now

back to tokyo, back to work

The sabbatical is over!

I’m back from train-hopping around Kyushu and Osaka as of April. Met terrific people in every town I passed through and have a few fun stories to share, but a small blurb on this page won’t do them justice - I think I’ll share them in a more detailed post later on.

People have been asking a lot about what it’s like to not work for an extended period of time, and the same questions tend to come up: how to manage free time, how to remain disciplined, how my perspective has changed on a 9-5, what it’s like leaving work, how it feels coming back.

I didn’t really know what to expect going into it, but I learned a lot about myself and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to do it. I was surprised that it was not an easy experience. Taking 3 months off sounds like a dream until your responsibilities smack you over the head.

With so much free time, you can’t use busyness as an excuse for not pursuing personal goals and working toward what’s important to you. This leads to critical moments of reflection where you need to ask and answer(!): What is important to you? What matters most, and why? What kind of person are you, and how is that reflected by your goals and actions - or the inverse: what do your current goals and actions say about you as a person? How will you work toward to these newly minted ideals?

Upon breaking free from work, your personal time is not just the sliver of life in between your office job, it becomes something it always should have been: the medium by which you commit yourself to the things you care about. And there’s too much of it to say “not now”; because an afternoon of “not now”s very easily becomes a 2 week chain of “not now”s without the excuse of work to defend your current lifestyle.

…Okay, I have more to say than I realized, so I’ll probably break this out into its own post as well!

guitar

I’m still loving my new (old) telecaster. I gave all of my guitars a deep clean and condition, got them restrung, and they are all once again constantly going out of tune a joy to play.

LoG’s guitar course continues to be the best resource I’ve seen to learn guitar. His methods just make sense, each lesson builds upon the last, the content is parceled out just right so as to not overwhelm learners, he demonstrates how the concepts from each lesson tie into the next, he teaches students how to practice and when to move on… I could keep going. Surprisingly, he claims to not have much of a background as an educator outside of teaching guitar (for over a decade), but his method of teaching satisfies every requirement I’ve come across in a few books on the topic of skill acquisition.

Oh, and it’s $5 a month.

I’ve been going through it to solidify some fundamentals and break through plateaus, and it’s doing exactly that. I feel like I’ve become a much more creative guitar player by running his practice drills every day.

songwriting

I’ve recently discovered School of Song which looks interesting if it doesn’t end up as MasterClass 2.0. It seems that each course offers be 4-8 lectures taught by well-known musicians. The Brian Eno course caught my attention, but I also spotted songwriters from Dr. Dog, Fleet Foxes, The Dirty Projectors, and more. Reviews seem to be few and far between, but the ones I have seen were glowing. I’m drawn to it because I’m trying to push through writing my first-ever songs, and I love that they emphasize collaboration as students often share work and chat over Discord. Apparently many people have met up and formed bands in person (although typically in the US).

I purchased the Laura Marling course on songwriting and the ongoing Song Analysis/Deep Listening course as I’ve been meaning to get into the habit of breaking down music I enjoy to understand what makes it enjoyable.

Strange how I will dedicate a day to staring at paintings in a museum, but I haven’t given myself the same space to properly, deeply listen to a song or album.

Let me know if you’d like to sign up together - they’ll discount the courses!

software

I’ve been coding up small fixes for everyday problems and it has been a lot of fun. Tinkering around with things, saying “what if…”, and having a go at tackling the multitude of monotony.

I recently listened to a podcast that indirectly touches on being a tinkerer, or maker, and it gave me something of an epiphany: making things gives me energy. I’m not sure how I forgot that, or if I ever even realized it.

Reflecting on the past ~week, I’ve enjoyed churning out a host of miscellany:

• a script to migrate the previousnow content to /notes so I don’t need to do it manually
• a RayCast plugin, blackhole search , that forces me to fill out a template with a plan before I spend an inordinate amount of time searching the web for something
• a YouTube url -> transcript txt batch CLI tool because I wanted to feed hours of footage of Q&A etc. to NotebookLM/ChatGPT so I could ask it specific questions around the ~10 min of scattered footage I’m interested in
• an iOS shortcut to take a photo of something and automatically send it to ChatGPT for transcription
• unreleased perpetual WIPs: strength training app, an app around building community. Both of these are proof of concept + testing how far I can get with repl.it and lovable.

On a related note, I just fixed a bug with the readwise integration - the thing that is showing you a few of my favorite articles below - where it was pulling in articles I read from a while ago instead of the past week. Not a big deal, it simply surfaced a few old gems for your enjoyment and my rediscovery.

Also spotted an incredible repository of various software tools that I’ve been going through this afternoon. This site has tools to help you find manga, learn about FOSS and privacy on the web, replace your ad-blockers, you name it!

reading list

These sections are auto updated. Summaries are courtesy of Readwise.

articles i've enjoyed in the past week

currently reading