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.
