Firsts in my life, this February :
- kept a physical conditioning daily journal
- figured out how to unify task management tools to eliminate the need for summary reporting
- decided to properly structure my wardrobe by codes
- got fitted for a tailored jacket; studied jacket technology
- bought watches for code-switching
- onboarded and orientated an EEE
- screwed up while replying to a proposition
- moved gear in a 5-ton truck
- practiced enumerated breathing
- had an air-conditioner installed
- wrote an open-relationship credo
- modelled romance as addiction
- discovered Puncak Setiawangsa
- figured out how the AKLEH works
- studied light-duty industrial shelving metrics
- studied mattress construction
- concluded that I have communication problems with low emotional quotient women (who tend to have high social quotients)
- got a rubber mallet; learn how to assemble boltless racks
- got a pair of boxers, and tested slacks sizes of H&M and Uniqlo for benchmarking
- moved a ceiling fan
Feb 16
Experimenting with counted sitting breaths in lieu of exercise. Batch 1 : 100 etc.
Since exhalations are more important for vagus stimulation, I'm counting those specifically.
Observable immediate effects are improved efferent nervous tone due to the repetitive exertion, I guess. Additionally, if the count is done in aural imagination, then coordinating that with motor nervous breathing provides a greater challenge.
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16feb
Enforced work. More growth needed.
1300
Third stop for the day.
1433
Fourth stop. Let's enforce a coffee and reflection.
1700
Fifth stop.
1837
Dinner, and reflection on the clusterfuck of my past month's account management. Almost reeled back a sterling opportunity, but bungled it after all. Most people might laugh if they knew how simple the brief was, and how badly I messed it up. Well, I am not particularly bright when it comes to this subject, but the remaining opportunity is to capitalise on learnings here.
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Just past the first eighth of the year. A huge pile of junk from 2020, and paying to have it moved tomorrow. Why? Even I don't remember. It was part of the plan. Ah well, no girls, and a big pile of junk in the sky, doth an art studio maketh, I spose. My life is torn between the women I love, and the games I want to play. I want the log cabin, I want the hacker's brain, I want a new model of physics, I want the money, I want the body, I want the charity, I want the grace, I want the girls, I want it all. Paying it in. Expecting nothing in return.
17 feb
I suppose in the next decade, I should finally return to the traditional occupations of management consulting or investment banking. I have the watch, I have the jacket, and I keep losing the girls, so I need to calibrate my compatibility with the sort of women I like to date. I guess it is a transition from early- to mid-career, now, at 38.5.
I always said, I expected to be a decade behind my peers, because I focused on academia up till the age of 21. Others had been focused on commerce for over half a decade by then. Ten years after purchasing my first real estate, I am moving in the machines and tools I have since accumulated. I suppose this provides me with a base to anchor the part of my life which studies poor cultures, the working class. It is also fourteen years since I ducked out of banking to study business and technology in startups.
Feb18
I have been thinking about the jargon that you masses use to discuss your feelings, because I like learning how to interact with the norm.
I was discussing friendship with a friend and highlighted the notion that, I don't have a concept of friendship beyond romance. I'm not a-romantic, certainly, so I'm probably pan-romantic. I find sweeping the floor, cleaning toilets, doing work for people, trusting people, and waging war to all be qualities on a positive scale of romance (maybe romance is just a combination of enjoyability, and complexity). This certainly isn't what most people call romantic, as they like to hate things - they only don't hate a few things, and the fewest of these few things strike them as romantic.
Feb 19
Poorbase now has air-conditioning.
21 feb
Maintaining cognizance is, being rich and poor, couth and vulgar, smart and dumb, all at once ... with the constant risk of pissing off on variety of peer, while playing to the needs of another.
22 Feb
"I'm good at solving problems," is a hard sell, which is why I rarely pitch this way. Not sure if everyone's aware of how that works.
It has dawned on me that I have problems communicating with low EQ people, if they have high social/commercial quotients, because I mistake their verbal ability for emotional intelligence, and I end up flooding their inputs.
And for the love of god, emotional intelligence does not imply natural empathy lol
Feb 24
2001-2005 : school on history of ideas and analytical phenomenology
2005-2010 : job experience in commerce and web development
2011-2012 : gradschool in functional programming and financial markets
2013-2022 : this is supposed to be the decade of business stuff post-gradschool, so I should probably focus on cleaning up all my unfinished work from the past decade, so that I can advance to other stuff, right?
The problem with me is that at the end of the day, I don't really care about the outcome, and it is a game to pass the time ...
I used to think I could just wait twenty years and cruise into 20k/month jobs. Now I'm wondering how to get 200k/month ones lol.
25 feb
Sometimes I get complaints of an absence of empathy. I think it is underappreciated how much work it takes to cause pain fo people despite having empathy for them.
That being said, I have reviewed recent interactions with counterparties, and decided to do even more work.
I guess I must increase my descrimination between subjects of differing EQ levels. Should be a big win - treating people as equals does not bode well.
Perhaps this also explains why some lovers refer to each other as "baby". 🤔
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Art is about oneself, science is about everything else.
Many people can't access/recognise their feelings without being affected by their feelings ... if they think/talk about anger, they become angry ... if they think/talk about happiness, they become happy ... if they think/talk about uncertainty, they become uncertain ... if they think/talk about sadness, they become sad. This structure is at this point in history, easiest to fix by art : internal meditation, and restructuring. I suppose scientifically, there may be known metabolic pathways and drugs which improve dissociation.
In the long term, it is one of those structures I hope we will eventually select against and evolve out of as a species : involuntary control structures.
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Another structure of note is memory accession patterns, and timeframes of contemplation. Some people are mostly thinking about the present, leaving miniscule resources to ponder memories and hypotheticals. Others differ.
I guess this is a refreshing exercise in continuing my study of cognitive structures - these personality factors are high-level structures, which is why I avoided them while focusing on more fundamental issues in college.
27 feb
The ideal day looks something like:
- HIIT
- eat meat, fibre, and carbs
- thinky work
- coffee
- thinky work
- cardio
- eat meat, and fibre
- strength training
- thinky work
- eat meat, fibre, less carbs
- light exercise
- social work
That was yesterday.
And I miss you, goldie.
Feb 28
Administrative window dressing. Car trouble. Hoping for a quick fix.
The post-gradschool decade is soon coming to an end. It was supposed to be oriented about commerce, and it has been. While I am tempted to shift focus to professional services (consulting, banking) in the decade following 2022, I am reminded that the original plan was to refocus on academic pursuit. So perhaps, it gels together like this :
- revert to a period of stabler academic pursuit
- maintain a few retainers as a matter of commercial discipline
- otherwise raise th price of time to 75x US minimum wage / roughly what a McKinsey partner is said to pull at the earlier stages of their career
Reflections on the long arc are fun, but daily life is as always, tactical.
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Whole afternoon spent fighting a thermostat.
Went home to get data, returned to office, and found dataset incomplete.
30km detour down the MEX, on the way to the mall.
Still missing the recent dream girl.
I just want to cry.
I think driving in Malaysia is killing me.
Well, I picked this adventure ...
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Why isn't enginewear rated in megarevolutions or something like that ...
1 mar
I spend many of my working hours discussing labour economics with colleagues. Sometimes the conversations get a bit personal, and notions of "desserts" and "deserves" pop up. It makes me think about my favourite variety of labour ... love, and intimacy. One thing holds true across all these spaces : no one deserves talent which they cannot retain. We've all had the opportunity to work with wonderful, inspiring people. And when they leave, it is not often useful to be sad ... all that energy is best spent on reacquiring their interest, or the interest of equal opportunities. A lie told among people, is that people are irreplaceable, but this is only true if you choose that addiction.
0800
Enforced waking, work.
2 mar
Realised I've been installing Windows GUIs since 199x ... easily a quarter of a century. I guess this is what it feels like to be old, and in IT.
Also wondering if I should proceed with the premeditated academic track in the next decade, or switch to $corporate because I like dating suits, and they don't like academic me.
Also playing block tag on Instagram with a friend who seems to not realise you can see my profile on the web as long as you're not logged in. God, the games boys and girls play.
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Trying to avoid office hours, in order to reduce enforced sleep and wake times, to get more productive hours per day. Success will depend on quality of colleagues.
Awake again. A little grief, but routine, and enjoyable. Enforced eating and work, next.
Emotional management is memory management.
Love and hate are just incentives to structure priorities in memory.
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While coaching colleagues on presenting financials, I'm also reviewing my personal comms logs and making notes on how to improve competitive advantage, in dating suits - including strategies which allow for improvement of my comm ops without requiring improvements in my cash flow.
That being said, it remains difficult to win the trust of rich people, when they know you have full trust in poor people, because they themselves don't trust poor people.
Also, I think I scare people who treat interpersonal relationships as simpler than their commercial relationships. I preferto think of all relationships as commercial in nature, and they should be managed professionally.
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On the bright side, at least I'm still aiming high enough to make glaring mistakes from time to time.
I generally give myself a ten-year handicap when evaluating my commerciable work. Maybe I should include under that, my dating experience.
3 mar
When a friend disappears, approve of their independence, and presume to require improvements to one's own ability to add net value. Reload, and handle the next target with more care, whether it has or has not been sighted before.
I think, if I do this every so often over two decades, it must be a character trait worthy of consideration for enshrinement as a value.
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A columnist wrote to someone with a fantasy, that there is a melodramatic "I can't stop x," and a literal version. I don't have this fantasy. But the columnist's point on melodrama is notable.
Because I personally opine that emotions are a temporary and unnecessary trait in the continuum of civilisation ... I partake in many social interactions either with an authentically bored and protocol-oriented disposition, or with globs of melodrama. And it is the latter which annoys many of my associates to no end, since they are unaccepting of my basic disposition.
Also, I probably confuse "the shit out of," many observers ... there is also my own authentic emotional experience to be acknowledged. Some people can't brain it, but all three aspects are coherent :
1. I can love you
2. I can hypothesise that love is not inherently valuable
3. I can make fun of myself for loving you
And so it is.
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Turn back time, and you might say that NATO and the Kremlin should have sponsored the formation of a treaty organisation between Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Caucasus ... armed them, and just let them mediate.
