Pham and I have now spent over eight years together. We continue to have stimulating conversations, like
| Jacob | Hi cat! Did you know you're a cat? You're actually the best cat that's ever existed or possibly could exist. Keep cattin', Mr. Cat! |
| Pham | [silence] |
He retains his interests in bookshelf parkour and investigating the mystery of what lies behind the picture frames on the walls.
Health-wise, he hasn't had the best year. He's been plagued with sneezes and sniffles and we have yet to find a lasting solution. He's also been put on meds for hyperthyroidism. He made it excruciatingly clear that he would not be accepting those meds orally, but thankfully there's a transdermal version that doesn't bother him too much. Indeed, he's perhaps more sanguine about me sticking my drug-laced gloved finger into his ear twice a day than I am about having to.
A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one. —dubiously attributed to Confucius
I felt like I was sick all summer. A month after getting COVID, I still had a bad cough, and finally decided my usual strategy of just taking over-the-counter meds and waiting for it to pass wasn't good enough. The doctor prescribed me so many things on such a convoluted schedule that I had to use a spreadsheet to keep track of it. I don't know if the meds helped or if I just needed more time, but, I was better within a few weeks.
But I got COVID again at the beginning of December, while I was in Lisbon, which helped turn that trip into a nightmare. And I still have symptoms, so I'm worried it's going to be another prolonged bout.
These are very mild ailments, all things considered, and I'm grateful to not have more serious or chronic health issues. But it's still been demoralizing. The silver lining, as my concomitantly-sick travel companion pointed out, is that being sick can make other problems in one's life suddenly not feel so important.
One thing I'm happy about: I lost weight again this year. Being sick helped. I also think I improved my eating habits in some ways, like not starting the day with a donut or pastry as often. And I did significantly more cardio—a bit of running, but mostly long walks around the city. I like walking, so sometimes the biggest obstacle is just how time-consuming it can be. I've tried to shift my mindset and view it as a priority. So, for example, it's often worth it to me to spend an hour and a half each way to walk to/from a meetup, even though riding transit or driving would be much faster. The extra time isn't being 'wasted', it's being spent on an activity that's important to my physical and mental health.
I did nothing.
I took three trips to places I hadn't been before. In January I went to Boston for the MIT Mystery Hunt. This was fun despite me being largely useless to the team. My main contribution was writing a script to collect a bunch of data on how the wordle puzzle behaved, which did ultimately enable us to figure it out. I also enjoyed writing a solver for Roman-numeral sudokus (a teammate wrote one more quickly, but I was too obsessed to give up until I got mine working too). I only had a little free time for walking around Boston, but I enjoyed what I did get to see.
I went to Atlanta in May for the graduation ceremony for my master's degree. I was really impressed with the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
At the end of November I (finally!) visited Europe. We went to Barcelona first. I loved Barcelona! We were in the Sagrada Familia at sunset, and there is no way for pictures to convey what an awe-inspiring experience it was, so I won't even try. Park Güell was awesome too; and I really enjoyed walking around the Gothic Quarter at night. It's a nice city for walking around in general: great pedestrian infrastructure; consistently aesthetically pleasing; an even distribution of little shops/restaurants/bakeries everywhere.
Then we went to Lisbon. I had an unfortunate experience the first night that made me feel unsafe in the area I was staying; there was a mixup with the hostel; and I got sick and stayed sick for the rest of the trip. So I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to explore the city; it was a relief to get home. (I will say I was a fan of the Amarguinha and lemon juice cocktail I had at the hostel.)
One thing I was worried about—and possibly one reason I'd never gotten around to doing a trip overseas before—was how well I'd handle the long flight. Sitting still for a long time, especially in a cramped space, is not merely uncomfortable for me; it can become very physically painful to the point of being panic-inducing and traumatic.
But the Seattle->Amsterdam flight didn't end up being a problem. Dramamine helped me sleep through the first few hours, and getting up periodically was enough to keep me relatively ok for the rest of the flight. (I'm very glad I had an aisle seat.) After a layover of a few hours, though, my short connecting flight to Barcelona ended up being sheer torture. I can't even remember the last time I felt such an intense need—and simultaneous inability—to sleep. I think I'd rather have spent a night or two in Amsterdam before finishing the journey; I might try to split up multi-hop trips that way in the future.
I may try to travel more next year, not from a desire to see new places, but rather because just getting away from my routines seems to help me come to important realizations about my life. I want to trigger those realizations more frequently. One I had during the Europe trip is that I haven't been working nearly as quickly and directly as I should on some things that are ostensibly my priorities. (It probably helped that during the flight out I was reading The War of Art for a book club.) Since then I've been managing my time differently and have already finished a couple tasks that might have dragged on for weeks or months otherwise.
I read 70-something books and wrote ~50,000 words of blog posts, mostly reviewing those books.
I feel like I've allowed an increasing fraction of my reading time to be spent on stuff that I'm just sort of interested in but not really passionate about. The field I really find most satisfying both to read and to write about is, usually, philosophy. I want to focus on that more next year. I did at least write up some thoughts on a handful of philosophy books this year:
I also made a detailed set of notes in slideshow form for that Scanlon book, which was a rewarding exercise; I think it helped me understand and engage with the book a lot better. I did this for a couple other books as well (The End of Race Politics and Limitarianism) but I have to admit it's just too time-consuming to do regularly.
For the past few years, I've been slowly working on improving my math knowledge, revisiting stuff I forgot since college (and maybe had never understood more deeply than was necessary to pass a test). This year, I got through about half of a probability textbook and one unit of the Khan Academy integral calculus course. I make a lot of Anki cards for myself to try to retain the information (and I've been pretty consistent for the past few years about regularly reviewing my Anki decks), though I know that won't be enough unless I keep making time to work problems or otherwise apply the knowledge.
Early in the year I spent some time doing Project Euler problems—I made it through the first 86 before getting distracted. These are often recommended as a way to practice programming, but beyond the first few they're really more about math, and encourage you to think through a lot of interesting stuff related to prime numbers, permutations and combinations, and other topics. I also went through an algorithms textbook. A lot of software engineers—myself included—have derided how often programming interviews focus on testing your ability to come up with efficient algorithms for tricky problems, even though the actual job you're interviewing for will basically never require you to do that. It's a valid complaint, but I've started to suspect that I personally want a job where you do need to do that sort of thing. (At one point this year I joked to a friend that my favorite video game is LeetCode.)
Next year I want to pick up the pace considerably on my math studying. I want to at least finish the probability textbook, a linear algebra textbook, and the choice theory book that's been on my shelf forever. There's no good reason for this stuff to be taking me longer than the corresponding college courses would take; I just haven't been pushing myself to stay focused.
I think of my piano hobby as having three components I have to allocate time among: learning songs, maintaining a repertoire, and creating my own music. Going into this year I was doing pretty lackluster on all three.
Although I was making good progress for a while last year toward learning the 3rd movement of Moonlight Sonata, I stalled out at some point; my normal habits aren't well-suited for learning such long songs. To make progress again, this year I established a habit of learning just one new measure per day, a few days each week. This worked pretty well and I'm up to about measure 141 out of 200 now. I think I'm going to switch to something like “learn 1 page per month”, though. I'm trying in general to minimize the number of every-day ‘responsibilities’ I assign myself, in favor of staying focused on one thing for a day (or two or three) and making more significant progress on it. I have a bad tendency to add more and more little daily commitments until I end up feeling continuously hurried and harried trying to clear the list each day.
I took a more focused approach to the only other song I tried to learn this year, the theme of Return of the Obra Dinn, and got it memorized fairly quickly. It's a lot of fun to play (as is the game it comes from).
Maintaining a repertoire of memorized songs is a continual struggle because: if I don't practice each song frequently, I'll quickly start forgetting parts; but the more frequently I practice a song, the more bored I get with it, and the harder it is to motivate myself to practice it. My willingness to push through the boredom got especially low for a while and I think there was a point this year at which I couldn't play any songs all the way through from memory any more.
I'm back up to five now (six counting Obra Dinn). A really helpful change for me was to consciously separate testing myself from repairing gaps in my knowledge. To test myself on a given song—which only needs to happen once every week or two—I'll play it straight through as best I can, and write down anything I struggled with. Then I can use those notes to focus the rest of my practice time on just the songs—and just the specific parts of those songs—that most need attention. (In retrospect this seems like a pretty obvious approach to take. But previously I would almost always try to play a song in full during any given session before I would work on any subsection of it, which meant I was wasting a lot of my energy excessively practicing parts that didn't need work.)
The thing deterring me from creating music more often is... well, it's just really difficult. And time-consuming. And the whole process is continuously frustrating. Luck/inspiration will give me a few measures and I'll fall wildly in love with them, so then I really want to have the rest of the song, but the rest of the song must be extracted from the infinite space of possibilities through a grueling note-by-note process of experimentation. Plus, the more progress I make and the more I like the parts I've written thus far, the more pressure I feel to make sure the remaining parts live up to how beautiful I think the song could be. This drives me to procrastinate, tacitly hoping that I'll be able to do a better job with less difficulty at some indefinite point in the future.
One way around this, when I'm starting to lose patience with a song, is to just improvise an ending and be done with it. That's how I finished one this year called “what could be”. I'm glad I did that as opposed to abandoning and forgetting the song entirely, but it's not fully satisfying. I think this is one of multiple areas in my life where I've been hindered by the fact that I'm not as willing as I used to be to let a single project consume all my free time for days or weeks straight. I do too much context-switching and not enough deep work. I want to change that next year.
I do enjoy improvising, though. I think my favorite improvised piece this year was a short one I called “urgency as a personality trait”:
Favorite fiction I read this year (with links to my reviews):
Favorite nonfiction:
Some music representative of what I was listening to (links to albums, artists, or individual songs):
Some favorite and honorable-mention games (links to the Switch store):
A few movies I enjoyed (links to IMDB):
Recently I took a closer look at my credit card transactions from the first ten months of the year.
I often go to coffee shops to read. I'm amused by the idea that for every $1 I spend on reading material, I have to spend $3 to buy the motivation to read it. (Obviously that's not really a valid conclusion to draw from this graph. But there might be a smidgen of truth to it.)
But seriously, I'm dismayed I spent so much at coffee shops. Over $300/month on something totally superfluous! Except... when I try to cut it out, I get depressed. Coffee shops fill a role in my life of allowing me to be around other people while staying focused on some solitary task. (Guess where I'm typing this sentence?) There are some free alternatives—like libraries and the wonderful KEXP gathering space—but not many and they're only partial equivalents. Still... in that ten-month period I had 351 separate transactions at coffee shops, implying I went to more than one per day on average. Even cutting back to one every other day would make a significant difference!
The categories that are already small may actually be the easiest ones to reduce. Many, perhaps most, of the games I've bought in the past few years I haven't ended up playing much at all. This year I probably spent more time playing Balatro (~$15) than everything else combined; I don't think I'd miss out on much if I adhered to a strict and significantly smaller budget in this area. It should also be easy to spend less on books. I like owning textbooks and philosophy books and some of my favorite novels, but for most stuff it would make more sense for me to use the library.
The worst $63 I spent this year was on a hardcover collection of The Metabarons, a sci-fi comic series which I'd somehow been led to believe was considered a classic masterpiece of the genre. My feelings on it were less positive.
At the beginning of this year the only specific goal I set was to complete my master's degree (and keep my 4.0 GPA). Done.
Since I remained (mostly intentionally) unemployed, my commitment to give a percentage of my earnings to charity was meaningless this year. (I gave $1200 to GiveDirectly anyway, because canceling the automatic recurring charge would have made me feel bad 😂.) I still plan to increase the commitment to 15% if I do go back to work in 2025. To be able to resume donating is one reason I'm starting to want to go back to work soon.
I also want to feel productive again. When I took time off in 2019-2020, I enthusiastically threw myself into several small software projects. But this time, although there's been plenty of stuff I'm interested in learning, I've had trouble coming up with something I want to make that feels both achievable on my own and worth the (unpaid) effort. It might be nice to be part of a team working toward a shared goal again.
...I also want more money. So, I'll probably be looking for a job in 2025.