Life

Art by Amanda Domagala, on Tumblr Amanda says, “Make bad things, instead of making nothing” Something similar that’s been drummed into my head innumerable times over the years, by many mentors: ...

If you’re ever feeling guilty about not cooking a fresh home-cooked meal, a reminder that people in cities historically either had cooks or ate at food stalls, going back to Ancient Greece. Ancient Egypt, too, although since everybody ate bread, beer, and onions, less of a thing. It’s a weird quirk of our obsession with nuclear families that everybody is expected to have time, skill, and equipment to cook daily and that if you’re a woman, particularly, you are a lesser person if you aren’t casually able to cook every day with random fresh ingredients. ...

My old-style slow notetaking process. Replaced now with Elipsa Annotations, which then move along with my thoughts into Org Roam Notes. Click to see bigger Cal Newport recently did a deep dive on his podcast, on a minimalist note taking system for various areas of your life. Video’s on Youtube, if you want to watch. It’s called A Productivity System To Remember Everything You Learn. ...

Mountains in Ladakh. Click to embiggen And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s, it will always whisper, you can’t have it all, but there is this. ...

Just something that kept coming to mind today. I met an old friend the other day. We’d fallen out of touch and gone our separate ways. We were both gifted watches by another friend of ours at the time. And they pointed out to me, I was still wearing the same watch. I gently pointed out to them, that this watch was a different one, something the better half gifted me just after we got married. This is a white dial, see. The old one was blue. And then we moved on to other things. What I didn’t tell them, was that I still have the old one. It’s battered. It’s scratched. It works. It keeps perfect time. It’s beautiful.1 ...

My idols have feet of clay, as usual. The book is one of those, do as I say, not as I do books. I learnt about his abusive behaviour about a month after reading the book. While I absolutely loved reading it, I cannot in good conscience suggest you buy it anymore. Hopefully the clip I linked to, should be enough, because what he did share in the talk, is worth emulating, even if he himself, didn’t. ...