I’m in a taxi in Beijing traffic atm. My wife and daughter are jet lag napping. We just went to the 798 art zone, which is very cool. Headed to the airport, then to Dalian. They’ve planted a ton of trees and cleaned the streets since I was here 7 years ago.
Great, planted more than 50 trees, now just water and wait. I seeded prairie grass along the street side, and that’s going to be an ongoing project. I will add several balsam firs to the lot in a few weeks, bringing them back from the upper peninsula. We have a few hemlock, but need more shade tolerant conifers.
"Weekend in New York" has been a break in routine since the days when we could find a clean hotel on Priceline for under $100, usually in the quiet financial district. Our cap is now closer to $200, but even that was enough to get us into the W Downtown last year, where we climbed the stairs and discovered a hidden billiard room with a view of the Statue of Liberty. The goal last weekend was to see Giancarlo Stanton at Yankee Stadium. The kid wore his Marlins jersey and brought his catcher's mitt, but no foul balls reached the grandstand level. Manhattan is different with each visit. In the old days, young people would show off their risk tolerance by standing between the subway cars to smoke. Now they take Juul drags while sitting among other passengers. Another pencil tower seems to sprout up each time I look around. We called this the "Minecraft Tower." 56 Leonard Street is actually nicknamed the "Jenga Tower," since there's nothing awkward about alluding to skyscrapers toppling over. Apparently they are not yet sold out, so act now.
Those daredevils must have killed themselves off or else gotten rich and moved into pencil towers, or the White House. MTA warns against walking between subway cars after 7 deaths in 2018
Greetings from Cape Verde! Closest I've ever been to the equator. Good thing I have more than enough sunscreen. Tomorrow's the meeting we're all here for, which is to discuss the (draft) report of the project to advice on the country's path towards electric mobility. It's great to have the last two months of work culminate in this trip. I'm happy with what I managed to pull off in such a short time. Definitely a good notch on my belt, so to speak. But I am also very aware of how serious I'm taking the responsibility for this project. I feel like I care too much, that unless it's perfect and everyone's happy I have failed. Need to give less of a fuck, but I also don't want to be less carerful and responsible. Hm.
What the hell am I doing with my life. Why do I spend my time doing things like Reddit and Pokemon Showdown instead of things like writing, meditating, organizing my life, playing piano, writing software for myself, starting businesses? I know what will make me happier. I know what will make me proud of myself. But I don't do it. Instead I do the stupid yet easy thing, even though it feels like letting my soul die.
So... why not try something new every couple of weeks? Try doing something out of your comfort zone an hour every day and visualize how that hour is going to improve your life. Before you know it, you will have some mastery over a different skill in no time at all!
I've been slowly getting out of a very similar situation from the things you describe. The big thing that has helped me is to prioritize building a platform of good habits, upon which you can build skills and projects. For me personally, this is being accomplished by strictly partitioning things in my life. My big time-sink has historically been the internet, so I started by eliminating most social media and by not carrying a proper smartphone. I get (and make) lots of jokes about my ancient blackberry, but after a couple days I really felt like my brain could breathe again. I try to keep screen time at my desktop to 1.5 hours on workdays--timed shutdown programs help a lot with this. To-do lists have also made a huge impact on my productivity--I try to make one at lunch every workday, and though I rarely hit everything on the list it helps me answer "uhh what am I doing again" with "throwing a few stitches in your project jeans" instead of "...reddit". Making priorities of things like journaling, artistic expression, and especially meditation has also been extremely helpful. I took time off of my regularly scheduled hobbies (6 months!) just to work on un-fucking my brain. It took serious mental effort for me to make meaningful progress on this, and it's a battle I've fought for my entire adult life. If a goomba like me can start getting on the right path, though, then so can you. Work hard to make yourself better, but most importantly, be willing to forgive yourself when you fall off the wagon. Dust yourself off and keep going, you can do it.
Because it's easier and offers more immediate gratification. Reddit and Pokemon are gamified to the point of addiction. Read Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken - her facts are questionable (anyone who quotes Heroditus as fact hasn't done their due diligence) but her perspective is novel.
So my dilemma from last week continues. I was ready to tell the academic job no, but they weren’t having it. They’re dead set on getting me there, and they might just do it. They updated the salary band for the job, so now the academic position is distinctly more salary and better benefits. To be clear, this isn’t some professorial position, it’s more of an academic support position. It should have a more conventional work-life balance than a job like that yet there’s always bound to be some bleed-in from working smack dab in the middle of it all. I’m certain it’ll be more work overall and more responsibilities, but not by an avalanche. It looks to be commensurate with the pay increase. Im still comfortable where I’m at now, but it’s a bit harder to rationalize that it’s best to stay put when there’s a better paying option. So many of the other would-be deciding factors depend on my ability to predict the future, so I’m not too keen on those. At this point I’m pretty inclined to take it.
Jump. If they were willing to up the salary to get you, they're probably more likely to up the salary and responsibilities as you grow into the position. Academic support positions are harder to hire than regular positions because there's more overhead to new hires; lateral hires are so much easier. If you like the university, and you like the environment, getting into it is a good move especially if it looks like there are other positions further down the road that would challenge and reward you.
I've been studying. Notes: at least a page a day Shakespeare: a sonnet a day As well as looking into copyrights. Once I get my music copyrighted, I will share what I recorded in Texas in March.
I am what you might call an occasional bike-to-work-er. I ride when I can, I love it when I do, but sometimes driving is just too easy. Denver is a GREAT bike city. Ample trails keep you away from cars, and even when you're in the street, there are lots of "bike lanes" or at least signage to remind drivers to be aware. There are even fairly aggressive traffic laws that protect cyclists right of way. In the 20 years or so that I've been occasionally riding to work, I've always skipped "Bike To Work Day". For some reason I rejected it, and didn't want to ride with the masses. This year, I decided to join in the fun.... and fun it was. What I always thought would be annoying turned out to be amazing and invigorating. To see so many people out on two wheels was refreshing and made me feel like part of something bigger. I mean - I see no less than 50 other cyclists every leg of my journey on a normal day - but today I saw HUNDREDS. And yet - the trails didn't feel crowded or too busy. There were a few spots where I needed to slow down to get through the masses at a refreshment station, but all in all - it was awesome.
Just came home from our local regional burn. It was the 3rd edition! I’ve had the craziest experiences this past week. I seriously feel like I’ve came back a different person. With lots of insane new friends. While we were unpacking the trailer yesterday, I really felt like something « clicked ». That I’m getting good at this. We unpacked efficiently, I was directing 2 people that were helping me and it was fast and organized. After a full week of barely any sleep. What I’m not doing next year is inviting a bunch of people that have never been to a burn to our camp because they want to check it out. This year, most of our camp were new. Some people stepped up, some helped but lacked initiative, some didn’t help much at all. Me and my boyfriend organized most of it, and we did deliver on our camp's brunch food gift. It was good but not great. I’ve seen awesome camps in action now, and if I’m organizing something again - I want only power players on my team. To have something epic.
Work. My boss was fired a couple of weeks ago. Since I generally work alone, that hasn't been a big impact on my work. But I set up a meeting with the VP and Director of the Sales department, and we had a heart-to-heart about my role/job at my company. They agree that what I am currently doing is not the best use of my time or skills, and that the company is moving in a new direction. We came up with some plans for how better to make use of me and my talents, and I'm pretty excited with the changes. Probably next month, I'm guessing. Personal. I'm all out of spoons. While I don't have a disability or disease, I am fully depleted on the social and ego level. Not sure how to refresh these things, since I have always been a social butterfly. My wife went out of town last weekend, so I went for a long motorcycle ride one afternoon (331 miles). But then she decided to come back early, so I had to turn around and come back, too. She's gone again this weekend, and I think I'm just going to stay home and work on the motorcycle's compression problem. See if I can make progress with that. And maybe recharge my spoon drawer. Diet. Last weekend I went way off the rails on my Keto-friendly eating plan, and ate ALL THE SUGAR AND CARBS. And I am pretty damn sure that is why I am useless this week... too laden with garbage food... so I got back on the fresh food wagon yesterday, and am going to continue through this week to get myself back on track. (I expect this will also help my limited-spoons problem, as well.)
Do people like Spotify? I'm thinking about trying it but don't love the idea of another monthly expense.
The absolute, unquestionable best five dollars I spend a month (on the student discount). And I'll happily up it to $10 when my student offer expires. They have an enormous library where I basically never want for artists or tracks (my music interests are not extremely niche, though). The app is great and bug-free. And I'm happy with their music-recommending algorithms (many different playlists appear at the main screen which are populated on daily or weekly for you to listen to based on your interests). Only feature I want for is a built-in song lyric display, which I see Apple Music has, for when I want to belt loudly along.
This is a major selling point, so thanks for mentioning it. I've been using Plex which has some features I like, but it also goes through broken-slightly broken-fixed-broken cycles on the app.The app is great and bug-free.
If you are techy, you could put all your music on a server, open a port on your router to the outside, and stream to the VLC app on your phone via SFTP. I've been dying to do this so I listen to my music more but don't have home internet, just my phone hotspot.
Spotify is brilliant. I set up a playlist of 10 songs that I liked that were kinda-sorta related. Their genres ranged a bit, but they all had a similar "feeling". I hit Play, and enjoyed the music. After the 10th song, another song played... and I liked it. Then another song. And I liked that one, too. And another. THIS is the magic of Spotify. Pandora simply randomly throws in a different song every 5th track. There's no logic to it. If you are listening to "Rock", and the 4th song plays on Pandora, the 5th song will be in the "Rock" category, but may not be at all musically related to your playlist. Spotify knows the soul of the track you are listening to, and is VERY good at finding another track that fits in the same vein. tl;dr: Spotify introduces me to new artists. Pandora plays radio-friendly shit I don't want to hear again. Pay for it. You will be very happy. (But the Spotify interface is TERRIBLE. Just... the absolute worst melange of weirdly inexplicable functions and features... nothing is where you would expect it to be, and none of the buttons or links go to where you think they will go. It's terrible. But the algorithms are SO GOOD, it is worth it.)
My gripe with Pandora is that it’s exceptionally good at finding music that has many technical similarities to what I like while managing to completely not be something I’d actually like. The “music genome” is a noble idea and all, but it really highlights the superficialities of their methods in qualifying music. I’d venture a guess that connecting bands solely by the scene and social connections they came from is a way better predictor of musical tastes than musical qualities.
Absolutely. If not Spotify, another streaming service would probably do you. I love music, and Spotify gives me (virtually) all the music I could want for $10/mo. I use it all day at work, whenever I'm doing chores...Really, just all the time. I think if I wanted to break that $10 down, I'd be paying less than a dime for every hour I spend listening to it. There are some concerns about how they compensate artists, but I encourage you to do some research and decide how much that matters to you.
Nature G committed suicide. I'm home at the moment; mostly what I wanted last night was nookie but mostly what my wife wanted was three hours of comfort about what to do about the fact that our president wants to argue about what are and are not concentration camps (PROTIP: if you're arguing semantics and concentration camps, you've already lost). Gotta go change out my phone, buy some protein (Q: how do you adapt to being a rich fuck living in a food desert? A: bring groceries with you on the plane!) and send myself a staple gun and a paring knife because I forgot the latter and didn't know I needed the former. This has been a 36-hour trip, which sucks, but beats the ever-loving tar out of no trip. The front sprocket on the bike is cashed. It's no longer made by Shimano. Which means changing out a bunch of shit; honestly the derailleurs are due, as are the shifters, at which point I'm looking at a $250 amazon list that will hopefully return it to function. A local bike shop says they can do it for $300. I'ma pay 'em. I might buy something new and send the old war horse back up to Seattle. It's currently 200 miles shy of 10,000 miles and by the time I get it refurbished it'll be within 50. But I'm more than a little conflicted about buying another bike for Los Angeles 'cuz fuckin' hell I was supposed to be done with this shit by now. Jewelry illustration continues apace. However, my latest sketches are a thousand miles away behind two locked gates so it'll have to wait until tomorrow. Tired. Worn out. Too much to do, none of it fun, and City of Quartz is a rough book to listen to while bombing through a concrete culvert full of detritus and homeless addicts. It makes me want to throw on a dishdasha and accuse everyone I meet of being decadent and corrupt.
So glad I got to see Tengger Calvary earlier this year at El Corazon. Wearing my TG hoodie to work today, in honor of Nature. I hope The Hu can step up and continue Nature's harder core version of MongoMetal. I mean, I like The Hu, but they are pretty lightweight metal, or more 'Rock' than TG was.