2023-09-17 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: 🌞 Summer 🔆 Weekday: Sunday 🗓 Date: September 17, 2023 📅 Week: Sep 11 – Sep 17, 2023

So some more time writing things out today, weeee! I went on a long walk this morning and it was quite nice. I walked around Dolores Park, and I was mostly intentionally trying to people-watch. I want to commit to this idea of “writing 100 scenes,” which mostly just entails practicing writing about people and places and events I see without committing them to be a full-fledged “story.” There’s some hope that those scenes will eventually become seeds for bigger stories, especially if two scenes feel like they resonate, but that’s not specifically a requirement for writing scenes. That is, I don’t only want to write scenes that feel like they go together. I also feel like I really want to pull apart scenes from music that I really like, like the two brothers donating blood at a blood bank (from Bon Iver’s “Blood Bank”) or the romantic hangout of a young woman climbing into a boy’s room through the fire escape (from whichever Pinegrove song that comes from).

I’m kinda ho-humming about that because it’s not strictly something that I’d publish — although I suppose why not? Why not publish 100 potentially-shitty scenes? I guess I feel like hitting “publish” is sometimes the part that scares me, or that at least makes me worried about this sort of thing. But hey, if I just yeet this stuff onto a website and never really link to it, it’s basically a personal repository. Yeah that seems fine.

I don’t know man, part of me just feels desperate to leave my current job. I’m just so tired of it, it kinda sucks, and it’s not specific to Stripe — I just don’t really like my career. Now, I bet in a few weeks it’ll all turn around and I won’t feel quite so shitty, and especially once I do these handfuls of things that I’m annoyed by it’ll be better, but right now I’m not feeling it.

I’m also just kinda feeling shitty in this very moment. I’m honestly exhausted, even after a weekend of time to recover and sleep. I don’t feel rested hardly at all, partially due to the aforementioned disdain for work but also just generally feeling not-great. I should probably go on a run or do some exercise, I bet that would help. And also eat something.

It’s also mildly funny how just the other day I wrote about how Morning Pages were super easy and that I was breezing through them, but right now I’m getting distracted every six seconds and barely managing to get this far, which is maybe only two-thirds of the way through. Fuck that, I’m going to just power through writing this whole thing.

The first scene I would want to write is about the girl climbing in through the fire escape. I don’t really yet know anything about these two — who they are, how they met, why she uses the fire escape instead of just going through his door or whatever. Maybe they just like the fire escape because it’s like sitting on a balcony. Maybe they hang something off of the fire escape, like prayer flags or one of those love-locks or something. Maybe she doesn’t want his roommate to know. Maybe she just wants to feel dangerous.

I don’t really have much more to write about. Maybe I’ll just say something about feeling tired. My mind feels kinda blank, like tv static. It’s as if the signal is just getting lost somewhere along the way, I can feel my mind seeing all these things, taking in all this information, but it doesn’t really make it into my consciousness. There’s an extra gatekeeper turning every other sensation away so I’m half-blind. It’s in those little gaps, those moments of blindness, that I open Twitter or something. It’s like I just blink and it’s open. I think alcohol is probably garbage. I know that I say that all the time, and in the moment it’s quite fun, but the price to pay for it feels rarely worth it. And what’s amazing is that this is the product of a single margarita. Wait, did I also have a beer last night? I frankly don’t remember, but I know I made only a single margarita. I drank a fair amount in Japan and never really had days like this one, I don’t think. I definitely slept a lot more than I normally do, but if anything that should be rejuvenating, I’m pretty sure. Maybe sleep is also addictive.