the cherry blossom festival. i was expecting something low key but instead half the damn city showed up. i guess people here will look for any excuse to sit around drinking in a park so it wasn't just the "usual crowd" i expected. weather was erratic and it was impossible to find anyone i knew among the hordes so i bailed pretty quick after walking about and taking in the vibes.
an ominous herd of people in suits passed in front of me. badges hanging from lanyards, clearly at a conference discussing some Very Serious business like finance or politics. they even had a photographer taking pictures for the inevitable press releases describing the immense success of the event. then, as they passed, a group of students drinking at a bar startled them with a bugle. it won't be in the press releases, but i will preserve the students' heroism.
the vietnamese roommate who i barely know had some sort of modest party. i can't remember if i have any actual basis for thinking he's vietnamese. anyways it was a first as the apartment is so small and shitty that only someone desperate or crazy would hold any sort of gathering there. there was a distinct stench of weed in the hallway and karaoke singing in vietnamese (?) so late that i also got to hear the doorbell for the first time, as a neighbor complained.
stopped by the modern art museum. kind of annoyed with this trend of statements from the artist attached to every work, or if that's not an option, a light novel-style title for the piece. it seems to me like they're being used to prop up/justify mediocre work, and i noticed a lot of the most interesting pieces did without them. or maybe interpretive laziness on the part of the patrons is to blame as well. no time to think or consider, have a glance, read the blurb next to it, move on.
catastrophic coffee loss incident today. it was bound to happen eventually. bright sun, sudden wind, cup so hot that i was trying to avoid holding it, it was over before i knew it. luckily no one was around in the street when it happened, but then i had to carry the dirty cup to the nearest garbage can, hoping no one happened to look too closely at it. then again, why should i care so much? i have heard that there are some hip people who drink coffee made from monkey poop. or was it lemurs?
a triumphant day in the struggle against machines. they are finally going to replace the janky coffee machine at the cafeteria that is always breaking. also, waiting at night for the train, someone noticed that the front glass of the overpriced vending machine standing guard on the platform had been pushed in a little, so a friend with small hands managed to liberate a packet of peanuts. victory has never tasted so salty.
i fear my laptop is not long for the world now. there are all sorts of ominous signs: overheating during even modest use that causes the fan to work overtime, mysterious freezes, a general lethargy. i will be quite sad to see it go as it was definitely the best laptop i ever had, but it had a great run of probably a decade or so (bought it already quite used so can't be sure). unfortunately, as a meme japanese business laptop it will be difficult to replace with a similar model, which is what i'd like to do.
one week since i kicked this off, still going strong. weirdly the weeks lately seem somehow simultaneously long and short. they feel like they go by fast, but then when i think back on or am reminded of things that happened only one week ago, they feel very distant, like they were two weeks or even a month ago. i guess maybe i've just settled into the routine, the cycle, no major events, in stasis until the big change occurs, which i already know is imminent as summer approaches.
in terms of weather (and thus spiritually), the first day of summer. went for an excessively long walk through the park/nature reserve/arboretum/whatever to celebrate. the forest and wetlands felt vast and remote, and yet from the viewpoints you could almost always see the triplet skyscrapers standing steadfast in the distance, reminding me of that manhattan wheat field an artist planted in the eighties. i sighted the skyscrapers like a constellation and used them to navigate.
at last, i have acquired a large amount of alcohol at a not-so-large price. this has been the only thing holding me back from unlocking my true writing potential. i have a theory that alcohol is the most literary drug, besides maybe opium. famous writers were either sober, drunks, or drunks who did other drugs on the side. people always bring up kerouac as a counterexample because he wrote a lot about smoking weed and how great it is, but he also drank so heavily that it killed him.
the weather has turned gloomy once again, so i've had to shelve any plans for going out for the foreseeable future (until next week). instead i stayed inside and got to work on some of that aforementioned alcohol. it was a bit of a weird vibe as i basically never drink alone. really feels like i've fallen off of... something... at the very least i got a good amount of writing done as a result, although i've avoided taking a second look at it so far for fear that it's just barely-coherent ramblings.
some sort of miscelleneous holiday today, in the middle of the week of course. but the dilemma i faced was how do you take a break from pretty much already being on break? work super hard instead? on what, if you don't have anything to work on? so it mostly just turned into an exceptionally idle day, of the sort that almost makes you wish you did have something to work on... the alcohol supply continues to shrink...
the rain remains unquenchable. meanwhile i have slowly been getting back on track, although it feels a bit futile as i can already see the next derailment coming up, and it's gonna be a big one. the rail appears to be leading off a cliff. but maybe it would be better to think about it as just a change of tracks. or maybe, out of sight at the bottom of the cliff, is something good. that's the problem with cliffs... you don't know what's at the bottom until it's already too late.
thinking about the contrast between some places during the week and during the weekend, going to the campus library on the weekend. there's a lot fewer people but it feels like there's just enough around to make it feel very chill rather than eerily abandoned, when compared to the activity on the weekdays. although the weekend skeleton crew of patrons seem to do the same sort of stuff, it seems more relaxed. the typing sounds slower, the conversations drawn-out, the stapling quieter and less frequent...
frustrated, the bad weather continues today and i just looked at the forecast for the week ahead and it seems like there's no end to it. i have a lot of downtime and would love to do some stuff outside while i have a chance, but at this rate time is going to run out and i'll be busy again. i guess i could always go out in the rain... but i'm tired of it from the last several months, plus i have completely neglected to get any raingear, opting to wait instead for the carefree sunny days that may never come...
a single day of good weather breaks up the recent streak of bad weather, which is due to resume tomorrow according to the forecasts. i feel like i'm becoming a boring boomer talking about the damn weather all the time, but it really has been disrupting my mood and my plans lately. i felt like i was being mocked by the solitary day of good weather in the middle of such a stretch, so to spite it, i refused to acknowledge it and continued my usual indoor activities, which was going well until it all fell apart in the evening...
yup, back to bad weather. decided to go to a buffet today which is always a gamble as the odds of having it go well versus having it be a disaster are basically even. tentatively filing this one under the "minor disaster" category as at one point i felt i was on the cusp of some sort of panic attack or anxiety attack or psychotic break. i don't know what it was, too little sleep, too much coffee, some sort of allergic reaction, the book i was reading... i somehow managed to calm down, eat a bowl of ice cream, and leave safely.
suddenly back to good weather, i guess it's just alternating now. really wish it was alternating the opposite way though because as it is right now, the days when i have time to go outside all fall on the bad weather days. in any case, i think i've officially made it out of the weird slump i was in for a week or so, possibly caused by the alcohol. it sounds bad but i really didn't even drink that much, like maybe 3 beers per night for 4 non-consecutive nights. i guess it must have been a "straw that breaks the camel's back" situation.
and now THE worst weather of the past two months or so, borderline hurricane conditions at some points. naturally this is also the day that due to some unspecified fault, the trains all stop running for ~30 min right after i get to the platform and just barely miss the last one. the wind was such that the roof over the platform offered little refuge from the rain, and after twenty minutes i gave up and took a bus. the rain abated for a while afterwards, but of course picked up again right when it was time for me to return.
washed a mega-load of clothes only to find out that the drying machine thing was busted once again. my only dry outfit had been absolutely soaked in sweat the day before so i ended up having to wear slightly damp clothes. it was unexpectedly fitting as when i went outside in the morning, everything was still a bit wet, the remains of the storm from the night before. oh, and then in the evening i very nearly got trapped in a miniscule bathroom while drunk because it had an extremely busted lock...
tanks and military vehicles roll down the streets in a line, the rhythmic sounds of heavily-armed soldiers marching down them in turn... superficially there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between an invasion and a holiday military parade through the city center. in a way it is a sort of officially-sanctioned, transient occupation. but the only fighting is behind the barricades on the sidelines, between spectators jockeying for better viewing positions. a wonderful family event, judging from the crowd composition. live music from the military band, even.
coming close to the end of an era for me... maybe... reflecting on change yet again. i would have changed more, i should have changed more, i keep telling myself, but i was being held back by environmental constraints. however, when i think about it, in fact much of what i saw or see as environmental constraints were just the result of constraints within myself. now once again i am in stasis, waiting for the next change in environment, but if i don't make an effort myself, once again it will only lead to stagnation...
as i was taking an extended stroll along the waterline, a squad of youths accosted me and said they were doing some sort of survey. my mind immediately jumped to "cult recruitment" as it tends to, so with some caution, i let them continue on to their questions. they asked only one, "what's your impression of us, do you think we look cool". i said they looked like youths and that i "guess" they were cool. i didn't have the heart to tell them that there's nothing less cool than seeking approval.
been having an annoying amount of trouble sleeping lately. could be the midnight(ish) summer sun, or maybe it's time to get a real bed. i was especially concerned today as i had a coffee really late in the evening, but somehow it had the opposite effect somehow and i was collapsing asleep only an hour later. unfortunately it was still too early to actually go to sleep so i ended up just taking a brief nap, from which i awoke quite groggy. naturally when i tried to go to sleep for real a few hours later, i was wide awake in bed for an hour...
lots of stuff has been going the past few days but i feel like this isn't *that* sort of journal. it's more of a vibes and musings journal than a record of what occurred, like i used to do. it's a lot easier to just write down daily events and your reactions, but when looking back on my own and snooping on other people's, i always find that they're pretty boring to read, like they're missing some sort of spice. a part of the space constraints i've created for myself here are aimed at finding the juiciest morsel of the day, and seasoning it just right.
once again i find myself helplessly trying to fight off the "grass is always greener" effect. whenever i've settled into a routine, i inevitably end up dreaming about breaking free of it somehow, but when i finally do break free of it, before long i'm wanting to establish a new routine. dilemmas like this are probably the reason nobody is ever fully satisfied, although maybe there's a paradoxical way to thread the needle: establish a routine of breaking routines. i've always believed that contradictions hold great power...
i've noticed that the more that happens in a day, the harder it is to make one of these entries. it was easy to choose just one strong image when basically nothing happened all day so anything unusual popped out, but now it's like i'm trying to figure out which mountain peak is the tallest in a range just by walking through over them in sequence. i also fear that the resulting writer's block is leading to too many entries that are just about writing entries, an ouroboros, a closed loop...
went out to a little decaying bunker, on a small island of wild vegetation in a field. the bunkers i've visited so far have always seemed strangely tragic, as they always seem to be in some state of disrepair from abandonment. most of them were not even used once, waiting for a threat that would never come. i guess that means everyone stayed out of danger so overall it's a good thing, but i still feel that odd melancholy visiting abandoned bunkers who never got a heroic moment, bearing no marks from bombs or shells...
my laptop seems to be deteriorating even more. just browsing websites is getting slow, and when i type sometimes there's some lag before the characters appear on the screen. the fan seems to always be running at maximum speed, pushing hot air into my general vicinity like a tiny space heater. maybe it is just the high temperatures outside lately causing everything. either way it feels too hot around my laptop and the small screen is starting to feel claustrophobic. it is a Hostile Work Environment and i cannot write like this.
went on a guided tour of some historic building. it seems to be a big tourist trend of the past thirty years, as historic buildings pass out of usage and are "preserved" for the "public". i wonder what the future of tours and tourism looks like. looking around, are there any buildings that we've built lately that seem worthy of the honor of being preserved and toured? i'm leaning towards no, but did those living and working in historic buildings decades and centuries ago think that their buildings would one day be the sites of secular pilgrimage?
walked by a strange, lightly damaged arch wall thing. it looked like it was there very deliberately, maybe as some sort of memorial or art piece. the damage to it looked like it may have come from bombs, bullets, or shells, so i joked to my friends "ah, a memorial to the great war". one of them looked at it deeply and remarked that they were almost positive it hadn't been there the last time they had come by, a couple years ago. curiosity sparked, we investigated the area for any plaques or other clues, but none were to be found.
oh man, that was quite a gap. but i suppose the suboptimalist's patron diety is the god of the gaps (and shortcomings). in any case, things will now be getting Back On Track in a big way. i often feel like i'm in stasis or even moving back during a vacation or break, but looking at it on a larger timescale, i often feel close to burnout before one and afterwards i'm suddenly very motivated again. so in the big picture, i am in fact moving forward thanks to vacations, even though it may not seem like it in the moment.
for some reason i feel like a lot of my best quips come when i'm tired. it might just be my fatigued mind imagining it, but i swear today and on other notable occasions where i've had to hang out with people while super tired but "second winding" hard and not falling asleep, i've gone on some real hot streaks and gotten good laughs from people (in addition to tons from myself). it's almost like a strange form of intoxication, i recall a fun fact from driving school that driving fatigued can be more dangerous than driving drunk.
saw the ol' google street view car today. sometimes i can hardly remember what i ate for dinner the day before but i remember exactly where i was last time i saw the google street view car. i guess that's because it's a minor Happening. out of curiosity i went on street view to check the location where i last saw the car and didn't see myself there at all in any of the captures. did google just never upload it or is my memory wrong... not remembering something is one thing, but the possibility of false memories have always unsettled me more...
been trying to do a lot of writing lately, it's going ok but i keep getting distracted by reading stuff online. there is this guy, tim rogers, who is mostly well-known online for making outrageously long and intricate video game reviews. many don't know this, but he also writes occasionally, and i sincerely believe he may be one of the best current writers. i'm not sure how to feel about the fact that instead he is putting all his effort towards video game review videos. i scrolled through his twitter to see if he ever released the novel he mentioned he was writing, but the only writing-related tweet was him dunking on people who use lots of commas. as a chronic comma abuser, i feel called out.
the car radio hasn't worked for a couple years now, some sort of anti-theft protection that activated when the car's battery ran dry once. you have to enter some sort of inscrutable six digit code to reactivate the radio. i haven't really been concerned about it (been trying to avoid too much stimulation at once) but many of the people who've ridden in the passenger seat have taken a crack at it, trying to find methods via google. today upon mention of the radio, a friend who had previously failed opened up the glove compartment, pulled out some little booklet, opened it to a certain page, and keyed in the correct code first try. sometimes everything just falls into place...
walking through the forest at the edge of the neighborhood, the trail intersects with the end of a long, thin clearing. up a slight incline, an overgrown path leads to its peak at the opposite end, where there is a single rusting bench among the grasses. it seems like it might have grown there, but at the same time the positioning is so perfect that it has to have been placed there deliberately. the ideal place to watch the butterflies and listen to the birds. i notice that the butterflies visit even the most wretched flower at the end of a blackberry vine.
hate to be back on the weather beat again but sometimes you just can't help it. i'm not a morning person (or maybe just not a waking-up person?) however due to circumstances i've been waking up early and have had the rare opportunity to experience the morning vibes. for some reason, without fail this past week it has always been extremely overcast in the morning, entire sky filled with clouds. feels like a whole different season. then, i stop paying attention, look out the window again a few hours later, and the clouds have always yielded to blue sky and sun, summer once again. i guess summer doesn't really like the mornings either.
slightly concerned i may be drinking too much coffee. i was always very careful about caffeine as my dad always said that if you abuse it too much, it won't work when you really need it to. however, for some reason coffee has been conspiring to appear in my path everywhere lately (restaurants, the fridge) and out of nowhere i'm drinking way more than i used to. it's only 2-3 cups a day, but it was enough to give me a headache (i think) the day i drank only one cup. at least i've heard it takes only 1-2 weeks of abstinence to reset tolerance, which hopefully i can pull off when the current stock of coffee runs out...
still finding myself getting anxious about not being "productive" enough or whatever. i'm doing a lot better than i was, a lot better than most people i'm sure, but it still doesn't feel like enough. i am comforted, at least, by reading about various accomplished writers who for the most part say they can't do more than 2-3 hours of focused work a day and agonize over it, doing stuff like revising single sentences over and over. meanwhile, how are the optimalist writers on the grindset like danielle steel doing? literally working herself to the bone, churning out formulaic romance novels with no literary value but plenty of profit. instead of readers, writers, and critics, who's singing her praises? business insider and quartz, of course.
my brother and his chaotic energy have returned to the house after only a week of peace and quiet. he was always a bit wild but lately it's evolved (devolved?) into legitimate psychosis. the eternal debate is whether it was something that was inevitable due to genetics, or if he melted his brain by living like a shut-in for months, spending the majority of the day on his phone browsing the internet and vaping gallons of weed juice. i also swear he was never the same after going to columbia with some people from twitter and getting up to all sorts of debauchery, a panoply of pills and powders and prostitutes. he boasted to me that they bestowed upon him the nickname "loco"...
went on a hike with an old friend for the first time in quite a while. he wants to start writing as well, apparently. all the cool kids are doing it these days. he plans on writing by hand with pen, though, and encouraged me to do the same. i was somewhat convinced, although i think i have to do things my own way and bust out the old electronic typewriter. it's somewhat similar because it ran out of correction tape a while ago, so you're forced to take things slower as what you write is immutable. i think it could also be helpful to get away from the computer, as the internet can be so very distracting...
time for spring summer cleaning. however it's annoyingly hot so it will be a digital cleaning, much needed as i'm a bit of a tab hoarder. i have no idea why i have such an aversion to bookmarking things that i let the tabs pile up until the top of the browser window literally cannot display any more. same thing happens on my phone, except there's a limit of 99 tabs. upon evaluation, about 80% of the tabs are an insta-close, and i guess they must have just gotten buried and forgotten when i opened new tabs for other reasons. there are a lot fewer forgotten treasures than i hoped, turns out i mostly remembered the most important things without needing a tab reminder...
phenomenally lazy during the day lately, however i realize now that this is only natural due to the heat. in spain where the weather is quite warm, there is the famous mid-day "siesta" for example. people are only expected to work through hot days now thanks to air conditioning, a liberator but perhaps also a tyrant. lee kuan yew claimed that it was air conditioning that made development possible in the tropics, increasing working efficiency. anyways, though i'm pretty sure i'm supposed to have air conditioning, it's either not functioning or being cancelled out by my computer pushing copious amounts of heat into the room, so i've accidentally rediscovered the summer experience of yore...
i have horrific, near-terminal lurkeritis. you feel very lonely and directionless on the internet as a sufferer because your fellow victims never talk about it, for obvious reasons. it makes sense to lurk on a lot of the big websites and i don't have any issue doing that, but what i have an issue with is this bizarre compulsion i have to read every message sent in these niche local discord servers while rarely contributing anything myself because frankly i don't really like most of the people in them and the topics rarely interest me. lurking in this way practically leads to parasocial relationships due to the communication asymmetry, which just makes things awkward when i do choose to interact. i really just need to cut myself loose, but since it's tied tangentially to real life it binds tighter than just any online "community"...
it's been a while since i really did some writing. it should have all been perfect: crack open a cold canned coffee, sit down at the typewriter in the atelier (dining room), and crank something out. the atmosphere was immmediately off, however, because as usual my brother commandeered the area to store a bunch of crap he ordered online to sell, this time a bunch of slightly stained graphic tees from the noughties with lame jokes popular back then (along the lines of "if you're bothering to read this shirt, you're stupid") that were appropriately on their way to becoming rags before an enterprising swindler at the raggery rescued them and sold them to my brother. surrounded by their musty aura, i nevertheless managed to write nearly a paragraph before running out of typewriter ribbon and being forced to call it quits.
went to a doctor for a single shot for something, not covid although they were really trying to sell me on a booster. also vitamin d supplements, even though it's summer and i go outside plenty. anyways, it's another place where you can see the attempts to quantify people or the mysterious condition of "health", taking down anything they could measure easily: height, weight, blood pressure, and whatever the plastic thing they clipped on the end of one of my fingers was measuring. lots of ritual just so they could jab me with a completely unrelated needle. they also tried to get me to fill out approximately three forms of medical history and demographic information, but i only got around to filling out my name before they finished up and told me i could leave, so i left it all there blank and dashed out before they could potentially catch me. this is known as "praxis".
disappeared into the mountains for a few days for a woefully underequipped semi-backpacking trip with an experienced friend who extended me an impromptu invite. there are a lot of potential reasons to be anxious as an unprepared novice camping out in federally-recognized wilderness, accidents and sickness and dangerous wild animals for example, however i was oddly at ease with it all except for one thing: hygiene. you never realize how deep the urge to keep things clean is implanted until you go somewhere where it is almost impossible. i stressed and fussed constantly about the gear i brought coming in contact with dirty surfaces, which by definition is pretty much every surface out there. the only option is to let go of those impractical ideals and embrace the dirt, like the stinky long-distance hikers that pass by on the trail...
as a notable eccentric and bohemian, it can be easy to get out of touch with the common man. fortunately, i somehow ended up taking a pseudo-vacation in a distant texan suburb, less than 24 hours after leaving the remote mountain wilderness. i could describe it but i'm not sure i would really be offering up any novel views or insights to what's already been written, in the same way that all the houses in a suburban development are nearly all identical. the one thing i will say is that while i know or feel that i am supposed to dislike it, i can't quite bring myself to do so completely. if cars ran on farts and people weren't convinced they had to fill every corner of their huge houses with stuff they never use or don't need, it really wouldn't be so terrible...
the locale has now changed to a "resort". the building is a huge, vaguely hexagonal ring of hotel rooms around a central atrium that's completely sealed off by a sprawling glass roof. this setup has led to me realizing the following: texas is mars. the central atrium is basically a biodome, with plants, paths, bodies of water, even a few modest buildings. the whole thing is air conditioned so it's always a pleasant 70ish degrees "outside" in the atrium garden. what about the real outside? well over a hundred degrees, the type of heat so intense it becomes physical, smothering, suffocating. no one is seen outside, shuttled between air conditioned buildings in air conditioned pods (cars). now it's obvious why elon musk moved to texas, it's mars on earth.
at airport security, the tsa guy patted me down and easily exposed my completely-intentional scheme to smuggle a hotel key card through the body scanner in my pocket. as i explained what happened to my friend waiting on the other side, the tsa guy drifts over and starts boasting about how the scanner can pick up even miniscule quantities of drugs. i don't know why he did this, maybe we looked like the types. then, he looked thoughtful for a second, and then lays this down: "yeah one time a lady tried to sneak a vibrator through the scanner in her pussy, but we caught her!". i could only respond to this absurd conversational turn with a somewhat-dazed "wow". he then concluded his strange spontaneous scanner sales pitch by informing us that the machine costs $160k per unit.
dropped by the big public library downtown for the first time in maybe a decade or more. i went there a lot in elementary school, but since then it's mostly been a succession of school libraries for me. what stood out to me the most in the library was the book return, a solemn solitary slot in the wall at the base of the library's central spiral staircase. lit by the skylight above, the empty circular area at the base of the staircase leading up to the book return slot felt like some kind of altar, or the site of some ritual performed before the ceremonial sacrificial offering to the ever-ravenous Slot, immediately conveyoring anything placed within to the mysterious realm beyond the wall. i took a picture and even now its aura still enthralls me.
once again, i showed up phenomenally unprepared for some outdoor activity and everything somehow managed to work itself out all right, as usual. some improvisation is required, there's a bit of anxiety and maybe discomfort, but it all ends up feeling like more of an adventure. the tendency these days, though, seems to be towards overpreparedness, carting around a bunch of stuff so that you're prepared for every eventuality. i see people going for brief day hikes barely out past the edge of town, shouldering huge backpacks like they're headed to the frontier. i used to do something similar with my school backpack, until one day i went through it and realized that i basically never use 80% of the "absolutely essential" stuff i was taking everywhere with me. however, when you take something out, cosmic law dictates that you'll immediately end up in a situation where you need exactly that thing...
this morning i was looking out at my brother's starlink satellite dish in the backyard, a lone white buoy anchored in the otherwise-empty sea of grass. during brief glimpses into his room, i've seen some antennas and other miscellaneous receiving equipment as well. i suppose it's only natural for crazy people to be drawn to radio waves, a whole invisible plane of hidden messages overlaid on the world. this is in contrast to the internet, which is not a plane on top of the world, but more of a parallel universe or pocket dimension which people access through various portals, phones and computers and such. radio is of this world, the internet is not. analog to digital, continuous to discrete, AM/FM radio waves directly encode the aural message, retrievable with the correct modulation, however the wifi radio wave is just ones and zeroes, ons and offs, ups and downs, the packet's nested layers of digital packaging and abstraction rendering it incomprehensible.
bountiful harvest in the thought-fields today. caffeine is a potent fertilizer, if the dosage and time of the day is just right. part of it could also be that i haven't written much in a while and have stored up all the unwritten words from those days, which will now come pouring out until i deplete the store and go back to the regularly scheduled daily word allotment. similarly, the once-formidable coffee stockpile is running quite low now, originally what i intended by not replenishing it but now i'm starting to question the wisdom of it. two cups a day really isn't all that bad. i am reminded of famous mathematician and eccentric paul erdős, who took and won a bet for $500 that he couldn't quit amphetamines for a month, but bitterly complained that as a result, mathematics had been set back a month.
i think i'm going to discontinue this page, effective immediately. certainly a good time to quit, on the last day of the month. basically, i feel like i've been waffling here between a journal and random short musings that happen to occupy me on whatever day i'm writing, and i'm not really satisfied with the result. i think i would rather commit to my Ambitious Intellectual Project (by this i mean the musings), since there's really no need for yet another random online journal. a journal could be helpful personally, but if i post entries online i have to make them so vague that it loses a lot of value, so there's that too. i also feel that the formatting on this page is making entries annoying to read as they gradually creep up in length. i think i'm just going to create a new page for dailyish musings, less length-restricted as going into excessive detail is unlikely with them, and if i can't come up with a topic for a day i can just pluck one from the new thought orphanage.
i've tried maybe five or six times over the years to keep a journal. none of them have lasted for much more than a week, mainly because of how outrageously long-winded i would get while writing entries. i was always a bit of a aesthete and usually tried to do it on paper, but writing by hand was woefully slow and combined with the level of detail i went for, i would end up getting behind in no time, writing entries for yesterday, then the day before, then three days ago, and so on... finally switching to typing for my latest attempt seemed to help at first, but then i just ended up using all the time i saved to write even more, and it wasn't long before i was behind again. a little progress was made by the switch, however, as i managed to continue for longer than ever before, 10 days, somehow clocking nearly 10,000 words even though it was a relatively uneventful periodalso, funnily enough, the brief final entry starts off by discussing how i'd finally managed to get the journal caught up again.
in any case, i think the time is nigh to try yet again, but this time with some constraints to keep it short. namely, the entry for each day will have to fit into the small space it gets on this page. i will have to limit myself to just one brief thought, observation, image, or event per day. this will help me keep the timetable, but also, looking back at the old journal entries, there were a lot of excessive, superfluous details. i believe that there is probably at least one thing worth remembering each day, but the way i was writing, it was completely drowned out by mundanities. it may not have even made it to the page because i was so focused on writing down every boring detail like i was reconstructing a crime. part of the benefit from journaling is also supposed to be the daily reflection you do, and if i have to go through and carefully select just one aspect to put down, if anything it should be more effective this way.