It’s 1pm. Yesterday, I began to feel sleepy at about 940pm. I thought I’d be in bed at 10pm. Ended up talking to people until past midnight… and then lingered on until 3am. Went to bed at 3am. isn’t that scary ridiculous? I spent a full FIVE hours longer than I had originally intended to. But I thought it was partially-kinda-worth-it because I made a new friend who’s pretty interesting and great to talk to. Invest in relationships, no? But also invest in sleep, idiot.
I’ve been doing some big things that I really, really would love to talk about and write about but I can’t really, and it kills me a little bit inside because it’s so real that I’m certain the writing would be beautiful- on the virtue of the validity of the feelings I feel, (… validity? there’s a better word. visceral quality of the feelings) that I feel- but oh well. Everybody’s life has unique circumstances, I should be thankful and grateful for certain things that I got that other people don’t. Maybe I should write for myself. I haven’t written completely for myself in quite a while, and in a sense I seldom really bother with that unless I’m writing on pen and paper, either into a journal or on random scraps of paper when I’m feeling particularly frustrated with life.
Anyway things on my mind- I’ve been wanting to re-do my entire blog. Well I’ve been saying that I’ve been wanting to do that for a long, long time but it’s such a “large” undertaking that I don’t know where to begin and I have all these grand visions and ideas and in the end I end up doing nothing. So I decided I’m going to start with what I feel like doing for fun, which is- I feel like adding TL;DR summaries to every single post, and curate them in a sort of table of contents kinda way. That way I will revisit each and every single blog post in existence, and figure out what’s good and what’s not so good. I’d like to summarize all of the thoughts and perspectives that I’ve explored over the years into a few neat lines- I sort of have a little bit of fetish for doing that, summarizing and resummarizing things… I know that’s how you learn, even though I never really did it completely well in school, I’ve found myself doodling it about things I care about… complex systems and all that jazz.
I’ve been reading quite a bit- not as much as I want to, but more than I’ve been reading in a while- I completed Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, and while that fella meanders and pontificates a lot, his ideas are interesting, powerful, valid and thought-provoking. It’s a challenging read not because he uses big words or complex ideas, but because his simple questions and ideas require you to reconfigure existing paradigms in your head.
What’s the opposite of fragile? We usually think resilient or robust, but that’s like saying the opposite of 10 is 0- when it’s really -10. Fragile things are damaged by volatility. Robust things are not. Certain things are anti-fragile, which means they are IMPROVED by volatility. Such things do exist- immediate thoughts include muscle strength, the human brain, ecosystems, gene pools, scientific discoveries and art…
I wish I could summarize it better, a bad summary is always a sign that you didn’t entirely understand what you just read- you have to be able to communicate it to others, and really while I feel like I witnessed his epiphanies I don’t quite live and breathe them. I will re-read and get back to you, maybe express smaller ideas at a time.
I’ve also been reading Lee Kuan Yew’s Hard Truths and Robert Greene’s Mastery- the latter for stories about hard working successful people that I can learn from, and the former just to get some insights into the grand old dame that has built our nation.
I am frustrated with my environment. I don’t have an entirely comfortable workspace- I share one with my mum, and my house is just a noisy and difficult place to do work in. I hate my room and my bed- I keep getting bed bugs every so often even though I kill them all and I threw out my last bed and those bastards are really just spirit-draining and soul-crushing because they don’t let you sleep, and they give you terrible quality of sleep, and even when they’re not around they colonize your mind and they come back again and again and you just can’t rest. I can’t wait to get out of here, seriously.
Err what else is on my mind. I haven’t been purposely exercising but I’ve been doing some cleaning and moving and chores and my body is sore in that awesoem beautiful way you get when you hit the gym… and Taleb mentioned this too- why bother going to the gym, you know, when you can take the stairs more often, take longer walks, lift heavy things when given the opportunity? I thought about this when I was helping my dad out at work too, throwing garbage- it felt like a good workout, a very “real world” workout… I’m actually thinking it makes more sense to work part time with a mover’s, for instance, than to go to the gym- you get paid money for it and you do work that actually contributes to something. But I suppose that’s just one perspective and mayebe there are movers who hit the gym too because of reasons I cannot completely intuit.
This word vomit has been a tiny bit tedious to write. I can feel my mind being a little slow and cluttered. That’s okay. I’m going to shower in a while and then I will do something else. I need to send a letter to an accountant for a parent. This city is bound to do us in, is a nice lyric from a song by The Break And Repair Method- drummer from Matchbox 20. I’m done.