My Year of Rest and Relaxation (rwb S6E17)
I did too much last year and I got bit! So this year I am going to learn to appreciate being alone again.
Coming out of the pandemic, I was suddenly an Extravert™️.1 I started attending every event that came my way and hosting a fair number as well.
Welp, I got burnt out, and wound up in some nasty interpersonal drama to boot. Plus, I set an informal goal of finishing a second draft of A Curious Dream by mid-March, when I’ll be out a couple weeks for travel, and I suddenly realized I’d have to spend a lot more time writing in January and February to catch up.
So this year I decided I would be an Introvert™️, or at least be more intentional about how I was spending my time. Learn to say no to some things, you know?!
Two weeks in I am happy with how the experiment is going. It is kind of nice to have a yawning chasm of boredom commonly called a “free afternoon” and not feel like that is merely a rest break in between reps at the bodybuilding gym that is social life.2 It is kind of nice to feel like I can go meander on a bike ride for an hour or two and not “waste” time that I need to “power relax”. It is kind of nice to spend an evening at home reading instead of going out again.
In the words of The Last Unicorn, “that’s the way life was meant to be. You’re supposed to be too late for some things. Don’t worry about it.”
In Other News
- If you haven’t heard enough from me, I wrote an article about how I built bookmarks.rwblickhan.org.
- If you still haven’t heard enough from me, my pals Denalex and Jacqline invited me to chat about productivity on their new podcast The Growth Gradient. I came off sounding like a knock-off Simon Willison but anyway…
- I finally read the classic psychology paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”, which introduced the idea that humans can keep about seven “items” in short-term memory at a time. However, the paper has much more of interest than that!
- I am trying to learn illustration (… very slowly …) and I like comics, so I was fascinated by this reflection on a “corrected”, colorized version of the final Calvin & Hobbes comic fascinating. Basically, they screwed it up, because the “rough”, muted comic was perfectly suited to its medium and its themes!
- For a friend’s birthday, I reached Tampopo again, which is becoming a yearly tradition I guess. This year I followed it up with The Making of Tampopo, which is halfway between a director’s commentary track and a documentary. However, it is highly highly recommended for anybody interested in filmmaking or just “doing great work” in general; the crew on this film had such absurd attention to detail that it’s frankly a miracle the film was ever finished. Ironically, that pairs very well with Tampopo itself, which is about an amateur going a little overboard in pursuit of mastery!