2023-01-08 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: January 8, 2023 📅 Week: Jan 2 – Jan 8, 2023

Another day, another page. I slept in later than I’d like to, but I’ve gotten off my routine of just going to bed when the sun goes down because the sun fucking goes down at 5pm, so that’s terrible.

Waking up early matters less on the weekends, but on the weekdays it makes me feel like a robot because it means I basically have to wake up and immediately start working, which is kinda awful. Having the time and space in the morning to do things purely of my choice (like Morning pages!) is far more energizing, or at least rewarding, than feeling like my day starts with obligation. It just sucks that there’s a billion things I want to do and so little time to actually do them. It’s kinda why I’ve been thinking about looking for a job with less hours or something. Working even 32 hours a week, or even less, for say, half the pay, would be a game changer.

The Name of the Wind is great so far, principally because there are many characters in the book who are just kind (and Kvothe knows that they’re kind!), instead of a book where so many characters are just bastards. Also, I appreciate that both of these things are true: that everything feels like it has a logic to it, but that details and “lore” behind all of those doesn’t necessarily need to be explained. There are people with motivations and those motivations are clear, but we also don’t need to know everyone’s life story. That’s a pretty difficult skill to have.

The narrative perspective is interesting, if a little bit weird to me at times. I like the story-within-a-story perspective, and the times where the first-person narration of Kvothe’s story is broken are cool but almost seem unintentional? I’m not really sure how to rationalize them, but the moments that they happen are touching, like when he weeps behind a cart and the narrator steps away and refuses to describe the scene. There’s just that touch of humanity there, and I appreciate that.

That said, I’m slowly becoming a little irked at how Kvothe just seems to be arbitrarily good at everything. I mean, he clearly makes mistakes, and those mistakes are generally motivated by tradeoffs he’s aware of, so he’s certainly not perfect, but it generally seems like if he’s in a solid mind-state, he never makes mistakes, and that seems a bit strange to me. I find him both charming and unrelatable as a main character. Perhaps that says something more about me than about him.

I wonder how it would feel to earnestly believe that you could do anything. I feel like I’m currently bounded by self-imposed “rationality” (which is not-at-all rational) that I’m not ready to do certain things. I think one of those is that “you’re not ready to be a writer,” which perhaps goes back to my whole “you have to be the best in the world at a thing for it to be worth doing” attitude, which is pretty shitty. There’s that Vonnegut quote out there about making things every day, silly songs, bad poetry, because that’s what makes life worth living. I should embrace that.

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

(I promise I’m not pasting in quotes to boost my word count, dear non-reader.)

There are also some slight moments like this one where my mind goes empty. I think that’s the real reason these Morning Pages are the most like meditation — they force you to see all of the thoughts in your head, shake their hand, and bid them a good day and a happy life, because now you don’t have to see them again. A few days ago, I noticed that my meditation after the morning pages was great because I didn’t have to spend the first 10 minutes quieting my mind down. The concentration was largely already there, so I could just sit in expansiveness for 30 minutes. Let’s see if that happens again today. (And I mean “let’s see” — that’s not an expectation that it’ll happen again.)

“Palisade” is an underrated Pinegrove song. The big guitar break with that crazy syncopation about a minute in is one of my favorite Pinegrove moments, and I just want to hear them live again. That is my only wish, thank you.

Hmmm lah dee da dee da dee da dee day- oooooooo, I don’t really have more words to put here. Interesting that what I wrote there definitely has a melody and rhythm in my mind (it’s that Bill Wurtz song of the same title), but English has no way to render those. I assume most languages don’t, especially for highly specific rhythm. I mean, languages have some sense of rhythm, like a mora in Japanese, and at least relative pitch, like tones in Mandarin, but neither of those are absolute, and that’s probably for the better. (”Why isn’t all written language just sheet music,” he wonders. How silly.)

I’m proud of how much I’ve been reading lately. I hope retreat doesn’t kill that off since I won’t be able to read for a week, but it’s been nice while I’ve had it. I’m also at the point where I go “Oh god I have five books I want to read right this second, let me carry all of them around” and then only read Name of the Wind.

I also seem to be spending a lot of time looking at monastic-ish orders for some point in my life. I don’t know, something about them seems interesting, perhaps just the “dedicating your life to something” bit. Right now I don’t feel like I’m dedicating it to anything, and that kinda sucks. Perhaps that’s also why I feel like becoming a writer — it’s dedicating your life to something beautiful, and dedicating it to (1) my current job or (2) consuming media instead of creating it is a depressing thought, not because either of them are bad — well yeah it’s because both of those are kinda lame.

Why is mindfulness any better though? It doesn’t really get you anything, zazen is good for nothing and all that, but it does make the world seem like a better place, and presumably then you can teach that to others or something. The bodhisattva vow seems like the most powerful part of all of that, I suppose, but I also don’t think I’m currently at a level where I take it seriously. By that I mean, compassion for all beings is not a felt-sense truth for me yet and I think there’s still some underlying estrangement or animosity deep (or not-so-deep) down there somewhere. Partially I think it’s just estrangement from myself.

Again, very distractable — I just watched a monk in Japan play a drum for like 5 minutes and read about Soryu Forall, but I don’t think it really got me anything. One thing that holds me back a lot from the monastic path is that my family may think I’m insane. So it goes. Well, it’s not that easy, I’d have to sit with that for a long time to actually process that. Partially because it does mean not seeing them very much — the bit I saw about this on the Deer Park Monastery site was that monastics could have their family visit whenever they wanted, but they would only leave to see their families once every two years, which seems kinda wild. I’m not sure that’s the route I’d want to go down. That also required relinquishing all my savings, and I do think it’d be nice to have ~no costs by living in a monastery but still having my savings accrue interest over the years for things like plane tickets and an emergency fund.

All that said, I wonder how much of my current “meaning crisis” is just “I feel bad in this particular moment.” Like, I didn’t sleep amazing, I’m still waking up, and I’m searching for something to act as an anchor for all of that. Maybe my writing is that. My stomach just kinda dropped a bit when I said that, in a nice way. And my forehead tingles. Breathing is good. You can anchor your experience in the breath, or in the body, or in fucking whatever. It doesn’t have to be capital-M Meaning, I guess.