No Coffee

I'm not sure if I've ever talked about this on my blog before. I must have, even though the habit, the routine, became much more solidified recently then in the past when my blog was more active.

I enjoy many things less without coffee and I think by definition that makes me dependent. Part of why I do no coffee days is to make sure I continue to exercise that disciplinary muscle of continuing to function without coffee, and also find things I enjoy doing without it. I've neglected the latter and for a time simply dumped all my chores onto the no coffee day since they don't require all that much brain power and being caffeinated doesn't help with them at best, and at worst makes me do them impatiently and haphazardly. In theory. In practice I do function slightly better even doing menial chores. Though part of it is also that there build up some amount of fatigue over the week that is pushed entirely to no coffee day as a result. Today as I truly reflected on my frustrations I realized it's simply not good. The source was that I was "running out of coffee time" to play Age of Empires since I don' play or even feel like playing games on no coffee day - if today had been no coffee day it would have been great tbh. It probably started with the expectation inertia to drink coffee for board game day at Joe's which ended up not happening, then that transitioning into a close to 8 hour day outside going to and fro and spending time at a mall deep in the suburbs. I guess it really should be a rule of thumbt hat I tell Chris I expect to be home by 6 or something in the future and that I should not be afraid to set my gaming recreation time more concretely.

I've also recently thought more about the energy I spend passively. Deviations from routine, negative emotions - I'm not sure if it's the same kind of energy, but I probably spend some energy redirecting my efforts, replanning my day, or getting over emotions without processing them later as Dr K might put it. But how do you process? If I think about it, I feel like I already know the ways I've done it before - blogging. For one. "Solo" adventures - another. I remember distinctly once in command school, where I cleaned the bathroom and listened to Paramore, doing nothing else while others spent their free night's out, well - out. That's another then (and probably more than the bathroom) - the music. The same, good old stuff. Maybe there's research on this, but I've basically locked in some of the music I always turn back to, nostalgia wise. I'm not sure if more will ever be added. Maybe, in a different way. Maybe it's harking back to times and emotions that become less and less frequent. Dr. K too, I think, is how I process - maybe that's why it's relaxing to hear him, but also dangerously engrossing if I do it at work, I guess. 

Other things. I'm thinking about my inner voices. No, not some psycho shit. I just mean how does your inner voice sound like and does it change? Mine does, I think, to some degree. If it were a transformer model for language, almost like a hidden layer of meaning separate from attention, long context, the word itself, etc. It's like long-tone or something, Some of it today is Grubby or Dr. K-like in language. I'm reminded of how I sound blogging here. In Singapore, sometimes, I would feel ashamed. Because it sounded like my "elitist" voice - the kind of English I hear and sound absent Singlish, and I was afraid I was a stereotype, that this was really me, and I was ashamed. Am I today? No - in some ways, I think I've accepted it. I've missed stream of conscious-ing. I've missed selfish-ly taking up space, standing on my soapbox about inner-psychology and musing like a teenager who read one book by Nietzsche. 

Cruelty

I decided to reflect today.

I reflect most days, but not write it down. Today I met a stranger who was crying, and asked her if she was alright, but soon realized I was quite unequipped to be of consolation as her friend had passed just then, a long time family friend. Absent of religious platitudes, and having not thought about what I would've liked to hear myself when my father passed, I was not sure what to say, though on reflecting on the bus, I think it would have been wise to offer to keep the passed in my thoughts and remember good things about them. Instead I quite awkwardly talked about how my father had also passed from cancer years ago in a bad situation (covid). Cancer is cruel, and ugly, and meaningless, and I wonder if that honesty would have helped or not too. It is objectively terrible, and that is why people are applauded for fighting against it. There is no consolation despite it.

I want to be able to talk better. My emotional spectrum seems to be comedy or anger, maybe because of the nurture from being a guy.

STEM

 I had a conversation with Craig, Josh and Glenn, Xun Yi and Yan Zhou on separate occasions. Different ways of getting to a similar discussion about how SF puts on free, cool stuff for young adults and Singapore does not seem to. There are good reasons that explain why, but veering off, I also wondered about Singaporean expression of passion. Using STEM fields as an example, the most commonly cited reason why Singaporeans don't seem to express the same level of passion in it is purportedly that the "rat race" killed this passion at a young age. I can certainly agree with that, but wanted to go deeper than that too.

My brother used an example during one of his tech meetups - he said the most enthusiastic, question asking audience members tended to be foreign, while Singaporeans largely kept silent. They are, there though, right? The Singaporeans still turn up. I honestly believe, and most people would agree, Singaporeans are actually passionate for many things, but some of these are expressed (more often) and some are not (less often). On the surface, cynicism is king. We suck thumb, then complain, and anybody who doesn't is lucky, rich, old, or wayang.