- i think i’m going to start writing wordvomits as bulleted lists. i was drafting a substack essay in bullet lists and something about it felt compelling to me. i think it’s that it makes me consider pacing and structure more, and those are things i want to get better at. i’m returning to this bullet now after having written the next one-and-a-half, and it’s clearer why i’m doing this. each bullet functions as a sort of micro-essay, and i want to practice writing these micro-essays so that i get comfortable with them, and can expand them, and can string them together more artfully.
- after my son was born i started lifting weights regularly. a kettlebell, to be precise. i did this for about 3-5 months and made lots of good gains. i did get some serious soreness in my forearms. at some point i think around the 3month mark i started to get fatigued, didn’t feel like lifting, didn’t feel like eating as much. a thing that i did differently than all the previous times this happened when lifting: instead of stoping entirely, i used less weight and did fewer sets. and eventually i kinda made it through. but then i ran into a complication with my annual army fitness test– i had to train for a 2.4km run, pushups and situps, and so i cut back on the weights and lost some muscle mass and got moderately disheartened. i was done with the test early june, and remained kinda sedentary for a couple of weeks, but now i’m getting back into it. the thing i wanted to write about is not so much the specifics i just spelled out, but the optics of the thing, in terms of sharing that information publicly. if i managed to work out consistently for 2-3 years and got sustainably swole, that would be something worth sharing with others. particularly because i’ve never managed to do that so far. i’m thinking about cigarette cessation: if you stop smoking for a few days and then get fully back into the habit again, that’s not really noteworthy. a couple of weeks, there might be something interesting there. a few months is notable. a few years, more so. i feel like there are thresholds like this probably in every domain, and people know it when they see it.
- i met a couple of twitter friends for lunch today, and a couple of other twitter friends for lunch yesterday. my mind is still lively with the conversations that we had. there’s something about this quality of aliveness that i’m always striving for, and which i have a tendency to “forget” if i’ve gone too long without it. i put the word “forget” in quotes because i think the word “forget” has some specific connotations that aren’t precisely relevant to the thing i’m talking about. it’s less about the forgetting of an idea and more like “getting rusty”, “losing touch”. i lose touch with the quality of aliveness, and everything feels more dreary, languid.
- ^ i’ve been spending a bunch of time sorting through old notes (prev wordvomit), which has been uncommonly productive- i made a youtube video talking about it, i’ve been kinda meaning to write something about it– my notes have been an albatross around my neck, and it’s been a relief to finally ‘process’ a bunch of them, many of which have been sitting dormant since i left my job in 2018. a lot of my notes are basically snapshots of past moments of aliveness, but they are not themselves very alive. many of them were in fact in varying states of suspended animation that felt kinda… lightly grotesque? deformed, misshapen. i’m reminded of a quote from anais nin about vividness. my notes don’t feel vivid and I’m quite sad about that. I want to build a vivid body of work. see also ray bradbury’s quotes about zest and gusto.
- ^ so what is to be done? what is necessary is courage. courage to say, it will happen again. i will be fresh and earnest and enthusiastic again. i keep clinging on to past utterances, as if past-visa had special insights that present-visa isn’t capable of recreating. which seems silly when i say it out loud. because past-visa is a part of me, and I am capable of basically anything that he was capable of. but i suppose the issue comes back to a matter of touch. i have also noticed that there have been times where my past selves attained heights in moments of clarity that i don’t typically reach day-to-day. that’s the nuance. sometimes i access peak states, and those are precious, and don’t happen as often as i’d like. being honest with myself about how this really works is critical for me to make progress as an author. it’s true that i have occasionally glimpsed greatness that is not accessible to me moment-to-moment. but not all of my notes are snapshots of that glimpsing. in fact most of them aren’t. most of my notes are stray thought fragments. a lot of them are quite disposable. and i’ve been traumatized by past loss into clinging harder than necessary– I am a bit of a hoarder and i’d like not to be. here i feel compelled to defend myself and say it’s not that bad, i’m quite functional etc– but nonetheless, i remain dissatisfied with my current configuration. it’s a lot better than it was last week, but the reduction in mess has help me to see even more clearly how much better everything could be. there are several principles that emerge that i’d like to think about. one is to clarify intentions. another is to make things people-shaped. another is to keep the most-used or most-relevant or most-important things closest to hand. — i’m cautiously optimistic about my next steps. i’ve been thinking about this stuff for a very long time, and a lot of it didn’t feel like time particularly well-spent. but maybe that will all change once I start moving things around.
Zindagi quote about restlessness in the heart means you’re alive