I think I was 11 years old when the movie Serendipity came out and I became aware of John Cusack sending me on a spiral of watching all my my sister’s VHS tapes. In Serendipity John Cusack keeps meeting a quirky woman in a way that John Cusack often meets women in these movies until they decide they should be together at the end of the movie. Really the movie has very little to do with fate and more to do with the restaurant named Seredipity 3 that they eat at. But in a weird serendipity style meet-cute way, I opened Instagram during a moment of weakness only to immediately be fed something about a way to stop using Instagram. All it said was to make a “No-Scroll” notebook, where every time you find yourself scrolling or having the urge to scroll you pick up this notebook and write a big-ol’-hand-wavey whatever in it.
Honestly, I’ve been writing, deleting, and rewriting this blog post for about 3 weeks now. It’s finally fermented into actual thoughts because of this stupid little hack that I never would have found without opening thing I hated so much. I haven’t actually used the notbeook all that much, but just having it means that I need to make a choice every time my brain wanders off: scroll on my phone or do the thing I promised and write in the notebook. Usually this means I do nothing for a while and stare into space until I’m ready to get back to doing work or exercising or reading or hobbies or cleaning. It’s a suprisingly good reminder to be mindful.
As I remove myself from my phone I really feel like I have more clarity about what I want to be doing, or at least need to be doing. Most of the time I just want to make coffee or watch people walking down the street from my balcony, but other times I want to update my dotfiles to automate away another mundane but annoying part of my life or read one of the 20 books I’ve started or write down something with a nice weighty pen in my smudged handwriting. It also makes it easier for me to think about what my goals are and what I need to do to get there, my biggest goal being to leave New Zealand, but that is a multi-million step process.
There’s also an issue of “this is all well and good during the term break but will I keep it up when I’m back at work” and I can honestly say, I most certainly will NOT keep it up. Something about work has become so draining that it’s just impossible for me to physically get out and exercise with the intensity I want. There are some days where all I can do once I’m home is lay down and fall asleep until the next day even. So, whatever I’m doing now, I expect to do it at one-seventh of the intensity, meaning once a week. But for now, I just need to enjoy that I have the freedom to make that third cup of coffee and sit down to collect online radio stations that will help me sleep when I’m completely burnt out.
a random list of silly things I love
I always seem to write when things are bad and miss out on documenting the good things. So, when I saw this, I thought I would give it a try. If nothing else, I’ll have one positive post on here.
waking up to a clean kitchen
when the wife and I hear a song that we both like but never shared with eachother before
the second coffee of the day
long walks along the Han river
teaching my students something that none of them knew before
when meetings are cancelled
when assemblies are cancelled
getting soft pretzels at the sunday market
not getting compliments for doing my job (weirdly?)
the first snow
animal prints in the first snow
writing in markdown
pain in the ascii
I spent most of my blog time today and yesterday trying to figure out the little ascii stamp symbol. It was rendering fine on desktop, but on mobile it was eating spaces, or so I thought. I assumed it was Jekyll doing some processing that collapsed empty spaces, but ultimately that wasn’t it.
After fiddling with css and liquid templates for way too long, I realized that the spaces were all there, but my phone’s monospace font doesn’t have spaces that are actually monospace. So it was just monospaced block characters with regular spaces.
Anyway, the fix was to put monospace characers in for the spaces and style them insivible. A pain to be sure, but it worked. I also moved it to an include file so I don’t need to worry about accidentally deleting part of it and breaking it. I thought ascii would be easier than making an svg, but I was so wrong. Now I have learned.
달려라 하니
The missus and I went for a 5k run over the weekend with a big group. Jumping into a 5k might not have been the smartest move considering we both haven’t been working out at all since my parents left, but it reminded me how good I feel after I exercise. This probably doesn’t mean I’m going to become a regular runner because I know myself. If they keep running this event, I’ll gladly attend again or even try out new events. But, running by myself with no one to pace me is not fun for me. It was the same when I swam. When I was on a team and my coach was screaming at us to finish 1km, no don’t touch the lane lines, and stop taking breaks on the wall, I was very motivated to keep going. When I’m alone in the lane or with casual swimmers, I’m more than happy to stop when I lose focus or I pass the person in front of me for the fourth time.
Boy do I hope that this is one thing that can actually sustain itself. We lost our usual social outing when the Korean language meetup folded, so it would be nice to have something to fill that gap.
social spider mans
The biggest culture shock when I came to New Zealand, and back into the Western World(tm), wasn’t the food or the extreme avarice toward collective thinking, it was that people still use Facebook in earnest.
I’d deliberately exited social media years before, made easier by moving to Korea, where people weren’t using the same platforms as the U.S. anyway. It never really came back into my life, but I keep feeling like maybe I should “speak” social media, like it would add some value to my knowledge of our own culture or help me bond with coworkers. At the same time, I hated my time on social media. It always felt like a waste. Getting back on that train isn’t possible anymore for me.
I’ve made a few attempts anyway. Mastodon was fine but I never remembered to log in, the friction was too high. Bluesky had a waitlist, and by the time I could have joined I realized I never used Twitter to begin with, so short-form posting wasn’t something I had any interest in. Tumblr I tried to return to, but it had passed me by completely. Too many in-jokes, too many fandoms all of which I don’t belong to.
The only places that still make sense to me are Tildes and personal homepages. Tildes resembles a simple BBS board, strictly text based, run by one opinionated person, small and invite-only in a way that keeps it focused on actual discussion and being curious and civil. And then personal homepages just feel like seeing into a person. What they value shows up in the choices they make: whether they go simple and fast or heavy and interactive, whether there are a lot of gifs, whether they’re using old table layouts. There’s an intentionality to it that a profile on a platform just doesn’t have.
I do still use YouTube, but I’ve blocked the social parts and the shorts, so my only interaction is with the creator by watching the video, which is pretty one sided.
When people bring up TikTok or Instagram or, most commonly, Facebook, I’ll just need to accept that I’m not going to connect with whatever point they want to share with me. I’ll either give them a blank stare or pretend to laugh along as I confusedly search knowyourmeme.
name the naysayers
While I don’t want to only record my negative thoughts. I did want to leave this here:
Just because a comment is negative doesn’t mean it has no value for teaching and learning.
—Dave Stuart Jr
95bpm
I don’t want to be overly negative, but the negative thoughts creep in almost every day. The facts are simple: I’m angry, I’m tired, and my resting heart rate has sat around 95 bpm since January 21st, every day between 7am and 4pm. I’ve never felt less healthy in my life. I know at least some of what I need to do to pull myself out of this. I need to exercise, keep up my journal, prep my lunch and clothes the night before, and leave New Zealand. But by the time I get home most days I need a nap, and I have “the mysterious headache.” You know that feeling when you’re not sure if you didn’t drink enough water, didn’t have enough sugar to keep your brain functioning, or if the stress of the day is making your shoulders ride up to your ears? That’s the mysterious headache.
It’s especially frustrating because people who haven’t lived here can’t understand why I want to leave so badly. Some things are getting better, but so slowly that I’ll be dead before I have the comforts I could have somewhere else today. Here it’s just vibes and talk of “personal freedom,” which is a nice way of saying figure it out yourself, we’re busy privatizing everything.
I can already feel myself slipping into the same talking points my brain loops through, so I’ll wrap it up. Tall poppy syndrome is real, and the term “green desert” is accurate. If you’ve ever wanted to live inside the beat poet version of “Stick to the Status Quo” on constant loop, then maybe New Zealand is for you.
a little room for me
This homepage is a little room where I can escape my daily life when it gets to be too much.
It’s a hoarder pile of html templates and markdown files. It’s built on the backs of others who put their work out there for free allowing a tired teacher to tinker as stress relief.
Sometimes I’ll break it or make it look ugly, just like the the deep gash in my phone screen. But, that just makes it more mine.
There’s nothing for sale, no like or share button. In fact I have no other social media. This is my only home online.