June Review

The last day of June. I want to get back into the productive state I was in until the end of May, but I haven’t quite worked up the motivation. I’ll start by looking back on the things that I’ve accomplished in the past six weeks or so.

I finished the outdoor table, my first real woodworking project. It doesn’t really match the furniture, and I’m worried about the hard-to-reach places that I wasn’t really able to seal, but overall, I’m quite happy with it. It looks cool, both rustic and stylish, and it seems capable of fulfilling its function too.

In a few days I will have finished my third session at Liberty University, marking the halfway point of courses I have to take (there’s also student teaching in the spring which I’m not counting).

I started listening to music again recently. It inspired me to practice the piano a bit more consistently, and now I can play Bach’s 2-part invention no. 1 pretty fluidly, and I’m on my way to remembering no. 8. I’m also working on Grieg’s Gangar (Norwegian march) and when I get discouraged or feel like playing something more emotive, I play the theme from Legend of Mana.

I read Troilus and Cressida after finishing Timon of Athens. It took me a long time because I never really got into it. It’s an interesting play, but better to study than to read, I suspect. The ending doesn’t feel complete at all, even though it is pretty much marked by the death of Hector and a short postlude. After that I read the Paradise War, which I finished on Sunday. I read the Song of Albion trilogy in 2005 (I believe I even wrote in a book journal about it), but I didn’t remember much of anything except the third book’s heartbreaking ending and that I really enjoyed the second book. Although the first book was apparently unmemorable, I was still somewhat disappointed by it—it definitely feels like just a set up for the plot in the later books.

I’ve gone through four Javascript tutorials in the last week, which are easy and interesting and have made me feel much more comfortable with Javascript. It’s discouraging that the projects are so simple that I hardly even feel like I’ve accomplished anything, but I’m telling myself that if I get through all 15 of these projects, I should be able to write something “real” in Javascript without having to google every single step and without getting frustrated when I get stuck.

Anything else? I cooked chicken piccata for the first time, which was quite good on the first night that I made it, and plenty enjoyable enough as leftovers, which was good because I had days of them.

Satisfactory

I was set to have another miserable end of the week yesterday with several unfinished assignments on the last day, but I somehow did a decent job with most of them. One of them I decided to put off today. I could have made something up, but I didn’t feel right about that, and I really wanted to take my time and do a good job on it. It might be difficult to finish today, but it’s going to be my main goal, and I’m definitely going to do it.

Obviously, I’ve been in a fugue of unproductivity for the past four weeks. Most of that time was spent in Rimworld, but then I bought two more games. One didn’t keep my attention long, but the second one, Satisfactory, is like a fusion of Subnautica and Factorio. It’s dangerous, and I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time on it. Before I found Satisfactory, I actually wrote a good long two-page post, expressing my frustrations and struggles and doubts, but I didn’t post it right away and my computer deleted it when it decided to shut down. Apparently autosave only works if you give it a location on the cloud—how stupid. Anyway, that discouraged me from making an effort again anytime soon.

Today I had coffee for the first time in a few days, and I also woke up early. I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep, but Saturday night I did, so maybe that helped too. Whatever the cause, I was extremely motivated. First thing, I put the third coat of sealer on my table, and then I channeled this motivation to my factory. However, I was feeling too good for that to hold my attention for very long. I’m going to give an informational speech about memory (this is related to the assignment that is overdue), and doing some preliminary research about that further increased my motivation to have a good day.

I have three strategies in mind to avoid relapse. First, stop making video games a sinful pleasure, with an emphasis on sin. Whenever I feel bad about myself, it becomes my default way to avoid confronting my discomfort. I need to see it as an acceptable but suboptimal way to pass the time. Second, change my study position to somewhere with more scrutiny. Ideally, I would be in this location for a set time period every day, and at other times I would be free to move around. Third, ask my parents to help me stay away from game binging. Accountability works, as much as I hate it.

Another thought—I waste entirely too much time forgetting what I memorize. I should try the memory palace, even though I think my spatial intelligence is too poor to make it worthwhile. I want to get back into scheduling my day—I think it worked really well as long as I did it, and I lost my drive quickly when I stopped.