I don’t know if I’m just tired, but I just erased the past two starts I made at doing this vomit. This is of course counter to the very spirit of the vomits- I’m supposed to just blurt out whatever is on my mind, and leave it at that. I find myself struggling to let go of the idea that there’s going to be an audience reading this, now that the last post got so much attention. I find myself trying to sound clever, as I used to do on Facebook and still sometimes do on Quora. I think the solution to this is to address myself. So I’ll do that.

Visa, listen to me. You’ve spent a lot of time stuck in this rut. You’ve actually been in this rut your whole life, as far as you can remember. It’s already starting to get a little boring. You can’t still be writing about this 100 vomits from now. Seriously, 100,000 words of apology can’t be very interesting. So let’s run through your thoughts.

Okay. I think I was reasonably productive at work today. I wasn’t overly distracted by anything. But I wasn’t super productive either. Most of the blogpost draft that I did at work was written as a word vomit on the way home from work yesterday. Well, whatever works. Seriously, whatever works. Just write and get it out. I should use the computer without any internet access, and block periods of time out.

I’m experimenting with beeminder. Turns out I actually started an account back when I wanted to track my studying for my A levels, but I have up because it seemed a little too complicated for my liking. Or maybe I simply wasn’t ready then. I wrote a vomit this morning, so that’s one data point for Write. I’m writing this one now, so that’s another data point for when I get home. I’m feeling better from the flu I had,  so I’m going to exercise when I get home. That’s a data point for exercise. I used to sort of use a sort of similar system with pen and paper when I was doing my military service,  but it all fell apart when I lost my notebook.

I have many, many more pieces of writing to do. Should I do sub-points for completing drafts or outlines of things that I intend to write? I have a piece for Poached due, and one for a friend’s magazine, and a neverending strean of work for… work. These vomits are personal, for my own pleasure and personal improvement. If nothing else, my vomits during my morning commutes are things that I’m going to stick to.

I’ve gotten a bunch of responses and emails from people who are in similar positions as I am, or are interested in the possible solution to the problem I’ve described. I think this makes it exciting. It’s like getting an A2A on Quora- I feel obliged to make progress now, at least for others. If I can help others get through their problems by solving my own, I think I should. I think that’s great motivation. I think we’re a big family around the world who understand each other more than our own friends and family do, and I think we should support and look out for each other. And the way this works is, of course, as it does with oxygen masks on planes- we have to put our own on before we can help others.

So that’s the plan, then. I have to put my mask on so I can help others. I might be stricken with existential woe, but it doesn’t matter- I need to get my mask on so I can help others. There are people out there who will benefit from my help if I develop myself into the individual who is capable of helping them. It might be more technically accurate to say that we can’t help others, we merely inspire them to help themselves… through our example. One person’s greatness inspires another to give herself permission to do the same.

The problem is that the status quo seems so… tolerable. The enemy of the great is not the bad, but the good enough.

Why am I reciting all this nonsense? Everybody has heard it all before.

Anyway, yeah, I’ve started using Beeminder.i sort of had something similar going with HabitRPG, but the constant bugs were problematic for me. Also the bars weren’t quite right. I can’t explain it. I’m really tired. Blood sugar level low. I should never go more than 4 or 5 hours without eating.

This is what you call a really, really weak word vomit. I ended at 768 words when I got home (Though I probably deleted about 300). Realistically I could stop here and rest assured that the times I went way, way over 1,000 would cover for me, but I don’t like the idea of not meeting 1,000 on any of my vomits, so I’m going to take this one stream of consciousness and carry it all the way into the net.

So- I’ve started up beeminder, and the goals i’m tracking are- exercise (sets of pushups and squats, simple enough), writing (word vomits count as one, work posts i think count as 1.5 or 2- this is my second vomit of the day), i’m also going to track meditation (5 minutes a day, min 3x a week) and reading (any book, 3x a week). That might be a bit too much. I don’t know. My brain is overly empty. It’s 11:55pm. I’m going to go to bed. Tomorrow will be better.

Ermmm I guess I could talk about how I logged into Facebook and saw a discussion going on about education and the cure to cancer. I deliberated responding to it- I wrote a response out, edited it a couple of times, but ultimately decided against it. I don’t want to publish anything publicly on Facebook in terms of statuses, yadda yadda. If I have something I want to say to someone on Facebook, I’m going to do it via private message. That’s just how I’m going to roll, and it has to do with my “path of least resistance” idea. I shouldn’t be spending time on that, anyway. I think I’m going to deactivate my fb account again. Once you’ve been away from it for a while, everything looks utterly vacuous.

but you could say that for a lot of things. anyway, i just had to coast this one through. pretty sad that such a nice number got such a shitty vomit, but such is life. no regrets. done is better than perfect. see ya.