March 26, 2018

It's only been a few days of journaling but it's starting to feel like I need to make a course correction. The daily diary is a reflection of what I'm doing at the time, and I don't think I remember well enough to start spewing what I want to think about a bit longer.

In other words, I want to make a change. The idea is to come up with ideas. The idea is to give myself some time to think, and I'm not quite doing that. I'm just spraying words for ten minutes and throwing it out there. Better than nothing, but not good enough. Not the idea.

Where did I get this? I was listening to Daniel H. Pink on The Tim Ferriss Show podcast. They were talking about logging and reviewing bad ideas, and while I think writing every day for at least ten minutes is a good exercise in momentum, it's not bringing me closer to the time I'd like to spend asking questions and writing stories about this weird world, this freakshow.

Watching Wild Wild Country was a good motivator tonight. It's amazing to me that this story of magnitude, as far as I know so far, has never crossed my eyes. It's the stuff left out of textbooks. It's the stories that mean something but we're not sure why. Maybe no one stopped to question it. There was too much regular life going on to sit and think. And sometimes, more today than ever before, that's a god-given luxury. Think. Write. Share it around.

The thing about writing for ten minutes was that I didn't want to think too hard and not put anything on the "page". Now I'm running into problems not thinking much or deeply at all. There must be a happy medium, a better way.

I could read an article and spend five minutes trying to go deep into a hole with it. Really explore. At least then it would feel like a start I could come back to and restart.

At least it's only ten minutes. The pivot isn't enormous. It's just experimental.

I started reading about Jordan Peterson today. Or I should say I read a new take on him. The article was written by someone on the Vox team, exploring the two kind of faces Peterson is portraying. There is a weird contingent of young, white dudes that see his refusal to say pronouns and the like as an act of strength and bravery and conservatism. I always thought Peterson had some interesting ideas about character traits and personal agency and responsibility. But it's always more complicated than a few sentences. And I haven't finished this article anyways.

But that's a good history lesson I'm sure someone will look back to explore years from now, and we're in the middle of it. Who is Jordan Peterson? What are the subjects of the day? Where do we go from here?

Starbucks has a new beverage - the crystal ball frappuccino. I saw the sign this morning after joking with some new friends that they really haven't broken out and experimented lately. I wonder if Starbucks lost the battle with another local coffee shop that invented the unicorn frap.