2024-09-15
I've changed the font on my terminal from the usual, Code New Roman, to Iosevka Term, which looks very different... I think it looks nice, and it doesn't have the problem other fonts have where it makes writing feel incredibly slow and sluggish, even though the actual speed of typing is unchanged... that said, I will see how long I keep it before I change back.
I listen to so much music now, and have begun to listen to it on the way to work and whenever I go about anywhere now... I wonder if it is a bad thing. That I can't just go about and listen to the sounds of the birds, without having whatever song (and I don't have a lot downloaded, so it's always the same hundred or so songs) playing in my ears. Probably bad for my hearing at a base level, but I mean mentally it probably does something untoward as well.
Then, it probably makes sense for me to stop. I do listen to a lot of distracting media, for instance I always have something on in the background as I work from home (and, perhaps related, I get less done at home). That said, I also want to be able to enjoy music, as it does sound lovely. When Yorushika released their album *Tousaku*, I remember I sat in bed and listened to it fully during one lunch. I want to say it was June 29th, 2021 but I may be misremembering. It was whenever it was released. It was a heavenly experience: I had already heard a few of the songs once or twice, but to hear the entire album, was truly amazing... of course, not half an hour later, I had returned to baseline mood, which I managed to attack myself over.
I think, I'll stop listening to music (and stop bringing earphones that give me that opportunity) on journeys to work... that said, it does make it hard for me to study Easy Italian! of course it would be good to read more too, but the podcasts do help, so perhaps wait until I've finished my Italy trip to put that into action (though, I think I'll keep learning it even after I've done the trip - I've a few Italian blogs in my RSS feed now too).
Now, of course, traditional social media in the sense of Twitter, Facebook, etc. is bad for all the expected reasons, and should be avoided. I do avoid it and have done for most of my life (I briefly as a teen had a Facebook to communicate with my friends, and Twitter in order to... see inappropriate things) but I wonder: could it be worth it to use the Fediverse social media? Like Mastodon and the like. I of course don't want to turn into one of those people perpetually scrolling, and just having e-mail and RSS now does sort of limit the kind of content to medium-form content as seen on people's blogs (or, I get e-mails from Seth's blog now), and of course, though the Fediverse could be good in terms of social interaction, I should probably achieve that just by getting my website up to scratch (actually updated, so finish them scripts, me!) and e-mailing people whose blogs I read. That said, is this something I really want?
I do like having tidy e-mails, and it does makes sense to have my e-mail inbox be a place where I handle communication. I think I am approaching a better system for handling these things, or at least a newer, tidier one, which is good; I still though don't know what to do in terms of social media. It might not hurt to try, so I suppose I could just set up a Mastodon account and see how it goes? I don't want to be dragged into the newscycle or anything, and would rather see posts from individual people in a way. A lot of blogging is just people writing about their lives - in fact, I do that, with a lot of excess rambling - and I wonder whether at some point I will grow bored of reading people just writing about what they've done, or find it unproductive. That said, it's nice to see what other people do, and their insights, in a way that sort of simulates what you get from talking to others in real life.
Hmm. I might just try it for a bit. That said, it has to be a purposeful activity: no mindless scrolling. I'm partly saved from that because when I'm away from the home or work I don't have internet, so have to essentially make do with myself, or my notepads and books.
I was reading Visa's thousand-word project, and stumbled upon one of them, I think it was seven-hundred-and-something, where he (or maybe his wife asked him this) asked: when does it end? about his work. It had a sudden effect on me as I realised, this could be part of the reason I feel so dissatisfied at work! In my personal life, I know when I've done something: as soon as I have gone to the gym and spent an hour or so their, I can reasonably say I've done a good day at the gym. For everything else, I can reasonably get to the end of an activity and say: yes, I've done a decent amount. But for work, there is always another task, always a backlog, always more to do. That said, I do get things done, but there is always a chance to beat myself up that I haven't done enough relative to what piles up. Perhaps this needs a shift in mindset where I try to do what I can and be proud of the progress I have made, if small. I am trialling sending emails to myself each day to demonstrate what I have achieved (generally because I work on bigger things, each day seems to only have an item or two) and at the end of the week to write what I did that week, including progress on long oustanding issues. That would help me, I think, to get a bit more organised; when the backlog comes back to bite that is when I get especially unhappy, though it does feel like a "it's my fault, but I almost couldn't help it I'm so busy" sort of thing.
We'll see. Hopefully I can come to get better at managing work, and being happy there, soon.
Have a good one.