April 2022
April 22, 2022
This is the first website journal entry that I've first drafted longhand before transcribing, editing, and uploading. I need to get more productive with the pen. Writing is a practice, after all, and one that's not perfectible. I have to thank my math studies for that nugget of wisdom: there's no such thing as perfection, only approaches to it, and while we may spend our entire lives firing arrows at targets, we can only ever hit near the bullseye, for the precise center of a thing is immeasurable in reality. Furthermore, a tireless pursuit of perfection, while noble, is self-destructive. Better to find places of satisfaction, little bivouacs where you can rest on the arduous climb up the peakless mountain called Mortality.
It's been a while since I've committed my thoughts to this site. First, it was school that distracted me, then reading, and lately it's been the absence of my wife and the miraculous intervention of From Software's Elden Ring. School's been out for a few weeks, the wife returns in a couple, and I'm more or less done with Elden Ring. As the so-called distractions fall away, my thoughts once again turn to what to do with my time.
Last year I chose to devote every waking moment from mid-April through to the start of September to the act of livestreaming on Twitch. I went all the way, leaned so far into it that any casual observer would be hard pressed to say that I could've done more. I put everything on the table. I experimented with various formats and content, created and destroyed a digital community, and learned a lot about myself in the process. That's all been chronicled here in past entries. The most important takeaway is that I did it. It's a thing that's been done: the culmination of some seven years of picking and poking away at the livestreaming venture. And I've come away from it with the most blessed conclusion possible: let it be a simple hobby. Nothing more, nothing less. And so it has been, at least since November of last year.
~3,200 hours stretch out from now until my next major obligation. Only 150 of those will be spent livestreaming; nothing compared to the 1,103 over the same period in 2021! I've gifted myself almost a thousand precious hours. Time only becomes a useful resource when it's quantified. The big project this year is the reading of Goethe's Faust. In order to maximize the literary value I need to undertake an academic and historical study of the Christian Bible, the history of science, and Western philosophy. This, alongside a review of Greek mythology and a reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses, should take a few hundred hours. Quite easily done.
At some point I need to reconstruct the literature road map that's led me to this point. Rather than just recommending books (a practice a despise, because I always feel like I'm trying to force an obligation onto someone) I'd rather present the path of organic discovery that I'm walking. This pursuit is unusual, and I don't know why I'm doing it. It's almost like a calling, in a way. I know that's about as far from a concrete reason as I could get, but perhaps it's a matter of the heart? I'd rather give a logical answer, but here we are.
2022.04.22
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