So.. my impression of meditation is that it is supposed to make me more mentally adept, somehow.. but I feel like most things I hear about meditation talk about relaxing and clearing my mind, which seems helpful if my problem is being stressed or anxious — which I definitely am sometimes — but mostly I'm depressed and unmotivated, and I'm sortof hoping to become more mentally adept so I can alter my brain to be the opposite of that. I wonder if meditation is the right tool for this..

When my brain chemistry has no "excitement" neuro-something-or-others floating around, and isn't interested in doing anything.. I wish I could get it to work on stuff that my future self would be appreciative of.

copying

My adviser from grad school sent me a poem he thought I might like: No Title Required, by Wislawa Szymborska. I did like the poem — I like the idea of an introspective poem that traces a line of thought in situ, as it happens — but I thought it was too verbose. I trimmed it down a bit here:

I'm sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning
 
I have come from somewhere
and before that
I have turned up in many other places
 
So it happens that I am and look
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
and a shadow skims through my hands
 
When I see such things, I'm no longer sure
that what's important
is more important than what's not

I'm not sure Wislawa would approve my changes. But I enjoyed making them.

I've thought about writing in the past. I've even tried writing a story — a very short story. But I'm not great at it. One idea that crossed my mind for becoming better was essentially copying someone else's story, but making some minor changes to it. Of course, this idea is just a copy of a previous post, it seems.

My sister wanted to know how expensive gas is in the bay area..

This is not photoshopped — the sign was just having an error — though it would have been so easy to photoshop that I suspect many people assume that's what I did.

This was posted on Facebook as a sortof experiment — see this post. I mean, I did think it was funny and worth sharing, but I usually don't post things on Facebook. Anyway, I'm reposting it here because someone pointed out that doing so would make more sense, and I agree.

Also, here's the original photo. It looked too small on Facebook, so I cropped it, though the preview image was really small, making me believe I needed to crop it more than I really did need to. Note to self for next time.

communicating with the world..

I had thought a good idea might be to generate a good reputation for some web presence so that people would come there all the time, and I could use it as an outlet to communicate thoughts to the world,

But now I think that people are directed to specific bits of information from sources like Facebook, Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, etc, as opposed to checking up on their favorite blogs or websites,

So now I'm thinking that I should be trying to figure out how to send messages that get noticed in-and-of-themselves on sites like that, with no care given to attribute it to me, except that Facebook and Twitter will show my name, but I'm thinking that doesn't matter.

So I posted a thing on Facebook, and we'll see how many likes it gets, and iterate from there..

notes: posted at 7:17pm Pacific on Facebook.. todo: put likes after given amounts of time here..

update: about 6 likes after 24 hours.. let's see if I can beat that..

Caltrain vs Shinkansen

judging by a speedometer app on my phone: 79 mph vs 168 mph

I'm actually surprised that the Caltrain goes 79 mph.. I wonder if that's right..

Hm.. I wonder if and how the word "oDesk" has increased in research papers since it's existence.