At some point during this project I printed out a few calendars for each year to try and get a sense of how often I was writing. I believe I posted it on Instagram, let me look it up… yeah, here are a couple of the years. I’m missing 2014 for some reason. Maybe I archived that one? Point is, I would sometimes go a month without writing, and I would sometimes try my best to write every single day in a month.
That was a pretty cool thing to do. But along the way at some point I started to lose interest in this project. Part of it was because I felt like I was repeating myself a lot. Another part of it was that my Twitter was starting to get more exciting, and I wanted to spend more time and energy there. Which was a worthwhile thing to do. But now I find myself thinking that I would like to have a finish date on this project, so I can complete it and get it out of my system. A part of me was hoping to be done before I turned 30. I recently turned 31. I’d like to finish it before I turn 32, then. I think a good way to do that is to go back to writing one word vomit a day.
I’ve restarted an old habit that I tried a couple of times: using pomodoro timers. I can’t remember when I first tried it, though I suspect I may have written about it right here…. aha, wow, I’ve mentioned it about a dozen times –
- 0043 “I need to implement strict pomodoro, for I am an animal not to be trusted”,
- 0087 “See, the thing about Pomodoro is… I click on one or two, and then I stop clicking. I get distracted and I stay distracted.”
- 0104, “I know pomodoro works so why don’t I use it? I think I have simply too many options on my plate”,
- 0111 “maybe I need to further bite-size work into pomodoro chunks of deep-distraction-free-writing”,
- 0135 “I’ve tried some measures in the past- having a chime every 30 minutes, Pomodoro… but the problem is that I never respect myself enough to adhere to these things.”
It goes on and on. It gets a little less bleak as the years go by, and then eventually I sort of don’t even really think about it. Anyway, lately I think it’s been working. It’s only been a few days so it’s hard to say for sure. But I think over the years I have done enough trial-and-error to begin to get a sense of what works for me and what doesn’t. I know that my systems can’t be too elaborate, can’t be too complex. They have to be simple, sketchy, improvise-friendly. I do think it’s satisfying to complete tomatoes. I completed something like 4 tomatoes yesterday, that felt good. Technically there are things that don’t count as tomatoes that should – I don’t do a tomato when I record a youtube video, but it should totally count. Maybe I should start, just to collect tomatoes, just to feel good. It’s kind of silly and arbitrary but it does seem to work, sort of.
I suppose the thing I’ve learned is how silly and arbitrary systems work. There’s a certain internal logic to them, a certain suspension of belief. It’s storytelling. You can bend the rules a little bit in service of the story, but you can’t utterly break them. You can’t suddenly give someone in the village superpowers to fight off the dragon, and then not explain it, or explain it with something utterly implausible and contrary to the spirit of how you’ve been setting up the story.
(Interestingly, reality does not need to abide by these rules of storytelling. Sometimes reality will give a villager superpowers for no reason, and we’ll have to scramble to try and make sense of it, because as humans we have such a strong need for reality to make sense. It’s both a blessing and a curse, and the smart thing to do I think is to try and use it to our benefit as far as possible, while periodically meditating on the futility of it all, and how much randomness and chaos etc play outsized effects in things.)
So. Tomatoes. Pomodoros. I’m doing these again. I’m writing a word vomit with one because I want to get this project over and done with. So there’s a daily routine emerging. Every day I’ll make a youtube video – today I made a video about Personal Energy Management, lol what a phrase. And I wrote this.
Hm, this is interesting to think about: for some period of time I felt like I maybe wasn’t doing wordvomits here because it felt like I was already “doing wordvomits verbally” on my youtube. But now I’m curious to see what it will be like if I do both text and video back to back daily. How will each thing inform the other? Will I write about what I vlog about? Vlog about what I write about? I don’t think I’d want to repeat myself exactly, that seems like it would be a bit of wasted effort, so it would be interesting to see there might be some sort of “division of labor” that emerges, where each medium does what it does best. I don’t yet precisely know what they are, but maybe now I’ll talk tomorrow about this in the video and see how that feels.
I guess off the top of my head, there is a certain rhythm to video, and also it feels very embodied… I move my hands around more, I look off to the side, gesticulate with my hands. Whereas when I’m writing, I think I’m extra-sensitive to what I’ve just written. I’m writing in relation to the text that has just come before. I’m more mindful of the structure and tempo of words, since I can’t vary the way I enunciate, I can’t use variations in volume, I can’t go slower or faster – I can try to use things like ellipses…… or I couldddd extend some words by being creative with the spelling, other things like that — but unless you’ve both made videos and written essays, it’s hard to appreciate just how dramatically different the mediums can be. I suppose trying to articulate that on each medium would be an interesting challenge. We’ll see.