Links and Notes - April 4th 2021

The sadness in Sri Lanka

This is a heartbreaking thread to read. It is also representative of the experiences that many of us face in this country that we call home. We desperately want to keep loving this place. Our roots are here. But at each turn, the country finds new ways to spurn us.

This isn't limited to racial lines either although that seems to be the most in fashion these days. It's this pervasive feeling that's hard to capture in words. All I can say is, every time I visit another country (except for America), I think to myself, "ah, I could see myself living here. So nice". And then I come back to Sri Lanka and I feel miserable at the thought of leaving this place. I want to love Sri Lanka. I also want to feel loved back.

A skate park/rink would be nice

Skating is a lot bigger than I assumed it was in Sri Lanka when I first started. I wasn't even aware that we had a professional association for roller skating. But it turns out that there's a lot of people who do skate. Professional. Recreational. It's not even just inline skating. Skateboarding is big enough that they wanted to include it in national races in 2019.

But you know what's not there? An actual professional skating park or arena. The training for one of the teams happens at a cycling track where there's a fair amount of traffic at the best practice times; not ideal for training technique even if it's ok for experienced skaters to train on. So where do others go?

Independence Square for once. Where they train on the little cycling path that's for the children to cycle on. So when the children arrive, they depart. Hardly freeing. Where else?

Around independence avenue, on the main road. Amidst all the traffic which hardly travels safely on those roads

And then there's another place I haven't visited but I know is used for training: The road around a temple.

I don't think any of these are great places to be training people for skating. It's a shame we don't have better. I realise that this isn't something worth thinking about in the middle of a pandemic, but it's something I've thought about a lot well before the first news of covid even hit.

Just keeping momentum

Common mantra that inspiration is temporary, hard work is forever. Today was one of those days where I needed it. After a disappointing conversation with a close family member yesterday, I felt the wind knocked out of me. Coupled with an extremely busy day where I haven't even read anything deeply except that tweet I saw on in the morning, I just didn't have the motivation to post today. But I pushed ahead anyways. Momentum doesn't just happen. We make it. I wanted to keep it going. So I wrote this.

It's not something I'm proud of but it had its lessons. I had two other titles in this which I opted to cut out. I read through them and had to be honest with myself in that it didn't live up to the standard that I am happy with. And attempting to fix them would have taken more time than I had. So chop chop.

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Previous links and note (April 3rd)

Posted on April 04 2021 by Adnan Issadeen