2023-03-12 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: March 12, 2023 📅 Week: Mar 6 – Mar 12, 2023

Freewriting for a bit, although I had a pretty fun idea in the shower this morning, where Carmen slowly comes apart over the course of the story, until the final bit is her completely departing from the other half of herself. In mind it plays out like Steve Reich’s “phase” pieces, like Piano Phase.

It took me nearly an hour to find a seat at a coffee shop today. It’s raining here in San Francisco, but surprisingly people are still out at cafes. I went to Cafe Reveille and people were literally sitting with umbrellas and raincoats in the seats outside. How do people like Cafe Reveille that much. It’s good, but not that good.

Unrelated, but I imagine it’s interesting to look back at earlier morning pages. Before, I was writing strictly how my internal monologue spoke. There was a lot of “kinda” and “like” and I would literally letter-for-letter transcript my thoughts. Now I feel like I’m writing something like a travelogue or a diary, where I’m attempting to put all of these words into structured sentences. That’s not a good or bad thing, but a thought. Perhaps it’s because Notion puts red squiggles under the word “kinda” if I don’t put it in quotes, and the red squiggles make me feel like an idiot.

I’ve been feeling a bit stressed lately, but I feel like I’m coming out of it a bit. I think I was berating myself for not writing enough, but in the last few days I’ve been trying something interesting, which is an attempt at inclining myself towards writing. It’s sort of like a weird version of metta, which is just inclining the heart towards compassion. I tried this last night as I was going to bed, trying some version of phrases like I am looking forward to writing tomorrow, which was an interesting experience. Some of you reading this (first of all, stop reading!) may say well that’s just self-affirmations and I’d say to you that you’re not wrong, you’re just not right. It’s a bit more embodied than that. When I say that phrase, it’s almost a modified version of the feeling of metta. It’s the feeling of nourishment, which is hard to say exactly what that is. Physically, it’s a warm feeling around the diaphragm and the heart-center, but I don’t really know what that means physiologically. But it was a necessary change of pace of this “taskmaster” approach I was taking before, where I would look at my accomplishments that day and say “you didn’t write anything today,” and even when I did, I’d complain that I only wrote 200 words. Instead, I don’t really want to focus on the outcomes, I want to focus on the “butts in seats” approach of just trying over and over again every day. If writing isn’t nourishing, I’m not going to enjoy it even when I do get around to doing it.

That said, for all of my ho-humming about writing, there was something really helpful in Several Short Sentences about Writing that provided some clarity for me. The idea was that when writing feels easy, it’s because the sentences that are coming out are “volunteer sentences,” which are easy and obvious and readily available. But those sentences are too easy, they could show up for anyone. It’s not that writing has to be hard but that it at least requires effort, that you have to dig past the meaningless sentences in order to get to the meaningful ones.

What else is going on, I don’t really know. I’m so fucking tired. I didn’t sleep well last night. I stayed up late, not remembering that I haven’t really stayed up past midnight in a long time. There’s something about going to bed when the sun goes down that feels right, and consequentially, sleeping in until 10 kinda makes me feel like death.

I really don’t want to give this talk about rubyfmt. It’s not so much that I don’t care about the tool or whatever, it’s that I feel so jaded about work at the moment. You’d think getting a promotion (!) would make one feel rewarded, make them feel like someone else sees the value in their work, but all it made me realize was that I simply didn’t give a shit. I looked at all the accomplishments in my brag doc and was like holy shit who cares. Technology is cool and are kinda interesting brain puzzles, but I really don’t want to work on it any more. Let’s make something more human-oriented that’s not about “increasing the GDP of the internet” — I’m more and more inclined to believe that that’s not actually a valuable goal and that the internet isn’t actually turning out to improve our lives all that much.

Of course, that’s not the fault of the internet. It’s made by people, after all. But the idea that it lets us do all the human things only infinitely faster is terrifying. Humans are slow. We don’t change instantaneously. Real-life “unfriending” traumatizes us for years, which is it a choice I can do in a second. Of course, I’m largely making that gripe with social media.

As I’m sitting here, I’m somewhat realizing that while I’m appreciative of some of the people in TPOT, I actually need to move away from it a bit. “Touch grass,” I say to myself. TPOT is one of those communities that at this point is potentially so navel-gazy that I’m not sure it lives up to its ideals. I think what I’m noticing is that a lot of TPOT focuses on healing and spirituality, but that in some ways I think those are efforts to not suffer, not to live a life worth suffering for. I know someone will say I’m wrong here, but it feels deeply human to struggle. Spirituality is one way away from this, and in fact it may be the “correct” one, but it feels like so many spiritual people aren’t really engaged with the world, and that feels wrong. We must engage, otherwise we don’t actually fulfill the boddhisatva vows set out from the outset.

I don’t know, maybe I’d just rather play in the mud.

There was a day where Carmen split in two. The whole earth kept spinning but half of Carmen’s atoms stood still for a whole minute, a earth’s rotation pulling one half from the other as if exfoliating her entire body.

It happened without notice, as these things do. She had only recently returned home, the home that was now only hers and no one else’s, a recent change of state, and put on an album she had bought during her midday walk. The movers had come while she was out and left the keys on her kitchen table. It’s over, she mused, and pulled a half-empty bottle of white wine from the cabinet beneath the stereo. She swirled the wine in her glass and lifted herself up on her toes, swaying, Turning, turning. A gentle, three-point waltz with no partner, no body to catch her.

As she spun, she felt farther and farther from herself. She like she falling asleep, her vision pulling farther and farther back. It’s the wine, she thought. She had never considered herself a lightweight, but with half her belongings gone from the apartment, she wondered if shock was settling in.