Memorial Day Weekend

All told, I think I did pretty well this week (despite some atrocious weather). I took care of several administrative matters, finished reading Spacecraft Mission Design, and started getting up early again. Technically I fell down on that last one this morning, but not particularly dramatically compared to recent Sundays and I'm on track to continue.

Part of that is that I need some space to work on my own tasks even despite the plan to do lots of stuff together on Memorial Day. Specifically, Dad wants to assemble some shelving units to organize the basement (which really doesn't seem like a priority to me given the functionality deficits on the main floor of the house) and of course we're doing the cemetery circuit. We'll probably cook out, too—I should ask if we need to take that meat out of the freezer tonight. That's...more than I'd really like, and Dad is off Tuesday to complicate matters. And he works from home Wednesday and Thursday, so.

Back to the library with me, most likely. I didn't get to it as many days as I would have liked this week, so I'm due for a correction. The next book of theirs I'm reading is non-technical, which I think lowers the activation energy requires while building up the basic habit.

I might stop doing Links

I'm definitely not doing them this month. May is almost over and I haven't saved any interesting articles to share. And I'm not in a hurry to go digging up links just to make the post.

This is directly a product of my hard-fought battle of wasting less time on social media—a battle I think I'm winning, this being but one more piece of evidence. But that itself is due to a strong philosophical opinion against news and for passivism. Several of the commentators whose opinions I value keep reiterating points about the value of focusing one's attention and fighting the distractions of our information-overloaded culture (see, for example, CGP Grey and Meredith Patterson for different perspectives on this problem). Honestly, I'm not convinced that they go far enough. It's not just about a difficulty focusing, but about the selfish valuation of your own time and effort.

On that note, my pace of reading books has been really go, and I'm not experiencing an overwhelming distractedness or anything like some people describe. If anything, it's the reverse; I read The Stand in eleven days, basically dropping everything once the plot started to pick up around page 250. To some extent that's because Stephen King is an engaging writer, but it also indicates a certain ability to engage with longform narratives still survives.

Returning to the main point, I'm just not all that enthusiastic about compiling a list of links just for the sake of compiling it. I don't even enjoy doing it, and consider how many stories have proven mistaken, illusory, or simply non-consequential. Why should I bother writing summaries for all of them? What purpose does it serve? Some stories are worthwhile, yes, but honestly the ones that excite me for whatever reason are probably worth discussing in greater detail.

That's why I'm probably giving up on link posts. This is hardly a hard commitment, but I would be somewhat surprised if I decide to resume link posting when I could be, I don't know, reading spacecraft engineering books.

Mid-May

I didn't do all that much this week because I was consumed reading The Stand for most of it. No joke, I read almost nine hundred pages between Sunday evening and the wee hours of Friday morning. I can clearly see why Stephen King is such a successful (as in, highly selling) author. Simultaneously, I have no strong desire to read any more of his work.

This, quite predictably, has thrown off a lot of my internal schedules and whatnot, so the goal for this week is to get that under control, and quickly at that. There's a number of things I want to do, like finish cleaning the fridge, get a haircut, push out a book review, work on job applications, and so on.

One positive: getting back to the YMCA after all these years. I'm mostly focusing on treadmill-type exercises because my daily distance walked must have crashed after graduation. This is a good opportunity to read in a significantly less sedentary manner, and appears to be a promising place to integrate library books into my reading profile. My mom is trying to get there two or three times a week, and I will endeavor to go along most of the time.

I might start swimming again if I can deduce the combination to my old lock, but until that occurs or I shell out for a new one, I'll go for something less capital-intensive.

Oh, also: the weather finally let up so the local campus observatory was open to the public. It was their ADA night, as well, so there were on top of the parking garage instead of a building roof; consequently, more telescopes. I got to see Mars, Jupiter, and Luna through some pretty big scopes, plus a couple of stars. The International Space Station did a pass near the moon early in the evening. This Friday probably won't be as exciting, provide the clouds decide to cooperate again.

Mother's Day

I spent basically the entire day doing things with people, and I am exhausted.

To be fair, it was a busy week. Still, I'm not a big fan of socializing. I hope I can spend a bit more time to myself this week. I have a blog post I want to finish and another I want to start, plus plenty of material to study and practice on my own. Job applications also fell off in the last couple of days and I'd really rather jump back on that saddle.

A small change: I've decided to no longer exercise on the weekends. My thought process is that first, exercise is often a stumbling block in my morning routine, and I'm wasting perfectly good Saturdays with slow starts. Second, I've been having weird pains in my upper body, so I think that I might need to incorporate a dedicated rest period, and weekends are a natural point to do that. We'll see if things improve.

(I should note that I've started alternating exercise sets and reading in the mornings, which slows down the overall process but makes it easier to complete, so my exercise has been slightly more regular in the last fortnight or so. It's also stacking up pages read, which is good for my self-esteem more generally—the length of my to-read list has been giving me anxiety for months if not longer, and finally drilling into it the way I have since finishing First Man is making me feel a lot better about it.)

So that's the current situation. No major progress to report, but not too much trouble, either. I'll probably stay in tomorrow to avoid overtaxing myself, but then it's back to the library everyday. Those engineering texts aren't going to read themselves.

Routines

My routine is less weekly and more daily, which I think is part of why the weekly reviews are losing interest to me. In the academic environment, weekly cycles mattered a lot, and I sort of rolled that over after coming home. Part of that, though, was that a lot of the house stuff required Dad's presence, which could only be guaranteed on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons.

There's still weekly components, especially on the weekends, but I'm operating a good deal more autonomously at this point, at least with regard to how I structure my overall time. I'm not going to the house to paint or whatever; I'm going to the library to read engineering books in the afternoons. I've noticed some of the same anti-productive dynamics at play there; I want to try shaking things up, but ultimately I am the one directing my action there and I have the capacity to change things should I so desire.

(I think I am going to experiment with that, in fact—not tomorrow, because I have plans that involve other people but an insufficiently specified time. Tuesday I have evening plans, though, so it would honestly be idea to try going to the library in the morning and coming back mid-afternoon to see where I'm at cognitively. I thought that would be a good strategy at one point back when I was working on the house, but in practice I turned out to be pretty tired when I got home and rarely accomplished what I wanted in the evenings. Whether the same applies here is an important question to answer.)

Introspection is still valuable, of course, and Sunday nights are still a good Schelling Point for introspecting. I'm just not sure it's the more insightful point to be doing so.