January 26th, 2021
- Thoughts I didn't tweet during #TwitterDayOff #2tweet
- the experience of interacting with my cousin's dog is very different now that I've learned a lot more about attachment and limbic regulation & the emotional brain. I feel like I basically get him and his needs, and he's just very down to be comforted when he gets spooked.
- Something here about nonverbal consent and "I pet myself". He can't say "yes" or "no", or ask for things to be different, but I can pay attention to whether he's vibing with what I'm doing, and what his control systems seem to want.
- <append to #TwitterDayOff thread a tweet saying>
- also have a place to put tweet ideas!
- also decide in advance if checking twitter messages is okay (I recommend at least trying not that) and if you do intend to do that I recommend <these notification-dulling styles/scripts>
- sometimes I practice Inadvertent Fasting
- > we are but babes suckling the milky way
- > idk who needs to hear this but:
it's not all in your head
literally, not even figments of your imagination are all in your head. reality is way too intertwingled for that. - > "One marshmallow now is *infinitely* better than two marshmallows in 10 minutes," Tommy said hyperbolically.
- How many of your ancestors can you name off the top of your head? (Uncles & cousins don't count)
How many could you name with access to your own files? (Literally check, or guess)
How many do you think you could enumerate if you got to ask all of your living relatives? - > Can you imagine not having the word "fun" and having to say the word "amusement" instead? This is the tragic reality french speakers are living with EVERY. DAY.
(Sure, it has different connotations than in English, but let's face it: the word amusement is way less fun.) - Every time I send an emoji in gmail, it turns into a godawful ugly blob... and every time, I submit a bug report to the gmail team. Embarrassing that their bureaucracy can't get those removed even though their own guidelines no longer approve of them.
- You've seen @visakanv at army bootcamp, but have you seen.... preteen Malcolm as an air cadet?
- I'm impressed on my #TwitterDayOff by how many of these tweets I'm writing in Roam to send later are between 250 and 280 characters. I guess I know the medium pretty precisely at this point!
- Notes on Home
- I'm doing a single-tasking experiment today as part of #TwitterDayOff, and want to take notes here
- < pull in init notes from CoTh cards >
- @ 11:26 - just finished a shower in which I began reworking a song I'd started writing almost 9 years ago! so juicy!
- and the song is called Breathe for a Minute ♫ and it's actually kind of about single-tasking
- and I'm noticing that, as part of the single-tasking workflow, I want to mark complete having done what I did on the song in the shower
- that was its own thing, it's done, fuckyeah
- marking it as complete allows me to feel WAY more present journalling here
- and then I maybe want to add an additional intention immediately that is like "write the lyrics somewhere" or "record a demo"
- (oh, realizing I hadn't actually added "8,3) take notes on single-tasking workflow", ie what I'm doing now, to my intentions. okay, done)
- there's an interesting Intend design question here actually, which is about a way to have like, progress marks/stamps on intentions, that are like, in some sense complete but you could still do more of them
- because it's not like I now want to mark this intention as complete, since I still intend to do more, but I want
- the satisfaction of logging a thing
- that intention to be complete when I get to my outcomes
- for now I think I'll use sandpiles for this, although it doesn't get that intention to be complete when I get to my outcomes
- I guess I could experimentally actually mark it complete then uncomplete it to set it as next action
- (whoa, how would it feel if "next action" were instead called "current action" or "on deck" or "right now" or something? 😮)
- might encourage people to use it in a more single-tasking way
- and there's ofc a question of like, am I gonna put "make lunch", "eat lunch" on there? I probably will today, but that would feel like noise most days - there needs to be a placeholder intention or even a placeholder mode or something
- anyway, I'm going to try this completion thing!
- @ 12:32 - man, single-tasking does not go well with having notifications of any kind turned on. I mean, I knew this, but seriously.
- ...update from a bit later: I ended up having some chats, some of which were single-task-ish though I didn't actually put the intention in Complice til after
- and some of them were like, a thing I was half-doing while the other half was writing that I did have as my Complice next action
- so yeah
- a major momentum downer is putting balls into a slow court - momentum sinks - relevant to self-energizing meta-team &
- this needs a way better name but the gist is a pattern I noted with TWO of my goals today
- a goal involving paperwork is delayed because a lawyer hasn't replied to my emails
- a music-recording goal is delayed because the guy I was hoping to collaborate with has been super busy so
- the interesting phenomenon here is that part of the delay is literal, but a lot of it is psychological!
- in both cases, there's still lots of stuff that could be done without getting more contact from the other person, but nonetheless in both cases almost nothing has happened for a week or a month respectively!
- there's something about like, putting the ball in someone else's court and then hoping they'll return it with even more energy, but instead you get nothing or maybe a small trickle.
- re getting more energy, see this slingshot thing:
- getting back a firm "no" would be way better, because it would put the ball clearly back in your own court. even if a bit of momentum was lost from the excitement not being returned, at least you have the ball again!
- interestingly, part of the damper for me with the music thing may actually have come directly from a message he sent saying something like "yeah I want to mix one of your tracks. I feel stoked about it. I think we could even get it in like films or something". this was initially exciting, but it now meant that one of the more exciting things in relation to this goal was a thing I was now waiting for him to do
- whereas if he'd just sprung it on me, that might've worked differently? idk
- at any rate, it's underscoring to me the value that it is to give a clear, warm, "no" or "not right now" when that's what's so, vs ghosting or vacillating
- at least in certain situations.
1 linked reference
what might a healthy community look like?
- Some discussion January 26th, 2021 in chat with friends talking about healthy community prompted me to share these reflections:
- I feel like I tasted a substantial percentage (50%? 70%?) of the Real Community thing in the group I was in in Waterloo for the last 8 years, but compartmentalized away the parts of me that knew something was yet missing, so it felt like the whole thing. Which is an incredible feeling! And has given me a taste for what it feels like to wayfind collectively towards having the whole thing for a whole group, and a clear sense that that's my top priority! So very happy to talk more about this, here or 1-on-1.
- I've been sometimes calling the thing Home.
- And there was something loud in the Waterloo group's frame that was negating at least my sense of Home but also in the way it was doing it was negating the idea that we need to integrate everyone's sense of Home. In principle the Waterloo framework is itself a wayfinding tool for doing that; in practice it had some blindspots that were keeping it stuck, afaict.
- Not to mention that I didn't feel quite at home in the absence of some rationalist memes/norms, though that's personal to me, whereas the many people thing seems more fundamental and universal. Like I guess that maybe wouldn't happen with ancient tribes, but it does happen naturally with small towns. Though also my experience in Waterloo also meant I knew that the rationalist scene wasn't adequately Home either.
- Come to think of it, I grew up in a small town (1400 people; 40-60 minutes away from the next biggest places which were like 10k people) and I actually learned some rare pieces from that about what healthy community looks like. As a kid I would wander around and many adults knew who I was without me having to introduce myself, and if they didn't I could tell them who my parents or grandparents were and they would know me. Also had a bit of the grandparents experience at a summer family church camp my ancestors had gone to for generations, which I wrote about in this song. It helped, I'm sure that my parents & grandparents were both very active in the community, so asymmetrically well-known compared to other adults.