notes/

small meaningful things

2023

2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008
February 28, 2023 4 responses
note
rethinking labels and value

I am still recovering from my last migraine, so today I had to walk instead run. While walking I found myself thinking that knowing when to do the right thing for my body – that sort of decision-making – willing myself into making the correct decision instead of the choice I desire, takes work too. It is just not the sort of work I am used to.

In one of my recent essays I wrote about the profound loss I had felt when I lost my ability to work like before. I also write frequently about the envy I feel when I look at my partner work. I realised once again this is the thing I keep doing: I have these predefined ideas of what constitutes as valuable work and I keep feeling lousy for not being able to do that sort of work.

But to make this marathon-like effort to work on my health and psyche for the past 8 years is also valuable. I just cannot seem to remember or perceive it this way. Most of the time I feel weak and useless.

On a similar parallel sometimes I am misguided into thinking that photography is “easy”. I simply press a shutter and voila there’s a photo. But to cultivate an internal world that is capable of perceiving moments worth photographing is also work. It is not something that I can set out to do and accomplish. It is a profound ongoing process.

Time and time again I find myself valuing the seemingly “harder” work. Like I prefer running over walking. I think I miss working on my interactive projects and I don’t value my writing as much because it is “easier”.

I would like to uncondition myself from this sort of thinking. I think it simply reinforces unnecessary negative feelings about my life and prevents me from seeing creative opportunities. Like instead of feeling lousy over what I have lost, I could work on my photography practice.

Sometimes I am aware of how inflexible I can be, but I am not sure how to break out of it, yet.

This note is partially provoked by Ankur Sethi who wrote:

“all the books I read, movies I watch, games I play, or music I listen to must have some sort of artistic merit…I can see how harmful it is, and I’m starting to question it.”

I think it is similar to how I label all the things I do into so-called useless and useful. I can understand the sentiment that life is short and we should optimise for time, but we our selves are works-in-progress and therefore we can’t really be the best judge of what is the best use of time. And sometimes the best use of time is to waste it.

By having very fixed ideas on what should be done and consumed, we’re setting unnecessary limits to where we can expand our selves. Who knows where inspiration may come from? And not everything needs to have a purpose. We can watch rom coms simply because we enjoy it.

In zen this sort of labelling is discouraged, in order to cultivate a mind that can perceive each moment as a fresh moment, to be capable of seeing things as they are, not just representation of their categories.

I have no idea why I chose to write this as a note versus a journal entry. Maybe I have this belief that I don’t really have to make sense in a note and it can be fragmented like this post.

February 24, 2023 respond
note
posting backdated posts

Terence Eden writes about how he publishes very old bits of his writing, writing that has existed way before blogs exist, and he calls them necroposting:

A blog isn’t an immutable chain of events. There’s nothing to stop us travelling in time. When I go digital sperlunking though my history, I often find interesting things I wrote before I blogged. So I bring these “back from the dead” and publish them as Necroposts.

I’ve been posting backdated posts since this incarnation of this website has existed, especially twitter statuses I want to keep permanently, but I have not thought about posting something that existed before my blogging existence. It would be totally embarrassing!

But if one day I become a person who is totally cool with publishing really embarrassing stuff from my foolish youth, it would be really interesting (at least to me) to capture the large jumps in my personality development. I regret not keeping more stuff from my childhood, probably only rare scraps remain, if any. I don’t have much stuff from the first 20 years of my life.

I do think more people should do this, I really enjoy when people’s websites become personal museums instead of becoming disenchanted with our pasts and wiping off entire versions of websites so lightly. I do understand the reasons why though. But until website graveyards exist, perhaps this too will be transient. At least it is cool to maintain one during one’s lifetime?

January 23, 2023 respond
instagram

my interest in photography started out not as a desire to take good photos by conventional standards, but to document precious moments in life. as I have gotten more into photography I…

more
January 10, 2023 respond
book
should we follow our natural inclinations?

Was reading The Bell Jar yesterday and it made me wonder why were they injecting insulin into the protagonist at the asylum – she wasn’t diabetic and it was supposed to be treatment for her mental illness. I googled it and it turns out insulin shock therapy to induce comas was a thing. I’ve probably written about it somewhere before: having too much insulin is the cause of metabolic disorders, which co-incidentally another book I’m reading right now is proposing the theory that metabolic disorders are the root cause of neurological disorders. So, by injecting ALOT of insulin into Plath, they are actually making her worse:

To induce the coma, medical staff increased the insulin dose to the range of 100-150 units a day. I have no insulin production as a type 1 diabetic and I take 30 units a day, so 150 units is a lot of insulin. They occasionally used doses as high as 450 units. After injections, patients experienced the typical symptoms of hypoglycemia with drowsiness and sweating before, providing the dose was high enough, coma set in. This state was maintained for up to an hour before being terminated by intravenous glucose. Now imagine going through that every day for a couple of months.

– source

Like wtf?

Still curious about Plath, I borrowed Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams from the library, and there was an introduction by Ted Hughs – I know his perspective on Plath is probably problematic and biased…so take this with a pinch of salt. I found it intriguing that Plath wanted to be a prose writer instead of a poet:

So her life became very early a struggle to apprentice herself to writing conventional stories, and to hammer her talents into acceptable shape. “For me,” she wrote, “poetry is an evasion from the real job of writing prose.”

…and not only did she want to write prose instead, she wanted to write only a certain kind of prose:

If a story is inevitably a fantasy, and if every fantasy leads eventually to the heart of the labyrinth, her problem was that she could not linger among the outer twists and turns and complications, where the world is still solidly itself and comparatively safe, however thrilling. She had an instant special pass to the center, and no choice but to use it. She could no more make up an objective ingenious narrative than she could connect up all the letters in her handwriting, where nearly every symbol seems to sit perched over a gulf. This lightning pass through all the walls of the maze was her real genius. Instant confrontation with the most central, unacceptable things. So her dogged, year-in year-out effort to write conventional fiction, in the hope of preparing herself to make a livelihood, was like a persistent refusal of her genius.

I feel like I relate a lot to this and I see this a lot with other people. That we envision our selves to be a certain type a person, to do a certain type of art/work, and it has to be a certain way. But plenty of times that vision of our selves is not who we are.

Of course, do we succumb to our natural inclinations or do we forcefully shape ourselves to be who we want to be? I think there are no clear or right answers. I do somewhat believe that one of the best leverages to develop meaningfully as an artist is to follow our natural instincts, doing things we actually enjoy. Learning a skill may be difficult and torturous, but one should ultimately enjoy the process or the outcome. It shouldn’t be dreadful or make us shrink.

It is though, challenging to discern what are our natural instincts and what are ingrained habits firmly stuck in a comfort zone. Developing that awareness itself is a lifetime skill.

Tangentially this essay on following our deep obsessive curiosity even if it may not amount to anything has been making the rounds on the internet. I really appreciate how the writer connected everything together to demonstrate how sometimes doing something for really long without expecting an outcome can actually lead to a great breakthrough, sometimes decades later, sometimes out of our own life times.

But Brock couldn’t stop wondering about what exactly was going on in those boiling pools. He was dying to know: What was alive down there? How was it surviving? So he spent the next six years revisiting Yellowstone and taking samples from pools, geysers, and vents.

Imagine spending 6 years doing something over and over again. Just because. Most of us probably wouldn’t even last 6 days.

Still I don’t think we should do things in hope that centuries later it will contribute to a world-changing technology. Perhaps we should do it just because. It will at least contribute to our selves.