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Pentathlon Day 11

Today is an all-target day. I’m going to hit everything. Boom.

The discipline of a “get to bed by 10 pm, lights out” deadline is useful to me. I would otherwise futz around and go lights-out later. I have a simple brain that needs simple instructions.

There is a parallel between having good taste and being good at a job such as mine, I’m starting to see. It’s not immediately obvious, because mine is a technical occupation, relying on a mental bank of decades of technical experience and constant study.

But there is a distinction between a technician and what I do (he said, modestly and humbly). 🙃 it’s the distinction between a woman who believes that buying Gucci creates style and a woman who assembles a wardrobe around items, regardless of brand, that are Good.

I am not exactly how to articulate this yet but it is part mastery (and self-awareness, for example, of knowing why an old Jaguar is beautiful and a modern Camry merely pedestrian, as if sketched by a seventh-grade boy, bored in math class). Hell, even a modern Jaguar is better than a modern Camry, though vastly inferior to its forebears. The bloodline has been diluted by successive generations of interlopers marrying into the family.

Anyway. It’s a useful exercise to self-reflect and ask self, “Self, explain to me why this is Good. Deeply good.” Grasping to find the words to explain the inexplicable is a worthwhile discipline in the same way that training for the half-marathon is worthwhile: self-discovery.

And most important, when you find Good, seize it and treasure it. Do not accept its cheaper imitation, the OK. Do not compromise. Be opinionated, unapologetically.

Vampires slink away when confronted with the brandished cross.