I wrote two word vomits yesterday before getting interrupted by the Internet and running out of battery on my Macbook. I wonder how far I can go today? Let\u2019s aim for 4. I\u2019m playing \u201cfrench cafe music\u201d in the background on Spotify. Where was I yesterday? I was talking about the supposedly carefree nature of childhood, and ended up digging into what I thought was interesting about the social lives of teenagers. Do I want to continue from there, or do I want to do something entirely different? The node ahead of me is \u201cSeptember 2017\u201d.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s go ahead. I\u2019ve been thinking about the passage of time. I\u2019m sure I could google \u201cvisakanv ‘passage of time\u2019\u201d and find quite a large set of writing. I\u2019m tempted to do it now, but let\u2019s pause that to finish the rest of this vomit. What do I mean by passage of time? I mean, time passes all the\u2026 time… and I don\u2019t really feel it. A couple of vomits ago I talked about \u201cendlessness\u201d. Another way of framing it is repetitive mundanity. Repetition by itself isn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing. I don\u2019t mind the repetition of writing again and again, day after day. It soothes me, nourishes me, helps me calm down, get into my bones. But I hate the mindless repetition of a daily commute. Commutes just suck, period. I\u2019m sure lots has been written about it already, so there\u2019s no need to reinvent the wheel there. The point is that there\u2019s good repetition and bad repetition, and since so much of life is repetitive, it makes a lot of sense to try and get more of the good and diminish the bad.<\/p>\n
Daily and weekly updates would be good to do, but a little unrealistic to have to trawl through on hindsight. Monthly updates, on the other hand, seem perfectly sensible to me.<\/strong> On the first day of every month, at 12 noon, Singapore has an island-wide test of our emergency warning system. It\u2019s tested with a pleasant chime that sounds like bells. (The actual use case is for warning sirens, in case of air raids and whatnot.) It\u2019s a useful cue and reminder that a month has passed. And it\u2019s a good moment to stop and reflect on the past month, and the month ahead. After all, if we live to be 80, we only get 960 months. That\u2019s less than a thousand months. And you can discount the first 20 years or so when you\u2019re still figuring out who the hell you are and what the hell is going on. So you get maybe 60 good years if you\u2019re lucky. And I don\u2019t feel very lucky. I feel like I should think about my life as though I\u2019m only going to live to, say, 40. I don\u2019t know why I have that feeling but I just do, even though my father and grandfather both appear to be aging very nicely. My grandfather is in his 90s now. Still, when I am still, I feel this sense of urgency. Like I\u2019m being complacent when I should be moving forward. I don\u2019t want to be in a total panic, I don\u2019t want to be rushing, but I feel like there\u2019s this adjacent reality where I\u2019m moving purposefully. That\u2019s what I want to be. Moving purposefully.<\/p>\n I happened to stumble on some old videos today \u2013 videos from 2013 and 2014.<\/strong> They don\u2019t feel like they\u2019re from very long ago, and at the same time, they\u2019re from 3-4 years ago. Just a few months after I\u2019d gotten married, after I\u2019d started work. My current living arrangement is now the most stable one of my life \u2013 most Singaporeans spend 6 years in their primary school, but I changed schools halfway through \u2013 so my longest experience in one institution was in secondary school. 4 years. I\u2019ve exceeded that now at my current workplace, where I\u2019ve come to work for 4.5 years now. It\u2019ll be 5 years before I know it. When my wife and I got married, we joked that if things didn\u2019t work out, we could just keep things going for 5 years and then split. That timeframe is coming to an end. Cheesy as it sounds, I feel the winds of change upon me. When I talk to other friends (typically a couple of years older), I hear similar things. Friends my age too are just beginning to get married. (Speaking of marriage \u2013 I saw that Hayley Williams and Chad Gilbert got divorced after 16 months together. They were dating for about 10 years and then they got divorced after 16 months. In their own words, marriage is not for the faint of heart.)<\/p>\n So what then? What then? I was watching the video of myself in 2013 and I found myself embarrassed, cringing. I was less graceful then than I am now. I was louder, more obnoxious, more annoying. I\u2019m still generally loud, I suppose, but I think I\u2019ve learned to tone it down over the past 4 years. I think I\u2019ve gotten a little bit more sensitive to the feelings of others. I think I\u2019ve become a little bit more considerate, a little bit more temperate. As I say these words, of course, I find myself flooded with recent memories of instances in which I have failed to meet my own standards. And I cringe again. I still have a lot of work to do, and I hope I will continue to say that for as long as I am alive. I want to be a constant work in progress. That\u2019s what I want to define me. Sometimes I encounter people who I find impressive, but after a couple of years of getting to know them, I find that they\u2019re pretty much stagnant in some way. I\u2019m sure I am too, and the thought troubles me. This is why I think it\u2019s really important to do regular status updates. To keep growing and learning and reflecting. I am 27.5 years old now. I\u2019m thinking back to all the milestone years \u2013 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25. They all felt like important milestones, they all felt like thresholds that I had to cross. And yet sometimes it feels like I haven\u2019t even started. I suppose it will always feel that way. All the more reason to get more focused, more disciplined, more rigorous, and to articulate my development more precisely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I wrote two word vomits yesterday before getting interrupted by the Internet and running out of battery on my Macbook. I wonder how far I can go today? Let\u2019s aim for 4. I\u2019m playing \u201cfrench cafe music\u201d in the background on Spotify. Where was I yesterday? I was talking about… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[338],"class_list":["post-10746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-word-vomit","tag-review-your-stuff"],"yoast_head":"\n