Showing posts with label self. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Procrastination

 I have reached peaks of procrastination that even I might once have thought were too great, too high. I've done it with the help of 'working from home', this monstrous situation that allows me to practice the piano, play video games, read nonsense, and any other disastrous activity, any time I like.

Back when I worked at the lab, in an office, I could only procrastinate for so long before I was cornered and had no choice but to do-the-thing. I couldn't play the piano or watch Netflix on a Tuesday afternoon in the lab. I might avoid work for a while by reading internet garbage, but eventually that runs out - it really does, it just takes a few days - and I have to do-the-thing.

But this...

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I've learned a Chopin nocturne - pretty well - laid groundwork for several Rachmaninoff preludes, memorized the 3rd movement of Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata (biggest thing I've memorized in.. decades, probably?), and now I'm getting the hang of the awesome last movement of his first Sonata. I'm getting pretty good at improvising random lines over 9 chords! It's great! 

And it's worthless and stupid and dangerous, since I'm not a pianist and I'm not getting paid to play the piano. I have papers to write, finish, revise; experiments to plan; blah blah blah.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

habitat

Made this last winter when I realized I was coming to Australia. Found it the other day and dressed it up a bit. From Yarra to Yahara, yep.

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

april report

Sorry April.

Not that I haven't done things this month. May as well just do a quick report.

Not in any particular order:

Finished the Mass Effect games. Excellent story, very effective, really wraps you into the main character. When it all comes to an end, you feel really invested, so I guess I see why some people didn't like the ending, but they by and large were probably stupid people. Sorry. It was excellent, will stick with me.

Rented a car and drove around East Melbourne - Dandenong and Yarra territory. Had a tuna sandwich in the town of Gembrook, which looked a lot like Kingston Springs, except without an I-40 running through it. Took the guy 30 minutes at least to get around to making the sandwich - one guy, >10 customers. I went to the Upper Yarra Reservoir, where  most of our water comes from. It was nice. Nice to drive. Almost had an accident a couple times, but it wasn't that hard to get used to the reversal. A little worried about driving when JP gets here, afraid that when we're talking and I'm distracted, I'll revert to normal orientation. We'll see.

Watched a total lunar eclipse, the best one I've ever seen. The moon rose as the sun set, and it was at peak eclipse - not even red, very dark, could barely see it. Then, a threshold was crossed, and light sprang out of the southern edge, and it slowly, over another hour almost, became a full moon. Really nice view, out behind MBI.

I have a serious beard now. See how much longer it lasts.

Started writing a paper on my current project. Procrastinating on rewriting the blur adaptation paper. Need to be working on a grant proposal for UW by the end of the week.

On migraine business: Saturday, driving day, had a headache most of the day, but I also slept until 10 that day and started pretty slow, so it was a forced one. Seeing lots of weird transparent phosphenes lately, but I think the days of aura are past. Future maybe. But not present. There may have been a couple other very minor headaches in the last couple of months, but I didn't note them. I really think the "being in shape", i.e. TKD, was making me susceptible to migraines. What to do...

What else...

Guess that's it. I should be writing more lately, essaying and journalizing, but somehow it isn't happening. Working seriously, and writing the past couple of days, but most of my thinking has been done on the long walks to and from lab, rather than in journal entries. We'll get back to it, don't worry. I still love you, xuexixs.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

anxiety, nighttime kitchens, broken foot

Yep. So, I guess 2014 is the year that HAZ goes back to sleep, waking up now and then for a random update.

I suppose that when I'm especially introspective or, dare I say it, depressed, I write here more. Or anxious. Which is to say that lately I haven't been these things. There's a bit of desolation, loneliness, but I know that's temporary, so it's not actually that hard. And what I'm doing otherwise, during the days, is so fulfilling that there's not much energy left to fuel anxiety.

So that's why I'm not here much lately.

Tonight, as I left the lab, about 8:30, I went to the kitchen to get a candy bar. I don't usually do this, but my foot is kind of broken and I felt like I needed an extra boost for the walk home.

Coincidentally, the candy bar was called 'Boost'.

I walk into the kitchen - or cafeteria, or as the Australians call it, 'tea room', and it's dark out, but the lamps over the lunch tables are on, and there's a smell, something I can't identify, musty, an odor that didn't belong there. And suddenly I'm a kid, sneaking into the kitchen in my mother's parents house after everyone's gone to sleep, to look through the cupboards for cookies or crackers. The light was somehow the same, the smell of course was key - memory is so strange - and, certainly, my action was parallel. A few times I've done the same thing, probably once a week to be honest, but there's always someone else there, and I'm too embarrassed to let someone see me taking a candy bar. Ha!

So I stood there for a dozen seconds and observed the memory, and I could *see* Elizabeth's kitchen, and feel the space of their house around me. The light, the smell, the feeling of night time and quiet and not wanting to wake anyone, and being by yourself.

What else is there? Interesting birds. Doves with tall feather crests on top of their heads. Mynas fighting with their reflections in windows. They're my favorites lately, jovial, nervous birds.

Going on a camping trip tomorrow! With a broken foot! I went running Tuesday, barefoot, and it was totally fine. Short on oxygen, but didn't notice a single mechanical problem, not one false step, and I was concentrated on the feet, on the ground. But Wednesday morning I get out of bed and it hurts - and the long walk home at night, man oh man, on a bad foot. I strained some ligament or tendon or something, can feel a bruise, left foot, outside/top about halfway down. At first it felt like it was in the ankle or heel, but it's migrating. Hope it's better tomorrow, so I can do some hiking..

Had a sort-of headache a week or so ago, but they seem basically to have stopped, so we may need to revise the subtitle of this journal.

Thursday, December 05, 2013

well well well

lots to write, and trouble writing. i think writing is hard in the winter. april to september seems to be my golden writing time, winter is the time for experiments. don't really have much going on at the moment in that domain - trying to set up a thing, but i already know it's not going to go anywhere, which saps the motivation.

but more broadly, i am going places. first, to melbourne, australia. finally have a chance to put my money where my mouth is with all the consciousness business - a six month stint in the big leagues. not going to break in, and i already have a new minor league job set up after this thing is over, in madison wisconsin (shouldn't jinx it - nothing in writing yet, but it seems like a good deal). so life is finally changing. i've felt happy several times this week, it was interesting. the only real anxiety, aside from nervousness at seeming foolish when i interact with these neuroscience people in melbourne, is with leaving my wife alone in america for half a year, when we both want to be together and make progress on you know what.

anyways, that's getting personal. but it's all wrapped up together, life and work and study, everything. i think this is best - the best thing, or sequences of things, that i can do. as of this summer, god willing, we will have new lives in a new place, and a few years of new stability, and new ways to imagine the future. i am getting a reversal in a particular feeling i usually have, a reversal i haven't had in many years, i think: that i'm fooling *them*, rather than fooling *myself*. for once, i must take advantage of this state of affairs. stop backing down, and go seize some opportunities for once.

see if you do it. report back here in december of 2014. i expect great progress.

(random other notes: headaches getting more frequent lately. woke up with one today, maybe tripped by dehydration, but also been seeing distracting afterimages and pseudoscotomas for days. no aura in almost 6 months though. may be past those days? now just little specky spotty auras? i'll be sad if they never return..)

Monday, October 14, 2013

objectivity

I finished Chalmers' book - The Conscious Mind - this weekend. A funny thing was that the next-to-last chapter, basically just a set of musings on the relationship between his proto-theory and artificial intelligence arguments, didn't interest me at all. This is funny because if this was 2001, I probably would have skimmed the book up to that chapter and then read it over and over and over again.

It's an excellent, important book. I wish I'd read it back when, but now was good enough timing. As I mentioned in a previous entry, just about all of my thinking on philosophy of mind and consciousness in this book; I think some of the ideas I developed naturally, like a lot of people do, but I've also read many of Chalmers' papers over the years, and a couple I've read many times, so he's undoubtedly responsible for straightening my thoughts on the subject.

But this book, it's one of those cases where reading is like sharpening your mind. You may have a set of knives, but you've let them clatter around in a drawer for a while, used one here and another there, and so they get banged up and dulled and maybe a bit tarnished, and so finally you sit down with the whetstone and a cloth and sharpen and clean, and there, a drawer full of shining, sharp knives. That's what it was like, reading this book.

In a way, it just sort of set me up with new vocabulary, or ways to structure my thinking about perception and experience, and why they are interesting, and what the alternatives are in thinking about how they are interesting. Sometimes, this is enough to take away from a book - it helps you organize, doesn't revolutionize your thought, but it helps you straighten things out, like putting the knives into categories, with the tips and blades all facing together.

But he also inspired me, and hopefully just at the right time (though I was asking for it, looking for it, so it's silly to bring up the notion of coincidence). He talks about psychophysics - although in more basic terms than the conventional science - and he presents it as a way of using subjective experience as evidence, as a thing to be explained. This was how I felt about it for a long time, but as the years and papers and experiments wheel on, you can't help but start to see things operationally, in terms of functions and moving parts, and you operationalize your subjects too, and they become black boxes that press buttons. This is so wrong!

It's wrong, and I used to know it was wrong, and I've maintained a sense that it's wrong - I recognize that this sense is part of what sets me against the West Coast internal noise crowd in modern psychophysics, and which allies me so much to the European tradition. But I'd kind of forgotten, explicitly, how it's something of a travesty against psychophysics to operationalize your subjects, especially if you're interested in psychophysics per se, and not in using it as a means to another worthy end.

What I'm rambling about is what we all know - when you have a subject in a psychophysics experiment, and you give them instructions on how to do the task, you are asking them to take hold of a phenomenal object, and to give you responses based on that object. Often the object is so ineffable that it can only be explained by example - 'this, you see this? when you see this, press this button; or, press this button when you think you see this, here'. The central object in the entire experiment is the thing that is seen. The instructions to the subject are the closest that the experimenter comes to the phenomenon of interest. But it's too easy, I see now, to slip into the mode of giving those instructions and then thinking that the phenomenon is in the data, and that by describing the data or understanding the data, you're understanding the phenomenon.

Ultimately, maybe, it's just semantics. Ultimately, all you have to analyze in any rigorous sense is the data. But I think that many psychophysicists forget, and start talking only about performance - I've done this many times now. I've gone long enough without enough inspiration, for years now, only seeing it peek through now and then, always having trouble circling back to the real object of fascination. But this book, Chalmers' book - or probably, just a few choice passages from the book - has renewed my clarity, and as I said, just in time, because I feel that the importance of these ideas, for my research and my writing and my very career, is swinging right into center stage.

Also, I have a headache right now, officially it's been 59 days since the last, longest gap since record keeping began (May 2012). I gave it a 3.5, but I'm going to go raise that to a 4.5 now, it's getting worse.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

toronto

just in time to make it 2 for June:



Notes at the Robards Library on the U.Toronto campus, 3:30 pm on 6-26-13.

My feet are very tired. Got up this morning at 5, took a shower, kissed my wife goodbye, and went out to meet the waiting taxi. Had a coffee at the airport.

Got on the prop plane to Toronto at 6:30. Had a coffee on the plane, with a muffin and a cup of yogurt. Clearly I am thinking of food.

Looking out the plane window while we were still on the Boston tarmac, I noticed that I could see the flicker of sunlight through the propellers - I was sitting right next to the front of the left engine, on a plane that was two thirds empty - but only in my periphery. So the propellers were rotating no faster than 60 Hz. Once we went to take off and the engines revved up, I couldn't see the flicker anymore - revving up meaning revving faster, you see.

Got to Toronto by 9, the Billy Bishop airport, on a little island on the lake in front of the city. First person off the plane, last through customs. Canadian customs are actually pretty challenging! Dunno what was up with that.

Then, took a 1 minute ferry ride to the shore, and walked north on Bathurst street. Made it to Kensington market and found a little open air restaurant to get breakfast. It was almost 10. I was already soaked with sweat. Ninety degrees out, humid, and not a cloud in the sky, and I'm wandering the streets of a strange city with a 10 pound bag on my back and a poster tube on my arm. I had a cheese omelet, which came with salad and hashbrowns, it was pretty good. And toast.

I am so hungry. I then wandered for about an hour, through Toronto Chinatown, until I came to the Toronto Art Gallery or whatever it's called. Bought a ticket and discarded my luggage, and wandered the museum for 3 hours. Best part by far was the set of installations on the fourth floor, something I've never seen before: little repeating 3-d audiovisual pieces, rooms full of stuff with recordings playing - some of the recordings were little dramas, one was just a rainstorm, from start to finish. It was great. Had a coffee at the museum.

Then I left the museum and went the wrong way, south instead of north, deeper into the city instead of towards the University of Toronto. Finally I made it here, and now I'm resting in the library, cooling off and writing these notes. I took lots of little videos of my day so far.

From here, I need to 1) get something to eat, 2) get to a subway station, 3) figure out how to use the Toronto subway, and 4) use it to get to York, or as close as I can (then I have to take a bus, apparently). If all goes well I'll be at York University in no less than 90 minutes. Wish me luck! I'm so hungry.

part 2, 18:56pm, June 28 2013

Meeting is over. Sitting in the weird weird weird Billy Bishop Airport departure area/lounge. It would be much nicer if half the flights weren't delayed because of some storm.

Meeting was interesting. Had several talks with F.K., about my current in-review JOV paper, for which he is one of the reviewers; about my current little blur adapt project that I presented (to 3 people, I think) here at this meeting, he had some very helpful comments there; and on other random spatial vision lightness brightness topics. Lots of fun, I think talking to him made the whole meeting worthwhile.

Also met with D.G., as a sort of pre-interview for a postdoc position. Not sure I want to really apply. I was testing to see if it was something that might be up my alley, definitely far up it, but now I'm thinking maybe too far. It's probably too much of a stretch to try to work natural scenes and spatial vision into the level he's working at. I'll study his work over the next couple of weeks, then let him know.

Also managed lunch with F.W. to discuss migraine psychophysics. She seems to have cooled a bit on the migraine spatial vision business, but is still interested. Similar attitude to N.H. about the difficulty and unlikelihood of having migraineurs do vision tasks or perimetry during their auras, though I am not convinced. I will take the long view. M.D. is enthusiastic, I met with him last week. I am almost thinking of writing an entire proposal out, it seems it would be relatively straightforward. I feel I've put all the requisite pieces together, i.e. bounced ideas off all the important people. The main thing that's missing is predictions as to how certain psychophysical properties might be influenced, which is something that L.L. brought up on his own. So now, it seems I should get back to him.

Interesting things I saw... C.B.'s keynote address was pretty bad. I don't know what the general opinion was, but it seemed for the wrong audience - like he was addressing a bunch of visual physiologists in 1992. Don't know what was going on there. Good talks were R.K. on superior colliculus, showing us maps and explaining function, things that if I've ever learned them I've forgotten; G.L.'s talk was interesting, reading and training reading with CFL patients; H.W.'s talk was good, R.B.'s I thought was too much review; A.P.'s talk on form perception and V4 was very interesting. A.P.'s and R.K.'s were like little topical seminars on things I didn't know; I guess R.B.'s was similar but I already knew all of it. D.Z. gave a talk on how MRI magnets affect the fluid in the semicircular canals, resulting in constant nystagmus for anyone who gets into an MRI machine. I remember the slight shock I got the one time I was put in an MRI magnet, but I don't remember noticing nystagmus. I might have thought it was concentration problems, instead.

So that was the meeting. Mostly good, a little slow in some places. I got to attend the retirement of the great H.W.. Poster sessions were too brief, barely worth the trouble, though I did get F.K.'s comments and H.W. came by and didn't complain about anything, though he didn't volunteer compliments or suggestions either. He thought the phase filter was a neat idea, though.

***

Observations on Canada

The way of speech is different. They do say 'soarry' instead of 'sarry', and they say it a lot. I hear a lot of 'os' instead of 'as', 'possengers' instead of 'passengers'. There's something else, a character that feels narrow somehow. I don't know what 'narrow' means there, but it feels right, so I'm using a word that feels right to describe a feeling that I can't otherwise describe. May all be in my head.

The York campus, which is in the northern Toronto suburbs, had lots of animals. I saw a raccoon, a groundhog, and a rabbit, and lots of black squirrels. I saw the groundhog and the rabbit at the same time. I don't think I've seen a raccoon up close since I was a kid, probably out at the cabin or something. And I'm not sure I've ever seen a groundhog up close. This was all right in the middle of campus.

When I was trying to get up to York, just having gone into the Spadina station, I got turned around and lost and couldn't find my way. An older guy, long white hair bound up behind his head, heavy set, white beard, noticed that I looked confused, stopped, and told me where to go.

Again, I feel that the people are different. A part of it must be in the speech, which sounds American but is subtly different. I think a professional would be necessary to explain the differences completely. Multiple idioms that I've heard from C* and D*, many times up here. I wish I could explain the feeling better, because I don't think it's all language. Maybe more visits will resolve this place better for me. It may be because this is big Toronto City, but people seem to dress strangely, less conservatively than Americans in general. Gaudiness isn't standard but seems more common than on Boston streets, at least. I guess I can't generalize from Toronto to Canada. Toronto is clearly an immigrant city, I would say barely half the people I saw in the city were white, lots of Chinese, black, brown, etc. In that sense, it reminds me more of San Francisco or LA. It's very unlike Montreal, which did not have such an American appearance, and which at the same time was much more white.

Aside from the people, it looks exactly American. No obvious differences in infrastructure. The York campus has lots of tunnels and connected buildings, which I would guess is more due to the winter cold and snow and not some sort of Canadian preference for warrens. When I walked through the city I got feelings of China-ness somehow, I think because there was so much construction going on. Nothing about watching the streets makes it look different in any obvious way from watching American streets.

All flights are delayed by hours. Some are nearly canceled. I don't know what's going on, must have been a string of storms across the northeast.

First time ever, I saw another Tennesseean at a vision meeting. He was an undergraduate from MTSU of all places, said he was from Bellevue. I questioned him a bit and he just talked and talked. Despite being from Bellevue, he seemed not to have heard of Cheatham County or Kingston Springs, and so I didn't like him. Complained of Tennessee as a place to escape, where no one wants to return. How can you want to escape if you don't even know your surroundings? Not that I'm not ambivalent about this myself, and I'm half over as old as this guy, but I don't think I was ever that bad. Main thing that rubbed me wrong was that he talked too much, which I guess is just a personality trait. It will probably get him places, I don't know.

Back to Canada. The buses were just like American buses. The subways were regular subways, long cars like the China style, where you could walk from end to end. Spadina station where I first got on was a link between two lines, one of which I didn't travel on, but it looked a lot like the Boston green line, trolly cars running through tunnels. I would have liked to try that one. The friendly white-haired guy got off one of those.

Forgot to mention til now, had a headache yesterday morning, give it a 7, maybe even 8. Woke up with it and it got worse through the morning, coming and going. Quasi-hangover, but I'd just had 3 beers with a full dinner the night before, not enough for a real hangover, though I think the alcohol probably did cause it, in addition to dehydration from the long trek across the city and the general relief of arrival. Slept terribly Wednesday night, partly from the headache starting, and partly from Terry calling and texting me every 10 minutes starting around 6am, probably had barely 5 hours total.

Right eye trigeminal was sore, still sore today, but the headache disappeared over lunch yesterday, went from a 7 to nearly zero. I was still a bit dazed and confused, but got over it pretty quickly. Slept well last night, got at least 8 hours in, maybe more.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

[last Monday, the 13th,  I woke up with a great headache that lasted more than 48 hours. left side on the first day, right side on the second. nothing else particularly interesting.]

notes after midnight on May 17, 2013

When I was about 12, I could go outside some afternoons, in my backyard, and see giant helicopters flying across the sky, with what looked like trucks and tanks suspended below on long cables, in long processions, one giant helicopter after another. That would have been nineteen-ninety, ninety-one, the Gulf War. Just now, on my last night in this house, to which my family moved in winter of nineteen eighty-five, when I wasn't yet six years old, I went out to the car to get the computer that I'm now writing on, and I hear a roar, a helicopter, coming from the southeast. I stand and wait to see it, and can't find it, as it's getting so loud that I can feel the vibrations. I'm confused at the conflict between what I hear and what I don't see, just a sky of stars, and then I see it, an enormous shadow, a blank space against the stars, flanked by dim lights, and the sound I hear finds its match.

Now I lay on the floor of the living room, what we called the room where my mother's pianos sat for more than 25 years, which is now empty but for little piles of human junk here and there. I'm sleeping here just for the strangeness of it, and because I figure if I sleep in my old bedroom, a smaller space as the boy who painted cats might advise me, I will get a cave cricket in the mouth. Usually a room looks larger when you clear it out, but the piano room looks smaller without the pianos. The true nature of the house is revealed in this room, a set of almost ramshackle wooden boxes, this room the boxiest of all of them.

I get to hear the crickets and frogs outside, and the constant truck of I-40. I mentioned the stars. And I get to spend one last night in this string of boxes in the countryside, set in an undrainable swamp, in the Harpeth hills. Only yesterday did I get that cliched phrase - you have these hills or those hills, hills is an appendage for a pleasant or obscure prependage. But this place is in the hills, and it was flooded by the Harpeth only 3 years ago, so I think it deserves the name.

I'm not sure what to make of all of it. I never quite understood my surroundings when I lived here, I only saw what was just at my nose and never questioned it or looked further, though I thought I did. Now I think I know how to see further, but coming back here and wandering around, I feel the old ignorance surface, and it's a strange feeling of simultaneously knowing where I am and never having known, and really only knowing that I'll probably never be back.

Friday, January 18, 2013

gone, gone..

I need to get back to posting on my research activities, which have not ceased completely believe it or not. Next time, next time.

My grandfather, granddaddy, RSM, died Tuesday night. He was 92, born on the Ides of March in 1920. He was my last grandparent, my mother's father. Her mother, Elizabeth, who I will always say was probably the most important influence on the development of the contents of my mind, died almost 3 years ago at 85. My father's father died in summer of 2001, 89 years old. His mother died in 1998, 84.

My mother's parents were always closer to us, maybe because they were younger than my father's - by a decade - and had a lot more energy left. My father's parents could only tell me stories and talk with me; my mother's parents took me places and taught me things.

Elizabeth gave me books, told me about what she knew and where she'd been, took me to museums and historical sites all over the southeast, taught me to explore cities and the countryside and new towns, and to wonder where we and our ancestors had come from, and where all people and their cities and their civilizations had come from.

Granddaddy took me fishing on the rivers and lakes that he'd fished on since he was a boy - since before they had existed, in the case of those big TVA lakes, I guess. He tried to take me hunting, but I clearly wasn't interested. He took me camping and exploring in forests and mountains. He showed me how to interact with nature, and I don't think he ever knew how much of it stuck with me. I'm not a fisherman, but I know how to fish, and I know how to get around in the woods, and I'm at home in the outdoors. He was also a doctor and an artist. On the outside he was a cynic and a skeptic as pertained to human things, but he was always fascinated with nature, and with the human being and the human mind, and I think he was proud of me for becoming what I am. I know for certain that since I was little I learned to copy his personality, and my mother has commented on it positively and negatively, because he could be harsh and negative. I always wanted to be like him.

It was so strange to see him go, just like it was with Elizabeth, who was always so mobile and active and who spent her last year or so unable to get out of bed. Granddaddy, and I told him this the last time I saw him, was always the strongest person I ever knew, the model of strength, invincible even though I knew he was always getting injured in one way or another, always sick but always too strong for the sickness. But in his last years he lost his house and all of his health, and became thin and pale and weak, and finally he too was stuck in bed, but thankfully only for the last couple of months.

One of the last times I saw him, around Labor Day, I went to pick him up in Dunlap to bring him back to Kingston Springs to stay for a while. He said he wanted to start driving again, as if it were possible, and I think he must have known it wasn't, but also that he knew that to get out and get around was his only way of living, and that otherwise he had nothing left. He talked about his old life, basically the time before Elizabeth died, when he still painted and was still on his own, and had her to take care of and to take care of him. Then she went, and he sold his house and moved from place to place, and I kept thinking he was like a living ghost, and he knew it. I wish he could have lived forever, but nobody does.

So is this the best option we have? Live to be old, and watch as everything is subtracted from you, until you are zero. He had nothing left, he had given it all away or lost it or had it taken from him. I think I will always feel like he lost too much that we could have taken, or that we took things too early. He was more than any of us knew how to deal with, and we didn't know how to deal with his slowly fading away. His nurse called my mother early on Tuesday morning to say he was writhing in bed and laughing, and we all took that as a sign, properly, that he was almost finished. He was so tired, I've never seen anyone so tired...

So sad this week, so sad...

Thursday, January 10, 2013

frustration '13

so, this past summer, my boss tells me that he's invited to give a retrospective paper on a particular topic as it pertains to a meeting he's been a regular at for almost 20 years. he asks if i'd be interested in writing it with him, and i honestly said no, i don't know the meeting that well, it's not really my core area, i don't have time now to do a retrospective which means all sorts of reading and research that i don't need to do on old things that nobody cares about anymore, and there are other things i'd rather be doing. he seemed to agree and said okay, we won't do it. then, a week later he tells me he agreed to supply the paper, as if i'd agreed, and so i didn't put up a second protest, except probably for a confused look on my face.

so here we are now, the paper is due, i've written it and spent a few good weeks on it, and i'm satisfied with it. i'm not even going to the meeting to present it. so now he wants to continue making changes and modifications to the structure of the thing, and he wants me to make the presentation for him. this is really frustrating. it's too late to fight it, because the paper is there on the schedule, he's going to present it, and i don't *want* to present it, and if i refuse to make the presentation he's not going to be able to do it himself, and it will just cause a fight and a falling out, which is bad because we're currently on good terms.

this is very frustrating. i'm put, again, in this position of paralysis, where there are several other things that i want to do, or need to get done, and instead i have to do this pointless job instead, and so i wind up doing next to nothing. i'm like a ghostwriter. how is this research? i have papers to revise and resubmit, papers to complete and submit, papers to write and complete, experiments to finish and write up, and instead i'm struggling over this stupid retrospective on a topic that i think is basically irrelevant, and in which my *conclusions* are that that work done on this topic over a 20 year period are basically irrelevant. the paper itself begs the question of why the paper has even been written. i think i made a big mistake in letting myself get put into this assignment.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

words

trying, trying, to get to a black belt in tkd. it's hard, because i am not good at tkd. i have no athletic talent whatsoever, but i try anyways. sometimes it goes well.

so i keep hurting my back over the years, and for the most part it's been less frequent in the past 3, what with the regular exercise. however, i hurt it badly, permanently, last year, after *resting* for a month. not resting actually, but working on a grant proposal, doing nothing but sitting/slouching and reading/writing.

so then, lately, i decided to start doing the sunday afternoon core training class, which is basically variations on sit-ups that you do in rounds, over and over again. it's good. i did it this sunday. the day before, i went to the grocery store, and forgot that we were almost out of rice, so i didn't buy any.

monday night we ate the last of the rice, so tuesday night, on the way home, i went by the grocery and bought two bags, because if you buy two you get a discount. then i went home. this was all on foot or by train. with two 15 pound bags of rice. i didn't perceive a problem.

wednesday night i reached out to lift up the toilet seat, and something in my upper back exploded. so no more tkd for the rest of the week, and it hurt a lot. it's mostly better now, hurts, but i'm not partially immobilized anymore. thursday and friday, along with the back pain, my right arm hurt and my hand was numb. so i'm suspicious that the damage wasn't just to a muscle, but to some part of the spinal machinery, although if so maybe it shouldn't be improving so fast.

i wrote a facebook poem about it:

people who stand
on escalators
cervical spinal nerve eight
the north wind
on cambridge street


in other news, i'm like most americans, preoccupied with guns lately. i don't think anybody has a right to have one, that sums up my opinion. oh well.

going to china tomorrow morning! that will be nice, except i have work to do that i'm not interested in doing but have to do anyways. should be alright.

**
also, this came out a few days ago, didn't know where to put it, it's pretty ordinary:

undirected urges
to assemble words
vaguely resembling
the task at hand

sitting quietly
struggling silently
ignoring tomorrow
avoiding time

congealing thoughts
pooling together
into my hands
out of my mouth

watch and wait
the page to complete
vaguely resembling
the task at hand

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

pathetic

okay, i was trying to use this site as a journal, somewhere i could type as a habit, and then take advantage of the indexing and all-in-the-same-placeness of it. the cloudiness, as the kids call it.

but now, for more than a week, i'm just whining into it. whine whine whine. i'm getting sick of myself, and here i have myself, whining into a recording. and i'm keeping score. and i actually look at the web stats to see if anyone visits, even though i am basically not linked to anything. well, i'm linked to the facebook profile, but apparently i don't have any stalkers.

today i got reviews back on a paper submitted more than 3 months ago. not terrible - the editor seems to like it, and one reviewer seems fine with it, and the other reviewer was ambivalent. but they all hate my writing. yes. dense, detailed, opaque, confusing. i keep.. getting.. those.. comments. why? this time, i'm going to blame it on the process. this paper took 2 years and a dozen versions to get assembled and submitted. the main result was scooped, so i came up with some more peripheral material and tried to integrate it, while at the same time trying to please my boss by going along with his terminology suggestions. well, i think the peripheral stuff is going to get cut, at least mostly, and i'm going to go for standard wording. i tried to write for commoners, and it didn't work. the strain was showing. so i'm going to go back to writing for myself, which is what i did in the currently almost-done paper that's about to be sent to the same journal.

okay, that was that whine. next, i talk with a colleague today, t*, and he shows me what he's working on, and mentions that his paper is out on his previous project, and i'm so jealous. not so much jealous of him, as i am hateful of myself. i feel like i've done everything wrong. every single thing. wrong.

then, to top that off, i collect a half hour's worth of data - which is more than it sounds like - on this new experiment i've been slowly, gradually, painstakingly working towards getting started. the basic form of the data, the form i had been looking at in the pilot experiment, looked just fine. then i thought i'd take a shot at the planned analysis, correlation between recording data and video statistics - nothing. flat lines. garbage. i really hope i did something wrong, or that i'm really not thinking about the computations in the right way, otherwise, it's really back to the drawing board. this should have worked.

so, day of self-hate and frustration complete. whine whine whine. who are you, what are you doing here?

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

no i

hey.

got this paper to work on - been working on it all day. for the last month or two, actually, with some interruptions. also, got that report to finish. and still haven't started collecting data on that rivalry thing. and what's new? anything else in the pipeline? not exactly. a bunch of computer stuff. got to write a review paper for a conference. need to generate some new grant ideas.

don't really feel like doing any of that right now. back kind of hurts. hurt it last year. spent a month on the first version of the fellowship proposal, spent a month sitting typing and reading. got out of that month, went and worked out hard. got tired, worn out. no problem. came home, picked up the cat bucket - not going to explain what the cat bucket is or why it needs to be picked up - and sproing, something went. so now it comes and goes, and now it's summer, time to train and work, and it's come. aggravation.

this summer is like stasis. waiting. nothing happening now. no big changes. no big plans. nothing to look forward to. nothing to be afraid of. turning 33 friday. 33.

could be playing the piano, but the neighbors don't like it so late. got a complaint a few weeks ago. oh well. could be reading a book. started a good one this weekend. "daily life in china on the eve of the mongol invasion". jacques gernet, 1959. academic study, history, culture, anthropology. gift from elizabeth, probably 17 or so years ago. never read it. it's been waiting for this moment, when finally it gets picked up, finally in the right place at the right time.

so, still getting books from elizabeth, she's been gone more than 2 years now.

will do that. get up in a minute, go lay on the bed and read that book. too much sitting here, waiting to start work, start at 11, finish at 1. why? sometimes it's a good idea. not always. jingping just came over, now the mind is changing. might type a bit on that paper. discussion has points to add. ideas to arrange. the rest is basically done. a few features to fix. not many decisions left.

what else? seemed like there was something else. days seem empty. nothing new coming in. jingping so busy. work is all ethereal. birthday coming. dread.

supposed to go out with r* tomorrow night. see if he shows. intuitive estimate odds 4-1 against. joked elliptically about going drinking with j*, then felt guilty about it.

dread and boredom. o july!

Sunday, July 08, 2012

sunday afternoon, procrastinating, politics

slight headache today. was reading this morning and kept getting a pre-scotoma sort of feeling, as though the letters were hard to see and overlaid with a faint sort of phosphene criss-cross, but there never was any scotoma, and the phosphene sensation was very ethereal. i suspect this headache is due to my having slept until 10:39 this morning.

***

not a very productive week. i managed to get the video rivalry experiment into working condition, but never actually cut a prism setup to start trying to collect some data. really, i want to get j* to cut the prisms for me, but she's never around. definitely will start early this week. i also finally started writing the ADI report. pretty dry stuff. most of the report will be figures showing that nothing is happening, accompanied by captions that explain as much.

***

i get randomly preoccupied with politics sometimes, so i thought i'd sit here and type out a bit on my political thinking. why not? i think writing this stuff down gets it out of the system. i don't like thinking about it - this sort of thing, writing it down and looking at it is sort of like spitting into a cup: you can't deny that it came from you, but you don't want to ingest it again. seeing this stuff in print might keep it out of my mind for a while.

okay, i'm basically a libertarian. i don't like saying that, because my general impression of libertarians is that they're kind of hateful and resentful of the way things are, and i feel that (even though, truly, i do have a lot of hate bundled deep down inside) i am more apathetic and discouraged than either of these qualities. i think that it is undeniable that in times of crisis, big and small, the state grows and accumulates power, and refuses to give it up. it just gets bigger and bigger, and acquires more and more power and responsibility, and consumes more and more resources, and becomes more and more inscrutable.

this sort of reaction to the government might also make me an anarchist, and when i was younger i considered myself one. the only books on political thought that i've ever read were proudhon, kropotkin, chomsky, and zinn. but as time has gone by, i have decided that anarchism, and socialism, can only be useful in the social sense, and not in the economic sense. people cannot agree on what they need, and what they deserve in return for what they produce, and on who controls what resource, unless there is a system of incentives and disincentives in place, and i think that the only such incentives that can work in the long term are free markets and law enforcement. so, i think we need capitalists and police, which means i cannot be a true socialist or an anarchist. i do think that capitalists should be more progressively taxed, and that police should be governed more closely by the people they serve.

i'm not impressed with democracy. i don't know why people must be able to decide on their own laws, when most people don't understand things very well beyond their own private spheres. i would be more in favor of a technocratic meritocracy running things, with democratically instructed public taxation and democratically elected police leadership. the main benefits of democratic government are that official corruption and state violence against the people are minimized. corruption is addressed by making it so that corrupt officials cannot possibly be reelected because of their reputations; violence is prevented because different arms of the state will be pushed by the people to prosecute excesses. i don't think that the way to get these benefits is, necessarily, to elect all legislators and executives, and even judges. the people need power to impeach corrupt officials, which can be done through referendum; they need power to investigate and monitor the bureaucracy, which can be done through some democratically controlled agency; and they need power to punish reckless state violence, which can be done through the same democratic means. it also would seem to be a good idea to put taxation in the hands of a democratic agency, or require all taxes to be subject to referendum. the state should only carry out functions that the people are willing to pay for.

basically, the democratic branch of government should be purposed with supervising the other branches, with the mandate of preventing corruption and violence in specific ways. the effective branches of the government would be run like a corporate meritocracy, setting goals for the purpose of improving and advancing the condition of the city or state that they govern. laws would pertain entirely to protection and advancement of commerce, public safety, and civil rights. there's the rub, i guess - what constitutes these pillars, and how to achieve them - but i think that a meritocratic technocracy, strongly bound by public supervision, would be better than the power and charisma driven system of institutional demagoguery that we have now.

so, i am in favor of a sort of libertarian technocracy. both the r* and d* party are corrupt, writing laws for the good of private industries, rather than for the good of commerce itself; they both lie constantly to the public and favor the opaque system of government that we have now, i.e. they both are opposed to public supervision of the state; the r* party is fine with social backwardness and feudal ignorance of human desire for freedom - a position they call "social conservatism", while the d* party pushes public reliance on dictates from the state, and the idea that all problems should be remedied by the state, which they call "progressivism"; they're both prone to doing stupid, wasteful things because in the short term it gets them reelected. i think that the people should be free to fail and be stupid and fat and suffer, unless they explicitly volunteer to pay for the alternative - not to say i'm against safety nets, just cradles - which i think means i cannot be a d*. i also think that traditionalism and nationalism are backwards and harmful, and that the state should be a modulatory force for progress, which i think means i cannot be a r*.

anyways, unless there is some big change coming, this year will be the first of many in the future that i will no longer vote for d*s as i have in the past (i did vote for a r* mayor once). i feel pretty stupid for having written this, but there it is. please get out of my head now, politics.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

nope

okay, so, that grant i applied for? failed. not discussed. not.. even.. discussed.

so, that's disappointing. hit rate was just 10-15%, but i felt like i had something. i've seen others with the same fellowship, and i don't think what i was proposing was of any lower quality. maybe a bit further from the norm, proposing things two steps from what anyone had done before - probably better to go one step at a time. there's also the fact that i'm obviously an underachiever. i can't hide it anymore - CVs don't lie. an underachiever with an abnormal proposal.

hurts my feelings, i guess. how can it not? well.. like i've been telling everyone, as a preemptive defense, i knew i wouldn't get it. a long shot. but it wasn't some self-fulfilling bullshit. i did my best. there's good stuff in there, and i'll do it anyways. but not putting it in the top half, not putting it on par with the rest of the proposals. that does hurt. i was hoping for a rejection despite a good score.

i think i'll probably still get comments back on it. i think. d** got comments even when his wasn't discussed in the last round.

let's rephrase the bit about being an abnormal underachiever. how about.. outsider?

let's get romantic.
tell the truth.
you see yourself as an outsider,
don't you?

i don't do it on purpose.
i don't try to be on the outside
in order to satisfy some requirement
that i've set for myself.

it's just what happens.
it's what i'm drawn to.
i'm drawn away.

you make choices
that put you on the outside.
your mentor is an outsider, and
you are the outsider in the lab.

in groups of friends,
i am the one who isn't
part of the group,
who tagged along,
happily accepting all invitations.

the underachiever.
the one you don't know.
i reject what they accept.

always the quiet one.
the different one
who finds himself in strange places.

it shines through
even in an NIH fellowship proposal:
you are a risk.

yeah, screw you. i wrote all that. i wrote it, then edited it into a poem. it's because of my self consciousness, not in spite of it. i am afraid to confront what i am, but i just did it. fine, i'm mad, and my feelings are hurt. i'm a pretentious kid. i'm used to it.

have to get used to this, kid. i hear there's a whole career of this ahead. have to keep writing these things and sending them in. some will succeed, some won't. i'll keep doing what i want to do, this is my guarantee.

Thursday, June 14, 2012

ohhh...

morning, myself. heart.
end. voice. nightingale?

This is just a diversion. There are things in life, every day, that we want to reach out and touch, or interact with, or follow, or watch, but we can't, because there are other things that we have to do instead. Other things that we should do instead. Self control can be suppression of the self, but sometimes it is just being rational, maintaining normal, keeping things the way you want them. Your mind is made up of many different parts which, on their own, are not as intelligent as you are. They don't have the same priorities as you. They don't even have the same memories as you - some of them have only existed for a few days, or months, or years. Maybe, some of them, you can remember when they came into existence. You can remember, because you are the one governing the rest, corralling them. You have to choose, at these instances, what to do - even if these things in life are like lures, and you see that between you and this other possibility, even just what ultimately would be a fleeting bit of soon-to-be-nothing, is a transparent membrane of a single impulse.

It's just a diversion. Maybe don't go back there. Maybe come back here, and see what you did, to keep from going there. Remember what there is in other places. Keep things level. Life is hard.

Monday, March 26, 2012

standing at fenway station, thinking, as usual, "what's my problem", and i came up with a nice little self-referential, iterative statement of it: it's pablum, but i'm not usually this verbally clever, so let's write it down:

don't do what you don't believe
can't believe what you can't understand
won't understand what you won't do

so that's the problem; it's not exactly as i would normally say these things. if you asked me before i formulated this, i would probably say, "i don't like to do what i don't understand", and that's what i started out thinking. but then i asked, "why is that?", and decided that if i don't understand it, i can't really attach to it - then i saw the loop.

interestingly enough, the solution is the negation of the problem, literally:

do what you believe
believe what you understand
understand what you do

both of these statements have a sort of inertia; once you have one of the predicates, it starts rolling and keeps going. since they aren't specific, both statements are generative or productive - the referents don't need to be the same on each loop, but of course they should be logically linked.

(really, the middle statement isn't necessary in either one, with 'believe' replaced with 'understand' in the first line. i feel like the middle line adds some depth, though, so there it is.)

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Typical Monday through Friday

In the morning, at eight o’ clock, two alarms go off. The clock is next to his bed, and he reaches over to stop it, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. The radio is in the hallway, just outside the bedroom door, and he comprehends it to varying degrees.

Sometimes his wife is up before him, but usually not. He gets out of bed, finally, usually before nine. He makes coffee and takes a shower. He brushes his teeth and gets dressed. He packs his lunch and makes a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. He fills a coffee cup and a thermos with coffee, adding enough milk to make it cool enough to drink quickly. He sits by the front door and listens to the radio news, eats his sandwich, and drinks the cup of coffee. If his wife is up, maybe they talk, or maybe she’s in the shower.

If he’s planning to go to tae kwon do that night, he takes his uniform, which is hanging from the radiator in the bedroom, folds it, puts it in a plastic sack, and packs it in his backpack. He gets ready to leave, puts on his shoes, speaks with his wife, kisses her, and goes out the door. If it’s raining, he takes an umbrella. If she’s up, she locks the door behind him, otherwise he takes his keys and locks it.

He steps outside and picks up the newspaper. He stops by the wall in front of his building, sets the thermos down, and puts most of the newspaper in his backpack, except for the front page. He sets off for Reservoir.

Walking down Sutherland Road on the right side, he may encounter some other people, but usually there are few, because most have already gone. He passes several other apartment buildings on his way. Often, there are workmen at one building or another, unloading things from their truck. Maybe he can hear them speaking Spanish to one another.

When he arrives at Cleveland Circle, he’ll try to walk straight through. Half the time, it’s not hard to do, since half the time the traffic is running across Beacon Street. Even if Beacon has the light, they might all have gone. Sometimes he stands and waits. This crossing is a convergence point from several directions, and more people seem to arrive from along Chestnut Hill than from Sutherland. Sometimes he sees someone interesting here, and can watch them until they all arrive at Reservoir.

At the other side of the Circle is Reservoir, but before he gets there he passes his dentists office. He owes the dentist money. He thinks he might have a toothache, but he’s not sure. He wonders if you can give yourself a toothache by focusing all your attention, and the tip of your tongue, on one healthy tooth. His mouth tastes like metal sometimes, since he got all those fillings last summer.

He arrives at Reservoir. It’s random. Sometimes he’s just in time; sometimes he’s just missed it; sometimes he waits. If he waits, he watches the people accumulate. Most of them he doesn’t recognize, but some he does. The people trickle in, then arrive in a wave when one of the buses arrive upstairs, then more trickle in, then the train arrives. He always tries to get on first, on the very back door. Usually he manages to be one of the first.

Unless he’s really late, there’s probably not a seat. He stands or sits, finishes his coffee, reads the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and people crowd on the train. More get on at Beaconsfield. He stares at people when he thinks they aren't noticing, but he assumes everyone else is doing the same thing. He compares nose shapes between two people. He tries to find two noses that are most different, and two that are most similar. He looks for noses that look like his. He is ceaselessly amazed by the irrational variance of noses.

More get on at Brooklines Hills and Village, but some get off there too. At Longwood, half the train gets off. Postdocs, doctors, students. Most of them are Asians.

Station by station, he gets closer to Government Center. Sometimes they make everybody get off at Park, and get on the next train. At Government Center, he always tries to be the first person off the train, out the back door. He can usually do it. By the time the train gets to Government Center, which is the last stop for the D train, there aren’t usually many people still on board.

If the escalator is open, he walks up and out of the station. If someone is standing on it, he curses under his breath and runs up the stairs. It’s a narrow escalator, no room to pass someone who’s just standing there. If someone is just standing there, they might clearly be a tourist and he forgives them. If they're looking at their phone, he sneers. He wonders why the others all line up to stand quietly behind, when he knows they all really want to climb.

Outside is Government Center, City Hall, the Federal Building. The plaza is bleak and impressive, every day. He walks down Cambridge Street towards Mass General. To cross Staniford, to get into the Institute, he usually dodges through traffic stopped at the light. He enters the Institute through the front door now, since his office moved to the other side of the building, and the receptionist always tries to talk to him about the weather. He doesn’t slow down, though.

He goes up the stairs to the second floor, down the hallway by the human resources offices, past the elevator and the second floor wetlabs, past the conference room, across the bridge to 2West, takes a right down the hall by the driving simulator, past the little kitchen where he microwaves his lunch every day, past the meeting room, past the restrooms, take a left, through the research assistant office, says good morning to Jackie at her desk, steps into his office, sets his backpack on his desk, hangs his jacket on his chair, sits down, and wakes his computer.

Andrew has gone to work.

Friday, September 09, 2011

memory

So, my office moved to the other side of the building a month or two ago. My lab is still over there near my old office, and that's also where the copier room is, and the kitchen where I get hot water to drink. So, I do still go over there frequently.

One thing I don't do over there so frequently is use the bathroom - there are two restrooms near the new office, so now I usually go there. These two restrooms are both unisex, and are next door to eachother, and are basically mirror images in layout. The old restroom is laid out differently.

So, just a few minutes ago, I go to the kitchen to get some water, set my mug on the coffee maker to wait for me, and go into the old restroom. This whole time, I'm thinking about the talk that Shrinivas gave a little while before. I do my quick business in the restroom, turn around to leave - and realize that something is wrong. I don't recognize my surroundings. I don't know where I am.

At first, it was kind of terrifying - I thought that I didn't know where I was at all, but quickly realized that, really, I just didn't know which bathroom I was in. The lighting, i.e. the color temperature, was unfamiliar. The layout seemed wrong. "Which one am I in?" I thought. "The left one or the right one?"

I stood there for a few seconds, and thought hard about what was wrong, then finally figured it out. I remembered the water, and that I must be in the old restroom.

That makes two times now that I was in that restroom and thought I was having a stroke. First time was the first time I had experienced a visual migraine aura, which was much more awesome than this.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

self

I have been thinking frequently about who I am, and about whether who I am has changed over the years, and if so, how.

One thing I keep returning to is this feeling that I am losing myself, or that my self is somehow diminishing over time. What I mean is, I feel more and more that I am what I do, and what I see and feel, and the people I interact with - mainly Jingping (not that I think I am Jingping, no) - and the random thoughts that run through my mind when I'm away from things to do or people to interact with.

This isn't necessarily a problem. I don't mind being my thoughts, or being an interaction with my wife, or being the work that I do, or the procrastination that I put between myself and my work. These things, or parallel things, are what I think we all are. But parceling your self into these discrete components makes them identifiable, and subject to direct analysis, which can reveal things in stark detail that you realize you just don't like. There are some specific features that bother me.

When I was younger, I spent a large portion of my free time writing. I wrote stories, essays on my thinking, letters, etc. I did this because I wanted to. Now, I write because I have to - I do research, and I have to write about it to sustain my personal profession. There is always work to do, and when I feel willing to write, I feel I have to apply this will to work, not fun. So, I almost never write for fun anymore. Even worse, I realize that I distract myself from this sort of unease by reading what others have written. It's as though I'm replacing parts of myself with parts of other people.

Also, over the years, I more and more began to think of my self expression as excessive, or pretentious, or useless, and so I suppressed it. I think that my entire character is suppressed. This has not had the result of simply bottling up my character, but instead I think that in some ways I am withering away - I feel that even if I tried to go back to my old ways, of writing out my thoughts regularly, there would be less to write. This is why I am writing this entry, which even as I write it feels excessive, pretentious, and useless. I feel like I have to get a ball rolling, though.

Another thing that bothers me is what I think about. We all have recurring thoughts that irritate us, things that we don't want to think about but that we do anyways. Some of these things are fine at a high level, because they are features of our lives. But other things - news, politics, etc., I find myself repeatedly going through these internal monologues, not daily but frequently, on topics like the American military, US history, religion, politics. Why? I tell myself that I don't care about these things, or I try not to care - I have no effect on them, and they seem to have no effect on me. I feel infected. I want to think about my life, my wife, my work, about things I enjoy. I'm not a politician or a columnist - why do I obsess over these sorts of things? I have not figured this out. I do get a strong feeling that these sorts of thoughts erode my self - they are not me, they are other people, other places. They make me forget who I am.

I am not bothered by thinking about sex or violence, or obsessing about the aesthetics of the Green Line tunnels, or wanting to see if someone sent me an email or a Facebook message, or my shabby piano playing. These are aspects of my life, they are fine in themselves - some of these things may specifically implicate odd aspects of my personality, but so what?

Conclusions: I still exist, but I have doubts about the vitality of my existence. I have suppressed myself too much, and the empty spaces in my mind are more and more taken up with irrelevant puzzles. I'm thinking that a solution may be to do something like this regularly, do more writing for fun, try to be more expressive with other people, stop always trying to hide myself from the outside.