I woke up in fear today. in my dream, I was struggling with something, i was anxious. in a foreign place without anyone or anywhere to go to. i remember an old lady and her finger falling off and it freaked me out. Then I faintly remember dreaming about my family. Just the idea and comfort of family, i can’t remember the details about who or what.

i have a theory that people feel lonelier in cities because they receive much higher sensory inputs of things and of people, things that they want, or they think they want, but don’t or cannot have. they see friend groups or couples, other more outwardly attractive / successful people walking on the streets, families travelling together. this theory stems from seeing foreigners and toursits exploring and traveling in chinatown as a family, or elderlies holding their grandchild’s hand as they trek up the hilly streets, old and young couples holding on to each other, it triggers something in me. i need more social connections. i understand that they take time to develop, but how to do this in an economical and natural way. i need to start reaching out to people on twitter.

In the efforts of building a mini library in my apartment, i’ve been going to the library to check out the books I have on hold, whenever I get the chance. I never realized the library opens at 10 a.m. A small status update: i have 23 books in my apartment now. I love living close to a library. I get to walk so much now and it’s something i'm taking for granted. I was essentially sedentary for 6 months in malaysia.

Every Wednesday for the past 3 weeks i’ve been going to one of the sfpl libraries, today I went to the one at presidio. I spend 3 hours “trying” to study. in reality I have an hour of deep focus, the rest of the time I’m browsing books, reading some of them, daydreaming, thinking about the past, worrying about the future, feeling sad, feeling grateful, and everything in between. i’ve been losing the motivation to study. the first pre-quiz prep was very much fear driven, now that I know what to expect, and that I don’t have to put in that much effort, it doesn’t feel that scary anymore. I should be curious and learn wholeheartedly, but all i see is patterns and solutions I have to ingest into my knowledge base so that I can spit it out the next day. the more I study, the more worried I get, and I start suffocating. statistics is suffocating me. classes are suffocating.

A few things I can remember from a few podcasts playing in my ear

• his first novel was handwritten, 200 pages, the only copy was sent to a publisher, he wrote for the sake of writing.
• Murakami shut down his bar to focus fully on a writing career for 2 years. if he was to pursue something, he wanted to go all in, 100%. if it didn’t work out, he told his wife, we will just open another small store
• for his bar, he learned that he didn’t need all the customers to like his bar, just 1/10 of them, and he will focus on making them happy.
• Murakami also got into running, he ran an ultramarathon of 62 miles in Hokkaido. he tells himself “I am not a living being, i am a machine”
• steve jobs: simple is sometimes harder than complex. it takes effort to communicate simply, to write simply. don’t use 1000 words where an image would do. don’t take an hour where 10 minutes would do.
• steve uses unusual but memorable words in his presentations, like the macbook is so fast it screams and the buttons are so nice you would want to lick them
• use taglines for products “1000 songs in your pocket” for the ipod