On Manual Effort
I’ve recently started hand washing my clothes, as is the fashion nowadays. Actually, I’ve just lost access to my washing machine and I’m too lazy to bring my clothes to a laundromat. Anyway, washing clothes by hand is a massive pain in the ass. I remember reading about how one of the only jobs Chinese laborers could get in America during the gold rush was doing laundry. I didn’t really Read More
How to Accomplish Long Term Goals
Long term goals tend to be hard to accomplish for people – they usually require investment over a significant amount of time, which is why they’re not short term goals. Long term goals are usually pretty easy to derail, as well, because things that come up in the short and medium term might be higher priority at that moment. Imagine setting a goal of saving up 50,000 dollars for your Read More
On Life Goals
When I think about what I want to have accomplished before dying, I find it hard to come up with ideas. What do I want to have done in my life? It’s to hard to find a purpose, so instead, I’ve removed the ambiguity and came up with some more concrete goals to hit. This is basically a bucket list, but not in the traditional sense – I feel bucket Read More
On Communication
I had something interesting happen while I was shopping for peanut butter today. (Edit for the sake of recall: this post was originally drafted on the 27th.) I was shopping for peanut butter and this older guy came up to me. He grabbed one of the nearby jars of peanut butter and started motioning towards it. I thought he wanted some help from me, so I looked up to see Read More
On NPR
I heard this story on NPR recently, about a woman who found herself in a case of mistaken identity. Here’s a link to the story. To sum, someone else in the same town had the same name as her, and she would often get the other Katie’s emails or membership benefits to grocery stores and so forth. This is like the epitome of an NPR story. Katie talks through the Read More
On Enjoyment
One thing I try to work on is focusing on the moment. There’s a lot of focus nowadays on being mindfulness and being in the moment. One aspect that I work on is savoring my food. When I eat, I try to pay attention to what I’m eating. What this means in practice is using all of my senses to enjoy the food – the taste, obviously, the aroma, the Read More
On Pipelines
One idea I had for keeping up daily blog posts was to build up a pipeline of shovel-ready topics in case I didn’t have any topics to write about that day. Right now, I have 10 unpublished drafts that could be picked up and expounded upon. In theory, this sounds great – in reality, I haven’t picked up those drafts since originally starting them. My current workflow is to start Read More
On Incremental Deliverables
I mentioned this early on in starting this blog, but I thought that one of the things that would keep me blogging was the satisfaction of small victories. Each blog post I finished would be a complete deliverable, giving me regularly scheduled wins. That would build internal motivation to continue, because I’d get get inherent satisfaction from writing more and more blog posts. While I do think this satisfaction has Read More
On the Burden of Caretakers
I’m watching this movie called Heart of the Dragon. Jackie Chan plays a Hong Kong cop who’s also the sole caretaker of mentally disabled brother. It’s a pretty weird movie, but I thought it was interesting how much the movie focused on the how difficult it is to care for someone who’s unable to be responsible for their own well being. It affects your relationships, your career, and your own Read More
On Growing and Changing Perspectives
One thing I think about is how your perspective changes at different points in your life. It’s not just the case that you have a different perspective, but as you age, the amount of life experiences that you’ve had only increases. I’d imagine your parents divorcing when you’re thirteen is probably devastating, but if the same happened at forty, you’d probably cope much better. Having a major life event at Read More