Cooling system leaked, car towed, date cancelled. FML. Second time I've tripped up on this lady with an engine overheating. Lol. Otherwise it was a productive day. I defragged the production floor furniture, and anchored my bed at home. I hope to remain relatively unaffected by loss of relationships, as it helps to guarantee my focus on work. Perhaps I will go walk my rock after I get home - maybe even push the codebase along a little. I also owe a business partner some phone number lookups, so I must remind myself to do that as I walk home from the workshop where my car ended up. It is a neighbour's shop and he is notorious for being expensive. I hope this is not too painful.
Later, as I walk down dark alleys, with a weight plate, to a nearby park, I get some sense that I've almost become the 37-year-old I wanted to be when I was in my twenties. I don't feel that I've learnt a lot of late. It feels like I did my specialisation around the age of 19-to-20-years old. After that I focused even more on seeking breadth over depth. As I approach the park, I remember getting hurt in the dark while playing hide and seek in a dark park when I was 10, some 27 years ago. A recent partner who reminds of my best friend from when I was seven, thirty years ago, is surprised that I remember that far back. But I remember things from further still away ... we all know how curated memories are subject to corruption.
We each carry such different appreciations of time. Some are shocked that others can wrestle with objects five-years-long, others find it simple. My first premeditated grind was six-years-long - I was sent to a Chinese language school against my explicit preferences - I was six-years-old when it began. My first long project was nine-years-long. I was probably eight- or nine-years-old, and the task was to get into college. College was supposed to be a four-year holiday. I really enjoyed that. Near the beginning of college, I was working on the optimisation problem to decide what to focus my studies on - there were some medium-sized distractions, but mainly I was interested in a question I had assigned to myself earlier in highschool after watching the Matrix, on my friends' recommendations, and finding it conceptually uninspiring, albeit cinematographically impressive. I set out simply to understand how to quantify human experience, and prepared myself for two decades of study - surprisingly, it was not so tedious, and progress was made within two years or so. Then I just focused on getting my degree finished, so that I could get a real job to focus on something new: the study of commerce which I had avoided thus far. I graduated in 2005, and it seems now we are 15 years in, so I feel great about having stuck to one project (with some holidays) on this time frame. And I really look forward to seeing what comes next eventually, one day, maybe years from now, as I am not yet done with commerce. Nevertheless, I get up each each day expecting to be surprised - though usually I am not, and it is a stoic plod through the mundanity of people who are driven by material gains.
Today, as I lie on a pillow reviewing the last 36 hours, I am not so pleased with my gains over this period. I can do better. So I am planning to put a bit more focus on my partner (the date) though don't know what it is exactly I am going to do - I feel our communication is yielding a low SNR, so I either have to fix my appreciation of it, or fix it itself. As for my business partners, I have as always, so many things to polish - that remains my primary occupation.
