large sensitive hands

4 minute read

Unlike last time I'm really not aching to do a journal entry, but it's important to do them when you find the time.

find the time

I've struggled to find much time these last 10 days. I wake up at 6:00 for a 6:30 gym class. If I want to be in any way sane I need to get to bed by 10:30 (as readers will know, this is no small feat.) I get home between 5:30 and 6:00 - this leaves me about 4 hours in the evening to enjoy myself, to do what I want. That's nothing! I hate work. I have a few options:

1. Use time at work to do "computer tasks". Things like browsing are.na, reading newsletters, printing sheet music, printing things to read, watching videos, purchasing things online, investigating, learning to code. I already do this anyway, so it could be helpful to formalise it.
2. Quit my job. I tried this last year, to mixed results. I certainly did a lot more journaling, but there was something missing.

something missing

I think I need a degree of challenge imposed from outside myself. I thrive of external structure. I've made great strides forward since I started my job, strides mostly around conceptualising work and putting into place a methodology to deliver it. It's not that I couldn't learn to do any of before hand, but I just didn't do it. It was always in the "soon" mental bucket, never in the "now". I wonder how I can force these challenges? I don't want to have to always rely on others to provide this external structure.

boooorrrrriiinnngggg

On another note, I wrote a start for my RIPE scifi idea:

RIPE

You hold a river stone in your hand. It's smooth and pleasantly heavy. Feel the contours, the coolness, the thousands of years that wore away this form.

Morse code was invented in 1830. Letters are represented by a combination of long and short buzzes in a hand held device. Soon phonemes are condensed into tactile ligatures. Tone is encoded in rythmic variations.

You feel an announcement by a large, innovative tech company, named after the fruit their flagship product resembles. You know it's them, the same way you recognise and know a friend's voice. You're feeling it on a small device that fits snugly into the palm of your hand. With a grid of what you could call speakers (the use of a magnetic fieldto generate motion in small magnets embedded in flexible membranes) you can feel the details of the announcement. The characteristic low hum of anticipation, the mid tonal prosaic concepts this new innovation expedites, the harmonising qualities of luxury and fine craftmanship. The internal gyroscopes modify the percieved weight at key moments in the brief, handheld performance.

You notice something else too, the way you notice a bird by the shadow it casts. Despite it's exponential complexity, your device is limited to a discrete array of cells. You feel in this announcement some movements in between these cells. Meanings that echo but can't directly be felt - not with your device anyway.

Your large sensitve hands grip the wheel and along with the gentle hum of the engine you feel the indication to turn right ahead. The road is designed this way, the vibrations tell you where you are and what's around you. Street signs would possibly be easier and cheaper, but culturally now any large scale visual information is considered pollution and an affront to ones rights to choose when they want to know, to reach out and feel the information that pulses through the world.

I got some good feedback, especially around "show don't tell". I'd like to introduce characters too, I don't want to stay in second person the whole time, and I think characters can reveal a lot about the world.

In the meantime I've also been collecting quotes and ideas on are.na, here's a couple of highlights:

Close your eyes. Imagine in your head a bladeless knife with no handle. Do you see how the image recedes from view the more language I add to it? A bladeless knife. With no handle. - Hafiz, I heard God Laughing

Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded. - Rainer Maria Rilke

less inspiring

• I'm trying to pickup Neovim and I spent a great deal of time tonight failing to understand the plugins intuitively. I'll have to read the actual instructions :-(
• I have done frightenly little drum practice lately - gym has taken precedent. May have to start doing it in the evenings.
• Had a huge week last week, lots on. Bullet journal has taken a hit - wouldn't mind getting that back to a good place to. Always more to do.
• I've been eating a nice but vague bean stew lately. Some meals are like that - salt and fat, but no clear voice. A good meal, in my opinion, has a clear voice. It's not been bad by any means, but it won't be repeated.
• The weather has been hot and humid lately - my hand eczema is flaring up

listening to

Seas Of Noise - Your Friend Brennan

questions

• What am I doing now that I could stop doing
• What wonder have I forgot about my life?