Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Going off schedule

Last evening was the first time this year I was in a movie theatre. I’d forgotten what it is like to truly immerse and lose yourself into something. It’s wonderful. For those two or so hours I am absolutely locked into the world the movie is presenting. No smartphone, no distractions. You can momentarily forget about whatever that is troubling you out in the real world. Oh right, I got to do that important thing for work next week…

The movie I saw was the fourth Spider-Man movie headlined by Tom Holland. Kudos to director Destin Daniel Cretton on a fantastic job. We always love seeing Asians representing and making an impact in the wider American culture.

A Saturday night out to the movies wouldn’t be my standard cup of coffee. Because the later show times affectively delay my beginning hours of sleep. When you’re a serial life optimizer like myself, deviation from the practice can lead to not only the initial pain of going off schedule, but also the anxiety of the cascading effects caused by the deviation. Any true gym-rat can attest that missing one workout session can feel like a regression of all the recent gains, and a ruiner of subsequent sessions.

Declining to see a late movie with your friend simply because you’ve got a sleep schedule to adhere to is a terrible way to live. Optimization in it of itself is fine because I think that’s how we get to consistency. Then the habit becomes a self-sustaining flywheel. So perhaps initially you should be rather strict about working out at a specific time - all the time, or an absolute ban on certain foods because you’ve got diet goals.

It is then difficult to get out of that mode because obviously the optimization has given you positive results. Otherwise it wouldn’t have grown to become habits. So you feel like you cannot deviate. But it is crucial that once the flywheel is achieved, we allow some randomness and serendipity back into the schedule. A compromised night of sleep will be forgotten in a few days. The time spent with friends enjoying a movie is a pleasant memory worth remembering.

That’s the central theme I got out of Spider-Man: Brand New Day: it’s fine to work on yourself and go at it alone for a while, but eventually you will need friends and human interaction to have a fulfilling life.

If I die, I die

The book The Last Place on Earth narrates the duel between two teams of explorers aiming to be the first to reach the very southern pole. The too long didn’t read is the winning team took a measured, calculated approach, while the losing team went full Rambo at the beginning, running out of steam at the end. It’s the same tortoise and the hare story that they’ve been reading to little kids since forever.

My personality is definitely on the hare end of the spectrum. Years ago while running a 10K, I drained myself going too fast on the first half. I then essentially walked the second half, leading to a slow result. If it were on a North Pole expedition, I would have surely perished.

It’s a deadly thing for motivation to strike me, because the sudden inspiration will cause me to focus so intently that I forgo everything else. I can be researching hotel accommodations in South Korea for hours, and won’t pause to even drink a lick of water until the job is done. Fiction books are especially dangerous towards the end, because I won’t stop reading until the very last page. Bed time? No it isn’t!

Besides, it’s not likely I would be able to sleep anyways. Slumber is not possible when that thing with the car still isn’t fixed (so glad my brand of car enthusiasm doesn’t involve massively fixing or upgrading car parts). Or the stuck kitchen pipe needs something stronger than Drano to clear. Is this the opposite side of the coin to procrastination? Once I begin something, it’s difficult to stop until the job is done. Regular life be damned.

Good thing then that none of my projects or tasks have downsides that involve death.

Rejected too few

Getting rejected sucks. Even when the situation is one where I fully expect to get rejected. My particular human psychology just isn’t built-up to deal with this kind of failure. It’s as if each successive rejection is a direct reflection of my personhood, a character flaw. How can rejection affect me so adversely even with the proper amounts of anticipation? Perhaps I’m indeed too invested in what others think of me.

Yesterday I made an offer on a car at a local dealership. It was soundly rejected, obviously, which put me in a sort of funk the rest of the day. I can’t really explain it. It was textbook negotiation: two parties can only agree to move on from the table. But then why do I feel so bad? I don’t think I put undue anticipation, hopes and dreams, towards my offer being accepted. It was just taking a shot: the answer is always no if I don’t ask.

Thinking back, I’ve always had this neuroticism. Back in my schooling days, I would dread getting English papers back from the teachers. Invariably their remarks and criticism would hurt me to the core. I was rather happy to be done with English classes after freshman year of college. Instead, I do my writing here in this blog. Where it’s safe from criticism (readership is minuscule, no one comments!), and I can commit all the subject-verb tense error I am wont to do.

Moving forward I think it’s helpful to get rejected. It’s good practice, and unless I plan to stay in my hole for the rest of time, it’s going to happen anyways. I need to learn to handle the afterwards better, to be able to move on quickly. It’s a part of what I’m trying to do in 2023: live authentically, and not care about what other people think.

All in perspective

A good friend of mine had his bachelor party at the local go-karting place. To see who can go the fastest in one lap: a great way to get the competitive spirits out. It’s been a long time since I’ve last sat in a go-kart. Back then the cars were powered by gasoline lawn-mower style engines. Nowadays the karts are all electric. It’s for the better, honestly: petrol fumes are some of the worst things to breathe in.

Other than the change to electric motivation, the karts are largely the same as I remembered. No adjustments possible to the seat and wheel (I wish for a closer wheel), and purely manual steering. My arms definitely got a workout from thrashing the car through the bends. There were eight of us in the group, and I ended up placing second fastest. Even though I had a weight penalty! The smaller of the guys have a weight advantage, I would say. The person in first place is lighter than me, I am sure of it!

Jokes of a sore loser aside, it was a fun morning at the track. I did notice however that there weren’t that many people staffing the place. There were only two guys manning the whole of the track area. And from the first race onwards, I did not see them stop for one second. Federally-mandated breaks every four hours? That’s hilarious. There would be lots of impatient customers if the workers paused just to use the restroom. Would they even eat lunch at all?

It’s a hard life our there for people in the service industry. We have a duty to be kind to them, especially during this period of great staffing shortage.

It puts into perspective how grateful I am to have a job where for most part I simply sit in a front of a computer. Tapping on the keyboard is the extent of any hard labor. I can use the restroom whenever I want, and I can leisurely eat lunch with not much of a time limit. As much as it would be nice to get paid more, it’s important to keep in mind how lucky I already have it.

Boring is good

What if boring is good? What if we are not meant to strive for greatness? Surely it’s perfectly fine to be comfortable, content, and be at leisure.

I had a mini existential crisis of sorts recently. It was the weekend, the time to do the stuff I want to do. To do things that improve and better myself. Like reading a book, or study some skill. Perhaps to go outside and explorer, grab that pricey Sony camera that’s been gathering dust since the pandemic started and do something with it. Why am I not being more productive? It’s the weekend! The time I pined ever so much to have during the busy work-week.

And yet, all I wanted to do was absolutely nothing. There’s errands to run, of course, but after that, lounging around seemed like the thing to do. But guilts of unproductiveness and stagnation quickly hit me, and I would then get stuck in rut, fighting between what the two sides want.

Why do we strive for more anyways? A lot of it is novelty. We can’t bear the pain and reality of doing the same things over and over. No matter how much the pandemic have made Groundhog Day a reality for us, the taste for something new and different is always the dangling carrot in front. This is why so many people are predicting a post-vaccine boom: we are all so ready to do something other than what we’ve been doing for the past year.

Why do I study things, read books, travel to places and do photography? For the chance that it may lead to something different, something new in the future. That’s the treadmill that I didn’t know I was on, but here it is on a quiet weekend, making me restless because I can’t force myself to actually rest. What if this monotony of life is all there is? Why can’t I be okay with doing the same thing day after day, week after week? I live a comfortable life: I should be satisfied with that if this is all that ever will be.

It’s okay if life is boring.

Precious times

They say time is the most valuable asset we have, and we should try our best to not squander any of it. Sounds great on paper, but have these people ever try to get out of a warm bed in the morning? The eternal fight between the comfort and protection of the covers, and the dreadful cold of a morning bedroom. Keep the heat on during the night? I’m too Asian and not rich enough for that.

Instead of getting out of the bed promptly after wake, I waste about an hour scrolling through twitter on the phone. Having my phone within reach of the bed is probably one of my worst habits, but I simply don’t have the willpower to quit. Reading through twitter in the morning is like reading the morning newspaper for people back before the times of the Internet. It’s informational and entertainment. The real enemy is infinite scrolling: there’s no natural stopping point, unlike an actual newspaper. The dopamine drip can be as endless as your capability to stay in bed.

The productive thing to do would be to actually get out of the bed, and then check twitter on the MacBook Pro. This preserves the value of checking the news in the morning, but crucially, it also gets me out of bed. Crossing the physical barrier is what releases me from the intense hold of that warm cover. Back when I lived with my parents, feeding the cat was what got me out of bed immediately. I think I need something similar to that to serve the same purpose.

Ultimately, I can’t be wasting an hour plus stuck in the bed every morning. What’s the point of waking up so early if I’m just going to squander away those precious morning hours? Perhaps it is time: I shall charge my phone overnight on the drawer across the room. I’d have to get up and out just to turn off the alarm.

A touch of curb

It’s one of the most terrible sounds in the world: the wheel-rim of a car grinding on a sidewalk curb. Try as you may to be careful during parallel parking maneuvers, it only takes one moment of carelessness to ruin an otherwise perfect wheel. The feeling in the driver seat, the dread of getting out of the car to check damage, is uniquely dreadful to a car enthusiast.

We suffer greatly when we put too much value to things material.

It used to be that something as benign as curbing a wheel would absolutely ruin my day, though perhaps I am improving. Last Friday I had the unfortunate tragedy of tagging the M2’s right-front wheel on the curb as I was pulling off to the side to park. Thankfully, the damage isn’t too awful, but I just couldn’t help to bash myself with my own stupidity. Reality seems to always bite soon as you get too comfortable and complacent.

I quickly forgot about the transgression, however. I was on my weekly visit to see my friend’s kids. I owe it to them to give my undivided attention. Stewing over the mistake of curbing the wheel serves no purpose other than feeling bad for myself and showing a negative vibe to the kids. I was somewhat surprised then that I was indeed able to put the wheel damage behind me and devote fully to playing with the little ones.

I’ve come a long way from the intense obsessive compulsiveness vis a vis my cars that I used to have. Maybe if the actual damage was worse, I wouldn’t have been able to forget it so quickly. Either way, I’m glad I didn’t stress about something that I cannot turn back the clock to change.