I haven’t written anything in roughly two months, so I thought I’d give a global update about me, as well as my thoughts about the blog going forward.
As I write this, I’m in a plane flying from Chicago to Japan. I left Israel on September 12, spent two months in the US (visiting family and road trippin’ with my girlfriend), and now I’m finally completing the move to the Far East. I’m nervous and excited, and ready for both a new routine and a new adventure. I’ll have 14 days of quarantine to start with, which will give me time to think through what I want to explore first!
COVID times have made these months strange. My girlfriend and I had planned to take a trip somewhere, and we decided the best thing to do is explore some National Parks in the States (hence, the road trip). Spending time exercising and only briefly interacting with small groups of people, in an outdoor setting, sounds like about the safest and healthiest way I know of to spend a few weeks during a huge wave of COVID cases in the US. We had a great time, and frankly it has set a new bar for how fun a vacation can be.
But now, as I fly to Japan, it’s back to work.
With my new routine will come, I hope, some time for reading and writing. I still have a pile of half-finished posts that will be first-up once I get settled and un-jetlagged. New Month Resolutions will begin again in January 2021, shifting Year 2 away from the awkward October-for-some-reason starting month (I’ll still commemorate Yom Kippur in my own way, don’t worry). In my last NMR, I promised to reflect on the blog and on NMRs specifically, which I did, and aside from the date shift I came up with a few changes to both:
I set up NMRs to be as flexible as possible, promising to make them simple and easy enough that I’d stick with them. I’d like to step it up this year, and focus on real problems I see in my own life. This means a bit less experimentation (e.g. lucid dreaming) and a bit more targeted problem-solving (e.g. exercise or drinking less). There’ll be some of both though, I think, and I’ll try to hang onto the level of variety of Resolutions we saw in Year 1.
I keep saying that I take too long to write things, because I want them to be perfect. To combat this, I’m going to experiment with posting rough drafts. If you read them while rough, please comment or send me a message, as feedback will be really useful! Once the draft is up, I’ll probably give myself a deadline to finish, after which the rough draft becomes the final. This way, I’ll hopefully write more without worrying if it’s perfect all the time.
In the same vein: I’m adding a blog category called “Worse Than Random”. More on this later.
It’s nice to see that some people still look at the blog, even when I’m not updating it. If you read any or all of something I’ve written, thank you. I appreciate you a lot. I hope to get better at this with time.