I have a lot of drafts.

1. Messes are clutters not just of things, but of intentions. That’s really what makes them difficult to deal with. Some messes can be healthy, creative, like a raucous party of interesting people negotiating and calibrating with one another in real time. Other messes can be wretched, a sign of a fragmented, schizophrenic being in conflict with itself. There’s a wide spectrum of what conflict can look like. Healthy conflict happens between secure agents. Insecure agents are open to varying degrees of terrorism as a tactic.
2. I’m grateful for the existence of guys with foot fetishes. I don’t personally care for feet in the slightest, but for me they’re an everpresent reminder of what it looks like to be really into something.
3. It was my childhood dream, for a period of time, to someday run my own cybercafe. I wanted to preside generously over a world of worlds, where people could fall boldly into waking dreams and connect with fellow pilgrims of possibility.
4. There are two things that I have grieved deeply to the point of debilitation: the alienating collapse of kinship from people whom I had thought of as my friends, and the loss of notes and writings from my youth.
5. Few of us receive any real, deliberate instruction in the art of living. Qualified instructors are certainly in short supply, and they seldom enjoy working within the constraints of stuffy institutions like public schools. Most of what we do learn seems to be accidental, coincidental.
6. We talk about a lot of things wrong. To be fair, we also get a lot of things right, and take those things for granted. But I’m greedy. I want us to fulfil every dignified ancestor’s dreams: that we would surpass them.
7. When talking about how our media technology can ruin those of us who lack deep wells of psychological and emotional resilience, I like to point out how the antagonist in Snow White became a wicked witch because her wall-sized smartphone called her mid.
8. When people ask me why I’m so ambitious or relentless, I ask them what’s the # of kids who they think deserve to feel alienated, depressed, suicidal. As long as there are still kids like that in the world, my work is not done.
9. The top post on /r/singapore for a time was a cartoon of a mother with a cane beating her crying child while she was studying. (link) I’ve always been internally conflicted about Singapore. Is there any other option for any thoughtful person when it comes to considering the country that both their inheritance and their…?
10. When I was 12 years old, my father slapped me because I didn’t do well enough in my Primary School Leaving Examination to get into the top secondary school in Singapore. I spent over a decade trying to understand where that slap really came from.
11. What hooked me on live music as a desperate teenager was the feeling in my body that I was finally witnessing something truthful. I remember feeling trapped in my circumstances, and in music I tasted freedom.
12. If I really understand how my attention works, i should be able to manipulate it. i’m tempted to say “manipulate it at will”, but at the present moment I would be quite happy to influence it 5% more than I currently do. I would like to be better at influencing my attention. Why? To what end? Well I feel like I’m struggling a moderate amount right now, and I don’t think such struggle is necessary. The struggle is to me a sign that I’m being unwise in my project management. I haven’t “softened the ground”. I haven’t “sharpened the axe”.
13. the big lesson of scheherazade is that storytelling can save your life. i internalized that early. if you tell your story well, people root for you, care about you, want to see you succeed. storytelling is about conflict, tension, puzzles, problems. setups and punchlines. mysteries to be solved.

tbc