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Had a reasonably productive Saturday. I keep waking up really early - around 5:30am today. I wasn’t able to fall back asleep so I just got started with my day. I read until around 10am when I started getting pretty tired and took a nap for about 45 min. This gave me enough energy to go to my office for a bit to finish some code I wanted to work on, and also use the campus gym. Talked with a friend while working who I haven’t talked to in a while, which was nice to catch up with him as well.

One of my office mates came in while I was there and he was telling me about how he got lost in a park while trail running and ended up walking around for quite a while. He didn’t have any headphones so he was left with his thoughts and he was saying how that he had a lot of productive thoughts related to his research work. This reminded me of how nice taking a long walk with no distractions can be to just think about whatever is on your mind, but that you may not be as consciously aware of. I should make more time to have distraction-free thoughts as well. I typically put on headphones for idle time and listen to music, so I’m going to try to do less of that now. Good to get better at not needing distractions anyhow!


Daily Listening

Didn’t listen to much today.

Daily Reading

I know a major spoiler about The Mysterious Island and its kind of fun to see how it has been progressively hinted and foreshadowed. I’m not sure I would fully appreciate these details if I didn’t know to look for them.

Read 100 pages of Hagakure today. The influence this had on Mishima is so clear. It’s funny how many of the bits of advice feel like they could be given by some cranky person today: “there are no good people anymore, all everyone wants to do is idle chatter about money and sex. No one reads history anymore” etc. We seem to think of events during our lives as somehow “different” than what has happened before, but the more I read the more it seems we’ve had very similar behaviors throughout history. This is plausible since our brains haven’t really changed much genetically in a long time, so the only real factor that could be changing things is newer technology. I noticed this when reading some old Roman works in a classics course too. So, I guess there is merit in reading history and he’s not such a crank after all!