2022.07.29.A: Darina (name changed for obvious reasons) is a Ukrainian guest in our home. She does calisthenics on the porch every morning — gentle, repetitive, cheerful, like a combination of Richard Simmons and tai chi. It struck me as quaint at first, but seeing her do it almost every single day changed that. It’s life-affirming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2022.07.29.B: A few years ago, my wife described similar habit of my mother-in-law, who much like Darina has a youthfully-middle-aged vigor. This conversation led to a YouTube deep dive in which I stumbled on the gold below. These videos convey a sense of cloying conformism that I find disconcerting, but also the eternal benevolent calm of the capital-S State in which we all live capital-H Happily and all have a capital-P Purpose. The emotional connotations of these videos are as inscrutible as an archaeological find, despite their recent origin. They are from another world. These programs were seen across a realm of dozens of languages and almost 300 million people, from Tallinn to Vladivostok and Norilsk to Serhetabat. And the music’s great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n