Commonplace Corner: Love life

The "Commonplace Corner" is where I drop some links to things that taught me something meaningful or made me think for a bit:

• My favorite piece from the Olympics, a beautiful celebration of Alysa Liu and the City of Oakland by Marcus Thompson II. (Gift Link: The Athletic)

Doubt didn’t stand a chance. Where skaters felt pressure, she bubbled with joy. While others stressed, she strutted. When it’s time to really shine, Liu doesn’t pop jumps, she pops her collar.

In that way, her performance was an homage to where she’s from and what she’s been through. Bay Area ethos groomed her understanding of confidence. Of greatness. Of value. So Liu knows. It ain’t on you, it’s in you. And if ain’t in you, it doesn’t matter what’s on you.

“I’m just glad,” she said, “that I could bring Oakland to Milan.”

...

In her city, reputed more for its startling statistics than a parade of success stories, swag is simultaneously inherent and earned. It springs as if from a geyser within, both as a proclamation of intrinsic worth and a rebuttal to any infringement.

Her talent made her a prodigy who carried Olympic expectations. Her personality can shine because of her elite ability.

And Liu’s style bears the influence of Bay Area diversity. Its confluence of cultures. Its junction of affluence and affliction. Its harmony of art and culture and technology and politics. Its legacy of hustle, evident from the slums to Silicon Valley, from the hills to the ‘hood.

And Liu is ingrained in that culture. She lives in a part of town that might scare the unaffiliated. At the same time, her world exists in a radius of fervent energy and community. Her rink is near her former school, Oakland School for the Arts, a creative educational hub that produced the likes of Zendaya and Kehlani. Liu and her coaches’ pre- and post-practice coffee spot, Kinfolx, is an oft-crowded Black-owned work space that converts into an event space when the sun sets.

It’s a few blocks from the Paramount Theatre, where in 2008 Donna Summer at 60 years old ripped a concert that people still remember.

• For those keeping score (me), the Bay Area is responsible for three Olympic Ladies Figure Skating Champions: Peggy Fleming, Kristi Yamaguchi, Alysa Liu.
• And for those who are super hard core keeping score (hella me): two are from right here in the East Bay, babyyyyyy – Kristi (Fremont) and Alysa (Oakland). And both started skating at Berkeley Iceland, which is where my sister and cousin skated and where I once tried hockey skates for the first time and proceeded to wipe out so hard I needed five stitches in my chin and never laced up ice skates again. Ahhhhh memories.

• We should all be side-questing! Side quests are the best part of the game! (The Guardian)

“Protecting my identity is my main goal,” she said in Thursday’s aftermath. “I know exactly what it’s like to not have that. My experience with it before has taught me how I should guard myself. I don’t go online that much. I hang out with my friends and family as much as possible. Being grounded is really what keeps me. I love exploring other hobbies, doing side-quests and what not. It keeps me curious and I’m protecting that.”

• Alysa Liu won the Aura Olympics (CNN):

How, she was asked, did she handle the Olympic pressure?

To which Liu responded, straight-faced and finally dead serious. “You’re going to have to explain to me what Olympic pressure is. Like, who’s giving it? What’s the pressure?’’

• Honestly, I had blocked out the 2022 Beijing Olympics figure skating event because that was just traumatic for everyone. So it took me awhile to really clock just how much seemed to have changed in the last four years. Some of that is related to Alysa Liu's win, but that was more of a bookend on the shift. After all, she was retired from the sport for over two years of that span.

• Then I was listening to The Runthrough podcast and Adam Rippon said, "Kaori Sakamoto saved women's figure skating...because she was the shining star in the dark cloud of Beijing." After the Russian fallout, she filled the void and "she pushed every woman in the world skate better, to jump higher." Sarah Hughes and Ashley Wagner chimed in to celebrate Sakamoto's role in creating the kinder vibe among the women. "She sets that tone that we're talking about, about the way they treat each other." That was all really wonderful to hear, and I couldn't help but turn to tennis and take a look through that lens. What can tennis' athletes learn from all that? What can be replicated? What can't? I'm still noodling.
• From Alysa Liu is Untouchable (Defector):

It is cruel that Sakamoto should want the Olympic gold so much—objectively more than Liu—and have to retire without something that many would consider a just reward for years of service. The 25-year-old great is a generational skating talent who weathered the quad frenzy and then dominated the post-quad era of the sport, and she faltered only a little on her final opportunity. But that loss is a bearable, ordinary, sporting sadness, which is refreshing in the context of what happened in 2022, when all that pressure, and a doping scandal, cumulatively crushed the favored Russian skaters and left both the gold- and silver-medallist despondent in the kiss-and-cry area.

Four years later, and it is a different sport, with a healthier and more joyous podium to celebrate. One that can carry Nakai, who is only 17 and was just happy to be on the podium; Sakamoto, who will retire having laid ground for everyone who will follow her, Nakai included; and Liu, who, in the intervening time between Olympic cycles, retired, learned how to play the game differently from everyone else, unretired, and then miraculously emerged victorious.

• This is a great profile on Amber Glenn, who had her own star-making competition. I wonder if any tennis players have tried this:

Glenn knew she needed a way to help her dial down her racing brain and turned to neurofeedback. “It’s like going to the gym but for your brain,” she says of the training, in which her brain activity is recorded while she is doing different things, from watching videos of competitions she’s done to doing relaxation exercises so she can better regulate the intensity of her brain activity. “It’s teaching me how to control my brain, usually with my breath and by relaxing my body, to get into a flow state, a good place,” she says.

Glenn says it’s no coincidence that some of her strongest results on the ice happened after she began using neurofeedback techniques in the spring of 2024. “It’s been a game changer,” says Allen. That season, she was undefeated through all of her competitions including the U.S. championships, where she won her second title, and this season, in addition to winning her third consecutive national championship, she earned gold and silver at her Grand Prix series events.

• Speaking of controlling the brain: I am obsessed with every word that comes out of Eileen Gu's mouth. She's absolutely fascinating and I sincerely hope other athletes are taking the time to listen to her too – STARES AT WTA TENNIS PLAYERS:

"Even if it hadn’t gone gone my way, I would have nothing to regret because I have done quite literally every single thing that I possibly could to prepare for this Games. There’s not one thing that I look back on and say oh gosh, I wish I had done XYZ. I’ve done it all. Everything I could possibly think of I did. And so even if the results didn’t come, I know that I did my very best and at the moment when it counted most, I showed the world that I wasn’t afraid to try. That’s embodying sportsmanship, it’s embodying the Olympic spirit, and I think it’s representing young women in a way that I would hope to be and that I think is really honorable."

• More absolute bangers from Eileen Gu:

"As young women, I think it is easy to doubt, like instilled, self-instilled self-doubt, but also maybe external subtleties and little micro things that make you doubt yourself and, over time, make you afraid to try. That’s why we see rates of young women participating in sports drop off precipitously between the ages of 11 and 14. So as far as trusting yourself, the power of sport is unparalleled because it is evidence over affirmation. You don’t tell yourself, oh I can handle the pressure. Oh, I’m so great. You do it time and again. Sports are really honest because you can’t lie to yourself. You know when you stayed late and other people weren’t there. You know when you showed up early and other people weren’t there. You know when you gave 100% in training day in and day out for months. So it’s not about at the last second I tell myself a chipper a little line and call it a day. It’s the fact that I look back on quite literally years, a decade of a hard work, of pouring my heart and soul into this sport. So yeah, it’s trusting myself, but it’s building that trust every day.

"A big thing is, I’m not afraid to try. I take big risks and for the last two Olympics it’s worked out. But even if it hadn’t, I think I left nothing on the table. I know that looking back at the Olympics and the months that preceded it there’s quite literally nothing that I could’ve done more. I have done every every single thing I could possibly do for this Olympics and so it’s like if things didn’t go my way, I wouldn’t regret feeling unprepared. I wouldn’t regret feeling like like I could’ve done more. So that I also think instills a bit of confidence in you because you can never control the result, you can never control the outcome, but you can control the preparation, and most importantly, you can fall in love with the process.

"I think overall I’m just a pensive person. I’m a very introspective young woman. I spend a lot of time in my head and it’s not a bad place to be. I journal a lot. I break down all of my thought processes. I think I apply a very analytical lens to my own thinking, and I kind of modify it. You can control what you think. You can control how you think and therefore you can control who you are. Especially as a young person, like I’m 22, so with neuroplastic city on my side, I can literally become exactly who I wanna be. How cool is that! How empowering is that, right? So the fact is I get to become every day the kind of person that me at age 8 would revere. Like, I would be obsessed with me today are you kidding? I would love me! I think that’s the biggest flex of all time that you can have like a little younger you be proud of you today."

"As a competitor myself, I think the thing we yearn for most is a worthy opponent. I think there’s something so beautiful in that. It’s not about beating other people, but it’s about the sense of healthy competition. That’s what sportsmanship is. That’s what the Olympics are about. If I went to a middle school and beat everybody at freeskiing there, it’s not exciting for anybody, right? What's exciting is that year after year we get to see the progression of a sport, as the average of everybody and everybody’s average rises that we all get better. Maybe the people at the top are contributing a little bit more, but everybody is contributing to that growth and that’s something that’s really special to me. So do I welcome that? Yeah, absolutely. I love to compete. I love to win, but I love to compete and I love to ski. So if I were to put that in order, I would say I love to ski first, and then I love to compete, and then I love to win. But at my heart and soul. I like to ski."

"Winning a medal at the Olympics is a life-changing experience for any athlete. Doing it five times is exponentially harder. Because every medal is equally hard for me, but everyone's expectations rise."

• It feels like the snowboarding took place forever ago, but goddamn is Chloe Kim just the best. Could have gone safe in her final run but nah, opts to stay true to herself and go big. (Gift link: The Athletic)

But these third Olympic Games for Kim were never going to be about which color medal she brought home. Between Beijing in 2022 and Milan Cortina in 2026, she both lost and found herself. A dark depression led Kim to hate the sport she first started in when she was 4 years old and has dominated professionally since she was 17. “I really started to resent snowboarding,” Kim said, “because it wasn’t satisfying in the way I had wanted it to be.” To return and make another run at gold, she decided she wanted to measure success a different way: through her own enjoyment.

She wanted to find her joy again. Her innocence.

“I had to make that shift and start snowboarding for myself and not worry too much about the medals and the awards and whatnot,” she said. “I wanted to do what felt good for me.”

What no one saw during the competition Thursday was Kim pulling Choi aside after Choi’s nasty first-run fall. “You’re a really good snowboarder,” Kim told her. “Don’t worry about what just happened. You got this. Shake it off.”

Choi, who at 17 is the same age Kim was when she won her first Olympic gold in Pyeongchang, heeded those words, then bumped the snowboarder she calls her “mentor” one spot down on the podium.

“She showed up so clutch,” Kim said later, “and won the damn thing.”

• "Document, don't create." I recently started playing around with filming and making videos for fun, mainly because I want to understand and learn the workflow and editing process. In the course of watching a lot of YouTube videos about the process, that line has really stuck with me.
• Wendy Outdoors is awesome. Watching this lady load and unload her canoe is so inspiring:

• Meanwhile, the Japanese are just built different lol. What an absolutely absurd view of Mt. Fuji:

• Ok wait, Koreans are also out of control hahaha:

• Wait, this Japanese king wins. This is my dream. I now have inspo:

• If you watch a lot of product review videos, you know that 99.9% of the time it's just a person sitting behind a desk unboxing and pretending to give a review when really they're just reading the specs off the box. But they say it all so authoritatively that it's easy to forget that you do not know this person and they probably haven't done much to actually earn your trust. Like, do these people live in the world? Have they actually even used or tested the products? Are they just hastily slapping together videos to churn out monetizable slop? OOORRRRRRRRRR are they this guy, who dropped the most incredible product review video I have ever seen:

• K Dramas I watched on Netflix while I was bedridden with the flu:
  • SIGNAL: It had been on my watchlist for far too long. Enjoyed!
  • PRO BONO: Delightful cast, Jung Kyung Ho is having a great time.

• Movies:
  • TRAIN DREAMS: Beautiful. But I regret reading the book before watching it. I think I enjoyed the darker version of the book more.
  • NOUVELLE VAGUE: BREATHLESS is one of my all-time favorite movies and Richard Linklater is one of my all-time favorite directors. So this was made for me. But I would recommend watching (or re-watching) BREATHLESS before diving in. It's important to have the movie fresh in your mind, otherwise it really won't make sense.