Work
Biggest thing that happened this week was a few conversations for long term work. Childhood Tanvi would never let herself be fazed by the concept or process of interviews, but Adult Tanvi learnt a different lesson in her early years. That intense anxiety didn’t wreck me as much this week, maybe because I did what I could to prepare and let the rest be. I’m almost... looking forward to more.
Life
I watched a play (in Kannada!), had breakfast with my parents, played two games of Chai Garam, and generally spent time with people.
But the weekend saw me.... this is a hard one for me to write. I drowned in some books again. My screen time has been disappointing, but we’re working on fixing it, one step at a time. The last two days have been a little better, with things that are “urgent” giving my brain something different to do. That is perhaps one way out of this.
Dad fixed my scooter! And I know a little bit more about engines as a result.
Tooling
Todoist continues to be excellent for me. I’m taking my meds on time, doing more random tasks than I thought I would, and continuing to reduce anxiety around having them show up. One thing that has bugged me about my workflow is that there doesn’t seem to be scope for an “in progress” task. This happens because a task on my list generally hides a few different tasks that have different dependencies. For example, to “buy couch”, I actually have to - scout and then shortlist couches on - ikea - Facebook marketplace - some WhatsApp buy/sell groups - narrow down the shortlist further with the nesting partner (having to remind the partner a few times to look) - schedule a pick up of the couch - figure out what to do with the old couch
When I’m putting that task on my list, it’s a pain to break it all down individually. But if I’ve spent significant effort on the task and it doesn’t actually move anywhere or I can’t check it off, my brain feels sad.
I suspect the approach that todoist enforces - to have tasks be in imperative, and be the smallest task possible - is good for a reason. I can imagine the kanban-esque method of icebox/todo/in progress/done/blocked that most of us in software engineering are familiar with doesn’t work for individual task management - needs more babysitting but provides more visibility and data for predictions for teams that aren’t very useful for individuals? Without looking into this further, I’m probably going to have to get comfortable with breaking tasks down as I get to them, and assigning times to them when I do. I’ll try that for a week and see what comes up.
Health
One headache on Saturday night. I forgot to eat for two 24h periods back to back so my stomach wasn’t very happy with me, but it’s been treating me okay after I started feeding it regularly again.
All those gains I made with my pull-ups and what not, in December? Gone. Poof. Vanished. URGHLSGBVLJKSDN. I want to restart a fitness regimen but cult group classes are wayyy too intense. Badminton was good for me but it’s been hard to find people to play with. In the books I’ve been reading, the protagonist runs a lot, and finds solace in it. I would also like to find that, but in the area I live in (and India in general) it feels impossible to be able to do that casually. Even when I used to, in Indiranagar, I had to put up with so many eyes that it just wasn’t worth it. I like treadmill runs, but I think they get boring. Maybe I will pick up just one run a week, no matter what, the way I’ve stuck to these weeknotes.
Media Diet
Reading
I’m re-reading Worm, the parahumans series . It’s a (completed) web serial - 1.7 million words, the equivalent of 26 normal length novels. I read it once back in college when I was procrastinating studying for exams. I picked it up because I remember the protagonist being very good at being morally gray, and there was a very sweet slow-burn romance in there that I wanted to engage with. I’m 1.2 million words in and VERY ANRGY because there’s like maybe 20k words that actually deal with the romance. What’s worse is that there doesn’t seem to be fan fiction that does what I want either? This series is one of Tumblr’s favs, and has been complete for over a decade, so I don’t understand why there are only 4901 works under the tag on AO3 (as opposed to ATLA’s 42643 or The Locked Tomb’s 6080) Crying because I’m bad at writing sweet cute coffee shop AU slice of life romances but I WILL do it if I have to. But please just give me to read, ty :L
Watching
White lotus. I’ve seen 2 episodes so far. In addition to the CGI monkeys, I also dislike the score - the mixing is really on the nose. But the story is great and I’m going to see this through.