2025-10-20 Journal Entry

It is perhaps a success of the practice when I think about opening up seven hundred and fifty words dot com and have nothing immediately spring to mind to write about. There’s the usual things – worrying about not writing, a recollection of what I did today (gym, tan (er, reading), laundry), some idle thoughts about the future – but I find those somewhat uninteresting to write about.

I do notice that I don’t really delve into the emotional world or the imaginative worlds all that much. That’s a shame, as those should be veritable gold mines of material to unearth and barf onto the page, or at least they’re more interesting than my usual bits. But blargh, I have so little to say on those. All I can say on the emotional front, I think, is that I’ve avoided listening to Dan’s voice memo to me. I think I’ve gone on this tirade before, but I disdain voice memos for this reason, which is that they’re sort of the worst part of phone calls and the worst part of texting merged into one. It’s a bimillenary (poor usage: sorry, I’m not sure how else I’d shoehorn that one in) disaster of a technological development: either transcribe it into text or just hand-write the actual text to me. No shade on Dan, and besides, I know that basically half the world does it this way – just about every person from Latin America I’ve ever met uses it this way, not to mention Tania et al. – but I still find it a tragedy of communication. Intellectually I know that it’s good, but it triggers all of my worst tendencies to avoid listening to it and so on, because it means I’ll have to set aside all this time to go listen to it and all of that.

But absolutely no technological decisions will or should be made based on my opinions about them. If such decisions were in fact made, there would be essentially no social media applications as I see it today, and we would more-or-less live in a world where people simply read books. I understand why superhuman AI is something that many people desire (and I do indeed use AI fairly extensively), but it sort of misses the point of intelligence to me. “Intelligence” as a thing is primarily there to have a rich inner world. It is an end in an of itself. This is likely less characterized as intelligence, which is defined as the acquisition and application of knowledge and skills, but rather something else. It’s squirrely: people often use the term intellectual for someone who may appreciate something like this, but I think intellectuals are often working towards some kind of end. It’s also not necessarily wisdom, which again I think is something more phenomenological or related to one’s own direct experience. But I’m unsure what else to call it.

Well there’s some of my rants for the day. What else? I don’t know. I’m a bit bummed that I feel as if I have little to write about, though I am enjoying the fact that my alternative plan for that is mostly to just read a ton. When asked about his daily writing habit, Jose Saramago said that his default plan was to “sit and write two pages, then to read and read and read.” That sounds like the life to me. I’m about to cross the halfway point of Cloud Atlas, which is getting to an interesting point. It’s an odd construction, I really must say – it’s written well enough that it manages to string you along through each of the sections, but it’s fairly clear that each one ends just as it really gets to the interesting bit, so it’s sort of implicit that the reader must then read the next 300 pages to come back to that story and finish it with all the future knowledge that you get in the middle sections. I don’t know exactly how much I buy that as a structure that should be replicated, but I appreciate it kinda intellectually, and we’ll see if the back half makes it all worth the effort. I’m also reading through The Tatami Galaxy, the novel, which I’ll just say I really enjoy reading it one a sentence-to-sentence craft level, which the TV show absolutely lives up to and honors. It’s just straight-up funny and light, and I have a feeling I’m going to fly through all 350 pages of the thing very quickly.