Imp Writes

I've been reading visa's excellent word vomits and I feel inspired to write more publicly - I've often felt a sense of wanting to express my thoughts and feelings but being blocked by friction, feeling I don't have the right audience, that I don't have the skill to zero in on the thing I actually want to say. So I'm going to try anyway. Right now it's 1:20 am and I'm hanging out at F's feeling tired and sleepy and vaguely guilty that I ended up scrolling twitter instead of reading R:EC like I planned and felt would be more nourishing for my brain. I hoped grounding myself in where I am (twisted onto the sofa with my feet up on the wicker chair) would help me think of what comes next but it's not that easy huh? The interesting thing - and what I keep coming back to - is the dark matter of human society - things you can't say in public because it's socially inappropriate and so you only ever learn under unusual circumstances - or never - or...

I started making omelettes because a) I thought it would be funny to take sasha Chapin's tweet literally as well as seriously b) actually follow through a la visas do 100 thing c) wanted a source of protein to bulk with d) I like omelettes and I'm frustrated by the brown ones. Halfway through, I'm not really sure what I've learned. I suspect I haven't really gone deep enough to actually gain the expertise sasha promised. Most of my omelettes are copies of each other. But I have actually gotten better and faster at making tasty omelettes. Let's see what I've learned. Coriander is magical. It is the perfect herb for flavouring an omelette. I tried basil and celery. Celery gives you an interesting sharp flavour. Basil doesn't quite work. Salt is important. Be careful to balance the salt against the number of eggs and whether or not you're adding salted cheese. Too much oil is not pleasant. Under oiling a non stick pan is relatively okay unless you'r...

There is a slightly weird hack I use when I suspect I may be about to start stressing about a problem I have. I can't recall seeing like this online, and it might be helpful to people other than me. When confronted with a problem I'm stressed about, I think, "Finite problems, bitch! Oo la la"  Technically I sing this in my head. What it means is something like this.  1. The problem is finite in the sense that it is not existential. This means that if I failed to solve it I would still be alive. Most probably I would also still be housed, clothed, fed etc.  And if not, where there's life there's hope (this is something I believe very strongly and may or may not be an important building block). So no biggie. The point is to keep the right perspective on what a biggie is. 2. If I really really needed to solve the problem I could just throw an unreasonable amount of resources at it. For example (this is partway between 1 and 2) I could change my name, move to anot...

This is a space to write about things at slightly longer length than twitter.  Over the last few days, partially inspired by some romantic and career setbacks, and also thanks to  https://blog.tjcx.me/p/consume-less-create-more , I've been thinking about how I can change how much time I allocate to consuming versus creating. One of the simplest ways I can do that is writing.  I have often been told that my writing is too concise - I find the literal act of typing and forming sentences tiring, and I tend to assume too early that other people would understand exactly what picture the words on the screen conjure up in my head. This results in weighty, cryptic one-liners. I'm hoping to avoid that here, where there's no word limit. In the last few months, I've also been feeling unusually uncertain about what I think I know and how I think I know it. On the plus side, this has also led to me renewing my sense of curiosity in all sorts of things - and I'm greatly enjoying ...