Being Michael Jordan

Two years ago, I read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now in a desperate bid to stem the emotional hemorrhage caused by a bad break up. Gushing despair and heartache, I attempted to resist being washed away by my own sadness with meditation, mindfulness, a gratitude practice. Friends and a dedicated therapist pulled me through the worst of it and eventually, the easy distraction of dating, lifting, and work covered up the self-doubt and insecurity. I’d occasionally dabble in mindfulness but preferred the relative mindlessness that came with lifting. There were brief flings with confidence; even so, when my workouts were a string of messy failures and guys ghosted, I’d tried living in the present again, attempted to detach and observe my feelings pass over me as I ruminated over every sharp jab of disappointment.

It took a pandemic and Michael Jordan to finally, fully get it.

Currently my sole social outlet.

Although Tokyo’s version of lockdown was lax by U.S. standards, the public has generally continued to respect social distancing recommendations. With friends who are decent people, my social life died. Dating became similar to how I currently view doing burpees on a sweaty gym floor: potentially dangerous, probably not worth the possible benefits, and highly likely to be embarrassing given my recent Covid weight gain. Outside the sudden deluge of work assignments, I wasn’t left with much in the way of distractions. The silence was deafening.

In response, I naturally signed up for Netflix and filled my life with Denzel Washington action movies and documentaries. I hoped access to near-endless hours of TV would somehow jumpstart the mindfulness I needed at work and the mindlessness I was craving during my lifting sessions. When The Last Dance aired and became available week by week on Netflix for non-U.S. viewers, I strategically waited until it had concluded to slowly binge it at my leisure. 

The docuseries about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls is, thus far, the only unequivocally good thing to happen this year. The ten-part docuseries follows Michael Jordan through his career with the Chicago Bulls, culminating in the NBA championship win in the 1997-1998 season. The catharsis of re-watching the Bulls dominate the court gave me goosebumps; Michael Jordan’s sheer drive and sometimes anger-fueled performance, inspiration. But most importantly, the Greatest of All Time taught me that to live in the present isn’t limited to the sensations currently felt and smelled and heard, but also require the knowledge that the past can’t affect the now.

“Why would I worry about not making a shot I haven’t made yet,” Michael Jordan reportedly told a friend. 

I could come up with several reasons and that’s apparently the point. To succeed at anything takes intention. It’s not mindless muscle memory that marks a successful lift, but the mental capacity to treat each lift as its own, discrete event, unable to be affected by the failed lift right before it, the guy I couldn’t get a text back from, or the unhappy client. Applied to life in general, it’s essentially the ability to stop negging yourself before you even start because in this one moment, none of that other stuff matters.

The realization was embarrassingly eye-opening but simultaneously liberating. It felt like breaking through the first 20 minutes on a bike, when your body finally gives up trying to resist the forced aerobic activity and settles into a rhythm. Since being gifted this nugget of wisdom via a docuseries on professional basketball, things have gotten easier. Ironically, living intentionally in the present takes less energy than worrying about the multitude of things that are beyond my control.

Of course, I’m not above bitching about it. A few months ago, on a random call, that’s exactly what I did 

“Hey, smile, ok?” Adam said, when I came up for air after about an hour.

“I am!” I shot back, “you know why?”

I paused.

“Because I’m Michael Jordan,” I said.

Tokyo in a Time of Corona

“Put on a mask before you go out,” my mother insisted, “people are getting punched in the face for not wearing one.”

I paused at the front door, about to argue that punching someone in the face seemed like a good way to get a viral disease, or least a bad bacterial infection, and that in the unlikely event that an unusually aggressive Japanese person punched me, that I’d just spit in the person’s face with my mono saliva. Instead, I put on the flimsy mask that was a little too small for me, resulting in large gaps on the sides. I braced myself for the discomfort of feeling my breath condense onto my face for the next few hours.

Tokyo has been a strange place recently, made even stranger by the global panic that hadn’t seemed to affect this particularly densely populated city until approximately 48 hours ago. While entire countries went on lockdown, Japan seemed to be doing what Japan does best: pretending that what’s actually happening, isn’t. That’s not to say nothing changed: cafes and stores were emptier on weekends, my local grocery store now has a limit per person on certain products, and bakeries started to individual wrap their breads and pastries. This raised the question of how many people’s saliva I had been consuming with my chocolate croissants until this point in time.

Yet, while Covid-19 ravaged the rest of the world, Japan’s number of cases had stayed at suspiciously low numbers, most likely due to the delusionary dreams of holding the Olympics sometime in 2020. Once that dream was finally killed off by Norway, Canada, New Zealand, and the fact that large numbers of people around the world were dying, a measured panic has ensued. We have currently been advised by the mayor of Tokyo to try to stay in this weekend.

It’s stupid. It’s stupid and frustrating that the politics and projected financial loss of the Olympics has discouraged a policy of more stringent social distancing here in Japan. Even with the large number of seniors that make up the Japanese population, bars, restaurants, and gyms remain open and people commute to work in crowded trains as usual. They just have more masks on now.

It’s also scary, made more frightening by the fact that governments are not incentivized to be transparent with information about the spread of the disease. But if the grocery store shelves becoming bare the night of the mayoral weekend semi-lockdown announcement are any indication, it seems people are concerned, and that’s comforting. Because we all should be a little more worried than they tell us to be.

Working virtually means my daytime routine hasn’t changed much; but as I live with my relatively elderly parents, one which has a lung condition, I’ve stopped going to the gym and have been refraining from regular social interaction since I survived mono. A week or so ago, caving to the basic human need to interact with someone not my parents, it resulted in a fit of first-world isolation anxiety. I began to ruminate on how deep my depression could go in these Covid-19 times and preemptively panicked because there was no way calculate the time I had left until my sanity unraveled. Would it be weeks, or days? I wondered. I half-heartedly started to flip through one of the piles of used, cut-up magazines on my floor with the hope of retiring a few to the recycling bin. An image caught my eye and brought back fond memories. The background blur of an ad sparked an idea.

The thing that’s easy to forget is that isolation doesn’t put your life on hold. It doesn’t make you any less expressive or creative; instead, it provides the unexpected gift of more time. It’s a time to create, learn a new skill, take online classes, or simply find a hobby. Because based on age and pre-existing medical conditions, even if chances are you low you won’t die from Covid-19 if you go out, you might spread it, and ultimately, someone else might.

So be safe everyone, and kind, and remember to wash those hands

Mono and the Micro Penis of Popsicles

Every November, hibernation calls and I get extremely tired. My energy plummets, I can’t stay awake after lunch, and I sleep a lot.

“Where’ve you been?” A friend once asked me as I tried to keep my eyes open to type a response back.

“I think I have mono,” I said.

I later learned that it wasn’t mono, because I’ve spent the past two weeks dying from that particular viral infection. While Covid-19 started spreading across the world, I apparently had gotten the wrong virus. What seemed to start as a bad cold suddenly escalated into the sore throat from hell. I could speak but I couldn’t swallow without gathering up all my willpower and courage to face the searing pain. My doctor thought it was strep but after a throat culture was taken via much gagging, the test was negative. He gave me some fever reducers and told him to tell him how it goes.

The medication didn’t exactly work; the fever was relentless and persistent. It would seem to fade, then come back full force at night. I spent a lot of time either sweating or shivering in bed.

During hours of consciousness, between Googling mono to confirm that I was now going to live with crippling fatigue forever, I’d tell my friends via various chat platforms that yes, yes, I was fine. I questioned the veracity of those statements as I laid in bed listening to podcasts and trying not to swallow, wondering whether living off GariGariKun popsicles popsicles – “soda” flavored popsicles with a smooth exterior and a crushed-ice textured inside – can be defined as fine.

When you take the bigger pandemic into consideration, I am doing fine. I have a known, confirmed-via-blood-test virus that has some end that does not involve pneumonia and/or death. But there’s little comfort in this, because at the very least, if it doesn’t kill you, corona virus doesn’t enlarge your spleen and sideline you from physical exercise. When a slight soreness started at the bottom of the left side of my ribcage, I knew: Mono had switched my goals for the year from a bodyweight snatch to all the other nonsense that’s involved in trying not to get fat without exercise. With Covid-19, I may not have been able to breathe, but I would have been able to lift within a couple weeks.

Since the pity party I threw myself about lifting, I’ve slowly been getting better. As of writing this, the throat pain and fever are gone. I’ve graduated from subsisting off GariGariKun popsicles to Dole fruit popsicles. My lymph nodes and tonsils no longer scream and sting from the acidity of the tiny frozen fruit desserts, which I’ve begun referring to as the micropenis of popsicles. My appetite is slowly coming back but I get tired easily.

The mono is probably a blessing in disguise. I’d left my weightlifting gym at the end of January and hadn’t definitively joined another. Weightlifting plans were up in the air given the scarcity of gyms in Tokyo where you can drop weights, and the entire thing felt like another re-run of what had happened with cycling in Japan.

Except, even with all this fatigue, forced time off, and other bullshit, it feels a little more hopeful this time around. I’ll be back.