I'm, like, in love! OK, I'm not in love guys. Not just yet. Don't get too excited. BUT, I reconnected with an old (and, the more I remember, remarkably dear) high school friend about two weeks ago - we just ran into each other at the bar unexpectedly. The next morning, he was hitting me up on Facebook saying we should hang out sometime. And I had this fancy night with friends planned for that Friday so I figured, what the hey, take risks little rabbit, and I invited him out. We've hung out 3x since then. He has a kid (a little 6yo girl) and had custody for the last week, so that's limited our ability to hang out - quite reasonably and responsibly, of course. Our next date is tomorrow...we are making chicken piccata at his apartment... We talk every day. A lot. This kid gave me a lapdance while breathily singing "Happy birthday, Mr President" in my parents' basement on my 16th birthday party. It's just like really interesting and... good. I don't have much else to say about it because I'm really excited, pretty into him, and there's no way anyone on earth would text me as much as he does unless they actually liked talking to me. So! I'll stop daydreaming about my wedding. (JK. I haven't really been daydreaming about the wedding. I'm too busy daydreaming about having sex.)
Instead of creating a separate thingy, I'll use this Pubski as a chance to reflect on 2017. John Green recently recommended writing two letters to your future self about what to take with you going into 2018, and what to leave in 2017. I think that's a great way to reflect and look forward simultaneously. ---LEAVE IT IN 2017--- The first thing to leave behind is my indecisiveness. If 2017 has taught me anything, it's that I need to make decisions and stick to them, not fret and worry and ponder forever on them if it doesn't make the result any better. At the end of 2016, I read something which took me most of 2017 to internalise: "doubt must come to an end." I haven't been able to find that quote's source ever again. The insight that phases of doubt are just that, phases, has been meaningful to me. The second thing I want to leave is gliding. In a classic "it's not you, it's me" scenario, I've had a lot of fun gliding, but I don't have the free time to do it properly. Once or twice a month isn't gonna cut it for something as complex as learning to fly. It's been fun, but I gotta close that chapter for now. I also want to leave calorie logging behind in 2017. I tried picking it up again last year, but it made me feel guilty for eating, which is the exact opposite of what I needed it for. It helped me figure out a healthier diet, which is good. Other than that it's just not for me. Finally, I want 2017 to be the last year I would describe myself as reticent in unfamiliar social situations. I avoided small talk the first weeks of my internship as I've done many times before. It took a Sherry Turkle book to make me realise how embarrassingly unsocial that is and that it doesn't hurt, you fuckin' hermit, these people are nice if you just let them be nice. ---BRING IT IN 2018--- First some minor things I want to take with me from 2017. It was the year I went out of my comfort zone a bunch of times, which is always insightful. It was the year of less distractions: after reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, I realised I should do with much less distraction in my life. My phone is now almost always on silent and I'm all the happier for it. 2017 was also the year I started meditating. For me, it's valuable as a kind of mental defragmentation: if I have any stress, worry or emotions on my mind I've found meditation to clear that up, or to at least make me more aware of how I'm feeling. I have also noticed that that clarity of mind carries over to the rest of the day. Meditation, for me, is a kind of mental health upkeep I didn't know I needed. I also started upping my reading game, and it's been one of the best things the year has brought me. A quick back of the envelope calculation puts me at more than 11,000 pages of nonfiction just in 2017, which is more than I have ever read in a single year. After five years of following my interests and curiosity to the best of my abilities, I finally figured out what I want to do in life. Not in the "I have found my calling" sense, but more in the sense of finally being able to connect the dots: That's from Steve Jobs' commencement speech in 2005. I remember watching it ten years ago, and those words have been etched into my soul in the form of hope ever since. The naive and dreamy kind of hope that everything will work out in the end. While I can't say that has happened or will happen, I feel like I'm headed in the right direction with the right tools and people around me, and I'm incredibly grateful for that. 2017 was the year I connected a whole bunch of dots and settled on a direction, and I look forward to see where that will take me.Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
The attitude here is inspirational. Oh, god. The guilt. Calorie counting helped me lose 50 lbs but that was, like, 2009. And I've been doing it ever since. God I don't know if I can do it.I also want to leave calorie logging behind in 2017. I tried picking it up again last year, but it made me feel guilty for eating, which is the exact opposite of what I needed it for. It helped me figure out a healthier diet, which is good. Other than that it's just not for me.
I'm in the lucky position of losing weight as soon as I do any kind of exercise regularly. Stuffed myself to the brim with food over Christmas and gained less than a kilo. From what you've told you're the polar opposite of that. Maybe you can ask yourself if you really need the guilt of red Myfitnesspal numbers to stay healthy because I realised I didn't.
I think that doubt is a lot like anxiety, in that even though they both present themselves as thoughts, they seem to innately command more attention than a thought such as: "oh, I need to go the shop." As a result, you start to think of them as coming from somewhere other than thought and this separation causes the experience to kind of double down. You get anxious of being anxious (anxiety sensitivity], or subconsciously doubtful about everything. But they are just thoughts. And if you acknowledge them you can see what's behind them and let it go like you would any other thought or feeling. Often enough, there's nothing behind them at all and, in acknowledging them, they ceases to exist This reminded me of a chapter I read entitled "The Possible and the Real" in Henri Bergson's book The Creative Mind . He states that most humans naturally, and incorrectly, presume that possibility precedes reality. Instead, it is reality that precedes possibility. The present moment is the constant process of chaos forming into an ordered reality. Once this reality has created itself "its image is reflected behind it in the indefinite past; thus it finds it has been, at all times, possible; but just at the very moment where it begins to have always been... The possible is thus the mirage of the present in the past. And as we know that the future will end up becoming the present, as the effect of the mirage continues unabatedly to produce itself, we tell ourselves that in our current present, which will be the past of tomorrow, the image of tomorrow is already contained although we haven't come to grasp it. And precisely there lies the illusion ". I found the chapter split into 3 parts online if you're interested. Part 3 contains the meat of the idea I mentioned above:At the end of 2016, I read something which took me most of 2017 to internalise: "doubt must come to an end." I haven't been able to find that quote's source ever again. The insight that phases of doubt are just that, phases, has been meaningful to me.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
I've been thinking about this all day, off and on, and I'm not sure I agree. Maybe it's because I'm stuck in a loop of anxiety sensitivity right now, but it seems to me that both doubt and anxiety are more like thoughts with feelings attached-- in fact, I might argue that they're mostly feelings. And I have never in my life figured out how to kick a feeling that I don't want to feel. Certainly not as easily as by simply acknowledging it.But they are just thoughts. And if you acknowledge them you can see what's behind them and let it go like you would any other thought or feeling. Often enough, there's nothing behind them at all and, in acknowledging them, they ceases to exist
Sorry, I was trying to be concise but ended up being a bit reductive. I agree that both anxiety and doubt are experienced as a mixture of thought and feeling. At the height of my experience with anxiety, it generally arose in one of three ways: 1. I have a thought that makes me feel anxious 2. I consciously sense something (e.g. a chest pain or strange sensation) that leads me to thoughts that make me feel anxious 3. A feeling of anxiety is triggered by some unconscious stimuli, which leads me to thoughts that heighten/prolong the anxiety The pattern here is that regardless of the anxiety's origin, it is thought that ultimately decides how it's handled. That is what I was trying to get at. Sometimes those thoughts might be subconscious or deeply embedded patterns of thinking, but they are thoughts nonetheless. It was also a gross oversimplification of me to say that anxiety ceases to exist once acknowledged. What I meant to say was that rather than getting caught up in thinking about or around the anxiety, whether its experienced as a thought or feeling, one should instead non-judgmentally acknowledge what they are experiencing and in that moment let it go. It may come back again and again, sometimes instantly or maybe an hour later, but again acknowledge it and let it go. This can be a very long process, but gradually you train the mind to not instantly react to anxiety. It gives you a space between thought and feeling that allows you to decide how to handle it, rather than letting the mind run away with itself. With enough patience and introspection you may come to realise what it is that's behind your patterns of thinking. For me it was an innate fear of situations in which I had not planned for. I used to imagine how events in my days were going to go, often even rehearsing conversations I was going to have. This lead to anxiety whenever things went 'off-script'. I recommend reading this chapter from Jiddu Krishnamurti's book Freedom from the Known, which was a great help to me during my most anxiety filled time. Here is a choice qoute: Now take your own particular form of fear. Look at it. Watch your reactions to it. Can you look at it without any movement of escape, justification, condemnation or suppression? Can you look at that fear without the word which causes the fear? Can you look at death, for instance, without the word which arouses the fear of death? The word itself brings a tremor, doesn't it, as the word love has its own tremor, its own image? Now is the image you have in your mind about death, the memory of so many deaths you have seen and the associating of yourself with those incidents - is it that image which is creating fear? Or are you actually afraid of coming to an end, not of the image creating the end? Is the word death causing you fear or the actual ending? If it is the word or the memory which is causing you fear then it is not fear at all. I hope this clarifies what I meant.At the actual moment as I am sitting here I am not afraid; I am not afraid in the present, nothing is happening to me, nobody is threatening me or taking anything away from me. But beyond the actual moment there is a deeper layer in the mind which is consciously or unconsciously thinking of what might happen in the future or worrying that something from the past may overtake me. So I am afraid of the past and of the future. I have divided time into the past and the future. Thought steps in, says, `Be careful it does not happen again', or `Be prepared for the future. The future may be dangerous for you. You have got something now but you may lose it. You may die tomorrow, your wife may run away, you may lose your job. You may never become famous. You may be lonely. You want to be quite sure of tomorrow.'
Thank you. It was called amazing by the subject of most of it. Then she added that she was personally hurt by some of the word choices even though she majored in English at one point and had the literal voice of the author explaining the intent. Which didn’t matter because reasons or something
Guten Morgen Pubski! Been a while, huh? Wow. Lot has happened. Let's get some subheadings going. School? Continues to go. I'm now in the middle of my third year, sitting on a 3.85 overall GPA and a 4.0 in my major (German Language & Literature). Plus, I have one gen. ed. class left, and then I can focus on my major // whatever the fuck I feel like studying. So academics are 100% not a worry, which is super nice. I'm pretty good at school. More importantly, I'm going to Germany!! I got funding from the department to go to Berlin for a week (beginning of March) and start work on my honors thesis (on ETA Hoffmann's Nachtstücke); after that, I'll begin a two week tour of German-speaking Europe with my study group, and finally settle down at Freiburg im Breisgau for a full-ass semester at the Albert Ludwigs Universität. I'm incredibly excited for all of this-- mostly just being able to speak German exclusively for so long. Since getting home, I've kind of realized that I need to be speaking German regularly to be happy now? Like, I haven't met any German speakers in Texas. Expected. But now that I'm fluent enough to think in German, it feels like there's this huge part of my lived experience that I can't communicate to the people around me. Looking forward to removing that, lol. (And honestly I'd rather live 100% in German than 100% in English) Friends! Ha. haha. ha. Wow. Over the summer, my best friend broke up with his girlfriend and started dating an acquaintance of ours. Apparently some of our friends thought he moved on too fast or whatever, and this became an excuse for them to air out dozens of grievances with him reaching back to, like, freshman year. The people that actually had real shit to be mad at him about are no longer mad at him, but certain friends can't get over their empathetic anger or whatever. It's mostly been a really great way of seeing who our real friends are. Became clear that a few of our friends may be cool to hang out with, but they kind of suck as friends, and they only act like our friends because we're convenient to them. Which is kind of a shitty realization to have, but better to have it than not. So we don't hang out with them anymore-- I pretty much have like 4 friends, all of whom I'm super close with. It's kind of ideal. Love or whatever. I'm not gonna get into details because there's no point, but since we last spoke: A few failed attempts at relationships A few flirtations Vague sadness Nothing earth-shattering. But I watched this weird German film about a dude in a weird relationship and had a sudden realization: when I look for relationships or sex or whatever, I'm trying to fill a need that I absolutely won't fill by finding a relationship. I don't know what that need is, or how to fill it, but I have at least a bit more clarity than before. We'll see if that goes anywhere. Odds and ends I started seeing a therapist at school after a particularly rough depressive episode. It was cool to have time to just think about my mental health and not feel guilty for not doing work or whatever, but my therapist kinda sucked. After our first session, I told him that I was out of the depressive episode, but I'd like to still talk about strategies for coping, root causes, etc. We talked for the next 3 weeks about adjusting to college and friend drama. Not what I was looking for at all. Hoping to find a better therapist, either in Germany or once I'm back. I started working out over the summer. Body positivity is at an all-time high. Not only that, but I realized how nice it is to just be able to do things? Like, I don't have to worry if I'll be able to lift a medium-weight thing. Or, I'm better at climbing trees. Or, I picked up a(n American) football for the first time in years and immediately was throwing well and farther than I can recall ever throwing. It's great. I'm sure there's more, but it can wait. We have 51 more Pubskis in 2018!
Not a great start to the new year. My dog has become very violent in the week I was gone, and has found a way to both burrow under, and jump over our 5 ft. fence. We lost him for about 3 hours the other day because he jumped into our neighbors yard and ran as far away as he could. He bit our landlord's dog (no blood, but that's just because I managed to get him off in time). He managed to get shit inside of my acoustic guitar. Literal shit. I don't blame him for acting crazy. He's living in a 500 sq. ft space (realistically less, because he's mot allowed in the bathroom), and it's now dangerous to leave him outside alone. He constantly hears 5 chickens and 3 ducks through our bedroom wall, because that's where our landlords decided to put their coops. All our neighbors insist on walking their dogs without leashes, despite asking countless times for them to, uh, not do that. We don't really take him for walks much now. Our schedules changed, and he's home alone for 10 hours most days. Also, he barks every time I play the flute. We're looking into finding him a new home. We're locked into our lease until May, and moving across the country with no decent way of transporting him in June. After that, living in my family's house with another dog and 14 actors. After that, who fucking knows. He's a good dog that we are just in no way fit to care for. Nothing's certain, but I think we know. -------- My girlfriend's grandpa died yesterday. We pooled our little savings to buy her a plane ticket out, and she's leaving tonight. They weren't too close, but she and her grandma are. She was married to her husband for 60 years, and is not functioning right now. She has a 40 year old son with special needs, and 5 without. I drank too much with 2 of them last night. -------- I've spent 3 hours a day playing piano every day this week. To the extent that I make resolutions, my sole pick this year is to get better at piano.
The little wife and I had a great time in London over the holidays, and now we're buckling down for some pretty foul winter weather - our area of New England's going to get hammered. Reports are calling it a bomb cyclone. Never even heard of that before, but we're stocked up on essentials & like...pounds of UK tea. My grandfather had a stroke 2 nights ago, still hospitalized while he also recovers from a fever. His first stroke was in his early 70s, and it really debilitated him - he's in his late 80s now, but he's been prepared for the worst for years. It's a strain on my grandmother, but she lives in an almost literal family enclave surrounded by her sons and grandchildren. She's not prepared to be without him, but she'll never be alone. That stage of life is so difficult for me to think about. They've been together for 60+ years, and they've faced more than I can imagine, including several death scenarios. When I put myself and my wife in that place - or my parents 20 years from now - I feel such a sense of dread...? inadequacy? something. The life experience they have is so valuable. I called my grandmother this morning before work to check on her. She's horrifically upset of course, but her outlook is...I don't know. Graceful? I don't know how to describe it, and I don't think she can either. But she feels it, lives in it, and it's not killing her to be in that emotional space. I ended that call feeling like she had reassured me. What a way to be.
I've been away for the past while, busy with research and personal/relationship growth. Some of the latter is going to take me years to get to where I want to be, but at least I know where I'm going, even if I'm not entirely sure how to get there yet. I finished a paper on my research, then cut it from 32 pages to 15 in half an hour to meet the conference page limit. I don't expect that paper to get accepted, but hopefully the reviewers will have some advice at least. I'm in an awkward spot where I'm not sure how to cut this into several papers, but a proper writeup with all the details and good examples needs about 40 pages. Maybe that's something worth publishing on the Arxiv as a supplement to a mch much shorter conference or journal paper. It's been pretty cold out lately; the chickens are not a huge fan of this but they seem to be doing alright. At night they fluff all their feathers out so they look like little potatoes with beaks!
I did not know that today is Wednesday. Winter break ends tomorrow and I guess this means it was good.
There's a lot I can say about New Years Eve. I spend the entire year working with some people ranging from non-profit board members to production companies to city officials to volunteers, and it went amazingly well this year. Which is problematic because we're still going to barely be in the black. A lot to think about this upcoming year, but the feedback has been good, and we have success we can build on. Had some spare time towards the end of the night, and ended up at our main stage for the final fire performance and countdown into 2018. It was bittersweet, standing there, alone, wearing my "Board Member" ID, watching all these couples and families have an amazing time. Gave me time to think about how much this all matters in the end if you don't have somebody to share the experience. Which led to a real, real, low emotionally which I'm still recovering from. But there's always climbing, and running, and I'm looking at bikes on Craigslist today for hopefully a weekend purchase. The one last girl I had any interest in is a lesbian, so that's a first, and fortunately I didn't find out by asking her out. But that's it, really, and it's a bit freeing, a bit sad, yadda yadda. No people left who I want to flirt with, want to get know on a more intimate level, and currently no prospects for meeting somebody like that since I've sworn off online dating and don't have the time to expand much beyond what I'm already doing outside of work. Resigned disappointment the phrase which was thrown at me last night. But that's life. And then you die or wake up.
Got a free shirt! I often record my commute with the Charity Miles app, getting a corporate sponsor to pitch a few coins to Habitat For Humanity while I enjoy riding my bike. (The Hubski team has recorded 1790 miles so far and could use some help!) Now and then there's a promotion. The t-shirt is cool, but a free hormone test kit was an unexpected surprise. I haven't overcome my reluctance to jab four fingers with needles, but I'm curious to see my numbers. For the new year I am following veen's example, avoiding distractions and aiming to read more. First book finished this year was The News: A User's Manual, and was about as expected, though it got me to delete a bunch of apps, including some foreign newspaper apps that were supposed to help me practice language but just bugged me with headline alerts I had already seen in English. The Road to Wigan Pier is wholesome misery literature that makes frozen toes on the way to work seem like no big deal.
The Road to Wigan Pier is often overlooked and - as you say - a real snapshot of misery. All the moreso because it's nonfiction.
Is pedialyte served here? No? Well it should be.
The Song of Roland The E-Book Dala downloaded me has this really weird thing going on where every few stanzas, a stanza is interrupted halfway through. I'm not surprised that there's an issue with the book, because when you get E-Books that are scans of really old books converted to a digital format, stuff goes awry. But usually, it's more along the lines of maybe a "u" with an umlaut ending up as six nonsensical characters in the final format. This is the first time I've seen whole segments missing. Anyhow, I like the poem enough so far that we're gonna get a few different translations from the library and I'm gonna figure out which one I like best and add it to my book collection. As I mentioned in the book thread, I once heard it as a "slog" to read. This thing is anything but. The poem is briskly paced and the stanzas are dense. As in, if you took the first dozen or so stanzas and re-wrote it in modern prose like Lord of the Rings or something, you have enough material for quite a few chapters. This is definitely a "blink and you'll miss it" kind of poem. Camera I got a new camera. Fancy and manual and intimidating. I have yet to break it out. I'm gonna do it tomorrow. Drawing I think I'm gonna try to make asilent comic about a hermit who desides to leave seclusion only to find himself alone in a city full of weird creatures of all shapes and sizes and types. I have zero confidence I'll be able to pull it off with any skill, but it'll be fun to do, if only to fill up an odd hour here or there. Positive Thoughts Happy New Year Hubskiers. Keep being awesome.
Can you take a photo of your photo with your photo?I got a new camera.
I don't know what I shoot. Chances are, it'll just be random stuff around the house to just get used to the thing, which means I'll have nothing to share because there's not really anything cool in the house worth photographing. We're in the dead of winter here in The States and it's worse than usual because of some kind of cold front from the arctic that's been here for weeks and is so big it stretches out all of the way to the south coast. So all of the animals have hunkered down so there's nothing in the backyard or the parks really worth shooting either. Plus, if I'm completely honest, I don't know if this kind of weather is safe for these kinds of cameras and I'm afraid of taking it out and ruining it.
If it's any consolation, of the dozens of "pretty cool" photographs I take with my smartphone, I only ever share one. I'm fairly new to this, as well, so don't worry about not having anything. Hard work, as always. Hundreds of photos to produce one worth sharing is a good exchange considering how your skill, with time, will lessen that to a hundred, tops.
Feeling lonely. Feeling useless. Feeling sad. I know it's all a mist of the mind and it's going to clear out soon. Wish I could block out the feelings so I could be a member of society. Rosa's getting along. There's a young warrior in the group she joins partway through the story, an Avar by blood. Avars are a nation known for its successes in the field of natural resonance. There's a branch in their society of warriors aiming to master both the resonance and their bodies. When they do, they're able to fight without weapons because their bodies become hard as steel and strong as a bull at will. The young warrior hasn't finished his training, opting for a pilgrimage to the outside world. There, he finds many reasons to doubt the teachings he was told to follow in unshaking faith from the youngest age. The old man, the group's de facto leader and a used-to-be dirty mercenary, has been a big influence on the young man's shaking convictions.
Cheers. It's not my first rodeo, so I'll be alright.
Typing this on my new QwerkyWriter keyboard, and feeling like a total tit, but also totally in love with this stupid thing. I only type on it when I take a break from Fallout 4. Oh, and I got all 40 of those vintage typewriters into the shop for service last week. I'll be getting 12 of them back eventually, over the next three months or so. Then I will distribute them to their new owners. The rest he is keeping in partial trade for parts, refurbishment, nostalgia, etc. I love this keyboard. Did I mention that? But it is weird to have a truly vintage typewriter keyboard feel ... with command, function, arrow, and volume keys. Takes a little getting used to. Hi hubski. Be well.
You could use that with Hanx Writer on an iPad and it'd be like the most expensive, Byzantine way to duplicate a thing you can get at Goodwill for $20. Full disclosure: Hanx Writer is the most useless app I've ever paid for.