Week 6, 2026 — cat-sitting, singing and writing to think and understand
It was my first week back in Paris, but fragmented as I was catsitting for friends, and spent considerable time going back and forth between my home and theirs. I have completed this mission, though, and I look forward to re-building my daily routines. Really need to get back in the gym, it’s been almost two months.
•
I prototyped an essay series to introduce some of the thinking I do with the Japanese books I’m reading, in terms of how it shapes my perspectives on design, systems and relationships. The process laid bare the gap between thinking about, which I experience as enjoyable consumption, and thinking with, for which I need rigorous training. This was a daunting realization. But after tinkering with it for an afternoon, I feel energized by the challenge. It is a worthwhile mountain to climb, and it feels like I’m starting a new chapter on my journey with books.
•
On Saturday afternoon, I joined a workshop on resonant singing and social presencing theater practices. The singing is more like vocalizing in different group configurations, which I find a lot of fun. It’s literally about learning how to use your voice, in a playful, experimental way where there is no yardstick for good or bad singing. In the last five years, I’ve had sporadic chances to workshop SPT, this type of singing, contract improv etc. Wonder how I can make it happen more often?
•
My reading highlight this week was Mari Yonehara’s novel “Olga Morisovna's Rhetorical Question”, an incredible detective tale that takes the main character (a middle-aged Japanese woman) to Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union, to unravel mysteries of the life of her Russian dance teacher (Olga Morisovna) from whom she studied under in Prague as a child. It runs the gamut of the 1930s at the height of Stalin’s power to the 1960s when those years start getting re-examined and re-constructed through public retrospection. It’s a 500 page novel that I read on my Kindle, and I’m not sure I would even have picked up if I’d realized the length beforehand. The list of Russian characters introduced at the beginning of the book was almost enough to put me off. After finishing the book, I looked at that list again and was very pleased to find that I had a sense of each character’s physicality and energy—and wished I could spend more time with them. Yonehara, who had a big career as a Japanese-Russian interpretor as well as writing novels and providing news commentary on Russian affairs, passed away from cancer in 2006 at age 56. I can’t help but mourn the role she may have played in helping the public understand present-day developments.