October 2022

Like every year, the lack of external, institutional structures, timetables and deadlines during the summer (holidays) has set me off to a freewheeling, unstructured mode of work. After a semester in which I have put myself at the mercy of not one but two departmental timetables, I really enjoyed some unstructured, relaxed, spontaneous tripping and thinking, in the hot hot heat. But the lack of goals to work towards, the slow but steady abandonment of established daily and weekly procedures ate into my discipline. The invasion of Ukraine has been a source of obsessive news-checking ever since it started in late February, but particular my Twitter obsession went completely overboard over the past two months. To reign in my compulsive checking, and replace it with a more healthy automatic habit, I bought a used Kindle the other week (my first overzealous failed attempt at turning myself into a reader by adopting a Kindle was circa 2010-11), uploaded Marshal Berman’s All that is solid melts into air, and have been trying to carry it with me and open it up wherever I go. It’s going ok so far, but I guess I have yet to find a way to engage with books in a way where I am satisfied with how I hold in and keep information from them in a useful, worthwhile way.

I have been doing freelance work, it is not mentally/creatively stimulating, but it is extremely well-paid, and leaves me much time to expend my creative energies on projects I am actually personally invested in (which I have been doing anyway, except now I’m not running a completely negative balance). As a side-effect of that work I get to listen to many actually reasonably interesting talks and discussions about social housing, and construction in the context of sustainability/the climate crisis, and it’s bleak. Which is nothing new to me I guess, but it’s maybe the first time that I see people professionally (rather than privately or politically) acknowledging it, while most people around me are gouging away on beef and flying around the globe as if there was no tomorrow. Sometimes I wonder what they are thinking, which always just makes me think of this:

I have a new idea of a physical object I want to build (a set of three digital clocks), I am already doubtful whether it will be ‘worthwhile’ or ‘interesting’ but I guess the imperative is to do what you gotta do, because to be yourself is all that yadda yadda and if it’s crap so be it. I have an old idea too that I was going to realise this year but I have been getting stuck with starting because I can’t do some of it by myself, so I guess that will be my bigger project, which will require some collaboration, some risking, some risk of failure I suppose. Risk of failure is a good one, maybe that should be my goal, to try and do something that could go seriously wrong, or badly, or be disappointing. Something public, something out there. I have a few ideas. Do I have a big goal, a path forward? It seems like my breakdown of journalling has destroyed my prospect of long-term goals, but really I have never had a working system of long-term goals, just a feeling of having had some. I guess I will just make a new one and check it. It’s hard to return to big, long-term goals. To come up with them when you’re in a mood where you don’t feel like you need to achieve anything big, where you don’t feel like you want to achieve anything big. What if it was just true? There is a difference between something “big” and something that is important for you though. Living small can still be valued living as long as you consciously commit to it. This is something I will think about in the next week, when I am spending a week in Portugal, a plane trip away that I personally find rather unneccessary, especially in the light of the impending planetary catastrophe and how it pushes me, us all, over our sustainable annual limit of greenhouse gas emissions. I didn’t even feel like going for the sake of traveling, of being in a different place, but I guess that is a luxury of having lived in the ‘Far East’ for such a long time. I’m just done with traveling, at least for a while. People say it’s good, it can expand your horizon but I, maybe because I am so strongly affected by my external environment, find it difficult to feel at rest, at peace, truly enjoy myself in a new environment, so I criticise people who enjoy travel for the sake of travel as hedonistic. It’s good to see different worlds of course, but truly there are very different worlds closer to everyone’s home as well, if we only bothered to look more closely. It takes time to see the differences, by resting in a place, not by scooting and jet-setting all over the place.