A summer of family time 🇫🇷🇮🇱🌴
Recapping a jam-packed summer in France and Israel and sharing some of what I've been reading, watching, thinking about
How is it already September?
As I sat down to write this post, it hit me that it’s been four years since I started this newsletter.
When I started off, there was plenty of alignment between waves of inspiration and available time. I wasn’t writing masterpieces, but I was publishing consistently.
My publishing hasn’t been consistent recently and it’s cliché but life is just… richer (read: busier) with Gaia in it. Windows of overlap between waves of inspiration to write and freedom to do so are increasingly rare.
And yet!
Heres’s one of those windows. Let’s jump in.
🇫🇷🇮🇱 France and Israel Trip
Living in Brooklyn, we’re pretty much on our own.
My family is split between Florida and Israel while Carole’s family is split across opposite sides of France. Before we had Gaia, our geographical conundrum was merely annoying.
Now that we have Gaia, geographic dispersion has become a real challenge. Everyone wants to see her (especially our parents) but it’s not easy to see anyone.
To pay off some of our “family time debt”, we took a month-long trip to France from the end of July to the end of August. We were enjoying family time all day and working remotely in the evenings after putting Gaia to bed.
It was exhausting and completely unsustainable 🤣
Fun fact: France is the size of Texas. So we were on the road for many hours (Gaia needs to eat every three hours so that slowed us down quite a bit).
Our stops included the following:
Paris
Chartres (overnight stop on the way to Baden)
Baden (to see Carole’s dad)
Versailles (overnight stop on the way to Metz)
Metz (to see Carole’s mom)
Dijon (overnight stop on the way to Annecy)
Annecy (time for just the three of us)
Paris (couple nights before flying back)
Some of my favorite shots from the trip
While we were in Europe I decided to make things more complicated for myself and booked a 4-day trip to Israel to visit my dad, grandma and sister to pay off a bit more of that “family time debt”; I was supposed to visit Israel back in May 2020 but… COVID. It’s been 5 years without a visit. I was overdue.
I left Carole and Gaia with Carole’s mom, took a train to Paris, flew to Israel, and spent a long weekend with my dad visiting my sister Maya in her kibbutz in the north of Israel. My sister’s husband Tomer is one of my favorite people and they have three beautiful kids who I love but rarely get to see.
While France is the size of Texas, Israel is more the size of New Jersey. This map shows the whole country. Distance from Jerusalem (lower circle) to my sister’s kibbutz in the north (upper circle) is 2.5 hours by car, mostly along that eastern border with Jordan.
A few other thoughts from the overall trip:
Traveling with a baby is logistically heavy. There’s lots of extra gear, feeding breaks slow you down, and baby jet lag is more painful than adult jet lag (harder to put them to bed, get woken up way too early).
Working US hours from Europe after doing childcare all day is exhausting. Carole and I started working around 6-7pm each night and didn’t log off until after midnight. Not sustainable at all.
Workspace unpredictability hurts. We moved around a lot and had varying conditions including spotty wifi, lack of space for simultaneous calls, and more.
In hindsight, should have probably taken 2 full weeks off from work to be fully present during parts of the trip. Lesson learned.
📚What I’ve Been Reading
Recently read a couple classics that I wish I read earlier in life:
The Drama of the Gifted Child (paperback). Still chewing on this one. Really solid book about the way expectations from our parents and authority figures shapes the way we think and behave to please them.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (paperback). Super well-written. One of the more enjoyable and useful books about psychology I’ve read. It put a concept into words that I really like: psychic entropy. It’s that feeling when you don’t really know what to do / feel confused or lost. It’s impossible to feel psychic entropy when you’re in a flow state.
I also read this quick one: How to Castrate a Bull (hardcover). Interesting business book with a fun/easy storytelling style.
And because some of the views of trauma in the The Drama of the Gifted Child conflict with Adlerian psychology laid out in The Courage to be Disliked I gave it another read. I love when two strong books have opposing views on things. The key difference is that Adlerian psychology pushes to deny trauma whereas freudian psychology encourages bringing trauma to the surface and processing it.
Currently reading:
On Writing memoir by Stephen King (audiobook)
Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson (audiobook)
Gardens of the Moon (Malazan Book of the Fallen #1 in paperback)
🎬 What I’ve Been Watching
Movies
The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I used to play Mario all the time as a kid so this was a fun throwback and I liked the way they built the storyline.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. I’m not into D&D but this movie was so fucking fun. Great character development and tons of laughs with action.
John wick 4. Delightful banger (sorry Carole for the non-stop shooting noises LOL).
TV
Foundation season 2. I read Foundation book 1 and found it pretty boring. This series has given it the story real characters, narrative and texture. It’s a rare instance where the show is better than the books IMO.
Silo. This is based on the Wool series of books by Hugh Howey. I liked Howey’s Sand series and find his world-building simultaneously futuristic and realistic. Apple TV nailed it.
Untold: Swamp Kings. During my first year at the University of Florida the Gators won a national football championship. It created an energetic buzz on campus and made everyone want to party all the time (thanks, Gators). This 4-part documentary provides a fun behind-the-scenes look at that team over 5 seasons.
Top of my Watchlist
🎙️ Recommended Podcast
The Skip 2-part series on Shadows of Superpowers (part 1, part 2) has helped me think about feedback and growth in a whole new way. Nikhyl Singhal is excellent.
✈️ Upcoming Travel
Salt Lake City (Utah) for a Continuum team offsite this week
FL for family time (my sister, brother in law, and their kids are visiting my mom from Israel so Carole, Gaia and I are flying down to spend a week together)
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