, flatter, more exposed than the documentary-style footage following Valerie around. Old Hollywood aesthetics on one side of the lens. New Hollywood surveillance on the other. The visual grammar was the argument. I had not thought about The Comeback seriously in twenty years. It aired in 2005. Nine episodes. HBO canceled it. Lisa Kudrow won a SAG Award for it, and still nobody talked about it the way they talked about, say, Arrested Development. Now, watching clips in between podcast timestamps, I kept thinking: this…