I spent this week observing and documenting random stuff… and I gotta say, it’s been a revelation.
After a decade spent immersed in New Age ideologies (and let’s face it – a lifetime spent in Western society), where I was taught that my thoughts, my identity, and my life were raw materials to be manipulated into the experience of my choosing, just allowing myself to witness what I’m seeing, thinking, and feeling without analyzing or altering is truly liberating.
Although I do believe in personal agency, am an advocate for the examined life, and am almost always engaged in some sort of personal development campaign… I also feel that the living of life can easily be lost in these endeavors.
Below you will find some of the random things I jotted down this week.
- That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it.”— David Sedaris
What have I been doing with my life lately? Navel-gazing, it seems.
- After spending a significant amount of time recently reading the very human words of David Sedaris (uncomfortably honest, raw, funny, exceptional), it’s clear how truly terrible AI writing is (boring, basic, insufficient). I simply must delete every word generated by artificial intelligence from my website and life, and never use it again for that purpose. It’s a mystery as to why I ever thought it was a sufficient replacement for my own words. You know what else is boring? My navel.
- I saw a Santa-shaped man in the steam room at the gym, standing in front of the steam pipe, spinning slowly like a rotisserie chicken.
- We ordered American-style pancakes for breakfast, but I forgot what America tastes like. M tried to pay with her room key.
- The banana tree leaves are shredded like confetti from previous monsoon seasons, and mimic the pattering sound of the incoming rain as they’re rustled by winds the storm will blow in on. Is rainy season here already?
- Syntha (my cat) shadowed my every move all morning, until finally shimmying under the bed to hide. She’s afraid of thunder, and I am her protector.
- Currently in a reading-everything-David-Sedaris-has-ever-written phase. Midway through a book of diary entries from his 20s. Why are the mundane events of someone else’s life so interesting? My eyes are opening to the many things I could write about that I previously thought to be unnoteworthy.
In the book, David speaks of a woman who wrote a book of advice called ‘If You Want to Write’, where she mentions the importance of keeping a diary. It was valuable, she said, because after a while you’d stop being forced and pretentious and become honest and unafraid of your thoughts.
I feel that.
Really wish I’d recorded my experiences up until now. I’ve done so many interesting things that I largely don’t remember the finer details of. Instead, I just wrote walls of rambling words about how confused I was. Maybe that’s why I stayed confused for so long? - Bali flooded today. I saw floating cars and a tall ramshackle building crumbling into a raging river that, yesterday, was a street.
- When M was a toddler, I weaned her from the binky by cutting the tips off each one. She was free to use them, but lost interest that very same day. Apparently, I snipped away the joy.
- My relationship with social media is complicated. Sometimes I love it, and sometimes I loathe it. I once used it to build a life coaching business, traveling around the US and moving to Bali. But these days, I’ve no desire to create content for it like I used to.
Sometimes it provides me with laughs, inspiration, and knowledge. It’s convenient for connecting. But it also consistently leaves me feeling ‘meh’ at best and inadequate at worst (always frizzled around the edges). Not to mention, its addictiveness is immediate. I find myself downloading and deleting Instagram daily.
Today I tried a new trick (ironically, learned of on Instagram). I set my wallpaper to plain black and my phone filter to greyscale. The intention: leave my phone at full functionality, but remove the psychological rewards of using it. Who knew the picture of my cat, whom I’m obsessed with and see every time my phone is in my hand, makes me apt to come back for more?
The verdict so far: a smartphone without color (especially social media) is dull, underwhelming, and, dare I say, depressing. I can do what I need to, but am way less interested in sticking around. The colors of my analog life are suddenly more vibrant.
Did I just snip the tips off my binkies? - I’ve been mainlining sugar lately.
A scoop and a half of palm sugar in each of my three cups of French press every morning, two cups of deeply honey’d chai tea in the afternoon, fudgey brownies from the health food store which I’m convinced don’t count due to them being gluten free and laced with protein powder – but still, I can’t stop eating them (Sometimes I buy two and consider it lunch)
Tonight for dinner, I had a slice of my favorite, way-bigger-than-need-be, lemon meringue pie from a cafe called The Glasshouse, situated next door to my favorite hotel in Sanur.
I always think I should give up sugar, but it’s one of the only vices I still have left (and who would I be without a vice?) I became a sugar girl when I stopped being a wine girl. Seems this is a common trait of the booze loving teetotaler.
I once had a boyfriend who quit drinking after three DUIs. He bought Sour Patch Kids in bulk, and after riding the bus home from work, he’d fiendishly devour them while wearing sweatpants and hollering sports words at the TV.
On my brother’s recent visit to Bali, we helped him procure ice cream three different times one day. He’s also alcohol free, and insisted throughout his stay that he was, in fact, “feeding his parasite”. Certain he’d acquired it from one of his many cats long ago, he seemed not only content with his intestinal house guest but considered it his duty as a good host to honor its every demand.
I’d like to think that my consumption habits are not as severe as these other sugar lunatics. But isn’t that the logic every addict uses to justify their behavior?
As I fork the last bits of lemony goodness into my pie hole, I resign myself to going on a sugar sabbatical. M reminds me that I say this at least once a month. - I’ve recently concluded that the thoughts running amok in my head, and the feelings that accompany them, are nothing to be taken all too seriously. Anything that shifts so quickly could not possibly be worth lending weight to, right? Seems an inadequate foundation for hitching an identity to. They seem to be more suited for entertainment purposes – a riveting show to watch when I’m bored and there’s nothing more interesting to look at.
- My voice was lost for so long, but now I’m remembering how much I love to write. I’m enjoying getting lost in crafting sentences – I don’t even care that the ‘e’ on my keyboard has stopped working. The satisfaction I feel is overriding the annoyance of having to keep an ‘e’ loaded into my clipboard, and the awkwardness of using ‘command V’ each time an ‘e’ is required (which is a lot, by the way – why couldn’t the z have stopped working?)
I’m reminded of the very first blog I had, before the notion of ‘making money online’ was even on my radar. Experimenting, writing, and sharing were pure, unadulterated joys which I’m now suddenly thrilled about reclaiming.