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the light of intellect gutters and goes out

2022-09-27

5 minute read

Last week I wrote a list of tasks I wanted to tackle in the week, this week I'm writing about how they actually turned out.

tasks

Estimate of time available: 20 hours 10 minutes
Actual time spent on projects: 19 hours 70 minutes 20 hours 10 minutes

pit         12:00
food        02:17
CS          02:31
Portuguese  03:00
routines    00:20
picture     00:02
            --:--
total       20:10

Here's the time log screenshot too - it's not perfect, it doesn't track everything, but it's still been helpful for this. image of a time tracking console log, with all the weeks tasks tracked in different colours

notes

sleeping in, late nights, the light of intellect

From about thursday through to sunday my days were a little all over the show, with late nights and late mornings. Last night, though I slept in yesterday, I put the phone and the computer down around 10:00 and read/pottered about for an hour. It was great, I read more of Paul Klee's notebooks. It's really filling up with post-it tags, I'm not looking forward to transcribing all the quotes. Paul Klee's Notebooks Volume 1 The Thinking Eye, on a desk with a lot of bright pink sticky notes inbetween the pages I will here, however, transcribe a couple from last night, from the start and the end of Creative Credo:

Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible.

A final secret stands behind our shifting views, and the light of intellect gutters and goes out.

I also sketched out some more pared back, MVP wireframes for conjugação - it's getting closer to finished. It's so easy to be overcome with possibilities, I have to constantly reign myself back into "what do I actually need this for".

interpersonal stress

Been over thinking some interpersonal issue lately, about a friend drinking too much and being annoying. Was reminded that I have the power to chose how much this upsets me. I found this quote "from" Marcus Aurelius (it feels heavily paraphrased, and I don't want to leaf through my copy of meditations)

“You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”
“It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.”

and now, after finding these translations too colloquial, I'm putting in another one from my copy, which is a little more austere:

Take away your opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint. "I have been harmed." Take away the complaint, "I have been harmed," and the harm is taken away. - Meditations 4:7

30 days of habits

I'm doing, on Gile's recomendation, James Clear's "30 days to better habits email course"

So far I like it, I'm only stuck on the bit where it's like "choose a type of person you'd like to be then pick a habit for that". What kind of person do I want to be? I can think of several, and therein the choice paralysis reigns. This is why I'm typing it out here, because the point isn't to pick one identity and one habit and run with it for all time but instead to learn about habit making. I'm tossing up between:

what else?

This quote from The Rise of Worse is Better

The MIT guy then muttered that sometimes it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, but the New Jersey guy didn’t understand (I’m not sure I do either).

The Last Luxury, JFK, Jr. by Alex Dimitrov

“ ... yet once you start answering those questions ... where do you stop?”
The old photograph of a young salute.
That one send-off to death, family; the beginning of character.
Maybe you know it’s the last year of the century. So come late and leave early.
(Others flying similar routes reported no visual horizon.)
It’s the last luxury. To go early and never come back.

“Comprehension precedes production–by a mile" said Susan Gross (?) I have come round to understanding that the operative word here is "precedes" - production must still follow.

I've changed the css for code snippets (sometimes used for poetry too), I'd like to change the styling for blockquotes too.

This felt like a long post, like I've drunk deep from the well of reflection. Like sleeping in, "you must of needed the sleep".

listening to

Call for Help by Pearly Drops

questions