its may2024 wow. next it’ll be june and i’ll turn 34. which doesn’t seem like a big deal, i kinda feel like i’m already 34. the years kinda blend together now. it’ll be a much bigger deal in october when my son turns 1. parenting has been a joy– the highs are transcendent and impossible to describe, but i must admit that it’s also been tiring and challenging in the most mundane of ways. the hardest thing is not really any particular task- diapers etc are no big deal. the hard thing is just the relentlessness of it, if it’s just you and your spouse looking after the baby. if there’s one thing i’d do differently i’d probably try to spend more time with family so that we can be less chronically vigilant. maybe starting at around 3-4 months or so. drool was a bigger deal than anybody told me. getting the baby to sleep can be challenging; honestly i don’t feel like we have much control over it. but all in all, i’m so glad that we are a family now, more than just a couple, and i cant wait to witness his personhood unfurl and flourish.
what else? there are three main things going on in my life other than parenthood.
1 is that we plan to move out of our current home, which means selling it, and buying a new one, closer to family. the whole thing is a massive project– we gotta start by getting rid of stuff in our current home so that moving is less of a hurdle. somehow that always feels like it moves really slowly. it feels like we’re afraid to let go of things. it’s crazy to think about in relation to the 22 year olds that we were, with no money, no stuff, just hopes and dreams. now we have a baby, bills and a bunch of junk.
2 is that i intend to really ramp up my volume of writing, primarily on my substack. i know i’ve been kinda whining about this for years now, ever since i shipped Introspect (which I whined about for at least a year longer than I thought I would, before finally publishing it in 2022). if it took me 2 years to write and publish introspect, it feels not-too-surprising that it takes me similarly about 2 years to really properly conceptualize Voltaic Verses. this whole thing feels like a battle against my perfectionism. me struggling to develop some kind of project management at the edge of my ability. really i’ve been biting off more than i can chew, been pushing myself too hard with no result and refusing to learn from it.
3 is that I’m working on building strength and muscle mass, ie trying to get swole, strong, gain weight. a big part of my motivation for this is to be able to carry my son for as long as he wants, and then some. and to be a model of strength for him, to lead by example in that regard. and also to push back against the commonplace assumptions about dadbod. i’d like to be in the best shape of my life as a dad, which i think should be very achievable considering that i was always kinda sedentary.
what’s there to say? well i felt like i made some great progress with 3 for a while but lately i’ve been feeling fatigued. oh, i also need to switch for a bit to doing pushups, situps and 2.4km runs in order to pass my fitness test for the army by my birthday, which is early june next month. so basically i have a couple of weeks to go hard, but not too hard because I definitely don’t wanna get injured or fall sick or be so sore that i can’t train. my approach is something like, 4 sets of 8 pushups, 4 sets of 12 pushups, every day, just to grease the groove and accumulate the reps. once i’m done with the test i’ll be able to breathe easier and go back to doing my lifts. i was making gains just from doing kettlebell work for a few months, but i’ve been getting tired of that. i’d like to do bench press and deadlifts again like old times. oh and hip flexibility and tight hamstrings are always a concern, being as sedentary as i am.
on 2, i published a substack post yesterday so i feel good about that, but for the most part i’m not satisfied with my tempo. I’ve posted 5 posts since january this year, which averages to 1/month, when i’m looking for something closer to a 1/week average. which is to say, i want to be posting 4x as much, minimum. looking more closely though, I actually just posted 1x in jan and not at all in feb or march, and then 3x in april, which is not too bad. if i did 3x/month, for a total of 36/year, i think i could be ok with that. but i’d prefer 4x/month for 48.
it’s possible that i might end up using the rest of this wordvomit project as scaffolding for my substack essays. if it led to me actually producing 50+ essays a year, I would consider that a great success, actually. even if the essays aren’t necessarily polished. they just need to be better than wordvomits. a little more condensed, intense, substantial. I want to surprise myself with them. I want to reference them in the future. I want to do a lot of things.
one thing i was thinking about in the shower was this: i feel like my substack is really a bundle of multiple substacks, a tale of maybe 7 substacks. but i don’t want to pick just one thing to talk about, the way i don’t pick one thing on twitter. it’s precisely the intertwingling that i think will make my work worthwhile. but nobody does this well i think precisely because it’s such a daunting task. i have to figure out smaller dominos, think and work episodically. how to do that? i think i have to learn from like, tv shows and maybe video games, large works that manage to be decent in chapters. a novel has to be a series of good chapters. I was watching a bit of alice in wonderland and i thought it was so good. top gun maverick was excellent too, i’m just reminded of that. some things are much more watchable than other things. contrapoints’ twilight vid. yes theory’s taxi video. there’s a skill to this that i want to learn.
so like, say i have 7 different substacks in a trenchcoat. how do i present them? i could do them in chunks, like focus on a topic for 1 month, then another topic for another month. or i could try to weave them all together, like the days of a week. (i wouldn’t realistically be able to publish daily, maybe, but even if i could- suppose i had a different topic for each day of the week… i don’t know if that would work out well for me.) I guess i’ll write Working Episodically and use that to think it through. done