word vomit 1000 words 15 minutes unedited
Just woke up. I swear, I woke up at 8am, or 8:15 or so- I remember looking at the time on my phone and being rather impressed with myself. And then somehow I went back to sleep. I fell asleep onto my open phone, and it is a testament to the durability of old phones that it didn’t break. (It’s an old samsung flip phone). Now it’s 11:22am. I’m bothered that I “wasted” 3 hours, but I’m rather well rested, and I did ultimately fall asleep at about 3am. If I had slept at midnight, perhaps I would have woken at about 5am, fell back asleep and woken up at 8am. Can’t be sure! Need to test these things carefully. Waking up early is so much better than going to bed late, yet for some reason the latter habit seems easier to cultivate.
Once again I’ve sat down and gotten started without planning what to write. My mind draws a blank. Last night I was doing some decluttering, throwing out large stashes of paper. I’ve also been working on “distilling” my notebooks- I’ve written hundreds of little notes to myself across about 10-20 notebooks over the past couple of years, and I’ve been meaning to kind of consolidate everything that I find relevant or important so I can get rid of them. A friend of mine would say- that’s just living in the past, you’re wasting your time and you’re being self-indulgent- and I can’t disagree, he’s absolutely right. At the same time, I feel like it’s something I really need to do. I grew up with little appetite or habit for self-reflection, I’d just coast along and do whatever is convenient at each step of the way. I’m terrible at taking people’s advice, and I used to think quite highly of myself… so I think the thoughts and reflections I have had would be useful to me, because I should certainly take my own advice, no? That’s what it’s all about.
I have to avoid the trap of living in the past, of course. The pareto principle comes into play- 80% of the value will come from 20% of the time. So there’s no need to obsess about it. Just get it over and done with quickly, then discard it and live well.
-stretch- I was thinking about this- when I was a kid, I had a website. It was quite pretty and elegant. I can still remember what it was like. I developed a lot of my design aesthetic from putting up websites- I wanted them to be easy to navigate, simple, not too cumbersome. I kept things black, used white text, but I avoided the overly stark/dramatic thing with a subtle white-stars background. It was very tasteful, I swear! It’s interesting for me to think about what I used to write about. After all, I was a child, I didn’t have any insights worth sharing, I didn’t really have an opinion on anything. The main content I had were jokes and games. That’s the interesting part. Somehow, at that time, my only intention was to have a cool website that people would go to- and so it may seem that I wanted to create a pleasant and useful web experience for people, and so I shared things that might have been interesting or useful- jokes, games. I had a guestbook, a counter, little things like that. I think I had an “About Me” page where I wrote about my life. I had a poem on the front page. I find it deeply tragic, on hindsight, that I didn’t save copies of that site, and that I lost my diary-x blog afterwards.
Diary-X was an interesting time, because I remember there was a period of time where I would blog every single day. EVERY single day, and it was always maybe 400-800 words or so. I would just talk about life, I think. I remember blogging about playing GTA3, and about how annoying it was when other people “copied” the way I wrote my MSN name (that was one of my earlier experiences with pissing off my friends by being a self-important prick). I remember that I copied the design from another person’s diary-x, and she wrote to me to scold me for it, and I apologized and we became friends and I ended up getting to know a lot of her friends, too. Somehow those things felt a little more special before social media really kicked off- those were the days when friendster seemed like a new and exciting thing.
It’s interesting to think about how, when Facebook was suggested, it seemed like a silly idea to investors, but now it’s become such a dominant, powerful force that it’s going to rewrite history, and when we look back at it in the future, it’s going to seem almost logically inevitable. Have I written about this already? Brr.
Thinking back about my original website- I wonder why I haven’t gotten around to embracing that games-and-jokes philosophy again. Somehow back then I wrote with a very clear sense that my website was meant to make other people happy, to give other people a pleasant and memorable experience of some sort, and I kind of lost that along the way as I developed an ego and sense of self. It’s really interesting to try and put myself into that mind again- I remember I would show off my site to anybody who’d look at it, so it’s not like I was some sort of altruistic service provider or anything. Still, the point of all this is- I’d like to return to that sort of service-providing mindset. How can I make my website useful, interesting and valuable to you? Because if it’s not useful to you, it’s a bit too much of a circlejerk (or a self-jerk, really) for me to find it particularly fulfilling.
Well, here’s another data point of proof that you CAN write a thousand words with absolutely no idea of what to write about, as long as you get started. I’m going to post this, check Facebook, shower and get around to transcribing more stuff, and maybe do my 90 weeks thingum. Oh yeah and I have an article for Poached to finish up.