Collected Agenda Scene Wiki

Wim Hof

22 min read

Wim Hof

Article

Wim Hof is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 16, 2024 and May 27, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “The Wim Hof method recommends rapid bursts of breath coupled with exposure to the extreme cold / Wim Hof (the man) lost a finger”; “things like Wim Hof and Heating Up and Cooling Down”. It most often appears alongside Baby’s All Right, David, Doritos.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: December 16, 2024
  • Last seen: May 27, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Moral Framework
December 16, 2024 · Original source
Risotto David made for me + prints from Paris Wednesday, December 11 I went to the Russian Baths on Wall Street on my first day in New York. I still go often now. It’s not really of my own volition. It’s a family tradition. It’s still pouring today. It’s been pouring all week. I used to think the Russian Baths were all liminal space and Russian mob, but now it feels less secret. The Doritos are from Israel. Russian Jews and Russian Gentiles, I hear someone explaining in line behind me. The building is huge. The pool area does feel kind of like The Backrooms. I have night terrors every night. In my dreams, I am never stuck in places like this. My aunt likes the cold plunge. She can stay in it for seven minutes, far beyond the recommended time of three. The Wim Hof method recommends rapid bursts of breath coupled with exposure to the extreme cold. I’m in the Infrared Sauna. On Christmas, I will swim outside in Walden Pond. Wim Hof (the man) lost a finger, an ear, something detached in the retina of his eye… I can’t recall the specific injury but something bad happened swimming across an icy lake. He took it too far. When I get back to New York, I will swim off Orchard Beach. There’s a group that goes every morning. My aunt tells me you have to go to Orchard Beach in the winter. It’s like Siberia in the Winter. It’s finally getting cold enough to swim. On my Wednesday at the Russian Baths, I lose my keys. I lose the big rubber slippers that they give you on arrival. I can’t last very long in the extreme heat or the extreme cold. An actor in the infrared sauna is talking about how he can only memorize lines in the cold plunge. I’m thinking about how I’m in an infinite feedback loop where everyone I meet keeps being actors. We go to dinner at the Russian Restaurant at the spa. It’s called Matryoshka like the dolls. I only learn this later David and I split potato pancakes, salad olivier which is the one with mayonnaise and egg and chicken (delicious), beef stroganoff, steamed chicken pelmeni. More stroganoff and borscht and red wine is also passed around the table. I can’t drink red wine, so I drink ginger juice and ginger vodka instead. Afterwards, too full to continue. There are other plans tonight - a film, a party, I promised I would go and I never cancel plans but sometimes I do just neglect to show up. A very bad habit. Inertia ultimately breeds pure evil! Time doesn’t pass at Spa 88. Still pouring but dark now, when we emerge from the underground. Thursday, December 12 My abridged review of Dimes Square (revival) today. I didn’t see it the first time around - I wasn’t here. I was in Boston. I was in a sorority. I arrived in this godforsaken ecosystem after it was already dead. I’m kind of being facetious. I think people try to qualify eras too concretely. Concretely: Dimes Square (the play) is indeed a period piece. In the vein of all Matthew Gasda’s plays, it is emotionally rich, lucid, kind of yearning, which catches me off guard but I think adds depth. The thing I like most about Dimes Square is this: it’s not self serious but also it is not sneering. The best satire is actually quite sincere. This is why most satire is generally and particularly in contemporary culture, bad. Dimes Square (the play) is excellent. I will be publishing a stand alone review of the play here shortly. I already wrote the review but then I realized I was far too stuck on historical accuracy and far too personally tortured. In the meantime (from my notes) -- “The main fault of the characters in the play is that they are cruel, but the main critique of this scene in real life is that it is (was?) (is?) full of people who are pathetic”
generative and godly secrets
May 27, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Sunday, May 18 On the first day of My New Life, I walk to the film shop, pour old windowsill tea down the drain, come to consciousness in the Infrared Sauna at Spa88. In the Russian Spa Cafe, you drink carrot juice in a bikini because Rebecca taught you what Fiber is yesterday, and now you are sure to get your fill. There is lox and seaweed and brown bread. There is a Caesar salad later, at Fairfax in The West Village, and they don't actually harvest your personality at the door. I journal a lot, I told my friend. I journaled the whole train ride in my mind, she said. I journal in Google Docs, I said. I don't know why I decided to say it like that. Like manic transcription of thought until it becomes more vibe than writing at all is some sort of one-up over mental assessment and determination. I have not been trying to one-up at all. I've been trying to be so honest about it, and I guess the concern remains that the truth will all surface and the roots will turn topsy turvy and inside out and then you’ll see that untangled, it was all kind of just midwit and ugly. I wrote about nihilism and absurdism and Samuel Beckett, but the piece turned out so simpleton that it makes me kind of queasy to return to. I wrote about the magazine release party on the roof where I felt kind of wobbly in this halter top dress tied way too tight. Then we walked to Casetta and I had wine and fish floating in tin and oil and then I lay here for a while when I got home. I lay very very still and when I twitched then rose again, there were packages at the door, a taxi cab and a friend on foot and his airtrain en route heading towards the apartment. I was standing in socks and hovering in the building's communal mudroom when he got home. Things are nice. I was talking not too quietly about all of it in the Spa 88 Wall Street Russian Baths Hot Tub. The most liminal space in New York with smooth warm aqua water and yellow kind of burnt light and chipped paint no windows. Dorito bags with Hebrew packaging usually stacked in the restaurant, today abandoned half eaten on the table by me. I could tell the fat guys in speedos were lingering sweaty just to listen, but I was doing no sort of performance for them. On the train, the girl on the phone kept glancing around to make sure others were listening. I felt sad for her. At the Spa88, I said my story all matter of fact in the hot tub and my Aunt said well, you really have your hands full and the fat guys looked away kind of bashful, and it was only then that I realized they were listening. You can disassociate away the concept of public space, too. Spilled coffee and voice echoing in this pool room with no windows so it becomes like time isn’t passing at all. I wasn’t talking to myself, but communication reverberates, and I was drifting all unaware of perception. Then I was in the cold plunge, in the infrared sauna which really does something nice to the fascia (the part that matters when it comes to things like Wim Hof and Heating Up and Cooling Down.) After the infrared, I began to gain awareness of my surroundings and movements and recollections of the sound of my own voice and things like the coffee my stray limbs sent flying off the shelf at Mille Feuille this morning and then I was there saying OMG Sorry and floating napkins towards the ground but also kind of just standing and blinking like some kind of dud. You wake up alone but there are people on the way. People already late. Keys and company and you are texting with an intensity that borders vitriol. The vitriol is what he’ll point out later. Before that, he is at the door and you are so happy to greet and be greeted. There is spilled coffee and Equinox Gym and Spa88 and Iced Tea, Sparkling Ice Soda, Cool Mint Zyns. I woke up and I waited around and I trapezed over to Equinox Gym and when I got upset later because told me he did not care about my story; it was then that he clarified he did not so much mean he did not care but more so that the story was full of vitriol. And so perhaps he was just feeling full of love and life. You can't get all rageful over something like that. I'm sorry I forget sometimes that you are not resilient, he said. My blood didn't boil. I went for a walk. You forget that all of this exists all the time, Natasha and I were saying by the Hudson River. In my glass apartment in the sky, I was alone for a while but now I am not. There is an Arabian rug and a Marble table that I hope someone will take off my hands for free. There is a CurrentBody LED mask and cocoa nibs and nothing in the fridge but the butter that I replaced with the wrong brand. I feel uncomfortable when I speak like this - about these little things that compose a life. Like I'm painting a picture in the details of routine, but there has been no routine. There have been a few false starts, and then now, a real one. I am conjuring an image of a morning with an empty fridge and an Arabian rug and the kind of person who reaches for different serums at different hours. If anything, we’ve been dealing more in potion than serums. But every potion certainly has its godforsaken limit, and so now - there is something else. Monday, May 19 I will take the rest of my youth as it is. He turns on the air conditioner for me and leaves to drink Non Alcoholic Beers while I stay put and read the Diaries of Girls Online. I walk ten miles and I do not really believe his friends who say there are worms at the Russian Spa. This is how rumors spread, I tell him. You are Married To The Truth, I tell myself. In the morning, there is light through my greenhouse roof and to start; I am the only one awake. It feels like this; I had one of the best weeks ever last week, where everything came rushing back into being as it should be and I was certain it would stay like this forever. Then there was sudden chaos on the phone, chaos on the train, serenity at Spa88 and then I was calling my mom muttering sentiments I knew she would find vaguely offensive, stomping around the financial district saying bad words like a child intent on proving herself lovable even if insufferable. He said it wasn't that I was so uninteresting, more that my story was bizarre, not really a story at all, full of vitriol. Everyone was running along the Hudson River and I had two or three diet cokes with dinner and I was up not all night but close. It goes like this: in the morning there is energy and a package thief filling a suitcase up with my boxes of celsius and fiber powder and whitening strips and dental floss. I crouch above him on the stairway and I scream HEY. He screams back HEY and so I let him have it. I turn on my heels and I run up the stairs. My favorite things are leaving the house in the morning and not coming back till late night, cool mint zyns, blackberry dr. pepper, turkey cold cuts with truffle mustard eaten in a kind of self-punishing way. I lie on the roof in my boyfriend's Adidas track shorts and a black tank top that I stole from the gymnastics locker room in highschool. The thing about New York is there is immense competition to be skinny, beautiful, successful, rich all in circumstances that are entirely unconducive to all these things, my friend is telling me on the phone. Circumstances like the package thief and your metabolism doesn’t even get a boost from the sun and also there are hard drugs and alcohol. I don’t feel above all of that, but I do feel distant from it now and so I suppose, with some plausible humility, this adds up to kind of the same thing. I wish I was a gentle person. I feel lazy today, but this is not the same thing. Tuesday, May 20 Last night, we went to Lucky's for dinner and I had something with tequila and Saint Germaine straight up and he had more non-alcoholic beer. Then, they brought us mountains of shoestring onion rings and a big wedge salad and it was good for a while, until I started to feel sick. I went to the bathroom to play on my phone while the scent of grease dissipated. The drinks were crisp and they brought the shaker right to our table. Lucky's was like a steakhouse, but with a smaller interior than your average We went to Matthew's house after, to sit in his barren family room while he hacked up a lung. I rolled up my Zara blazer that I stole from Paul's Casablanca lost and found after someone stole my blazer first and also back when I was an alcoholic. I curled up under my blazer on Matthew's tiny couch while Matthew and my boyfriend talked in code and made rankings of all their friends. Matthew's apartment was pretty empty except for a whiteboard with a list of girls he likes and a Chinese new year banner and a huge pile of hats that said I'M IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA. “Jesus, she is combative. you're right, she's so combative,” Matthew told my boyfriend, talking about me. "It's possible that Canne after dark was something that happened in the daytime," he said. "she'll get mad if I ask her why she won't play anagrams," he said. "The activation triggers a chain of events leading to increased dopamine release," he said. Sometimes, when I am with my boyfriend's friends I feel like I am in a video game, or maybe in an orphanage. You don't want to be someone who is contorting your face and yelling. It is morning now. I don't really know what happened there. Being at these parties more sober is strange, because there is nothing else but me and yet I still don't really understand. I am listening to sweet and gentle music, and I feel a total surrender. S - i do feel bad i was not so gentle and kind about this. i get myself trip wired and lose it. but it is always better to be gentle and kind and i understand new york can kill the soul and there is something beautiful in a peaceful house alone and that is why you left which is innocent and pure and it's not fair to be rageful to you for that. Wednesday, May 21 There were two cigarettes and two glasses of wine at Voile de Nuit. This becomes some sort of Diary of Consumption. I met Ellie at a tall house on a wooded street in the West Village where she works on things pertaining to design and then we spent the hours in the courtyard of Voile de Nuit, which I adore because it’s reminiscent of Summer and Reality. I behaved badly the last time I was here. My boyfriend comes by to drop off fries. We run into friends at Caffe Reggio and it's raining by the time we reach home. My boyfriend says: Spreading secrets is entropic Keeping your mouth shut is static Spreading misinformation is generative and godly I do think he is mostly kidding. It's Simone Weil who says about rage - “To be able to hurt others with impunity—for instance to pass our anger on to an inferior who is obliged to be silent—is to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make.” And I wonder which character I am in this story and it's not always the good one. I was thinking about all of that in the novel. That and the self surveillance of it all. Unfortunately, my thought experiments are ruining my life and also, the novel is ending up being All About Me LOL, too. The play tonight (Revolution at Flea Theatre ) is nice, because I walk through the rain to get there and smoke cigarettes outside The Odeon after, and because its depiction is of genuine weirdos, not like Quirked Up, not like the girls my friend texts me about after the party, “have you met them? so spacey!” not like, becoming strange because of course there is some desire to conjure up some personality and if you’re pretty then it’s fine and even appealing to be off-putting. The play is like grocery store clerk alcoholic, gun in the purse grocery store clerk alcoholic, therapy speak coping mechanisms like count up then down then up and it’s employed in the play as the coping mechanism not as an ironic tactic. Drinking beers on a birthday in the back alley and the play is disaffected from glamor in a way that I’m realizing not many things are. Like even most depictions of poverty in a lot of media, at least media coming out of New York at least certainly media surrounding youth culture and a narrative surrounding a party, goes like; we have nothing but we’re slippery adjacent to everything as a result of our charm and good looks and happenstance. The play is like, leftover charcuterie from her husband’s weird mega church and splurging at the liquor store and old cocaine shoved into a bowling ball but there’s an innocence and almost childlike wonderment to the way they tackle the expired drug situation, and the play is not about drugs. There’s a genuine kind of earnest stiltedness to the conversation that lends itself to sincerity. Thursday, May 22 May is quivering right before me; I'm not letting it lapse like April did but there are still smokescreens, silkscreens, my fingers are sleeping right through it. The Club, last night. The Play then The Club. It was smokey and sweet. My lungs felt coated in something sour by the end. The smoking patio was wet with dew and I was kind of floating, not in a bad way. Not hungover, it's something way more visceral but still hazy. I could feel it all start to slip, and so I held onto myself quite tightly. My boyfriend's screen time is 102 hours a day across devices. My face is encased in sheaths of plastic that keep you young, but they're not the temu kind that's weird and freaky. The light I use is Science Backed. I'm thinking of getting into vintage workout wear. I'm thinking of getting into Vlogging. I'm thinking of getting into filling out paid surveys online for luxury perfume sellers that require you to swear your spending habits are High and you like perfume from MiuMiu and you Hate Balenciaga and what perfume means to me is; I think sometimes scents can bring up... nostalgia? I say. Do you own a Prada dress? they ask. We leave the party early - I'm sick and he buys me chicken caesar salad pizza. Aren't you glad we left early so we could dance a little at home, he says. In the living room, the windows are all a little frosted from the rain. There are lights in the neighbors windows across the courtyard but it's thursday night, the rain has stopped. You couldn't have expected everyone to just stay home, really. I notice the people in the windows if he is spinning me across the room. Exhibitionism. I catch myself in the peripheries. The windows. The back of my mind. And I never shut the blinds but that is just no Executive Function or Detail Orientation. I am not some sort of voyeur. Friday, May 23 10:45am, and they are playing some kind of staticy electric classical mashup of music from the Fedex truck outside. "Even as a grad student, I felt they were looking down on chaos," one young man at the Yemeni coffee shop is telling another. Buying: coffee and chicken quiche but none of that is for me. Buying: peanut butter perfect bar and celsius and my boyfriend's screen time is up to 316 hours since midnight since he's doing things indiscernible to me but which he clarifies are Not Fraudulent. I am trying not to write so much in the google doc diaries. It is like I have learned these diaries as a trick, and now I am addicted to it. Now, I can’t do anything else. I must release all thoughts, but to release one thought I must go through, again and again, everything else. And so I go through it all, again and again and again. The thought, and then everything else. We were going to talk more about Spirituality today, but the tripwire keeps happening - stuck on: Vanity and Careerism. I make subheadings to keep myself in check. VANITY. CAREERISM. CAREERISM: Here is where I am: I have the substack for now which is nice this is something that I suppose in some ways is a defining thing I have done but it does not feel like so much it does not feel like it culminates to anything just proof of existence, yes, but everyone has some sort of proof of existence and it is nice to write the story behind something. The story itself cannot just be the story of writing about yourself. And for a minute I was very very very sad and so that plotline became dependable, but that is no sort of thing to rely on. And this is why it cannot all just be the writing of the self. It hasn’t been. [redacted] felt like something different, investigation, beginning middle end, it was not just here I am, it was like a puzzle it was like being very precise with it and it was the biggest thing I have done so far and I sat with it for such a long time. And perhaps I am being dramatic because there are other projects I could start in the meantime but I can’t sit down and make myself think oh what would be an interesting and pithy thing to talk about for somewhere glossy, I cannot do it. I think about doing it and my stomach rises into my throat with how little I care. And so it has to be a story that bursts out of me. There was one, and I can tell there is almost something else too but it’s like David said yes, it’s difficult while you are in the waiting room. Since beginning writing this, my fever got higher, and we are hanging the Bacchus masks around the apartment plus yellow golden softlight and, now I feel more peaceful about it. I wasn’t having so much humility. Nevermind. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, May 27 From 6pm (show at 7pm) at Baby’s All Right — Baby’s Presents a benefit concert for the Immigrant Defense Project with Palehound, The Ophelias, and Grumpy. Dj set by WeTakeManhattan. - “All proceeds from the show will go towards supporting the IDP’s 20+ year mission of fighting for the rights of immigrants targeted for imprisonment and mass deportation via advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.” | GA (18+) $38.86, Ticket and Bonus Donation $49.69
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RaEX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7945ab16-c051-4062-8d64-a0fd574c3968_1106x420.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rmSM!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe8f3b744-fe77-4a40-b032-304d78f13ff1_428x548.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zRlU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5106c642-5b7c-4f8f-a799-c60b10039a5d_488x486.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QlxV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9c5eb95-81d2-4503-852b-4bdc513730dd_698x434.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0g1m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3da24e28-0d39-4802-abf2-53116dd83b00_308x392.png, Baby’s All Right, Palehound, The Ophelias, Grumpy, WeTakeManhattan

Graph View

Backlinks