Lessons From the Kissing Booth

I have only been swimming once in the years I've lived in Seattle--lakes being cold and full of monsters and all--but this weekend turned out to be too hot to do anything else, so lake swimming it was. All the heat and sweating makes my angry robot all hop around, but it almost certainly would have been worse anywhere else. And I suppose that this summer has largely been about doing the things I don't usually do, between the lake swimming and the canoeing and the learning how to ride a bicycle again. I suppose I might as well revisit these things before I turn 30 in a few weeks, to give that some gravity.

A while ago I read an article about a climate scientist who is racing both the warming climate and his own mortality to acquire ice cores from all the icy places, so that we will have a better shot of knowing what has come before. It's his heart that's turned against him, in the usual ways, and it's almost regrettable that the cores of people don't have the same kind of layers and rings, that we can't see their growth years and drought years the way we do with ice and trees. Almost regrettable, but maybe still best left secret.