Month: March 2023

Awake since 3 am. I guess I should concede to reality: my body has no interest in sleep. Like Marcus Aurelius, I want to stay in bed because it’s warm and feels nice, but I will heed his admonishment. It’s time to get out from under the snuggly warm blankets and do what humans must do.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”

Meditations, 5.1.

It’s dark. Raining.

I don’t want to read. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to lie in the dark quietly. I don’t want to get up and make a cup of coffee and just sit. I don’t want to eat, even though I’m a bit hungry. I don’t want to listen to music or podcasts. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to do. I don’t want to be in action, be poised for action, or be at rest.

All states of being are unsatisfactory, except being under the warm blankets in bed, in the dark, awake. And that is unsatisfactory, too.

Oh well. Let’s get up and make a cup of coffee. Something will happen. The dog will think it’s breakfast time for her. She will want to go outside, stick her nose out into the rain, and nope her way back inside.

Postscript. Awake for 90 min, to 4:30 am Decided to get up, and was about 6 steps toward the kitchen when I thought “oh, I could sleep” and went back to bed. Slept until 6:30 am. Good.

Good morning. Up before dawn. It was a dark and stormy night and it’s a dark and stormy predawn morning. Well, gentle rain. I wouldn’t call this a storm.

Who am I and what is my right place?

Right place? More and more it seems to mean me just sitting and injecting an extraordinary amount of time to finding clarity.

Prune away noise, find a path.

Interestingly I have made repeated forays into the thicket of semi-organized files on my laptop. It’s too easy to save, too easy to tell myself “I will organize it later.” Now I am cleaning, deleting, organizing, de-duping.

It may have something to do with the Last Standing challenge, now at 80 days and 7/159 participation. I’m still standing.

Slower. Clearer. Confidenter. (Sic). More willing to visibly judgmental.

Not afraid that I will be harmed if I discard something. A wrong path clearly defined and confidently pursued is not wrong. It is a method for eliciting useful information.

Not afraid of discarding physical items. Keepsakes, even.

Awake before dawn, even though I would have liked to have more rest. All the way awake.

Feed the dog, make a cup of coffee. Sit, a bit disoriented, dreading the day ahead. It’s because of work: too much of it, and I’m fairly sure it’s not in my Right Place. Some of the upcoming day, sure—it’s Right Place activity. But not most.

The first stand-alone product has become clear to me. It is the same knowledge product idea as everything else, but this is scaled appropriately and small dimensioned so I can make it.

I must build it.

The market is small, but . . . proof of concept. And personal satisfaction. It would make me happy to say “done” to this, as small and obscure as it is.

The product is a subset of the big product that I am making. That’s a good sign: don’t want the big thing because you don’t need the big thing? Just buy the part you want.

I know I threatened to go private in order to get honest. I haven’t done so yet.

That event is important to note: either my initial hypothesis is wrong (honestly requires privacy) or I’m not willing to be honest (yet).

Or some third thing, because artificial binary choices are misleading. (Obvious example: there hasn’t been a topic that I felt the need to lock up as a private post, so the “yet” word is operative).

I like plaintext tools and Markdown because it’s fast and relatively distraction-free. I don’t like it because as of yet I have not found useful tools to integrate illustrations into what I write. Or, at least, I haven’t learned how to use the many plaintext tools I have tried, and the several that I continue to rotate through.

I want to write fast. I want to write chunks and assemble the chunks easily. I want to be able to publish the chunks molecularly as I build the organism.

The urge to publish molecules and a desire to escape bloated WordPress (I was once reasonably familiar with WordPress including diving into PHP when necessary—no more) led to a leisurely exploration of static website generators, text editors, git, and many other exciting (!) tools. It lead to note-taking apps like Roam and Obsidian. All of this took me away from what I want to do: get stuff out of my brain and out on the web.

It’s back to Word on OneDrive. Let someone else get it from Word to HTML and onto a web host. Word let’s me outline easily. (Yes I tried innumerable outlining tools). Word lets me embed images easily: drag and drop.

The lesson is: so only what only you can do. I am good at diving deep—getting all the way wet—in a subject area, and I know viscerally when I have reached the bottom of the ocean for that topic. Research materials on one side and an open document on the other.

I am good at simplifying complexity into diagrams. Omnigraffle pretty, Visio ugly. This is truth, so don’t fight me on it.

My computer is slowly getting lighter and easier to carry around as I delete one application after another. Wally in Dilbert told me that deleting a file from the hard drive would make my computer lighter. It must be true.

But clutter is disappearing too. One book I am writing had a shitshow of disorganized files. Sweeping everything to one place, making that place OneDrive, and then methodically cleaning up the file tree made the project coherent again—and something I want to work on. The mess, and the pieces of the project in disparate places, repelled me.

Memo to self:

• Only do what only you can do.
• Solve the rest of the problems with money.

Irony. This website works for precisely the reasons I describe above. One tool: the WordPress app on my phone. The backend is WordPress but I don’t care and I put up with it.

Just like Word. One tool, good enough, tolerate the fact that it’s somewhat shit, and get on with it.

I will solve the conversion of Word to HTML with money. I will let technology come to me with well-considered alternatives and switch when it’s irresistible.

(The desire to leave Mailchimp is irresistible. I just don’t know where I’m going yet. Substack or Beehiiv probably, because of reduced friction).

No. It is not possible to convey more emotion than Maria Callas does in this performance. Even if you do not understand the words you can feel the despair. I weep every time I hear it, sometimes more than others.

Go listen to any other performance—there are plenty on YouTube. They are flat compared to Maria Callas in this performance.

“Look at me I am talented” or “I’m just doing my job here” or “I am an artist.” Fleming. Tebaldi. Any other big name. Technically competent, sure. Impressive? There are many. Evocative and laying her soul bare? Emphatically, no.

I was introduced to La Wally by the movie, Diva. This performance by Maria Callas brought me to deeply appreciate opera, rather than dismiss it as a frivolous curiosity or movie plot feature.

From there, I went to marinating myself in Wagner overtures and preludes. Hours and hours on endless repeat.

I can’t say I love opera. I don’t listen to much, and I am selective in what I choose. The predominant theme of tragedy (as in La Wally, as an example) is not something I choose to absorb, and you are what you think. Listening to Ebben? Ne andrò lontana makes me weep. Every time. Strong medicine.

But OMG. As the pinnacle of cultural achievement? Opera is Exhibit A.

The only other individual piece of music that compares is Misere by Allegri. I recall a flight to the East Coast with Misere (performed by the Sistine Chapel Choir) on repeat. At about 1:10 there begins a Moment, and I would shed a tear every time it rolled around again.

Sacred choral music (and especially Misere) is beautiful and uplifting. If I choose to hypnotize myself with music, that’s what I look for. Otherwise, silence.

OK, I’m a pagan. At the moment it’s Rachmaninov’s piano pieces that are on endless repeat. So sue me.

It feels good to get too much sleep (of course there is no such thing). This morning I woke fully rested, unable to roll over and go back to sleep. I’m going to do it again tonight.

I went with too little sleep for so long. Part of that was situational: the pressure of kids, work, etc. Partly it was because night (after everyone went to bed) was the only time I would get down time, alone time. I think I need more quiet time than the average person.

Part of it was productivity bravado and the prevailing attitude of hustle and don’t waste time with useless activities like sleep.

Cut out the bullshit and live well. If you’re tired at 8 pm go to bed at 8 pm. If the circumstances are configured to make sleep possible, allow sleep to occur.

Now I wake up early and get some quiet time before Teh Wife wakes up. Feed the dog, have some coffee. Write this. Then she wakes up and joins me. We talk about whatever. It’s a good rhythm.

Three 5k runs. The first was run 2 miles, walk the rest. The second and third were runs. 12:35 and 12:02 average speed.

Ok to start.

Next week: add 10% to the distance and start extending one day to be the long run. Let’s say 5.5k twice and 6k for the long run. I don’t want to ramp up too fast.

Also.

Run it out. Or as the podcast said, get all the way wet.

This is good.

Today we trudge slowly. Show up for early morning appointments. I don’t know what else. Go run.

What else? Not much. I worked late and hard last night and this morning I’m paying for it. This is a lesson to be learned. Slow and steady wins the race, not spikes of effort.

Like everything, you must pay. If you want more now, you borrow from the future. But sooner or later you must repay the debt. Stay up too late yesterday? Pay the price today with sluggish body and brain.

Today is payback day. Today is “live within your means” day.

Applied to running: yet another 5k today. Banking 5k runs, slow and steady, means next week I bank 5.5k runs. And the week after that another 10% increase in distance. All of a sudden after a very long period of time, hey presto, I’m running 15 miles. That’s the plan.

I ran my usual route last night after work. It’s 5k. I set a target speed of 12:30 and hit it (12:35). I started off too fast and slowed it down repeatedly until I hit the target. Also, and this is why I slowed it down, I ran the whole distance instead of walking some.

Why slow like that? Because I want to hit the 1/2 marathon distance and be conversational while I’m doing it.

Observations:

1. I could have run it out on Sunday. My brain told me to walk on Sunday and I did. There is a message in that: physical capacity was greater than willpower.
2. No music, no podcasts. I can take boredom and quiet. Boredom is a compliment, not a curse.
3. If I increase my distance modestly—very modestly—every week I will be able to do a half-marathon with ease. The power of starting early, setting modest goals, and sticking with it.
4. I don’t have to be training gonzo style. Rest days are part of the plan. I am a gonzo type of person. It’s not necessary to be a gonzo type of person. I can drop this unhealthy cope.