Disappointing dinner on a cold and dreary day [Thu 29]

savory fruity spicy oats, walk to work and back, little writing, persepolis grill disapponting dinner with PS

Writing this very late in the evening (3.30AM!) the next day because reasons.

For lunch I had oats with cinnamon, sugar, banana, and apples, plus almond milk, all piping hot. The day was cold and dreary and I napped a bunch of it, went to the office in the afternoon, napped a bunch more, procrastinated on the writing and eventually it was time to go to Persepolis eatery at UW.

It was so crazy cold in the evening even waiting for the car when PS came was freezing crazy. We went to persepolis, I ordered an item under the assumption my server was of Persian origin but turns out she was Nepali and my order was terrible. Their baklava was pretty shit too I don't know how you can mess that up, and hummus was nothing home to write about either. Ugh, what a total disappointment. I just talked a lot, mostly about how hard I was at work with my freaking website, without touching it even a little bit for the fourth day in a row.

Got home, did a little bit of the chores and went to sleep, didn't write much at all. Cold dreary weather when I'm unprepared for it can clearly adversely affect my mode and writing, there's no denying that now.

What do you think is happening?

When you tell me
that you love
talking to me,
considering all has happened
and the general vibe of
how shall we put it
tension (?)
that exists all over,
and the potential in
what might,
because you have thought about it,
and so have I,
it is well-advised to
redirect the compliment away
for we don't want
to get into will-they
or won't-they
and the same old pattern
of mutual disappointment
and regret,
but oh well,
there is mutual interest all around,
we just need to make sure
it's there for all the right reasons
and not you know,
for things some of us want
more than others,
that the rest among us
would prefer very much
to not be aligned in that direction,
maybe you will change
or perhaps I will,
one of us must
surely or else,
it will end in dust,
once
again.
Won't be a surprise,
to be sure,
to anybody.
And so we must ask
to ourselves,
and to one another,
what is it exactly
that you want,
and can this work?

Unexpectedly early sleep [Wed 28]

rainy lazy day, rice lunch, most checklist items done, light reading and writing, rest for 20 minutes turns into 10 hour sleep, shockingly early sleep

It rained all freaking day long.

Had rice from TJ's with beans, eggs and achar with kefir for lunch. Was really good with ticking off checklist items, solid work done.

Went on a walk to Volunteer park in the rain. Got hella wet but it was worth it. Did some light reading and writing in the evening. Was going to get back into writing more and fell a bit tired all of a sudden. It wasn't dinner time yet so I rested for 20 minutes for a power nap before completing the rest of the writing goals.

Got up 10 hours later next morning, one of the soundest sleeps I've ever had, unintentional one.

Frequently asked questions about the whole Pine Forest situation, yes we are aware

Is it true that Lord Shiva, lord of time and death, was attracted to the lady form of Lord Vishnu?

What exactly was going on with the wives of sages, did they really lose all their inhibitions and clothes and jewellery? Were they out of control so easily?

What about the sages, how could they, so full of tapas, fall so easily into the trap of maya, how did they not see the depth within?

Did the women and the gods actually...hmmm do the deed, or is this all metaphorical?

Wait, is this actually old age-y way to describe wild events of sexual nature involving multiple parties?

How is it that the sages thought they could use their weapons on Shiva when quite clearly they were aware of who he was?

The great snake Ananta, what part of this entire event was he interested in that he wanted Shiva to repeat it all again just for his sake?

Is this the real origin of the Natraj form, and are the story associated with it authentic?

How come did the gods' wives didn't have issue with such activities undertaken by them? Were they unaware of what had happened, or was it 'anything goes as long as you're not in your regular form'? Would the gods have been just as okay of the devis had executed a similar event?

Why has nobody written stories about the children that might have been sired as a result of this event? Wouldn't it be quite amazing?

What remains and what's done: how's the website coming along?

Project Phoenix is over. Hurray!

The website is not, there still needs to be not insignificant work put in so it's acceptable to put it out in public. It's okay, I'm nearing the finishing line, a weekend plus a half-week of motivated effort should help me push through. Exciting! I'll be so happy to just stop talking about the project over and over again! It's done, time to forget it!

So what's left? Well I'm quite close to completing what I have planned for the first phase. About 8 hours of writing, in topics I'm comfortable on, 2 hours on harder topics, and maybe 5 hours ish on the tech work? I will basically copy the existing template from one of the flying ones, eventually coming to an end goal. Slow and easy. What will take so much time is posting the individual posts in the website, some significant editing and formatting will have to be done. A little worried that might take forever, but that's a problem for another time. Eventually things will be on my website, that's important to understand!

The second and third phases will be ongoing, 'work in progress' that I'll pick up during weekends and possibly in April once March Madness is over. I don't want to get back to it immediately, writing fiction to get away from dreariness of the technical writing is the plan. Some plans are more aggressive than others, but I'm going to get there easily, none of it is horribly hard.

Why does this matter? Why am I hurting myself, making life miserable focusing on this simple thing? Because I wish the website to reflect my internal image of self, my goals aspirations and understand of what work, life and the world should be like. It's my social media, my linkedin, and my resume. A brilliant opportunity to be seen by the world. A chance to shape my own narrative.

Will have to maintain the website regularly, adding new content every couple of pages too, so that will have to be budgeted and planned out, but for the moment the relief of getting it out of way is exciting.

More on being more organized at work

I have written quite a lot in recent days on how to get my shit more organized at work. It's important because I'm looking to more 'growth' there, and it just doesn't happen out of nowhere, that requires motivation combined with planned course of action, held together my systems to establish self-accountability.

The four questions I have been trying to answer are: how do I write more consistently at work, how do I choose the topic(s) of my writings to optimize for my fun and also career progress, how do I get reminded of my quarterly goals every day and work towards fulfilling them, and how do I get my minor achievements recorded so I can present them as evidence of my achievement at quarter-end.

My writing habit has been tight for the last...how many years has it been...five actually, yikes...five years, thanks to this blog. That's not enough for professional growth though. There was once a time when I was writing religiously, early 2019 it must have been, but it got left by the byside, because hmm why was it again? Well to much disruption and no clear expectations like I had for my personal life. Nothing to keep me accountable, easy to sneak off. So now I need to replicate my personal learning in the professional domain. Need to keep myself accountable, identify how well I'm doing, understand how close I'm to completing each goal and check them off, using dashboards if I must.

To summarize: now I'm hoping to leverage the good habits and discipline learned during writing in this blog to create similar habits for writing, as well as personal productivity management at work. My hypothesis is the replication needs to fundamentally have me spend a cleanly separated time to do just those tasks, like how my writing is mostly undisturbed.

Workouts picking up

Updates from my workout regimen that started about a week (or two, was it?) ago!

I started with 5 repetitions and am all the way to 20 for sit-up, pushup, and squats. The next goal is to gradually increase the number of sets to 2, and eventually 3, doubling the reps for each set, so it'd be 120 repetitions total. It's not a crazy hard goal, but I haven't been doing it for too long so I'm taking it easy. Rushing into making one's workout routines intense only makes one sore in a bad way and get away from working out.

It doesn't feel like my workouts are getting the work done because I don't ache anywhere (yet), but with the hurt knee, it's okay for the rest of my muscles not damaged for the moment. Once the pace picks up, the strength will develop, the body will be more ready for sore muscles.

Also continuing with the app workouts, after meeting with the PT earlier this week, the exercises there have been getting more intense. I've been feeling stronger and actually feeling the effect on my knees and calves, something that wasn't happening last week. The goal for this week is to go up from 3 times a week to 4-5 times, and then 5-6 days a week eventually. Need to build strength gradually here, no rush.

Things on the up and up!

Recovery day, trader joe's biryani dinner and walk [Tue 27]

Writing this two days after because I was burnt out in between and then slept at 8pm yesterday!

This day involved lots of rest, naps and recovering from my website burnout. Also read quite a bunch at home. Had rice for lunch.Went out to work to Volunteer park, 3 rounds there, then to Trader Joe's where I bought couple of packets of their frozen Biryani and also eggplant. Didn't feel like cooking at all and was sick of everything that had been eaten. Thank god for TJ's food, it's affordable and yummier than restaurant food. Had rice with eggplant (both bought at TJ's)

What I need to remind myself is, days like these are slower, but other people have nearly as much free time as I do and get lot less done, so it's okay to take a day or two off. Need to learn to be flexible and kind to myself when not much is happening and productivity and 'getting shit done' expectations aren't met. It's alright. We'll get caught up!

The novel writing plans ahead

March madness is coming up ahead. Serious plans are being made, considerations on writing novel are becoming serious and not just random thinking. There's a way to get it done that I can see too, divide a novel into short sections that I can write in one sitting, plan the heck out of every scene, and just write those sections.

This is not idle planning, high-level wishful thinking. I have the blueprints. Just need to plan out the details for each project.

Here's what I'm thinking. The novel will have 30 chapters, each chapter 2 scenes. Each scene is to be divided into 3 parts, each part comprising of 2 structural elements (in general, this is not a hard-and-fast rule). The 6 structural elements of a scene are: 1) exposition, 2) inciting incident, 3) turning point progressive complication, 4) crisis, 5) climax, and 6) resolution. The idea is that during initial planning I will know what each chapter will do, the beginning and end of every scene. I will know what the scene will begin at, where it will be located, the characters, and where it should end up at. Then, in every writing session I look up a scene, figure out what structural elements I need to write for it, and start writing.

The confusion lies on whether I want to be planning at a 'third' level or a scene level, because if I plan at a scene level but write at a third level, there's going to be a mismatch: scenes MUST be coherent and will read strange if different elements of it are not connected to each other because I wrote them at very different times. But this is overthinking the details. Lets plan out the chapters first, the outline should help me decide what the atomic element of my writing is.

Where I will start on then: I will need to plan out the characters, their motivations, the plot and various scenes to get started. I will fill in the scene details later, and then eventually shape and mold the exact direction. After all the scenes have been written I can always go back to make everything more coherent, add voice to the characters, improve the quality of writing and inject 'underlying themes' and as such. The goal is to produce a novel, a lightly-connected passages of 1500-1800 words each that number 60, over the course of a month or so.

The interesting thing is, it might actually be easier to write this novel than the phoenix project since at least nobody can 'look up' the data, I can just lie through my teeth and it only has to be internally consistent. Which is not even important as I'm going to be the only reader. This will be the first, crappy draft, no pressure. Just get the words out already!

More planning, more writing, more organizing and more ambition: the goals ahead for 2024

This will be an intense one, in a good way, so brace yourselves!

Working for my website, realizing all the cool stuff I've done in the past and writing about it has made me realize something: for the last ten years I have been far too unambitious, too shy, too afraid of failure, and all because I had a single point of weakness. And the weakness wasn't very relevant in the big picture but I let it define my life. That was: a failure to succeed in tech interviews, a lack of ability to excel in leetcode-style conversations. It's not a measure of man, it's not even a good measure of an able engineer. It measure the ability to stay focused for one very specific subset of skills needed for a career, in many ways quite irrelevant to the job at hand. If a six-month lesson (at most) can mean the difference of 3x in salaries, and that lesson being irrelevant to one's everyday job function, it's quite clear we're getting back to the Chinese system of imperial exams. I didn't want to work at the Imperial Court. It was a mistake, should have sucked it up and risen up along the rank of courtiers. Oh well, the studying process made me miserable and I didn't do group studies.

Thanks to working on the website, I've learnt to affirm myself and appreciate what I have to offer. I've learnt the power of planning, to think ahead before executing, and how to go about actually 'doing things' and not just plan endlessly. I hope to use this clean and methodological technique at work as well: collect information, write everything down, motivate myself, and be aggressively ambitious career-wise. I need to use writing and evangelizing to get myself a promotion, that's the goal: a rise in the ranks in the next 9 months or so. I will make lists for everyday at work (just like for my personal life), get them down, check them, spend an hour writing for various causes, spend an hour doing things that will get me a promotion, and spend the rest of the time in 'core work' -- my everyday tasks. That's 10 hours weekly to do something work-related but not team-related. Shouldn't be awful.

I like my current work situation, the goal is to get better at it and get paid more for it. It's within my reach, what remains is to actually act on desires, to execute the plans.

Shaping my future at work using LLM's to shape my destiny

New year, new goal-setting at work, new measurables etcetera. They're being extra annoying at work, specially the less-experienced managers among us, and so it's important to make sure one is fully committed to deal with the incoming conversations and how to deal with them.

I fed the text of expectations they gave me to LLM so it could come up with an exact set of actionable goals, that folks from up in the hierarchy couldn't put in precisely. It was pretty decent. I need to put in a couple of days of work into it take it to create weekly, monthly and quarterly plans, plans that can be divided into 30 - 60 minute chunks, easy to execute and get credit for.

It's not using them for my personal planing either, my plan ahead is to evangelize for LLM adoption inside my team and the whole organization, to shape our architecture, use prompting practices for all business owners and employees. The goal is to leverage it into a promotion because it's time I took control of my own destiny and shaped the direction of my career.

But first, the website, to establish my vision of self, my career, and where I want to go ahead in life.

State of progress of Project Phoenix, a one-month retrospective

The way forward: complete the last essay post or two, a few 'steal this idea' and 'hobby posts', and start posting online. The posting itself will take several days as final editing needed, but this is not the end of anything, this is the beginning of the start of the website project, need to be posting one in there every two weeks. Coming up with ideas, dumping it, assisted by gemini and other tools.

February is done at this point and the website won't be. It's okay. The timeline was quite aggressive, but even without that the last couple of engineering posts were really really challenging and sapped out all the energy and motivation for me. It was an unreasonable goal, unnecessarily demanding but that's what got me this far. I got really really close, and that is worth big celebrations. It's fine. Getting things done first, then improving on them, then doing them right. Or mess around the last two steps, the first needs to be done definitely.

What I should have done / something to consider while I plan in the future: divide an aggressive plan into phases. If the easy phase is done before the expected end date, jump into the following one, but don't go in the 'swallow all in one go' route. In general the only way I can be driven is through an aggressive timeline, but keeping the hardest for the last was not a great idea because it was what broke me. But putting it in the start wouldn't have been great either because I wouldn't start at all. Something to ponder, maybe not doing shit I didn't enjoy at all is the way to go?

Many things were learned:

1. I can actually take a 'side project' every month, a commitment of an hour-ish and get it completed. Can spend up to 60 hours a month easily, without significantly impacting my life. This fking project must have taken twice that time at this point.

2. Planning is an important part of any long-term endeavor, specially artistic or technical ones. Plan out your writings, plan out the project. Have an ambitious timeline but don't hold yourself to it unreasonably. Ask yourself how you're feeling about the timelines, and be flexible if it's bothering you too much.

3. AI is an important part of any workflow going forward, no doubt.

4. It's important to control the narrative about you, not just the website but in general. Be your own storyteller, at work and as an artist.

5. Productivity begets productivity. Start small if you must, if it's the size of the project that is turning one off starting something great. Wait until you pick up the pace before you decide to go 'all-in'.

6. Consistency is the key. Writing 30 posts in 30 days is infinitely harder than doing the same over say, a year or two.

7. Have a good idea of who your target audience is, and always go for the, so to speak, jugular. Their interests must directly align to what you have to offer, otherwise it's just a long song-and-dance.

The miserable cooking in Seattle winter

Sometimes when you think the winter is over,
Thank god and it's time to reduce your clothing wear,

and you can now get away from the outdoors fear,
you check the temps, and you oventure your way out,
and discover it's all been a lie, and the weather
has turned, the spring is no more near
it can be hard for a person of single existence
to cook again for more than base sustenance,
and so in recent days, all I have been making
is food enough and sufficient to keep me sustaining
to power the basic survival systems, get the hearts running,
and not much else, because the cold takes away
all the drive and motive and energy
to innovate and learn and tech, and laziness holds sway
And one begins to think,
at least in the past when I made sandwiches
and things as such,
they might not always have been healthy, yes
but at least there was diversity in color and texture
and one could experiment around with the options,
but now I pay much less,
and the choices of options is even low so,
it's two 'base carbs' and some proteins from whatever source,
there is nutrition that's hard to deny,
but there's not much joy,
in the buildings that stand start,
from everything else,
happening at the park....

Thank god for Trader Joe's frozen Indian food

The other day I had no energy or desire to cook, and didn't feel like eating out: 15 bucks to pay for the shittiest yuckiest food in wretched physical spaces that would barely feel me up and make me feel bad about myself was not one's idea of a great eating out experience. In the past I'd have snacked around to fill myself up, but this was not one of those occasions: it's time to get serious about cardiac health and such snacks are never quite filling and satisfying. So what is one to do under such circumstances?

Trader Joe's! Frozen food! Biryani, the vegetarian version more specifically, yum yum yum. I bought two of them at TJ's, along with a can of eggplants, and had rice, kimchi, veggies, eggs, kefir, beans and the eggplants and it was like quite filling at tasty? It was one of the better meals I've had in recent times, and that includes eating out. It was cheaper than eating out by a magnitude, and just as tasty as most indian restaurants.

That's my comfort food at this point. It's comforting, it reminds me of eating TJ's food with friends and family, and is the happy place that reminds me good food can be had for cheap, and inspires me to cook more. Thank god!

Born to lead, or to laze around and not do anything?

I've been thinking about this, and I'm quite good at holding people responsible and accountable, to give them solid advice, to change the direction of projects and to envision larger strategies and goals that people themselves may not see. I can also force myself to look at the context around people's circumstances, and see what the ideal way for them would be dependent on their needs, and tell them what to do. And then hold them accountable to their commitments. I can mentor people, quite enjoy doing that, I can advise, I can create visions, I can hold folks accountable, and oh dear I can most certainly plan. I have inspired, I can show the path forward to people, and I can guide people to the path of their choice. In other words, is it possible that I, the shy noob who hides even among the small team meetings of shy engineers, was born to lead, as a mentor, a manager, and an explorer? Is it possible that my interest in telling people to sometimes hedge their bets, to improve their skillsets, to go explore a certain direction, is all motivated by this innate skill and drive to be leading? Am I a born leader, formed to take charge of projects, teams and squads and take them to success and victory? Or are these lamentations of a lazy person who hasn't been able to achieve much else and uses the excuse of wanting to lead as a way to divert self-attention from more important factors one should be focusing on?

Hungama back to back watching, art class and rest from burnout [Mon 26]

 two movies, no walk, mostly rest, art class, late to sleep, recovery from the burnout

I write this two days later because I was a little burnt out by all the Phoenix work I was doing, specially since it was getting so tedious and miserable and I wasn't having fun doing it at all. Regardless this is an experienced life.

Went to the art class, got back and had food by 4-ish, then should have gone out on a walk or written something but I really really didn't want to do either. I wanted to rest and relax, just make people talk, maybe that's the computer system being generated, or a tool to evaluate the functionality of the russians. Man, what a strange world that would be if it was all that, a big fucking ruse.

Regardless, in the evening I watched two hungama-related back to back. The first was Hungama the hindi movie 2003, and the next was the malyalam movie it was a line-by-line remake of. It was actually funner than the newer movie.

Was so late to sleep and rest because I was too much progress to perform and do interesting things that there's much to contribute in the field. It's quickly changing so I wouldn't yet put you out there.

I now know how to do SAVERS affirmations and visualization!

We've talked about the 'savers' technique to make one's mornings full of drive and energy a few times before in these pages. The idea is to read, write, exercise, meditate, remind yourself affirmations, and visualize your way to success the first thing you do after waking up and that keeps you pumped up with energy for days and days.

Well I haven't exactly been doing that but I've been trying to half-ass it as closely as I can. I workout after work. I write during work. I read in the mornings and the evenings. I meditate during my walks or whenever I'm free, and I've been reminding my affirmations and visualizations on time...in the afternoon but hey at least it's being done. It'll happen in the mornings when I completely internalize that it's the only way to have it succeed  completely. Visualizations are hard because it's easy to get carried away into fantasyland and be distracted, but I've been training myself with short sessions and targeted goals, so that's improving too.

Eventually I'll do it all between me opening up the laptop and getting to my first meeting, but for right now savers is all over the place. The important thing is I'm at least doing it. You know how they say: first do it, then do it right, finally do it better! I'm doing the first part and figuring out how the second part would happen before eventually adding o the art process. I'll be so pumped and motivated when that happens!

Stuck in the bad vicious cycle of lack of productivity, drive and sleep, and trying to claw my way back

The last two days I was pretty unproductive from a personal perspective, by which I mean that the Phoenix project didn't make any progress despite it coming to a deadline real quick. There was burnout from too much writing stuff I was not having fun writing. A little too miserable. A break had to be taken,  no other way around recovering my mental energy. I slept and read a lot so it wasn't completely unproductive, but the fact that my project didn't finish was a bit of a hit.

Then this unproductivity made me not want to sleep since I was too conscious of not having anything to show (or posting on this blog until 1am) which meant my sleep was short and of poor quality, which meant I got up tired, and that made my energy levels quite low. I was 'off' for the entire day, being unmotivated and groggy and that in turn reduced my productivity severely. And that's how the vicious cycle continued.

It's worked like that in the past but I figured out how to break through it super quick. By half-assing things in my checklist, the ritualistic things, doing them for doing's sake so eventually my mind can ground itself in the habits and learn to be comfortable sleeping early and going back to what I was doing or enjoying doing. So by today I'm more or less back in the game. Does mean I'm writing ten posts today but it's no big deal, a few posts here, a few posts for the blog and I'm ready as an eagle!

Art progress

I'm getting better at sketching, maybe? Just a little bit. Definitely not significantly so, but I can understand the feedback my art teacher gives me, and apply it to my work, and converse with her when she gives more feedback. I understand, more often than not, what's missing in my pieces, and after a good feedback can implement it though it's hard for me to understand how to make a piece better right after looking at it. Earlier today, a classmate told me: wow that's pretty good it actually looks like the cloth you were working on, which maybe could be a backhanded compliment but I took it earnestly and was quite excited. I have learned to do quick sketches, understood that smaller 'outline' sketches are better because they can be done quicker and easier to get the proportions right when drawing the real sketch. If I keep doing this for at least a couple of more quarters -- and I did register for the next one already -- I'm going to be getting better, that is certain. One can always learn, always get better.

What I need to do in art and in life is to decompose the world into simpler shapes and colors, to the basic blocks that build it, to blur out the unnecessary details that distract from the beauty that lies within and focus on what's important. As goes art, so does life.

Just need to keep practicing it consistently, over and over again, every day for some amount of time. Because that's how artists are made.

I feel a little burnt out due to project phoenix

I'm not enjoying this, not at all. I didn't go on a walk today, couldn't, because it was cold but mostly writing one of the LLM posts has sucked out my creative energy from me. I didn't write much anywhere actually I write this almost five minutes to midnight, my meeting at work six hours from now because it took me so long to recover. I'm doing probably what's going have ended up being the most painful part of Project phoenix: writing on topics I'm not an expert on, don't know much about and honestly don't care much about writing but must do because my website needs to look at least a little bit technical. If that were it, and I were doing it at a reasonable pace the situation would already be unsustainable but no I'm expecting myself to produce five or six posts per day or in two days under those situations. It's an insane pace, the time pressure, the topics, they ain't right.

This is unsustainable, it's not fun and I'm forcing myself into a difficult corner for no clear benefit, no transparent reason. This is masochism for masochism's sake, almost. Things need to be changed, we need to come up with better techniques to deal with these matters.

Writing, ricing and walking [Sun 25]

 bhat tarkari lunch, bhat chickpeas eggs kimchi oats soy sprouts dinner, much writing and planning done, volunteer park walk, doesn't show on map because internet off

Had bhat and tarkari for lunch, wrote a lot through the course of the day, cleaned the apartment talked to sister, talked to my mentee for almost two hours, wrote a bunch, went to Volunteer park for walk, didn't listen to podcasts much and definitely didn't listen to audiobooks. Preferred old episodes of Peep Show instead.

For dinner I had rice, chickpeas eggs kimchi, oats and soy sprouts. Wrote a bit more.

Oh my map recordings for this day don't exist because i'd shut down my cellphone data because of reasons (not wanting to use my connection while at home due to crappy connection), so it shows I stayed at home all day long which is not true at all.

Some commentary on Hungama and the Malyalam movie it was remade from

, watched Hungama and the movie one after another because a little burnt out, good entertainment, I laughed I rolled my eyes, I compared and contrasted, so much more sexual energy and chemistry among characters in 1983 movie, the characters feel more real, low budget but feels closer to the message, hungama feels disjoined in time and space, desexualized and deromaticized, not a hint of human connection between characters, poor casting, actors overwhelming, underpowered female actors, lots of space to talk

Earlier this evening I was running out of steam as the excessive working on the website for the past month, specially writing on topics I don't really care about and have little expertise in is weighing me down. I didn't want to write, didn't feel like going on a walk, sleeping at 6.30 in the evening was not an option. So I watched Hungama. And then the Malyalam movie that inspired it Poochakkoru Mookkuthi, which shall hereby be known has PM.

Solid, solid entertainment, I laughed, I rolled my eyes I compared and contrasted, and I made judgments. So much to talk about. There's about a thousand times more sexual energy and chemistry between characters in the 1983 movie compared to the one released exactly 20 years later. The characters in the older movie feel more real, and yeah the low budget nature of it does hamper the creative possibilities but it feels closer to whatever point its trying to make. The modern Hungama feels dis-jointed both in time and space, the transposition of social mores of Kerala in late 70's to one of Mumbai in early 2000's doesn't feel right, neither is the city believable. The newer movie is desexualized and deromaticized, it has little human connection, the casting is just terrible, the strong actors give great performances but they overwhelm the director's choice where better decisions could have been made, the choice of female actors makes female characters much weaker in Hungama compared to PM, and the flirty casualness of the older movie is gone, replaced by timid, tight fakeness.

There is so much to talk.

Also, I believe one of the characters in PM might be the androgyne Shiva, or some symbolic representation of him but that's a story for another day.

Back to good old rice

I abandoned rice for a bit there, since coming back from the East Coast earlier this year. And now I'm eating jasmine rice on the reg once again, with beans and veggies and kimchi and eggs but rice is rice. It's probably bad for cholesterol, it's definitely bad for my tummy and my weight, but ugh, I can't. I will instead improve the rest of my diet, even take the right kind of supplements and healthfoods to reduce my cholesterol, bump up the walks and do serious workouts but I'm not going to give up on rice anymore. Without rice eating is hard, carbs are hard, days become dark and dreary and things just get muddled all over. Rice defines days and nights, it is rice that gives structure to meals, one that adds heft to food, the agent that tells my brain, that's enough for today, you've had rice twice already!

Quite clearly in my bhaatpanaa I'm a Nepali at heart. But so be it, this is how things become simpler, and life becomes easy. What am I fighting rice for? What's the cause? Why rebel against a system that hasn't hurt me (or anyone really) and is actually quite good? I ain't no rebel, and if I were there's better things to go against. I ain't no enemy of rice.

I'm back to good old rice. Annapurna save me.

If, somehow, things magically went the way of one's plans, what's next?

Counting chickens before they're hatched is never a good idea. However, creating a coop for chickens, arranging for the heating systems, and getting feed ready for your expected brood before they're actually hatched is just good planning.

Let's assume, for a moment, that things work out, alright. I'm able to get the remaining 6 posts out of the way by tomorrow or the day after, and then the 12 hours worth of other work that needs to be done, and then somehow end up posting it on my website after doing the technical work, in the upcoming weekend. I have some plans for what's next, as I've divided the website work into v1, v2 and v3, and that's all the work required just for v1. So the next stage is to work on v2 and so forth. But like it's not absolutely necessary and I can also look around to see if anything else is worth exploring. I've already mentioned 2 march madness ideas: 10-posts a day writing practice, or a march novel. Jan was for completing project 140, february was for phoenix, what's another possibility for madness now?

Some other options besides the previous 2: getting some serious work out to be published in Nepali newspapers, and become a regular contributor or a columnist, successfully after 14 years of dreams and fantasy, long after the papers have lost their luster. But that will take me what, a few hours every week. There's the podcast plan next, to plan, record, edit and publish it, and every 20 minutes of published podcast time will likely take me 3 hours in the back-end to complete. But that's still 40 hours over the course of several months at least, so it's not the worst. If the podcast ends u going somewhere, thinking of churning out a few more episodes, maybe start another podcast on Hindu mythology finally, and possibly even turn the movie podcast into a move.

The ultimate goal here, for anyone not keeping score, is to leverage all of the material into a solid online presence, a premium personal brand, of the sort of person who probably makes three times as much as my current salary. And then use that branding and personal image to negotiate for such offers in the future. But that's quite far away right now.

Significant inroads with the training syllabus

I've been working on creating a series of training sessions as a part of an eight-week workshop for new and aspiring software engineers, and the planning is coming to an end! The Fellow with the non-profit, who I've been mentoring this year reminded me that I should work on it (I've asked him to hold me accountable, and he's so good at that), so I had a basic outline created (~800 words) and made chatgpt fill in the details. Some of the details filled were not great, but I was able to take the shit it puked out and got solid planning for 8 sessions, both topic outlines and homework for each class. The goal is to post the planned work out with the rest of my essays on my engineering blog too, which will make the total number of essays 32. I'm almost ready to present it to the trainees, don't even need a powerpoint now since I've got my practice with my mentee, but maybe the workshop attendees will need it. The idea is to put this syllabus out for the non-profit first, then it goes to my website, then I share it with folks at the office, and finally the hope is I will be able to use it to train dozens of trainees at my office every year, because I feel the contents of the training are quite important.

It's unclear if my workplace is going to be receptive to the idea, but the non-profit will likely be more than accepting. Now all I need to do is to find willing candidates who can give me 2+ hours weekly for about 8 weeks contiguous. We will see....

New banh mi place and Hau Hau journey, leftover crappy momos [Sat 24]

leftover momo lunch, lots of writing and living by the checklist, Hau hau grocery trip and banh mi, so many veggies and Asian condiments again!, evening write, pre-sleep reading

Had leftover momo for lunch, it was just as bad as the night before, what a sad state. Wrote some serious posts for the phoenix project and whittled down the remaining count to six, the hard ones one would really rather not do, so it's a tricky place to be in. Lived the day according to the checklist and had a great time generally speaking, lots of family talks etcetera too.

Went to Hau Hau grocery trip in the afternoon, had banh mi before the trip, bought 30lbs of veggies and fruits for $60 which seems...decent when put that way, and now my fridge is actually packed with fresh foods, something it had been quite lacking in for a long while. The absence of tomatoes is quite acutely felt, but it's not a good idea to get off-season tomatoes to cook.

Wrote a serious amount in the evening as well, for the project and on this blog, and read a solid few pages before going to sleep.

Things as they are and other nonsense

Just keep writing until it feels boring and lame, that's what I'm telling myself, because I haven't done one of these on this blog forever despite so many of the recent posts being personal ones, journallike, I haven't been able to open really you know because structures and topics and what not, sometimes though one wonders if all this writing is doing active harm to writing habit and techniques and then it dawns upon the writer that without this creative outlet there would be very little else happening so whatever is being given to the world may be less than good, awful even but it's all for the sake of learning, getting to understand oneself and the world, speaking of which and apropos to nothing relevant really there are people who one has so much fun talking even when strictly speaking those aren't ideal conditions and it's not just because those are forbidden situations, it's just some people are compatible in certain ways and when the compatibility aligns in good ways, but also disaligns in the wrong ways it's the worst because how might one be able to work on the dynamic because it has no future and many grown-up adults have had such little life experience beyond their extremely tight social and geographical bubbles that they legitimately believe compromises aren't worth making and things will work out because they have always done so and it's quite likely they're going to be right and nobody is complaining about that here, it's just an observation that good things happen every so often and to be unproductive due to such reasons is such a joyful situation to find oneself in, and finally I wish seattle had more thunderstorms and heavier rains because sometimes I miss the sound of rain and the fake sound that plays on the device hinge health sent me doesn't quite do it as well.

More navel-gazing on how I want to write fiction, but don't know how to get started

Forgive me as a lot of these posts are on writing and surely there's nothing boring than a writer writing about writing besides a filmmaker moaning about filmmaking but stay with me, we're making progress.

Here's the dealio: I want to write fiction, have always wanted to. Stories, novels, anthologies, what have you, anything that my brain can come up with and the target readership is willing to read. But I haven't been able to. Because of the pressure, of performance, of time, of 'inspiration', and the impossibility of actually being able to commit to writing 100k words on the same damn topic over months and months. Like, how does one even go about doing that! Fiction needs to be written in chunks of connected material, you know one flowing into the next, all creating a large coherent masterpiece that's greater than the sum of its part. I have never ever written connected chunks, the furthest I've gotten is a few pieces from a couple of years ago that kind of referred to each other.

So. Here's the hypothesis. A theory. A question even. Is planning the answer to my dilemma? How would I even find out? The idea is: I plan the shit out of a planned piece of writing, a hundred thousand words divided into thirty chunks, all thirty chunks divided into parts of 600 words each, giving us a total of 180-200 parts. They're writeable, manageable in a matter of 30 minutes to an hour. And all of it carefully preplanned, thought out and organized. In the end, if one is left with a bunch of 600-word writing expectations, with each topic expanded to a couple of hundred words already, it'll be really really hard to avoid completing them. And eventually, we'll have a novel. Of sorts. It'll be bad, oh hella bad. But I'll have a novel, something worth showing to people and talking about, an interesting fact that I'm not ashamed to admit in public. Not that I'm ashamed about other achievements but this will be a specially interesting one.

Here's an idea, a proposal, an alternative to an existing proposal. What if...instead of the madness in March I proposed a couple of posts ago where I would test and try different writing structures, 10 posts a day on this work, what if I plan out and finish a novel through the course of the month instead. And since I've gotten back to writing at work, what if I finish half of it at work, and half of it during my personal time? 2k words at work, 2k words at home. That's like, an hour each of really really bad, awful writing. That gives me 30k words a week. Which means in 2-4 weeks there will be a super duper crappy novel, but a novel nonetheless, that will have come out of it. It sounds alluring, a little bit enticing. Seductive even. Definitely better than the current plan for march madness for sure. And it'll be easy because it'll all be planned out. And the fun part will be in planning! It'll be so much planning that I won't know when planning ended and writing began. But maybe the planning will kill the concept? Maybe the overhead burdens will make it non-viable?

This is such an exciting, interesting, curious topic worth exploring. The chunks don't need to be written chronologically, as long as the planning is done right. I don't need to get the nuances of individuals, and the change in personalities through the course of the book right either. That comes in post-writing. It's editor shit. My job as a writer right now will be do write a long coherent piece.

Fingers crossed. I'm legit excited. But will have to end the phoenix project asap.

Perhaps the way to regular newspaper writing lies in project phoenix and planning?

I will have written very close to 32 essays in about a month of time, and yes a lot of will have been assisted writing but I damn near wrote the word equivalent of all those essays, just didn't organize it too well. That's not even the end of it, I'll have written perhaps 25-30 'proposals' that go on for 1000-1500 words each too, which makes the writing that's been done this month...Intense. And serious. The quality of my written work hasn't gone up considerably, I'm no more of a creative and entertaining writer than I was a month ago, but it does feel like I'm significantly better at the mechanical, manual task of getting points across, getting the process of 'pen on paper' done more efficiently. Whether that is actually good for creativity, who even knows but at this point that's a bird far off, we're hoping for productivity, the good stuff will come when she wishes to.

What I have successfully done this month is made a habit out of topic-writing (coming up with ideas to write on, a hard task I've not yet mastered for this blog unfortunately), planning out a piece of writing...again something I was quite bad at forever but it turns out my skills and interests are aligning there and I've come to the realization that while planning shit out might take longer than writing the essay preemptively, it saves so much time and one can avoid 'writers block' because planning and writing are two separate modes of creation and it's much easier than to write, and to expand on planned points to an essay than write from scratch. The third thing I've learned is to 'fill things out', which is to expand upon a topic and the various ways it can be approached. Much thanks goes to Ai models for assisting with that, but I've realized that essays are rarely ever thought of and written down in a single 2-hour setting and they need to be 'chewed through' and digested in the various parts of your creative system until they are finally digested enough to uhhh poop out the words, I guess... You get the point, one must sit on one's thoughts and this month has taught me the value of doing that and the skills in achieving it.

Another point is I have realized the importance of writing seriously and for other people instead of entertaining myself or keeping my shit together. Writing can be used to communicate my ideas and influence people, and it can help me establish a 'personal brand'. My plan is to create a strong online presence on the strength of my thoughts and since I can't you know mind-communicate, words will need to be my medium.

I have wanted to write for newspapers as a regular columnist since 2010, but that has not worked out because for me inspiration came in 'fits and bursts', which meant the discipline and motive to actually be invested in the craft of writing wasn't there. I was an artist, not a craftsman, I didn't have the maturity to follow through. But now the discovery that if this painful crappy hard-assed way is the way to get one used to writing, so be it, it's less than ideal and in a dream world the ideas would come to me like magic I'd love jotting them down and we'd all by happy, but that's not how the world works. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.

So then: how does one go about writing consistently for newspapers? This is what identified: think of a topic (or five or twenty), write general summaries for all of them in one go, the gist theme and conclusion, then go back to each and keep expanding and expanding all the points, and then eventually bind the points in a light structure. Eventually the rough work for each essay will be so large, it'll be impossible to avoid writing it, as the material will be longer than the essays themselves. At this point I'd use assisted tools, or just sheer willpower to turn that content into well-organized essays, maintain a portfolio of them, and eventually send them out to the newspapers. Because, why not?

And thus begins the real journey!

Saigon Deli Banh mi review

Earlier today I went to a new Banh Minh place, the Saigon Deli on South Jackson to try their sandwiches. I know for a fact theirs are the cheapest tofu sandwiches available in town and wanted to understand what the big deal was. They're priced at 5.50 and are pretty filling. I ended up paying $7 in cash because reasons...It was the first time, so I wanted to be extra generous. The prices though, they're still from the 'golden age' of sandwich pricing, and you know what the 5.99 footlong era is over, but the affordable banh mihs can still be had yum yum. So much better than subway it's not even a loong long faraway competition.

Yes, the place lies on a slightly more sketchy intersection than the other viet banh mi place I've been going to. But it's better in other ways: it's got way more options on desserts, refrigerated cakes and other viet products, if I knew what half of them I'd be a very content fat boy. The sandwich itself was as good as any other place, couldn't find a distinctness, or any compromise for the price.

I will probably go there many more times for their sandwiches but also to buy their desserts, baked goods and other items. Their lunch deals are extraordinarily affordable too, so if I want a quick takeout without bothering with Sichuanese Cuisine, this will be my go-to place!

Fun momo party, a failure in veggie momo making [Fri 23]

too much of a friday, lowkey work, oats and veggies for lunch, relax chill and do not much at home during the day, walk to PS's for momo dinner, come back home in car for equipment, chhyang appreciated, disappointing momo, hangout for 6 hours, late into the night, coming back home winding down and reading, late to bed

All day long until 7 in the evening I didn't do much because it was a Friday and I had a plan and the week had been a bit too long, hadn't it? Work had had its ups and downs, I'd gotten used to living my checklists for almost a week at this point, things were going pretty decently generally speaking so I deserved some sort of break or another? So I told myself and did exactly nothing until the evening. No reading, writing, none of my checklist items, just work and chill. Work was lowkey too.

For lunch I had oats and veggies, and by veggies I mean chickpeas, tomatoes and shit tonnes of spices in my drawer. It was confusingly good? It was too easy to make and felt like it shouldn't but I loved it and the added eggs were a nice touch.

In the evening walked to PS's place for momo dinner, cut a bunch of stuff, was driven back in the car by S and I took my mixer and chopping board plus the knife, the board was lost to the night by the way.

Everybody enjoyed my chhyang, it was good times hanging out with the Seattle hang and impressing them with my hobby. That was the good part.

The shit part was the momo, I've written about that already, but it was as disappointing as it could get, I was actively sad since this was one of the few times I had been looking forward to a momo meal.. But the company was great and that's what mattered!

We hungout for quite some time, far beyond the midnight, friend A dropped me home, and despite being so tired I was full of energy to do a bit of my chores and read quite a few pages before falling asleep.

The eleven kinds of guys you see at Seattle clubs

1. The guys (indian mostly) who come to you to tell you to dance with all the 'white girls' because it's just a game bro and you gotta play
   
   
2. The super duper drunk guys who are just so friendly with everyone, jump around at every place, and won't stop talking to you, giddy like a child, even as you guys are pissing at the loo next to each other
   
   
3. The guys who are super aggro and push against you when dancing with their group and won't even acknowledge it
   
   
4. The guys who are super 'out there' and ready to jump at anybody's bones and just give a weird vibe, they keep not getting it even when everybody's tryina escape them.
   
   
5. Guys looking to buy large hordes of women drinks because they're really that desperate
   
   
6. Guys far far too old to be dancing with the super duper young girls they're dancing with
   
   
7. Clearly sex-pest guys
   
   
8. Possibly hyped up on drugs but maybe they're just this high energy normally like me? guys.
   
   
9. Yawn this is so boring I was in Berlin for a year and the dance clubs there were outrageous, even New York has better clubbing scene compared to Seattle, don't know why anybody would dance here kinda guys.
   
   
10. Guys who come to the floor to dance but end up just drinking and watching and barely ever break a move before calling it a night
    
    
11. Guys who have clearly not left their houses in a long while and are so glad to be around other human beings....
    

The worst momo I've ever made, or possibly had, and the mistakes that led to it

We went to PS's party yesterday, I had prepared rehydrated mushroom chunks, nutri chunks from trader joe's and the 'frozen and then thawed' blocks of tofu I was so eager to make use of. They'd make the best momo fillings, because the texture would be perfect, there was so much anticipation and excitement!

But mistake! There wasn't enough flavorful veggies and spices in the party, not enough onions cabbages and green leafy vegetables, so in the end the mixture tasted of nothing. The ingredients were all flavor soakers and not flavor havers or givers, which was my biggest mistake! It didn't taste like much before going into the momo, and the taste hadn't changed after being steamed as a dumpling. I had followed the meat recipe almost 1-to-1 instead of relying on my vegetarian recipe experience, and that led to the terrible eating experience. I didn't finish even five momos or so, didn't even bother making more dumplings from the rest of the fillings. A second batch was made, it was offered to other guests, and the rest of the momos from the first batch and the fillings were packed and brought home.

I had the rest of the momos for lunch today and they were just as bad. The next time around I need to add more flavorful veggies and spices to the mix, that should have been obvious but it took me such a terrible eating experience at a friend's place to discover it. Oh well. You live you learn.

Budding hydroponics problems

I setup the hydroponics set a couple of days ago, so that my pothos plants could root and be ready for the summer. The system is quite bright and the times for the light to get turned on are all messed up and I can't be bothered to fix it as it stands, but I've surrounded the device with foil so it doesn't scare the bejeezus out of me or irritate me when I'm in my living room. The idea is to take out the cover whenever anybody is over so it does look as wretched.

However, there are uhhh budding problems that have been noticed. Namely, some of the leaves which were previously slightly browned are growing their 'burned' areas, and even some of the fresh and bright young leaves of the plants I care the most are showing signs of light and heat burn, leading me to wonder if it's too much light for them. Because what's the point if I can't help them with the device? I don't want to manually control the timing of the lights as it's not a viable strategy that can last long, and the light is kinda' hard to turn off and just let the pump work? I will test this setup out for a week or two, and if this still leads to similar death and disease, I'll instead plant those cuttings into water bottles and put 'em against the window sill land plant tomatoes in the device instead. But still, it's unclear why they're dying and browning because shouldn't these tropical plants go absolutely gaga for light or something?

A reorganized bedroom is the way to peace and happiness

reorged my room, bed pillow against the wall on the window, much nicer empty space opened up in the middle of the room, looks so neat and tidy, after one or two days of cleaning, good enough to make it a part of 'one room apartment' as initially planned, just need to mount to more posters and my bedroom life's a rockin....

After much hemming and hawing, planning replanning, forgetting about the whole thing for months, talking to friends for ideas and restarting the whole process about three times total, my bedroom has been reorganized and it feels so good. I've turned my bed by 90 degrees so that the pillow side rests against the wall that faces the street. So now the bright streetlights come from behind my head and bother me only as they reflect against my ceiling and walls, which isn't completely awful. Oh and a real nice space opened up in the center of the room, consolidation of the tiny spaces that existed all over. It can be my yoga space, meditation space, or just nice fancy carpeted space. So many options to consider!

My room looks so neat and tidy that after one or two rounds of quick cleaning and tidying, I'm considering it ready to make it a part of 'one room apartment' theory of my place I envisioned. The idea was to open up the bedroom door always when the guests are over and treat my bedroom as an extended part of living room. I'm getting a lot more comfortable to be doing that.

The final thing that remains is to mount the 3 posters remaining in my bedroom, and it's rockin' time. They won't take too long either, just need to have the time and motivation to actually get it done, hah!

Hydroponics is finally set up! [Thu 22]

heavy writing at work, setting up hydropponics, oats and banana with kefir for lunch, last of the pancakes with bean soup and last of the saag for dinner, heavy writing after work, walk to volunteer park and back

I write this on the evening of Saturday because Fridays have somehow turned out to become my wildest days of celebration where nothing gets done, not even the things I should be doing to continue existing as a fully functional human being. It's unfortunate but...whatever...

During the day I was quite busy at work, got some good work completed and felt nice. Had oats with banana and kefir for lunch, then cleaned up my plants, watered them and then set up my hydroponics set with a bunch of pothos plants. Two days later some have started showing signs of leaf burn but if they can't handle the heat, what are they good for even?

Did some heavy writing for project Phoenix after work, three rounds at the Volunteer park while listening to podcasts and back in the evening, and had the last batch of pancakes with bean soup and the last of saag for dinner. It was a lazy day to be writing, needed so much goshdarned motivation to do it, but my checklist life was successful, got the workouts done, gone other chores cleaned up quite easily. Some progress is being made!

Project phoenix essays coming to the most challenging part

I have updates on the Project Phoenix situation. There's some news on the scope of the whole thing, and a good news bad news. I have decided that I will be okay releasing a MLP (a minimally lovable product) that perhaps doesn't need to include everything and the kitchen sink for the website to be published out for the world to see, so my final output should be about 20 hours away, barring the editing time in the final posting stage and the technical website work which I'm choosing to ignore for this round. Content first, lets get this shit out da' door, then we'll focus on making shit nice. So 20 hours seems achievable seeing as there's 5 more days of February left. Some of the posting might get shifted into March, and the first few weeks of March might be spent for version 2, but I'm okay with cutting March madness short.

Next I've got the good news. The thing that I've been the most fearful about in the project, the long technical essays are so close to be done. 25 of them are complete save for the final editing process, which means there's only 6-7 left. The bad news is they're probably going to be the hardest of the bunch and might take the longest time. But maybe not, who knows...2 p5js tutorials should be decently easy, 3 posts for LLM's will need some research to be done but are totally doable, the longest and the most time consuming will be the 1-2 posts for Golang tutorial...goal is to run Golang in the server, on android and the browser and post the tutorial of it online. Don't know why I'm putting myself through that misery seeing as I don't even use it on a daily basis, but my hypothesis is, there's got to be some thing that shows I've got core technical competency and some skill at technical writing, and this will be my chance.

Beyond that, it should be smooth sailing. I can't wait for this phase to end, so I might give myself a treat at coche valley...

An ode to the humble onion

O mighty onion,
Rotund and oh so proud
In royal purple you come to us
and give us the gift of lust
for food, and all things that smell good.
You turn the dull and boring
into a symphony of complexity,
Oh you Ganesh of the cooking world
who gets the worship of every cook
making varieties of foodstuff,
we pray thee, that you grace us with your best
and elevate whatever else we put in you at rest.

Oh onion powerful and strong
you bring even the great of warriors
into a stream of running tears
your layers deep and intriguing
like an unending book of mysteries
that one can just
keep on reading and reading and reading,
you rule the world,
the east, the west, north and south,
you got it all,
we bow to your might,
we bow to your story
we bow to all that
you have ever given to us!

Work writings, workouts, and projects coming online, only thing remaining is sketching

Perhaps it's the excitement of the approaching Spring, perhaps it's February and my brain just loves it so, or perhaps there are reasons in my life unrelated to the seasons making me do this, but my life seems to be shaping up, my shit appears to be getting together on my projects?

For the last week almost, I've gotten back to making and trying to live on daily checklists, I've gotten back to writing thousands of words on my work blog where I hadn't written in a year and loving doing it, my workouts have been as consistent than they've ever been...I mean they're still quite small and my arms and core aren't even hurting even a post intense session, but there's a start! Oh and all the fermentation projects are coming online as well, so is hydroponics, looking into getting back on mushroomery. The seasons are on the up-and-up as well!

The only thing I've desired to do but haven't actually been able to execute is sketching. Four practice sketches remain until my class on monday and I'm trying to come up with techniques to improve my flow and motivation, but also give me an intrinsic understanding of my target subjects. The latest fad is this side called line-of-action which time limits you seriously and forces you to gain a basic outline of a scene and put it down on paper, then focus on it more, and so forth, until one is quite comfortable representing one's surroundings in an agreeable manner.

The 'big ticket' goal for sketching is to use it to create illustrations for the articles on my website. Don't know how that's going to work out, but I'm optimistically positive.

Hydroponics has begun, finally!

Earlier today I finally setup my hydroponics kit, four months after buying it on Prime day from Amazon. The reason it was setup was that I wanted to make sure some of my weaker pothos plants bulked up and got ready for the summer, but they didn't look like they were ready, so wanted to provide extra nutrition and sunlight to them so it's going to be a wild and fruitful summer. It turns out setting this thing is stupidly easy. Put some water, plant food according to the instructions (and the instructions are just as simple, they even tell you to use the container lid as a measuring equipment!) connect it to the lights, and turn on. That's it! I dropped all of my new pothos cuttings into the machine because they need to be ready for a new season, but it's going to be all sorts of veggies and flowers and herbs from hereon! My tomato seeds are waiting to be germinated, just need to validate the technology on the plant cuttings.

For most of the day I put the machine on the kitchen counter where I could see it from the living room, it wasn't too bothersome but come the evening it was going to be a distraction and a cause for sore eye so I hid it on the other side of the kitchen. The problem was it was far too bright still, so I covered it with some aluminum foil, that will reflect the lost light back to the plants and also save my apartment's ambiance and my eyes.

And so after this, only one 'large' project remains that I haven't even started touching out of those I have acquired equipment and raw materials for, and that's my mushrooming project. I'd been intimidated due to the power and fertilizer requirements but they turned out to be small potatoes in the big scheme of things. If I can use the same mindset and ethics to get mushrooms working, it'll be a homerun. I mean, I must try  setting it all up, why not right, not like I will have a lot to lose anyway? All the raw ingredients will go bad if they're not used soon...

Fulfilling civic duties and Trader Joe's snack [Wed 21]

Fire at work that I cause, breakfast of pancakes, rush to the seattle public hearing, great contribution feeling productive, walk to the office and back, quick TJ's grocery trip, lots of writing,  dinner of sandwich including eggs and many spreads, sleep slightly late

Caused a pretty big fire at work the night before, and we spent the rest of the day trying to fix it, it was done at 1.30PM est so no rest or relax or unwinding for me for that entire time. And the rest of the day was spent recovering emotionally from having messed things up so bad. Had a breakfast of pancakes in the morning, didn't take photos of it for some strange reason.

A bit before work was over, put on nice clothes, quick shower and shave and rushed to the train station, to go to Seattle City council for a special meeting. I contributed there by providing feedback and felt so good, there was also a couple of school kids there though, so perhaps this should have happened much earlier. Walked to the office from there, had a tea and a coffee and unwound, and eventually walked back to my place. Wrote a little bit for the Phoenix project, and then did a quick TJ's grocery trip where I bought the Froozo snack as a pick-me.

Wrote a bunch in the evening, was so so very tired. Dinner was egg sandwich with tomatoes and lots and lots of sauces and cheese and spreads.

Sleep was a little late than usual because writing was so very procrastinated.

I guess I do care a little bit about work, huh

Quite often I will pretend that whatever happens at work has very little impact on my life, that my work balance is perfect all thanks to me, and my personal life is strictly protected. This week has made me realize it's not the case.

On days where I've been productive and done well at work or won plaudits I'm full of energy and excited. When the work is not great, or I break stuff and need to fix it up, the emotional state is completely different and goes on a damage control mode, it affects my personal life too.. When my workdays are extremely unproductive, so it appears are my private days, and stressful planning and internal days reflect stressfully in my personal life as well.

Yeah what happens at work clearly has an impact on my mood and it's silly to pretend otherwise. I need to own up to those events in advance and make changes to them while maintaining existing infrastructure and IaC owner. One must trust new hire or entrance-level work.

In the end though, it's all buying one tradeoff for another, and one must decide only after being aware that this is a conscious choice, and one must ideally consider all aftereffects of a marriage ceremony, sometimes the guy or the girl are so blind in there relationship, they won't be able to find it....

Review of the trader joe's snacks I bought today

Yesterday I went to TJ's for a quick grocery run and wanted to get something small and sweet for a pick-me. The chocolate bars were far too sweet and high in calories so I picked up this snack called "Frooze Balls" without fully understanding what it was. Quick review.

Frooze balls are balls of date mash with peanut butter and fruit jelly inside, rolled around in coconut bits and containing nothing besides fruit and vegetable pulp, no added preservatives or sweeteners. The taste was quite good and it felt good to realize that I wouldn't have to worry about the calories or my body too much due to that. There were four or five of those tiny balls inside a $1 pack and I ate through all of it a fifth of the way from the store to my place.

I highly, highly recommend the frooze balls to anybody who's looking to try healthy and yummy snacks that are naturally sweet, it's unclear if it'll help you lose weight, but it'll definitely make you want to lose weight so you could eat more without potential health repercussions!

It's a 9.5 out of ten

A meetup that was actually fun, productive, inspirational where friends were made!

The other day I finally attended the version of the tech event that was meant to be attended sometime last month and I did go in but was too shy to do anything and walked back straight out, ate at the Mexican place on Broadway and made myself home. This time around, I was one of the earlier people to go in, talked to a couple of groups, made a few 'friend for the hour' relationships, discussed important topics and generally got more comfortable talking to strangers. The idea isn't to leverage all the people I met during the event into job opportunities or whatever, it's to get a sense of what lies there, get to understand people really, be curious about where people come from, what they desire, and how they work. If nothing else, add some nuance to the simplistic worldview that I might otherwise have.

Originally I was quite shy and unsure about the event, but happened to be seated to quite talkative and passionate people, and thus got involved in vigorous discussions right away. I spent time with several groups (four or five), exchanged almost a dozen contacts with other attendees, ended up spending about three hours total there possibly longer than everybody else. Had so many long passionate conversations about the topic in question, about myself, about the country etcetera. I was one of the last people to hang around in the event with two other passionate people, and even played the role of product owner for one of the guys because they had used the 'engineering mindset' and decided to create the product long before ever understanding what their customers needed.

In the end I met the organizer, introduced myself, exchanged a few passionate words and exchanged business contacts. This was all so very new (or re-new) for me, it was refreshing! At the end of the night, I wasn't even tired, I basked in the buzz of having talked to new people! Was inspired by the organizer to organize similar events in the future too...

The first political activism event well quite well

Earlier today I went to a public hearing at the City hall, it was open for public comment on a matter of great importance to me, relating to new construction happening in the city, and I felt if I could make a change anywhere, this might be it, so I gave my voice to the cause. I wasn't on my own, it was a part of a political activism group and they had given us a good context on what might happen and how we might approach the issue.

I originally prepared a message in my notes, but after the guy in front of me, the leader of our chapter, gave an impromptu message, I was inspired to do so as well, and I talked about the importance of walking around town. Some people were amused and laughed a little bit, but that was my angle and I think I made my point. I loved the experience, got a little buzz out of it and might keep doing it. Who knows how effective such comments are, but this isn't for the town, this is for me, to get practice for my political career.

I didn't stay for the whole event because it was too overwhelming, even though I know it's the best to stay around for the most boring part of a public hearing of such kind, that's where most of the events and decisions can be influenced. But another time will come, and I'll be more prepared and driven for it...

Oh there were a couple of kids from middle school there too who came in to provide comment on some trash stuff near their school.

It was quite a momentous experience for my civic contribution, and I hope to do more on similar grounds. I felt proud of having contributed to the civic discussion, and hopefully influenced the scale of political decision-making, as small of a contribution it might have made. Just hope this is a start of a political career that I can portably to Nepal or wherever I end up next, so I can become politically engaged and eventually run for elections and as such.

Light meals and amazing meetup activity at Stoup[Tue 20]

The day was personally extraordinarily productive as I started following my checklists early in the morning, cleaned all the rooms based on it, did workouts, all the kinds, and so much more. All I need to do is follow my lists for three more weeks, and then four more, and it'll be a habit forevermore.

Lunch was two cups of kefir, food has lost its charms in these groggy dark gloomy days with not much to look forward too, even the desire to go eat out hasn't taken hold.

Wrote some great stuff at work, and after, and headed out for my walk as soon as work was done. Walked to Volunteer park with podcasts and audiobooks on, and took the standard three rounds.

Came back, had dinner of oats with eggs and beans for dinner, wrote a couple of pages on this blog and finally finished the 19 'easy' posts. I have 11 pending ones that I must finish soon, today was spent in planning a lot, hopefully that translates into just as productive writing.

Went to Stoup brewery in the evening, spent three solid hours there making friends, having engaging conversations with people and generally had a grand old time, ever wondering why I was scared about going. What a lovely time that was had!

Wrote a couple of pages on this blog after coming home, not the best quality of writing that was for sure.

Oh Olympic statue park, yer in Seattle too!

Oh Olympic park,
the grand jewel of the Elliot Bay
the queen of the western part
of Downtown in Seattle down
How I miss thee
on sunny days,
and on rainy days
when I miss the sea and the water
and remember, oh you exist too!
Walking through your roads,
next to the bay and the sea,
looking at the grain ships
and the barges too,
made one remember,
we live not in a deep dark
green rainforest,
but a lush healthy water town
next to mountains
and lakes and rivers of its own
and oh so many seas too!
I forget every so often
that you are here,
oh and so much do I miss you!

Only twenty minutes of busride
are you away from me
yet it feels like an eternity
the distance between us
sketchy streets and boring boulevards,
heavily-trafficked roads
and rushing trains and cars,
they stand on our way
between the two of us,
and hinder our connection.
Oh Olympic statue park
I love you so,
and in my dreams
I walk through you
every day or two.

Review of A Natural History of Beer by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle

I listened to the A Natural History of Beer by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, as an audiobook borrowed from a local library. Quick comments.

The book was quite informative, it had a decent section on the history of beer, so much chemistry, couple of chapters about the biology of taste and drunkenness, the science of water and hops and barley that goes towards making beer, modern yeast technology, fermentation, and everything in between. It was technically a decent book, there was nothing I found lacking or more desiring.

The thing is, listening to this book made me realize I couldn't give a crap about beer at all. Who cares about international bitterness unit, who cares about the eight stages of tasting and smelling the beer, who cares about the American brewing association chart / circle of beer flavorings. They were a passing interest, and nothing really held my attention. I'm interested in fermentation, the alcoholic kind as well, but there was something about the whole beer saga that didn't get my attention. Perhaps I find hops too strong while mentioning beer, or perhaps malted barley feels like a bit of a cheat for someone used to do mold fermentation. Regardless, listening to the otherwise decently written book gave me the understanding that I don't care about beer, and would rather listen to literally anything else in the world. Not the authors' fault, not blaming them.

Yeah I'll give this book a 7.5 out of 10 despite everything, beer enthusiasts will be buzzed by this book.

Book review of 7 Rules of Power by Jeffrey Pfeffer

I read 7 rules of power, by Jeffrey Pfeffer, who's a researcher on power and orgranizational dynamics at Stanford as an audiobook over the course of 2 days. Review.

At the start, I was quite skeptical of the content, so played it at 3x the speed. The author acknowledges that the content of the book is going to make many readers uncomfortable and squirmy, and he's had that experience with former students of his at the business school. But, he says, not being informed about how the world works doesn't make you better or keep you safe, it only keeps you uninformed, and unable to play the game everyone else is playing.

Pfeffer lists the 7 'rules' of power that are practiced / one must follow to obtain power. Or just be interested in organizational politics. If you are uninterested in power or organizational politics, the author argues, you will soon find yourself out of the organizational. Over the six hours of the book, he gives dozens and dozens of examples of former students and collaborators who were originally skeptical about his thesis, but eventually came around to his way.

The rules themselves are:

    Get Out of Your Own Way.
    Break the Rules (Carefully).
    Show Up in Powerful Fashion.
    Create a Powerful Brand.
    Network Relentlessly.
    Use Your Power (Cautiously).
    Understand that Once You Have Acquired Power, What You Did to Get It Will Be Forgotten.

They could be condensed down to five, maybe six rules, but 7 is always the magic number, specially with self-help books of this sort.

And yeah, they make sense. I was super uncomfortable acknowledging the reality of some of those rules, but so works the world, and it would be unwise to reject reality to stay safe inside one's cocoon of ignorance. We must understand the rules and play by them to get wield power and use it for the good, the author argues. Yeah, sounds true.

I don't have much to complain, it was an easy read, interesting too, this was all so new to me, and yeah some of it will be novel and one will want to argue or dismiss some of those points, but these have been discovered and identified after years of research. Ignore at your own peril!

I don't know if I'll end up reading a lot more literature in this niche, but I certainly enjoyed this book and it made me want to be a lot more ambitious and get more things done. And just for that, this book has been worth it.

More Project Phoenix updates

 Goshh.

Some good updates, some crazy plans.

The good news is that I'm done with the 19 essays I had preplanned, which leaves me with 11 essays to be written during work. Six of them are tutorials and 5 of them are descriptions of problems solved at work, which sounds like it'll take so much energy and time and effort. It's unclear if I have the gumption and work ethics to put that work in, but well there's no other option is there?

Besides that, I still need to finish the steal this idea section, and like the other bazillion sections I've thought of.

Speaking of bazillion sections, I keep coming up with amazing ideas for my website, and honestly I could be working on it for the rest of the year and still not be done with it. Or maybe that's what I should do, keep working on it for the rest of the year while finding time to do other things? Maybe during the 2 25 minute writing sessions I've kept out for job in my checklist?

There's going to be the fermentation section. There's going to be political and social activism section. Then a section connecting politics to fermentation with local cultures etc. Then there's going to be my socio-political manifest, my vision of what Nepal can be. Next comes the podcast section: there's going to be the movie podcast, and also the politics podcast where I talk about my hmm approach and views on politics, institutions and the way forward. And on and on and on. So many ideas, so much potential. Such little work done.

Fingers crossed, I'm thinking if I get like a big load of this done by early-to-early March, do something more interesting for the month, and come back to working on this in April, I might get it to where I want it to be, with one more month of effort.

This is exciting, legit, but also so very scary.

Productive at work, good old checklist lifestyle [Mon 19]

Great accomplishments at work, work-writing again, projects, cleanup and living by checklists again finally, skipping the Pullayup hike to write a lot and to Volunteer park, pancakes for lunch, oats and beans for dinner

My work which I don't write about much in these pages was quite productive, I completed something that had been bothering our extended teams for months. In a single day. Now the path's cleared up for greater successes and I'm digging it. In a maybe-related note, I started writing in my workblog once again, just a bunch of notepad files in which I have been writing since 2019 or 2020, my original writing journey actually started there. It must have been 2019, but not 2018 because that would be too early. Yikes. Can you believe that it's been four years since the pandemic began? I mean I was ready for it to go as long as five years and then make a lot of sacrifices for the wild new world, but still, how times has flown by!

After work I cleaned up the place, processed a bunch of ferments and wrote a decent amount. Had pancakes for lunch. Went to walk to volunteer park, got my 10k steps somehow despite only one round, it's because I must have gone somewhere...else...but can't remember where. How did this happen? Anyway, yeah walked enough. Oh yeah I remember now, I walked halfway, my knees hurt too much so I returned and went again a couple of hours later.

Was meant to go to Pullayup in the afternoon, skipped that to finish the first part of Project phoenix. I'm 19/30 in terms of written prepared essays, the essays from hereon are going to be tricky and thorny, and will need to be dealt with great care. Ugh. Also I'll need to be writing like 1.5 essays of such sort at work every day if I want to be done my the end of the month, because outside work I'll write other stuff.

Had oats and beans for dinner, talked to somebody on the phone I feel like, oh watched tv it was, good stuff, wrote a bunch and went to bed. Also the day I lived by checklists, something that was began 4, 5 years ago, that helps me get my situation real good.

An orgranized team doth make an efficient worker bee

Hear ye hear hear this,
the tale of how we fixed
a great problem, a mystery
that'd been haunting our story
for the good part of a month...or three...
our software app would go up,
after a day of standing it,
but never again, would it work
unless it was all brought back down.
So we tried a few times,
changed that knob, moved this switch
poked that socket,
shook that cabinet,
but nay, not a thing stirred,
and we thought we were destined
to live in the misery
of taking app down
in a process three-day long
and bring it up in one more day,
the rest of our life was gonna be that way.

And then one day
it was decided,
the spirits of the application
would be warded,
for they had bothered us far too long
and Istio isn't too hard if you know
what it's doing, come on,
so we set into an exploratory mode
kicked the deployment, and tested the code
a look here, a look here, a minor deletion
and then discovery...
the name of the website, was being set
but when deleted, never unset
so an attempt was made,
to rewrite over and over again
alas but to no avail!

We fixed it win a minor fix,
and thus the headache lasting months and months
was gone in an instant,
celebrations were to be had
and much rejoicing was done,
Finally!
The Spring of productivity had come!

Actually, the ai styles of writing are quite...irritatingly...distinctive and hyper-active, somebody tell them to be more normal

The title. The essays are always so overly exuberant, always stressing too much, always overusing the connector prepositions before paragraphs, a bit too goody-two-shoes pointlessly and so saccarine, it's almost as if they were written by aliens who read a book of the best, most inspirational essays of all time, and decided to copy them, my projects will need significant toning down, maybe I'm doing it wrong, future prospects.

Even though I give it a format, it barely ever follows it. it's so high-energy, so uppity-sounding about even the most boring of topics. And there's always a call to action, a very at-your-face strong call to action on whatever it may be. If you tell it to write about cows, it'll end with a tearjerker about how we need to take better care of the cows, if you tell it to write about cars, it'll end with how cars are polluting the Earth and we should all get EV's. Surely there's something in the base prompt for the system which is influencing this, because I can't imagine what sort of person would write so aggressively preachy, annoying, pushy essays. Yeah I said it, the essays are preachy and pushy and I'm having to spend so much time on them, I'd have been done better without it.

I have been overselling my website project thing

I might be overdoing the website thing at this point. Every time someone asks what I'm up to, I tell them blah blah blah, hobbies, walking, classes, so much reading, and oh I guess I gotta work on my website now because I don't have a web presence. And they only ask about the website. They're all so excited too! What sections will it have? How cool is it going to be? Will it have features, and what will it have? So on and so forth. So much so people are even talking about a website launch date! Yikes!

To be fair, it was Pg who jokingly brought up the launch party, and she didn't really really mean it, and she did give me the idea for a MLP (minimally lovable product) which sounds great, but every time I talk to basically all of my friends, they're all checking up on how the website work is coming up. Which is...some...pressure, which is good, but it was supposed to be this small thing to put my presence on the web, to show people that I exist, not this mega drama thing. Ugh.

But seriously, I'll need to make a kickass website. Maybe it's me who's holding myself to too high of a standard. There's a post incoming where we'll discuss that topic, but the list of ideas for that website is only growing. I did kill the stupid 'book reviews' idea, but it's been replaced by five others. Ah.

Podcast idea for limited series: ten episodes on one single movie

I won't write down the name of the movie because people will look it up and they'll find this and connect the dots, but... Here's the idea: there's this one movie that I must have watched at least a few dozen times at this point. What if I created a limited-series podcast on it, ten episodes of 20 minutes each, where I unravel one of the various issues. Use it as a mirror of Indian society, the film industry and the context under which it was made. Discuss class and wealth matters, matters of the heart, one of women, and one of fame and greed. Each episode, new topic, all about the same old film. That one...which I don't want to name but it's a great hindi movie. Every episode gets a new guests, friends family acquaintances, and people who will talk to me about movies. 20 minutes of recorded and edited down conversation, though the real talk is going to go for much longer. In the end if the idea works out and there's some sort of traction, we can do 10 more episodes, if not we'll call it a day and close it out. Why. Not?

Except maybe it's going to be a lot of work to plan, run, edit and post those episodes, and I haven't done any of those steps in...ever.  Maybe I can get my sister to do some of the work too. And oh of course we'll need segments in each episode, it won't be us droning on and on about the same thing for 20 minutes. I don't know how to run the segments! What to do!

Walking group discovery, political talks and Domino's [Sun 18]

Up early, walk to the Arboretum, Interlaken and volunteer parks, meeting groups of walking teams including single girls!, cupcakes for lunch, attempt to afternoon write, thwarted by broken internet, nap in early afternoon, walk to friend P's, chatting and talking politics, domino's dinner, driven home, limited writing, dead tired to bed

Writing this the evening of the Tuesday, finally having caught up to an eventful weekend when not much was done.

Woke up around 9.15 which was pretty early for me seeing as I'd slept at half past three possibly four the night before. Met up with Pg at 10.10 and walked all the way to the Arboretum. At the arboretum office we encountered a large group of walkers inspired by an insta-influencer, and most of them were (probably, hopefully?) single women, so...I need to join that group. We walked all the way to the endpoint from where UW stadium is visible, and had two cupcakes each for lunch. I know. I've grown chubby in recent times but that's the topic of a whole different post. Walked back all the way home, dropped Pg on the way because she had to start hobbling and took the bus.

Back home I tried writing here, really did, but the laptop internet was broken and wouldn't get fixed after multiple restart attempts. Instead I napped for a few hours. Turns out I'd not reconnected the router properly from the night before, it wasn't my laptop's fault.

Gathered a few bottles of chhyang and went to PS's face. Friend R was there too, we had tonnes of chips, chatted here and there, talked politics and had a jolly good time. PS is so full of energy and drive, I'm envious, I wish to be that kind of person again. We had Domino's for dinner, one never goes wrong that way. R drove me home, where I might have written two or three posts before passing out of sleep. So. Very. tired, I was.

What if I...just walked more and walked harder?

I wrote two posts ago how Pg and I met followers and fans of the insta influencer who were walking the other day, and a 2-hour walk was its whole thing. I'm beginning to think, maybe walking is a more serious activity than I've given it credit for, perhaps it's a hobby one can actually put in their profiles? Some people dance or read or write or watch sports. Some people like to walk, all the time, everywhere, that's the way of life for them.

That got me thinking, maybe I can be a neighborhood walking tour organizer for Northh Capitol Hill, leading people through the cool streets and the verdant parks, show them the interesting landmarks, teach them the history of the place we all live in?  Or maybe I'm taking this a bit too seriously.

Even if not that, maybe I should up how much I walk everyday, perhaps 2.5 hours daily, straight to the arboretum, all the way to their office, and back is the way to go? That would reduce my daily screen time, increase my physical workouts ( I think I'm gaining weight again because of my fucking legs and the lack of proper workouts) and feeling better generally because of the relaxing soothing effects of walking, be it rain or shine? I should really be a more all-weather walker, rather than the 'mild-weather' walking person that I am.

My bedroom is my own, a normal human adult male's finally, and I am soon to be the master of these lands

I moved away the corner storage material from my living room to the closet next to the entrance. Now my living room is my own, everything I have in here is something I wanted to be. My furniture has been all setup (still need to rearrange my bed because it's in the middle of the fucking room and I have hurt my legs against it on multiple occasions), the posters have come and some of them have been put up. So I'll need to spend maybe an hour mounting all the posters, twenty minutes moving furniture around to a better setup, and after 2 and a half years of moving to the emerald city, my room of sleep will be mine, completely and totally. I will be the master of these lands, the same way I completely owned my room in Boston. I'm excited.

The posters are here, the posters are here, OMG!

The posters prints from shortrunposters arrived over the weekend, they were slightly smaller than what I had in mind, but perfectly sized otherwise, they are matte finish and really good color reproduction too. It's a bit concerning how good this is, I don't understand how other companies can survive when this one printer had done me so extraordinarily well. There's reasons to suspect I might have hit the 'motherlode', so to speak, a wholeseller who also offers retail services on the side without much marketing to omake extra cash.

Regular readers will remember I've been talking about getting custom posters printed for my apartment for a good half year, and now I have finally accomplished my desire. All six posters were ai-generated using Gemini ai and are 'hand-drawn' representations of Kathmandu city.

Oh and I mounted a couple of them already too, two have been put on walls using my sneaky 'cardboard mount' technique. Two large strips of cardboard stuck to the back of the posters using tapes, and the cardboard stuck to the wall using velcro. So the posters are stuck to the strips of cardboard using pretty solid tape, but in the back so they're not seen at all. The effect is so good, and the perspective is really good that people have touched the posters interested by the mounting way.

There's four posters left to mount. Two are almost finished...I'll pick them up when I have some spare time, and there's not enough cardboard for the remaining two. Also I made a minor mistake and they're copies of the same illustration, but ah well, guests will think I really really like that one. Hah.

Good things are happening, this is exciting!

Seeing a insta-fluencer led walking group full of single women

On Sunday, which was yesterday as I write this friend PG and I were walking around in the Arboretum when she asked me if if the place we were at was actually aroboretum proper, that's when I pointed her at the board exactly in front of her which had the word 'arboretum' printed on it twice, we laughed about it. Just then we saw a large group of people, mostly women, outside the park offices. We wondered what was up and P asked one of the girls, part of a group which included a woman who I know for sure was a Nepali newari girl because of how she looked and the dark lipstick fashion sense. Apparently an insta-influencer has started a walking group in Seattle and they were a part of her entourage, so to speak, and it was all coordinated through the site and not meetup like usually happens. So many single women all in one place!

We joked later about how men go to all these places and parties and hobbies and complain about not meeting single women, and here was a group of women that was doing all the social things they could think of doing, hanging out with other people, who probably were facing similar issues: not finding men despite using all of their social connections. So I wanted to follow the influencer without singing up for insta. Earlier today I did a 3-step process to achieve. Joined a site that converts isnta feeds into rss feeds. Then joined another site turns rss feeds into email notifications. Then gave it the mozilla relay email id so it never gets to my identity. This way I can keep track of other fun social activities without having to join the darned app.

Also, does this mean walking is a real hobby with real activities and opportunity to meet with people? Maybe that's my calling, meet people who like walking a lot and doing low-key things? Maybe this is destiny? Who knows, but I love walking and I shall be doing it, whether it gives me fame and wealth and prestige or not.

Posters Ahoy! To partytown! [Sat 17]

pasta lunch, walk to the Volunteer park, my posters arrive, mounting them, egg sandwich with veggies for dinner, hangout and chhyang dranks until half past eleven with cousin, cha-cha's hang, barboza and comet too busy, at chop suey DYC until 2, long and loud conversations until three in the morning, very late to sleep and early awake to go on walks

These words are being written on Monday afternoon, after having missed the bus on Saturday and Sunday because surprisingly, shockingly, lots happened over it. Oh yeah project phoenix was minorly disrupted, but one must pay the price of socialization somehow. I'm coming to an end of how much can be done without referring to the work computer and spending hours on figuring the technical details anyhow, so it's not like I'm intentionally delaying things either. Away and onwards!

In the morning I spent a couple of hours working towards Project Phoenix. I'm 14 posts in, five more posts for book reviews, and I'm as far as the current process can take me.

Had pasta for lunch with chickpeas and everything as has been standard for me. Walked to Volunteer park listening to podcasts, my phone was somehow on the airplane mode throughout and didn't record the geographical progress though my exercise app did. After walk I planned on writing a lot, but my posters came, more on that later. I mounted two of them on carboards and put them on the walls with velcro, it looks kinda fancy now. Had egg sandwich with chickpeas and veggies for dinner. Reached out to my cousin who came to hang and we drank chhyang for a few hours, more than I had planned, and we left my place at quarter to twelve. We spent like 30 minutes at cha-cha's to get a read of the night, and then went to barboza to see what was up. There were about a hundred people queued outside, so then we thought of going to comet instead, which again was a failure because of the long line outside it. Eventually we ended up at chopsey at the DYC party and danced for the next two hours until 2. We walked down to my apartment, smoked up on the street, and talked for an hour about the need to stay away from drugs for young people and so forth.

Came back up, surprisingly full of energy, brushed got my shit together and eventually fell asleep at quarter past three. An eventful night after so long!

Seattle blues is only too real

I was at friend PS's friend yesterday, and the usual squad of him, me and R bro were there. We were talking about how he was the only one taking initiative to invite people and called me out on not organizing anything despite having promised for two months. R bro and I were talking about it on our drive as he dropped me home, and I admitted I had been lazy, and it was the winter blues. He concurred. P has energy, he said, he just moved to this city so it's not sucked him dry of joy and motivation and the social energy yet. We people, you and I are Seattleites, people of the PNW, we've lost the human spirit that takes away the energy to interact with each other, we are awkward fools who have fallen in love with the weather and terroir of the city, but we've forgotten what truly matters the most: socializing with other human beings.

Okay well he didn't really say it in so many words but it was said in the spirit and I heard what he meant. It was so very true, it's not like I actually don't have people to hang out with, I could make a long list and start sending out texts and have a busy few days weeks and weekends, but that hasn't come to be. I've stayed hidden, afraid and too puny. The rainy weather might be my favourite, but it's not the most conducive to spending time with other people. They talk about Seattle freeze, well I have been frozen that is true.