I just reached work at lunch time, and everybody’s gone so I wonder if I can quickly dash off a vomit here right now. I have a vertical monitor so I get to fully immerse myself into this experience, which is cool.
Two thoughts– reading a book on the way to work, and observing the huge mass of people who coexist with me in the area I work at.
First, quickly, book. I went through a phase where I tried to do word vomits on the way to work on my phone. That actually went alright, although I never quite found a writing tool that I fully enjoyed– I settled on Evernote, but it’s still not nearly as good as using a keyboard and monitor.
So now that my phone is cracked, I’ve decided to try and do vomits before I leave home for work (did one earlier today), and another when I get home from work. And if I feel like I have more capacity, maybe I’ll do one more before bed, or maybe I’ll do one when I reach work (like I’m doing now).
And I kinda liked it this morning, I think it was really pleasant to make progress on the book I’m reading. [1]
Again, I tend to write things when I have just one data point [2], so I need to take this with some skepticism– but it feels like reading on commutes is more pleasurable than either scrolling through social media or attempting to write vomits. Why? My vomits on my commutes don’t always get completed, and it’s always frustrating when I have like 50% or 70% of a vomit written, but I can’t quite get myself into the same frame of mind or the same zone, so I can’t finish it. If I try to simply continue from it it feels awkward and disjointed and I just don’t like it. I don’t like managing all of that data and information. Maybe if I had a better way of managing information I would like it.
But in the meantime, I have the opportunity to read books– and I have a lot of books that I want to read, that need reading, yet have not been read– presumably because again I’m unnecessarily perfectionist about things and I want reading time to be so nice and perfect. On hindsight, when I was a kid I would just read like crazy because books are amazing and they deserve to interrupt everything else I’m doing. I would lie on the floor and roll over and over– I’m sure I’ve already posted a picture of “portrait of a boy reading” somewhere in one of the earlier vomits. [3]
So it feels like commutes are good times to get some reading done (if the train isn’t too bloody crowded… which will probably be the case later). I typically read with a pen and then underline and add notes as I please, so I can revisit the book later on and have a conversation with my younger self about what is interesting or important. I’m enjoying the notes in my books almost as much as the books themselves.
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Okay, now for a quick sketch about the people. It’s interesting to pay attention to people. I live in a little apartment with my wife and two cats (and a tenant), and I work in an office with about 10-20 people in it at any given time– but I’m mostly just noticing the two people I’m sitting in between, and the 3 people sitting across me. We might have lunch as a group of 10 or more.
Sometimes I go to grab coffee downstairs, and there I bump into people from other offices. I have neighbours at home– people who live next door, and people who live in floors below– but I don’t really relate to those people very much. We have offices next door to ours at work, and they’re working on other interesting things. I bump into people at the coffeehouse downstairs, and I know they must all be working on different problems, too. And then we zoom out to the commute, and there are literally hundreds to thousands of people that I rub shoulders with every single day. I’m curious about them. What are they up to? What are their troubles and concerns? I wish I could know. I wish I could peer into each individual and really get a sense of what’s going on with them, because it’s so boring to just obsess about me.
I suppose I could start with my close friends, and ask them what’s up. I should really do more of that. I’ll schedule coffee with more of them.
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[1] Currently re-reading: Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, after re-reading Black Swan. I had last read it when I was still unemployed, I think. So now I get to look at it with a more discerning, working-adult perspective. It’s pretty good stuff. Makes me wonder what else I ought to be re-reading. I’m really going by feel here. Should I be reading new books, or re-reading old ones? That’s something I shouldn’t really worry about until I’m done reading this one– whether I finish it (I’m pretty sure I will) or I feel like I want to do something else.
[2] I have a lot of data points about what it’s like to write about things when you have only one data point– which will probably be one of the interesting things for me to talk about once the vomits are done. I will have like a hundred data points, maybe more. I wonder what I’ll learn from that. Probably that I don’t learn very much. Maybe I should get to that sooner rather than later. Daily re-writing should help me revisit this point earlier.
[3] Aside: I should definitely have some trains-of-thought about reading, etc that I can just refer to instead of re-writing over and over again. Have thought about this before. Am starting to see the clear utility in it. /school, /reading, /failure, /smoking, and so on. Links to all the posts I’ve written about each thing, and a general summary of the story so far. That just feels like a lot of effort, though. So I suppose I should figure out what the minimum viable effort is. Just a search, with all the links? I suppose I could do that over the weekend? I have to get some work done first.