2023-09-15 Journal Entry
đ Season: đ Summer đ Weekday: Friday đ Date: September 15, 2023 đ Week: Sep 11 â Sep 17, 2023
Well I missed out on morning pages yesterday, but itâs a Friday afternoon and I canât really make my brain focus on work things, so instead Iâm going to buckle down and actually write things. I donât really have anything in particular to write about, so Iâm going to just write about the really immediate-term desires and see how those go. For example, I was thinking of taking some edibles tonight. Is that a good idea? I mean, itâs not bad, at least in the âunhealthyâ sense of the word. I do edibles quite rarely nowadays (minus a small one the other day, itâs been like a month at least), and from experience their usage seems to come in waves, especially given that right now I just have some that I want to get rid of before retreat/moving and in the future they wonât be nearly as accessible. But also theyâre just pleasant and enjoyable. I think thatâs my thing about them though â I donât know if I have another alternative thatâs as accessible of consistent enjoyment as weed is. Thatâs one of the primary reasons folks do a lot of jhana work, that being able to consistently reach pleasure makes you less likely to grasp for it. When I take edibles, I often meditate as they kick in, and I wonder if thereâs more value in meditating before I want to get high to see if I still want to get high afterwards. I really liked the point that Dr. K (of HealthyGamerGG) made about why monks donât have bad habits, which is not that theyâre so disciplined that they donât do them, but rather that theyâre so aware while theyâre doing them that they no longer need to continue. Thatâs also part of the idea behind Existential Kink, that you do things and do them being fully aware of what youâre doing. Revel in them! Because when you fully do them, youâre aware of all of it, everything, including the grasping of the thing itself. Honestly, even just writing this out and being aware of the experience of being high is making me want to do it less. Not aversion, but just admitting that I know how things will pan out â itâll be nice for a bit, Iâll time travel to the end, and things will be fine but not substantially better. YAGMI.
What else is going on. My brainâs been a potato. I havenât really been sleeping particularly well, mostly due to not going to bed before like 2am every day, so Iâm only getting 5/6 hours of sleep and wanting to sleep til noon every day. I figured that adjusting my circadian rhythm to the sun a bit more would help, but after the first few days I still wanted to stay awake really late. I also think itâs a bit of the âtime-stealingâ mentality where work is being a slog so Iâm subconsciously trying to reclaim more time at the end of the day to fit in all the other stuff I want to, which is primarily learning Japanese nowadays. Every day Iâm burning through a decent amount of Anki and watching at least an hour of immersive content, which is really fun. A lot of the more simple stuff, like learner-oriented podcasts and vlogs, are actually like 90% intelligble now, which is great. Iâm trying to figure out the gap between those and higher-level stuff, but Iâll figure it out. Itâs mostly that things like Midnight Diner or Violet Evergarden end up using too much slightly esoteric or rich vocabulary that I donât quite follow, so having to look up half the words for every sentence isnât ideal. But I did manage to find several beginner-ish videos about temples and shrines and such, which was really interesting. Finally learning why things were called âjinguâ or âtaishaâ was actually quite helpful in retrospect, so good to know for the future.
Ehhh what else. Not really all that much. Iâm looking forward to sleeping a lot and trying to get this damn house in order, because right now things are looking rough in this apartment. My bag from Japan is just sitting open on the floor of my living room, and there are books all over the goddamn place that are half-started or that I likely wonât finish. I need to pack some up and pick out the ones I definitely want to keep, because things have got to go somewhere! Plus I need to call some movers and get dates lined up and all of that, which will be its own mess, and then everything needs to start going on Craigslist. Ah! Honestly, thatâs actually not all that much though â I just need this weekend to really burn through a lot of it.
Welp weâre almost at 850 this time and I feel like I could do another 850 more, but thatâll be for tomorrow. See you then, my love.