New York New York

I've written tens of thousands of words on New York city. Here's the gist of them all: NYC has always felt, and will always feel, foreign to me. DMV has become home, Boston is home, home is home, I'd be down accepting cities in down south as home. NYC is weird tho. It's not home. Even when I'm there not to party, even when I'm just chilling and just staring at the ducks in the park it doesn't feel comforting. It's too -- foreign (?), European, strange, anything but home.

Note to self: never date anyone there. Everr.

Traitor!

They're saying the revolution cannot success without each revolutionary coming out as a class traitor. The revolution will fail.

Loser

Have I said this here already? I'm the sort of loser who's going to end up dating and ending up with his sister's friend if he makes no change to the current life trajectory. The more you know, right? It's not bad, or shitty or whatever, it's just a standard I would have hoped to have easily exceeded. Etcetera etcetera. How the fuck has one Allagash beer, the first one in many weeks, gotten me so introspective anyway? Right, sbk and SuBas are talking about friends getting married, and I'm talking to Kr in West Coast, old married to her hub. Whatever.

Fermentin' and a-porkin'

Been brewing Kombucha for the last four months, and successfully tested the good stuff with a bunch of guests last weekend... They loved it! Doubling capacity soon, and will try to make into 'gifting homebrewed Kombucha' category. Exciting times, exciting times!

In related note, ready with the ingredients to brew chhyang, just waiting for the right moment (and unfortunately, container). It's gonna be in-cre-dible! Next after that, BEER! Wooo!

Also cooked some really good pork over the weekend. It's true, as J the coworker at my new company said, it's pretty difficult to screw up pork belly. Still, it was a style of cooking I don't usually cook in (with soy vinegar, soy sauce, brown sugar etcetera, yanno the deal), so that's marked as a resounding success now.

For more daring experimentation, reading up on academic research on fermenting milk with kombucha innoculate. Not entire sure how that's gonna work, but lets keep our fingers crossed!

Comfort

I was (and am) obsessed with The Office. I've watched every episode at least fifteen times, and I listen it to sleep. Figured it was too much of the show.

So now, I don't watch it at home, but listen to it on my commute to and from work. Get solid three to four episodes out of the way, so that way I'm getting my daily dose of the office without wasting my time. Lifehacks, man, lifehacks.

July Updates

I bike to work in the city now! Solid 45 mins of city biking, but it's not awful, and much faster than taking bus+train.

For the last two weeks, I've been regularly-ish going to the gym!

I've not been writing or reading as much as I planned to, but that's because I'm lazy...

More updates to come etcetera

Novella writing idea I'll throw out there

Writing is an exercise for the mind as running is for the body. Writing everyday on a consistent basis means you improve your writing, and overcome 'writers block'. More importantly, it means that even if you are writing 500 words a day, you end up with 2 Harry potter novels worth of words in a year! Even if 80% of that is unusable, you can still make a solid collection by compiling and combining the rest.

I've been thinking about writing for an hour/hour and a half ever day, to reach 1000-1200 words every day. A 'project' would last for two weeks, and within that time, I'd write within the same theme. My dream idea is to complete a 'novella'/story 10-15k words long every two weeks. To make the stories more interesting, I'd take whatever was in the Nepali paper the day before, and incorporate that into the story. Here's an example: The Story of How Comrade Chairman Won: A Tale of Jumping Mon(k)eys. You know, turn the guff-gaff that happens in Nepali chiya-pasals into stories.

Fingers crossed!

The difficulty in being good

Dharma is suksma Gurcharan Das says, subtle. Even the most pious men and women who have devoted their lives to being good, kind and fair often fail. Not because it's impossible to meet those ideals, but because it's hard work to identify in any given situation what goodness is. There's great subtlety in the right course of actions one must take, even after ignoring the utilitarian concerns. Krishna would not have been a utilitarian, he would be more aligned with Kant's Categorical Imperative -- his definition of karma is a lot more complex and subtle (and perhaps more well-considered? We HAVE had ~1900 more centuries with that) than Kant's Imperatives.

Being good is hard work -- it requires constant self-examination and understanding of the subtleties of circumstances one finds themselves in. It's not to imply that being good is not worth it, but that goodness is EVEN more underappreciated quality in an individual than most people who appreciate it consider. Good people are not good because it's easy, they are good despite it being hard.

What is all this AWOL about

I'm lazy. I have a job now(!) which doesn't give me a lot of slack time like 'back in the day.

I'm reading cool books at this precise moment.

Gurcharan Das's The Difficulty in Being Good: The subtle art of Dharma is a damn good book for anyone looking for recommendation.

Angela Duckworth's Grit is pretty good too, but it's more of a psych-research, pop-psy than an in-depth philosophical exploration.

Good things have been happening, okay things have been happening. I'm taking someone to the court because reasons. Someone will interrupt and say 'oh but small claims court', and then someone else will say 'ohh and its because random roommate rent-nonpayment' but yanno, batatas potatoes.

Yet another post I'll regret later

Dear girl, I've said it sober and I've said it drunk. Need I say more? I mean it. Lots of love, babe. -R

Apparently

So I posted like six blog posts the last six months believing they went to this blog. Apparently I have a different blog where they went to. Bleh, whatevs.

Making money

If you want to make money in Nepal in the next twenty years, invest in religion. Trust me.
See: Turkey.

Beep bop beep I'm still around

And actively thinking of content and stick etcetera we you can imagine from an inspired mind.

New book idea

Title would be: The Histrionic Hijinks of Hiranya Kashyap. Inspired by the turbulent term of tike Tyler, without the 'spoiler'. 8 months of high school, 2 chapters for a month, and four extra chapters would be 20 chapters, each about 2.5k words ish each. First chapter would be a strange sexual encounter.

Back in DC

Back in DC for what is probably the fifth time this year. I've most definitely spent more time this year crashing at friends' than at my own place. Does that say anything about me and/or my friends? Who knows? Who even cares anymore.