Pandemic Diary #80 – it’s spring, time to … ??

ive def gotten more work done on the right things since last posting, but i’m not sure it counts as hustling, and it def hasn’t made me feel any better. maybe i’ve spent so much time in my room hustling that i need to go out and water and sun myself or something

today is the day

to get ten minutes of exercise

mentally i’ve kind of moved on from russia-ukraine compared to reading the bbc each day. weird to think about.

npr shortwave is nice

bbc more or less is great, they went into why the nytimes headline about russia urkaine 1/4 wheat or something doesn’t actually mean a shortfall of 25%

i guess i need something i can measure progress in vs research which i am just so depressed to think about it feels like i’ll never get anywhere with that and i’ll just be poor forever and fail out

i’ve totally given up on yoga even ! it was way easier to commit to and i actually went when it was cold out a few times, i’m not sure what’s wrong with my brain

ok, fix my bike, bike to costco, buy cheesecake (it’s that state again where i’m scared that whatever i do might make things worse)

i should go into the lab more. maybe on days i have no internship meetings (wed and fri?). and try to do at least 10 hrs/week of contract work. having more fun budget might help. or take up climbing?? puzzles????

doing codewars with friends — i defended it as, you’re really just executing algorithms when playing boardgames too. but i’ve actually grown to really like it. maybe it’s the people i play with. though, i’ve yet to push my boundaries and learn the algorithm-y stuff i should.

maybe i need to be able to binge things when learning, so that’s what’s holding me back from edx…

after vaccines, i’ve become so much less judgemental about other people’s choices. it was an interesting tension in the past. thinking that travelling for leisure was a questionable decision to make societally. or eating indoors. but nowadays these choices feel much more like personal comfort decisions than community pandemic decisions, somehow. i judged myself really harshly for going to malta.

yea, the b-level malta conference, my lack of brand name internship, my lack of like anything, with regard to being 5 years in. it’s probably the main issue here. so i need to… yea… get work done ! stop worrying about normal daily mood fluctuations and introspecting so hard. go volunteer or something meaningful with my time. raise a cat or something, though having a litter box in the same 7×10 ft room … I’m not sure how that’ll work… maybe something smaller than the litter robot in the living room?

there’s always this wiggling around where i think there’s some secret sauce people have that i’m missing. but for all i know there are habits of mine people are thinking, if only they could contort their working rhythms into something similar, they could do better

hm

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/world-war-ii-empire-colonialism/629371/ was an interesting history perspective. “a new book argues that the conflict was a battle for empire” is the byline. the idea the framing of democracy-totaliarinism is this western narrative that turns wwii into “good winning” rather than a self-interested fight for colonies. and the idea of the US thinking of “the goodness of war” which i can see the logic of – the US as the world’s policeman. that our intense defense spending is a good thing that keeps the world order intact. (if we model nations as self-interested, it makes sense that nations who aren’t on top in this order would want to change it)

and learned about france. straight up did not know that there was a european union country in south america – french guiana ! that uses the euro and everything. i thought i knew about empire, but i clearly do not https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXP8F4TIZ0U