ismael kadare's paris review interview

• "Negative creation for a writer is what he doesn’t write. You need a great talent to know what you shouldn’t write, and in a writer’s consciousness nonwritten works are more numerous than the ones he has written. You make a choice. And this choice is important. On the other hand, one must liberate oneself from these corpses, bury them, for they prevent one from writing what one should, just as it is necessary to clear up a ruin in order to prepare the site for building."
• "I write two hours in the morning, and I stop. I can never write more—my brain gets tired. I write in a café around the corner, away from distractions. The rest of my time is spent reading, seeing friends, all the rest of my life."
• "Writing is neither a happy nor an unhappy occupation—it is something in-between. It is almost a second life. I write easily, but I’m always afraid that it may be no good. You need a stable humor; both happiness and unhappiness are bad for literature. When you are happy, you tend to become light, frivolous, and if you are unhappy your vision becomes perturbed. You have to live first, experience life, and later write about it."

reading about dog cloning, never knew this existed wow

• hoi polloi - the masses, ordinary folk, used In a derogatory way to refer to popular opinion
• Via Gen pets - $50k to clone your deceased cat or dog
• the ethical issue of monetizing bereaved pet owners, and using two other nameless dogs/cats in the process of making the artificial pup/kitten
• can’t recall much from the things I’ve read, worried my brain can’t store information anymore, its leaking with holes.

notes from church

Luke 22:3 Satan entered (Eserchomai) him = metaphorically, it means an evil thought entering Judas, betraying Jesus for money

Luke 19:9-10 today salvation has come to this house, because this man is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost

Are you like Judas or the elder son in the prodigal son?

The dangerous sin is the hidden sin rather than the visible sin

Hidden sin is only between you and God

Sin is not necessarily criminal acts, it’s also your thoughts and words and behaviors and desires and greed and envy and spite and anger and bitterness and lust.

Charles Spurgeon “The nearer a man lives to God, the more intensely has he to mourn over his own evil heart”

I like this church so far, even though they’re all Indonesians, it’s a relatively small church, a tight-knit community, of families and friends and young adults and kids and uncles and aunties. I think I can pass as indonesian being light brownish yellow? But for a moment I felt out-of-place, I wanted to be back in Ames at the chinese church. But it wouldn’t be the same anymore. There’s always stages in life, and it’s always difficult crossing from one to the next, there’s an uncomfortable transitory phase. You have to get used to the different languages, the new people, and the new environment

Basketball was fun with them, haven’t played with a group in so long. I just keep missing my shots which makes me feel like a failure. i was mostly ok even though I played right after eating, so surgery actually helped a lot. Also it was windy and cold, so that’s my first time plying without sweating much.

I'm actually so slow at math, couldn’t play 24 well, was always the last. Is it anxiety? Is it self-doubt? Is it brain fog? Is it sleep deprivation? Was I always this slow? I remember i took an IQ sample test wi try my neighbor and I was quick at math. Maybe I’m just slow now. I wonder if I can be fast again.

What’s the right amount of studying? I study too little and I might be underprepared. And if I don’t do well, the damage was self-inflicted. Too much and it’s opportunity cost, I could’ve worked on something else. This is like a early stopping problem. When is the right time to stop the search, can studying be framed as a search problem? You’re searching for material that you might not be familiar with, and spend more time on the unknowns than the knowns. you practice and understand and encode, and hopefully it all sticks before you forget it all again in a few months or weeks. It applies to life too, when is the right time to stop and let go? To stop searching for answers? To stop spending so much time on the same things, chewing on the same bone, saying the same things, and just move on? Is anxiety and forlorn and longing a sign that it’s not worth clinging on? Or it’s all part of the process?

I placed a hold on a ton of journal/diary/notebooks of famous writers from SFPL and I’m excited to read them. I want to write in a way that I won’t cringe at myself if I read it the next day or week. (Not a year since writing ability improves overtime and this shows progress). I think I’m still figuring out a structure for these blogs. Or at least some form of purpose or goal. So I don’t spend too much time thoughts dumping. Reading their journals can help me organize these daily entries.

I read and consume so many things in a day. I find little snippets of text that I want to borrow for use in my own writing, like collecting sea shells and rocks from the beach. Also interesting ideas that I might want to resurface in the future. But how do I organize all of this? My brain only keeps what it needs. Is there still a use to reading if i only remember fuzzy and inaccurate versions of what I read? How can information retrieval be more accurate? Why is it that I forget what I read so easily?

Staring at my iPhone at night in my dark room is probably not a great idea for my sleep. I need my desk light, please ship it asap Temu.