met old friend DC today as part of our ongoing unplanned ritual of passing back some military equipment back and forth between ourselves. it was a very fruitful conversation, I found myself sighing in relief multiple times. it’s so healthy and satisfying to be in the presence of someone who is supportive, perceptive, encouraging, curious.
i think the biggest thing that i had to come to terms with was the fact that I am a published author now. I’ve updated a few bios here and there to say “Author of FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD and INTROSPECT”, which has been satisfying in a particular way. But I feel like I have more to do. Buying this laptop was part of it. There are a bunch of books I want to buy next. I was thinking, I could have a personal private library and a separate “professional” library for work.
At the highest level, I fantasize about having a large office or studio entirely to myself, with a lot of space, that I can fill with all sorts of objects, paintings, prints, sculptures etc that inspire me, and of course oodles and oodles of books that I can reference. That’s the vision, and what I’m trying to do is manifest a smaller version of that vision for me personally in the short-to-medium-term future.
What else can I do? Another big theme that came up for me was the importance of properly grieving and/or appreciating past states, past goals, past intentions. I think this is very important for me. Some people might be able to just move on really easily, but I’m not. I’m a very sentimental person. I want to keep thinking more and better about what all my writing projects are about. what is my twitter about? what is my substack about? what is my blog about? what are they each for? I don’t think I’ve really thought about this clearly in a while. they’re all sorta just… things i do. i have, or had, an ambitious goal with my substack to do something that I now think I’m not quite capable of doing soon, but I would like to build up the capacity to do it. I have a lot of drafts and ideas and I’d like to “air” them in front of other people. I could make tiktoks or youtube videos about them. I’d like to have done that.
There was a time where I thought about my blogging almost entirely in terms of a local audience. I no longer think that way since I have an international audience now. I might make a “return” at some point, but I don’t yet particularly feel compelled to. One of the best things I can do for local friends is to demonstrate what it looks like to have an international orientation anyway. Or so it seems to me. There’s something in there about the nature of persuasion. I think I have a messy, janky understanding of persuasion. I know it well in some domains, but I haven’t yet gotten around to translating that understanding across other domains.
There was a time where I thought of using my blog as the site for a research project of my curiosities. That was… before twitter? Twitter is a better place to post half-baked thoughts than my blog, especially when there are other people who get their eyes on it. Hmm why am I not just tweeting out all my drafts? That would be an interesting solution to a particular kind of problem. A day spent doing that would probably bring relief. That feels good, that’s something that for some reason hasn’t occurred to me until I wrote this wordvomit. Which is an example of how writing wordvomits sometimes just hands me freebies. Really it’s just… giving myself time and space to allow different parts of myself to speak with each other.
I stil have some time and space, what else do yall (me) wanna say? There was some talk about maker visa vs manager visa, and me trying to be both people at once causing some mess. So I could just… come up with some requests from maker visa, without presuming what manager visa would say or decide. “I want to buy… 10 books… 20 books…” I think I would say yes to that. We’d work it out, maybe some system of, 5 books a month or something. But that’s not even where I should be right now. I should just dream about what might be possible and not think about it. I would… try and get my camera set up on my computer again, because I prefer my youtube videos to be higher quality if I can manage it. What else do I want? I want… I do still want my notes cleaned up, but what does that mean? What does that look like? I think what I want is an overview that makes sense. Right? If I have an overview that makes sense, then the mess doesn’t feel so much like a mess anymore. And now I’m thinking about how I was looking through EEAAO gifs, and there was this bit where they’re in the alternate reality and the alternate not-husband says, in another life I would have really liked doing laundry and taxes with you. The interesting thing about the laundry and taxes line I think is that it makes the starting state – which seemed like a mundane, mediocre, tedious, undesirable state – into a desirable state. It’s romanticization. It’s enchantment. I would like a romanticized and enchanted perspective on my own life please.I would like to reenchant my life. I’d like to see beauty in the puzzles. I know I am capable of it “if I just applied myself” ha ha ha. Yes. Everything is beautiful. Make yourself comfortable. Everything is a story waiting to be told. You just have to see it. And lately I’ve been struggling with seeing in part because I’ve been trying way too hard to make something happen that wasn’t ready to happen. But after several sighs of relief, I think I can face my reality for what it is. It is beautiful just the way it is. It’s a work in progress. And I’m working it. And it will become better. I do know this. I do believe this. Relaxation will allow me to see it even more clearly.
Hello! You do publish your drafts as tweets though… kind of. The tweet about “I’m a published author now so the books can count as expenses” fits right into this word vomit. And also, the 1000 wordvomits account tweets these wordvomits.
Anyways, that’s your personal business hehe 🙂 The part about ‘re-enchanting the mundane’ painted a really nice picture in my mind. Especially reading the word “puzzle” woke something up in my imagination. Puzzles are really nice. They represent mystery, and existence is (can be perceived of) as a mystery. When you talk about “reimagining your life”, or seeing it in an enchanted way, and you add the word puzzle to it, you arrive at “puzzling away at your own existence”, which kind of looks liek someone working away at a question, bringing together ideas or things or anything to arrive at a solution, opening a door. But imagine a dark blue-black-violet background and a white question mark hovering over it. That’s the imagine in my mind. When you re-enchant your life in this image, it might get easier to notice certain things. Because when you consciously think of what you’re doing as a puzzle, you may become more intentional with some sort of things you do. But that’s not for me to say, after all, i am just wordvomiting on a wordvomit. *shrugs* I’d love to keep the image of the puzzle in my mind too, because it feels like i can then invite some logic to the things i do, because puzzles are fundamentally logical. So then even when i’m working at an essay about X thing, that I got hyped up about by reading an article two weeks ago, i can imagine it as a puzzle piece that might possibly fit a bigger question(problem) i’m facing. I think of “puzzle” as a video game puzzle, where what you got to do is some form of “Pick up this crank from this wardrobe and use it to turn the mechanism on floor two of the mansion and then enter the next level”, sort of puzzle, not a jigsaw puzzle. So then, the essay i’m writing out of hype is no longer so disconnected and dreadful(-ly purposeless in the giant scheme of things), it is relevant for the puzzle because it may be connected to one of the items that will lead me to the next door. Who knows? And then, the image of the puzzle also allows me to approach actions that are more social-skill based, as things that require logic. When you re-enchant your life with the image of a puzzle, then you can think of social actions as logic moves that make up a whole (a puzzle) that will make sense in hindsight, as it reveals. Logic does exist in all the things we do (it was never restricted to mathematics), but calling upon logic in non-scientific or non-tech activites has been a thing persistently left out of our training or daily habits. Might do good to read some logicians from ancient civilizations. The image of the puzzle would help with our awareness of that logic, though. A truly wondrous opportunity, i’d say.