Willpower and Babies

I almost got hit this morning. I was riding my bike down the road in front of my apartment building—it’s very residential and narrow—when a small utility vehicle came barreling down a connecting gravel road. He was going really fast for being on a gravel road and having to make a fairly sharp turn at the end of it. The visibility was fine and yet he still didn’t stop when he got to the main road, so I had to swerve to the other side to avoid being hit. Somehow I was really calm as it was happening, but after ten seconds or so I replayed the scene in my head and was dumbfounded.

On Thursday night I woke up sneezing at midnight and wasn’t able to go back to sleep until 4:30. As a result I felt miserable on Friday, and the allergies are still sticking around three days later. In November! What the heck! I spent the majority of the weekend reading a very long fanfiction that put Emiya Shirou from Fate/Stay Night into the Mass Effect world. It was really good although overly wordy, and I really did spend too much time on it. I skipped the gym completely (it has now been over a week since I went). But the weekend wasn’t a total wash because I also took the Matsumoto Castle tour and went to a bar with Big D in the evening.

My mother told some of her friends that I was thinking about becoming an electrician, and they were confident that they knew people who could give me a job very quickly. That feels good and I was happy about it. I still think it would be a great job because even if I don’t stick with it, it gives me practical skills, and if I try to move to embedded systems I think it would be an asset. However, if I decide I have to live overseas, it won’t do me any good and I will have to start over again. Plus, if I make that my main plan on coming home but find out that for some reason I can’t do it, that will be at least six months lost that could have gone into the teaching degree. If I do the teaching degree, worst case scenario I trade $18k and a year of my life for a master’s degree that I don’t put to use. I don’t see that as such a bad trade, and furthermore I can’t see myself never finding the degree useful. Maybe in twenty or thirty years I will want to change jobs and teach, possibly at a community college. And as much as I enjoy learning, I think it’s a waste to not have some kind of higher education degree (I realize that’s a flimsy reason, though).

I think I need to work on setting weekly goals. Maybe one problem with my lack of motivation is that I have so many goals that I am overwhelmed. So let’s think about what is important. I have a Japanese test in three weeks, so I should really study for that, but lately I’ve not been motivated. I should go to the gym (or do exercise) for the sake of my physical and mental health. I want to get up earlier and try to do devotions. I want to try working on my memory program. I need to get a haircut. I think that covers all the more urgent tasks. Programming isn’t really urgent—I want to try, but I suspect that it will require more willpower than I expect, which I should use for more urgent things. A haircut needs to happen ASAP—maybe I’ll do that today and call it a day as far as willpower goes. For the rest of the week then I will just focus on Japanese and exercise. Maybe if I make a deal with myself to do HIIT at home, then I won’t have to go to the gym, and I will have the willpower to study. But it seems more likely that I will simply give up on exercising altogether if that happens, alas.

It might be clear to see that I’ve been thinking about willpower lately. It would be nice to quantify it and how much each task requires. I thought about making a program for it, even though it probably doesn’t have much relation to reality at all.

My parents and I talked about a family member having a baby without even being engaged much less married, and how my brother didn’t understand how that was a bad thing. I felt like I needed an analogy and I didn’t come up with anything that fit very well, but here were the two that worked to some extent:

Imagine your friend gets into and decides to attend an Ivy League school (or maybe Duke to make it closer to home). That’s a great thing because education is good and it’s prestigious for your friend. But your friend has no money for tuition and won’t receive scholarships, and plus they will study art history. Can you be happy for your friend when there’s a good chance that they will carry the student debt for decades? Of course out-of-wedlock birth is worse because you’re making a decision that affects another person, one that you’re supposed to care for and protect.

So another analogy—your friend tells you that they adopted a big dog from the pound. That’s a good thing, right? But your friend lives in a small apartment and frequently works late and goes on business trips. It seems unlikely that the dog will get the care it needs, so is it really a good thing?

In both of these cases, the basic action is good, but the circumstances make it potentially tragic. I think I could come up with better analogies, but it’s hard to appeal to a culture that is so essentially individualistic.

On a happier note, I saw a cute pun today: A hundred years ago everyone had horses and only the rich had cars. Now everyone has cars and only the rich have horses. Oh how the stables have turned.