A Small Tumble
Dec. 6th, 2022 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jakebe
I didn't do anything that I had planned to do yesterday. No preparation on this Friday's game, no doing our laundry, reading "The Bone Clocks", or studying the writing Masterclass. I want to try and dig into what happened there, see what I can learn.
It was actually a pretty decent day at work. We're launching a scholarship program on Friday, so I had a meeting with my Community Moderator (it's kind of like a personal assistant for a specific program) about updating the program website at least once a week to make sure the news is current; worked on the website, the community engagement plan, and a student handbook; and held a few meetings to get folks oriented through the week. I even asked a pretty good question during our organizational all-hands meeting.
In the afternoon, L (my best friend and next-door neighbor) showed me that he had finished the D&D character he made for me. We made a pact to design each other's characters for an upcoming campaign, and he's been really excited with the creation process. I haven't been...quite as diligent, so I promised him that I wouldn't look at my character until I finished his. So I started working on it.
And that actually went pretty well! I'm happy with the concept I've come up with, and the building of the character went off without a hitch. I just need to build the backstory, personality, and character model before I'm done; I'm sure I can get that done today.
But after that, I made dinner: miso-glazed pork belly with soy-marinated eggs, cucumber-kimchi salad, sesame-marinated carrots, baby bok choy and sushi rice. I...don't know how to add a photo yet, so I guess I'll need to figure out where/hot to host them. It took a bit more work than anticipated; grating carrots took a bit more time and a lot more effort, and I donked up the eggs quite a bit. In fact, most of the meal I had never really made before.
I'm not a fan of pork belly at all, so I've never cooked it. But it seemed easy enough. I had also never made boiled eggs, so I wasn't quite aware of how delicate the work was. I broke two of them before I managed to get a really good soft-boiled egg. Peeling it was a bit fraught, even though I used white vinegar to make the shell a bit easier to take off. Slicing the Persian cucumbers wasn't too bad, but making sure the eggs, carrots, and cucumbers were properly marinated required a level of multi-tasking that I find a bit draining. In the end, it just tuckered me out. I was ready to call it a night once dinner was done!
We watched an episode of the new Twilight Zone with dinner, the one where Steven Yeun is a mysterious man who imprisons himself in the jail of a remote Alaskan town so he can be pardoned on Christmas eve. Apparently, the sheriff's practice of pardoning one inmate every Christmas had become known in the "extreme traveler" community. But of course, there's something off about him and things are not quite what they seem. It's a good episode. There is an element of racial politics that runs through all of the Peele-era Twilight Zone stories, but it doesn't feel too forced or heavy-handed.
Then we invited L over to watch the first episode of Andor, the Star Wars show all of our friends have been raving about. The look and feel of the show reminds me a lot of the 2000s Battlestar Galactica -- grounded, gritty, unflashy science-fiction. I think it's a vision of the Star Wars universe fans had been clamoring for and I can see why it's been getting such great praise. Since it was only the pilot, there's not much to say for the plot yet. It's just getting started, and it's clear there are a LOT of moving pieces. It feels like it's going to be kind of a complex, twisty political thriller.
L went home, and by then it was around 9:30 pm. I could have spent the next 90 minutes working on the game, or reading "The Bone Clocks", or watching a Masterclass video. Instead, I bummed around watching YouTube videos and playing "Banners of Ruin", a rogue-like deckbuilding game that I find challenging in a fun way.
After a certain time of day, my willpower and focus are spent. I can try to push myself to do the productive thing, but it's a struggle. Maybe this is the failure point for yesterday; I could do the hard thing even when I don't feel like it.
My day was productive: I put in a solid performance at work, made a pretty complicated dinner recipe, and built a D&D character. But the things that I set out to do yesterday morning just didn't get done. I'm most disappointed with the lack of writing/game prep, as I had missed doing this over the weekend as well.
I've reached a stage where missing a day of a system I'm trying to build doesn't upset me TOO much. Habit building is a process, and failure is a part of that process. But when skipping one day becomes two or three, it feels worse. That's where I am, so it's time to prioritize discipline.
Tonight, I'll try doing something hard after dinner and TV, digging into ways to pull myself through the resistance. Making a game of it is my best shot. We'll see how it goes with tomorrow's report.
It was actually a pretty decent day at work. We're launching a scholarship program on Friday, so I had a meeting with my Community Moderator (it's kind of like a personal assistant for a specific program) about updating the program website at least once a week to make sure the news is current; worked on the website, the community engagement plan, and a student handbook; and held a few meetings to get folks oriented through the week. I even asked a pretty good question during our organizational all-hands meeting.
In the afternoon, L (my best friend and next-door neighbor) showed me that he had finished the D&D character he made for me. We made a pact to design each other's characters for an upcoming campaign, and he's been really excited with the creation process. I haven't been...quite as diligent, so I promised him that I wouldn't look at my character until I finished his. So I started working on it.
And that actually went pretty well! I'm happy with the concept I've come up with, and the building of the character went off without a hitch. I just need to build the backstory, personality, and character model before I'm done; I'm sure I can get that done today.
But after that, I made dinner: miso-glazed pork belly with soy-marinated eggs, cucumber-kimchi salad, sesame-marinated carrots, baby bok choy and sushi rice. I...don't know how to add a photo yet, so I guess I'll need to figure out where/hot to host them. It took a bit more work than anticipated; grating carrots took a bit more time and a lot more effort, and I donked up the eggs quite a bit. In fact, most of the meal I had never really made before.
I'm not a fan of pork belly at all, so I've never cooked it. But it seemed easy enough. I had also never made boiled eggs, so I wasn't quite aware of how delicate the work was. I broke two of them before I managed to get a really good soft-boiled egg. Peeling it was a bit fraught, even though I used white vinegar to make the shell a bit easier to take off. Slicing the Persian cucumbers wasn't too bad, but making sure the eggs, carrots, and cucumbers were properly marinated required a level of multi-tasking that I find a bit draining. In the end, it just tuckered me out. I was ready to call it a night once dinner was done!
We watched an episode of the new Twilight Zone with dinner, the one where Steven Yeun is a mysterious man who imprisons himself in the jail of a remote Alaskan town so he can be pardoned on Christmas eve. Apparently, the sheriff's practice of pardoning one inmate every Christmas had become known in the "extreme traveler" community. But of course, there's something off about him and things are not quite what they seem. It's a good episode. There is an element of racial politics that runs through all of the Peele-era Twilight Zone stories, but it doesn't feel too forced or heavy-handed.
Then we invited L over to watch the first episode of Andor, the Star Wars show all of our friends have been raving about. The look and feel of the show reminds me a lot of the 2000s Battlestar Galactica -- grounded, gritty, unflashy science-fiction. I think it's a vision of the Star Wars universe fans had been clamoring for and I can see why it's been getting such great praise. Since it was only the pilot, there's not much to say for the plot yet. It's just getting started, and it's clear there are a LOT of moving pieces. It feels like it's going to be kind of a complex, twisty political thriller.
L went home, and by then it was around 9:30 pm. I could have spent the next 90 minutes working on the game, or reading "The Bone Clocks", or watching a Masterclass video. Instead, I bummed around watching YouTube videos and playing "Banners of Ruin", a rogue-like deckbuilding game that I find challenging in a fun way.
After a certain time of day, my willpower and focus are spent. I can try to push myself to do the productive thing, but it's a struggle. Maybe this is the failure point for yesterday; I could do the hard thing even when I don't feel like it.
My day was productive: I put in a solid performance at work, made a pretty complicated dinner recipe, and built a D&D character. But the things that I set out to do yesterday morning just didn't get done. I'm most disappointed with the lack of writing/game prep, as I had missed doing this over the weekend as well.
I've reached a stage where missing a day of a system I'm trying to build doesn't upset me TOO much. Habit building is a process, and failure is a part of that process. But when skipping one day becomes two or three, it feels worse. That's where I am, so it's time to prioritize discipline.
Tonight, I'll try doing something hard after dinner and TV, digging into ways to pull myself through the resistance. Making a game of it is my best shot. We'll see how it goes with tomorrow's report.
