It’s 123am. I should go to bed soon, because I have an appointment at 11am tomorrow. So the last thing I can do tonight – that I should do tonight – is write one more word vomit, then call it a night. Prior to this I was going through my tags. A bunch of my recent vomits are untagged. I’m starting to click through old vomits and re-read them. I’m a little worried – I’m looking at old things and wondering if there’s anything decent in there at all. There’s definitely SOME good stuff, but I’m considering the possibility that there’s a lot less of it than I had hoped or expected. But I realize this is probably a consequence of having an evolving definition of what is good. Which is to say, a lot of what I had written before is something I would’ve considered good a couple of years ago – but I have since further developed my definition of “good”. That’s a good thing, that’s better than the alternative.
I’m going to spend this vomit walking through my todo list and thinking about what’s going on here. I have one todo that says “make more roundup pages for /1000/”. The roundup page is actually on my main blog. And I haven’t really made much progress on these. Why? What’s stopping me? I must be having some confusion or uncertainty about what the right thing to do is. Part of it is wondering, how many roundup pages will I have? Will there be dozens? If so, should I really have dozens of pages on one blog about another blog? It’s just such a massive volume of content and meta content. Well – start with the simple fact that /1000/ is my playground and I can do whatever I want with it. I think the roundup pages should be on this blog itself. Okay?
So… would this be a task that I work on tomorrow? I feel like… not really? Why? I guess it doesn’t feel… exciting? It feels like I’m going to be rewatching an old movie, rereading an old book. Well when I put it like that… I know from experience that revisiting old content always, always, always triggers fresh and new thoughts. Because I am no longer who I used to be. I am a new person now. And I have new thoughts and responses. So… definitely, I should start making re-reading my word vomit project a thing. But… am I not excited about it? “I guess it’s because I have all these other things in my inbox!” – whoa, bullshit alert! it’s true that I have 50+ things in my inbox, but does that mean that if all of those things were done, I would move on to working on the Pages? Seems unlikely! I’m avoiding something.
I took a moment here to start going through all of my tasks – and I found one that intrigued me – “write more book proposals”. I decided to make it more precise, and turned it into “write 20 book proposals”. Now that would be an interesting thing to share with people, wouldn’t it? So far I’ve been coming up with one book at a time. But it feels like it would be a good idea to practice wrapping my head around book ideas. It does a few things at once – it lets me come up with lots of ideas, which is always fun. It lets me fool around and not take myself too seriously. And I can share it with people and see what they think. Now that might be an interesting way of carving up my word vomits!! What if I tried to figure out all the possible books I could write within the context of my word vomit project??
Well, I’ve spent a bit of time going through my Things todo items and now it’s 3am. You see the bind I am in here? I’ve been completely productive, I think, and yet an entire hour has passed, and less has gotten done than I had hoped – expected, even. I really need to properly revise my expectations and be clear about how much I can possibly get done in a day. In an hour. In a block of 2 hours. In a block of 4 hours. This is what I’m going to be working on in the coming days.
I feel a tinge of regret for not having already travelled. But there’s still time. I can still travel. And I can start going through my todo list every day, and start cleaning out my notes every day, and be systematic and procedural about it, and then also schedule some me time, schedule some wife time, play some video games, meet some friends… I can do all of that. Tomorrow I’ll send out a Tinyletter, too.
At this point I think I just want to reflect on my todo list and tasks. I don’t like looking at my todo list and tasks. I dislike that I don’t like looking at it, because when I DO get around to looking at it, and making little bits of progress in it, I feel pretty good about it. I know the backstory to this – I hated school, and when I was at work, while I liked my colleagues and work environment and so on, I was still slow to shake off my habits from school. Well, now I don’t even have work – I just have me. I’m looking at my schedule for my own reasons. I’m working on my todo list for my own reasons.
I think looking back, a slightly younger me would feel a little guilty, a little bitter, a little angry, a little ashamed about having this current reality. I’m older now, and more experienced, and I can recognize that none of those feelings are particularly useful in helping me make the change that I want to make. I’ve spent a lot of words getting to a simple idea – that I want to change my behavior patterns, and that doing this means looking at things every day, opening things every day. It’s so easy to talk about when I’m in a talking mood, but it’s difficult to remember to face the thing you’re avoiding.