# OCT 1: - [x] Get supplements out of the way, no armodafinil. - [x] Exercise 15m HIIT + preworkout ←→ to get creatine - [ ] Spend 30 minutes wordclouding and doing the 4 things prescribed - [ ] after, shower 10m, masturbate, immediately start piano 30m - [x] morning pages/journal dreams/thoughts/loop back table mess to current preoccupation and what you think you were concerned about - [ ] Go to Daily Planner To-do list and pick one and do it. - [x] Resend revision VO - [x] Backread and incorporate things like stretch goal = learning chess, learning Tagalog, PhD, learning video editing, incorporate other things. - [ ] Nicole history scholar who? Schedule when to buy her book Imperfect Tense and Times - [x] EOD: organize books downloaded yesterday, schedule when to read them, schedule when to contact for curriculum correction - [x] Figure out a routine = when to summarize films to a friend, when to practice piano, when to go deep on a stretch goal, when to talk at length or debate or improvise with AI. An improv day is Friday, a debate day is Monday, a summary day is Wednesday, a feelings day is Tuesday, a mentoring day is Thursday. # Morning Pages lol technically afternoon pages. It is 5:19PM. Goddamn R.F. Kuang. I don’t understand critics who say she’s not a good prose writer. Babel is shaping up to be my favorite book. It is very heartening to feel elated at every passage I read again. I don’t know but maybe it’s the exercise making memorization easier. “He looked at the curve of Babel against the moonlight, at the faint silver glow cast off by its many reinforcements. He had a sudden, very clear vision of the tower in ruins. He wanted it to shatter. He wanted it to, for once, feel the pain that made its rarefied existence possible. ‘I want it to crumble.’ So lyrical and so easy to remember. Maybe it was “vision, shatter, pain, crumble.” keywords highlighted in your brain like glow sticks in the darkness. I like it very much as a dopamine hit. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. So this is what it means to be reader. A literature lover again. I don’t exactly know what it is about some types of literature, maybe it’s hype and the infrastructure of marketing influencing my perception about Babel in the first place. Maybe I just like the idea of silver bars thrumming with magic. And perhaps, that was enough to fuel me to read through this entire book. But the prose. THE PROSE. The ‘killed by childbirth in a room humid with blood that smelled like the ocean.” It is so visceral. I would never have thought of it. But I’m not R.F. Kuang. All right. I don’t know what to write. This is my first morning pages in a very, very long time and I’m reeling at the passage of time as always. I’m perpetually besieged by the feeling of wasting time, the AI doomerism of late, and the fact that I’m still in the reskilling stage. I want to write about Jeffrey, if only because I need to write about him to write Anatomy and the Perfect Guy (TM). He likely asked to have that adorable picture of him be deleted off the BYD Sta. Rosa page. I just hate that I didn’t save it. Maybe someday I’ll get to take new pictures of him. He looked so happy. Transitions. It’s the logic that I’m perpetually still trying to piece together. How do you finesse through a paragraph without looking like you’re disorganized? I used to know how to do it. I need to read my past papers to thread through logic again. Or ask ChatGPT how I somehow managed to lose this one skill, like a crucial lynchpin of essays and writing. I really hate that I’m also beset by so much guilt. From 2019, I guess. I finally remembered why I posted that “apology” and tagged Ma’am Angie. I was very self-incriminating. I literally wrote that blog post about “Why I don’t believe in true love” about her. Goddammit I’m pathetic. That self-hatred runs deep. I really was so dumb in a very offensive way. At least other people are only dumb intellectually. I truly don’t know how people thought I was a good person or had character. I truly didn’t. This guilt is eating me up right now and all I can hope for is that she forgets who I am or somehow made peace with it like with me making peace with Paolo. This is really shattering my identity formation ability. How can I be a good person if I shit on people who have suffered more than me? Especially if that person was a very good person to me early in life. Fuck. But I don’t want to dwell on it longer than necessary. I should learn from this because it’s the only thing that I can do that isn’t destructive and self-flagellating. To think—and I had this thought blaring in a muffled way the other way—that other people out there who haven’t grown up like I have continue to be evil and do senseless things like destroying other people who have been nothing but good to them. I didn’t intend for her to find out directly, for one, but still it destroys me to think she is hurt because of what an insecure and selfish and thoughtless person like me could have written. I hope she didn’t read that blog post. It’s very hard to think she didn’t when I just put two and two together and remembered that I saw her at Ayala, and she didn’t look at me even if I was standing in front of her. Goddammit. No. FUCK. I haven’t been haunted by a memory in a really long time. I’m very desensitized by a lot of things, but this—well. At least, I’m beginning to recalibrate—I think—and regain a sense of recall about my recent past and its meaning on my life. Things have been very meaningless and stale for a long while since September started and I really thought I would have improved by then. But luckily I picked up on September 30. My sister came home yesterday and bought me On Cloud shoes. I’m just sad that I don’t have money for our birthday. See? I’m normal—I AM NORMAL. I AM NORMAL. Memory working better compared to 2022. You don’t rise to the level of your ambitions, but you fall to the level of your systems. I never had a real system to take into account routine. And it’s all about input output. I was haphazardly trying to get a routine started through TickTick. She was a completely different person than me who had no direction but a real black hole of a wound and mimetic desire. And she had no help from AI. Oddly enough I don’t feel as bad if it were not for the fact that I feel like I’m one node in a million or billion of others in a system that feeds the climate crisis. And every single day I try to improve, I have this little voice that assures me that I’m normal—that it isn’t so bad, that I’ve not forgotten muscle memory from my partially successful piano session yesterday, that the person scanning my brain really wasn’t an idiot who thought I was younger than my age. I just hope I get over this grief of losing something precious. Because I did, I lost something precious. And it’s not just Jeffrey. It’s the larger grief walloping me and making me emotional listening to “You’re Gonna Go Far” and remembering that dream where they both kissed my head in a liminal paradise. I would have probably memorized this song by heart. Which reminds me, by heart. So much could be explained by this, this dilating force of emotion that opens and makes possible the impossible. Like a cervix expanding to give birth to something that could destroy it. People remember things because it resonates. Deep within, the thought crystallizes within the inter-sensory world of images and memories. # ROUTINE: DAILY: ASK YOURSELF FIRST THING: what day is it today? - [x] Wake up supps, creatine, preferably with MCT, FOREFRONT GOALS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 Took more than 30min because I woke up late deliberately to recover from 6AM sleep start. Planned my entire weekly routines and daily routines. - [x] exercise, shower 15m + 15m - [x] Read books 30m (you can skip this alternately to train spontaneous thought) - [x] Morning pages daily 30m - [x] Monday = freewrite 30m, ask yourself, TUE = review, THURS = review, next Monday = review - [x] Talk with AI/TT every day 30m - [x] Wednesday = explain film or your writing to AI I was moderately stressed, but not so much as if it’s a real interaction. I surprised myself but I still have some gaps in absorption. I didn’t recall why she was kidnapped along with her coworkers. I forgot the aunt’s name. I forgot what exactly Danielle Radcliffe wanted. I forgot that rich creepy guy’s name. I forgot what they were supposed to retrieve at the party. Are you supposed to easily forget movies you’ve watched? I mean, if somebody asked me to explain the Hunger Games I’d go in a tailspin trying to transcribe every single frame. But it would be different in writing, because speaking is an entirely different, if not related but different, art. - [ ] Memory training every day ~60 - [ ] EOD: 1 hour before bed, admin tasks: reflect (log what happened), backread, incorporate tasks and planner, plan next day and copy routine again, strategize, organize books, organize table, clean floor, look at physical planner, screenshots and iPad flashcards, = 3.5 hours, 4.5 hours max non-negotiable = after that, allocate what is left to thesis, work, writing projects. You have to be really devoted for this to work. Your supplements will help you. WEEKLY: SAT/SUN - [ ] Watch film Saturday, explain film right after. ~3 hours / Alternately, write an essay and offload outtakes by recording yourself. Write essay/thinkpiece about obscure Italian drama no one in my circle has heard of. or Write primer on what happens after antipsychotics = essentially getting rid of your patterns, it is an afterthought to psychiatrists whether or not they are destroying your brain, because it is doing what apparently is effective, it dulls or gets rid of your brain’s natural state. Nigrostriatal dysfunction being noticed by academics because exactly. Movement disorders caused by the drugs. - [ ] Stretch goal Sunday for 2 hours, chess, video editing, Tagalog conversation with AI, - [ ] Prepare Anki bedrock 4 hours Sunday / essentially light studying and structuring knowledge - [ ] Piano 2/week Saturday, Sunday 30m THESE ARE THE ONLY DAYS YOU ARE ALLOWED TO REALLY DIVE DEEP INTO TikTok, Facebook scrolling. # REMINDERS: 1. Ideal is association that readily associates = temporal-parietal junction time flower and pattern recognition = flower petals are patterns, left interior frontal gyrus being the seat for rule-following = Sabby Jake Zyrus inside bottom??? 2. Paraphrasing this content, then add, deform, contrast, associate, elaborate, examine, recast, infect with new or old 3. You try to link context as much as possible to the individual items or else you’ll just have free-floating data with no meaning. Also, try to really understand what it is, not just rote. 4. When watching video, like Weapons analysis by StudioBinder, really try to engage your understanding and bring external thought into it as an opposite force, you cannot just be passively ingesting content. 5. Cues: dad noticed I was ignorant, formed analogy on the spot. 6. Visualize your concepts = multi-sensory integration 7. Stop eating processed food. You know the risks. 8. GAP: not quite able to make deductions or implications. What does this imply? What are the consequences? 9. Internalize all the advantages bequeathed to you now: heuristics, shortcuts, memorize them. # THOUGHTS I cannot wait until some of these painstaking processes become muscle memory and autonomic as breathing. 3:20PM: feeling a bit weird and wired because of the preworkout. It’s just so unpleasant to feel like this. Equal parts excited and scared. Learned something about four-chunks = heavy, ancient, solid, and eternal. brain likes this. Also, brain, I feel, doesn’t so much have an ease for complex tacks as sweeping up simpler tasks with ease. They feel easier because brain is used to harder stuff. Death is inherently a Real event that shatters reality. I don’t know but I can’t imagine dealing with the grief of losing someone permanently. Maybe it’s the fact that it happens to a lot of people that makes it easier to bear. At least you’re not alone. At least you’re not uniquely fucked. —prompted by Rayji de Guia repost of Mendiola rally victim. —I just realized you really do have to embody yourself into the movie to really be able to summarize it well. —Watched Weapons with fam. Your sister is able to put the dots together—that’s why he went to the police station—and anticipate that Gladys rang the doorbell. You are supposed to solve or be curious about the information presented. You anticipate outcomes—underexercised. Anticipate what will happen in next movies. Goalposts constantly change. Great. 20,000 pesos for at least 3 months of supply on average for my precious supps. Here’s to becoming a TPN-dominant brain that doesn’t get tired and doesn’t zone out. All those years in classrooms. # TASKS - [x] Figure out the total cost of your brain supplement and nootropic stack = lithium, uridine, tropoflavin, magnesium, DHA/EPA, Alpha-GPC, caffeine+L-theanine, iron that doesn’t taste like ass, armodafinil, butyrate, sulforaphane, MCT oil, zinc, copper, preworkout, inhaler - [x] schedule a blood test - [x] Reminder to stop eating processed food, sugar-highs, and others because the risk is too high. - [x] Schedule change sheets/pillows - [x] Backread Notion + crystallize routine ## PROGRESS 1. Managed to schedule weekly/daily tasks 2. 6:06PM. Exercised, read, did morning pages done and now I gotta do memory training. Gotta power through the fear and dread. 3. I did not do memory training, but I did talk to AI about Megan 2 for about 15m. I have now done 6 big tasks of moderate difficulty and had some mini-tasks like actively recalling DCID, schizophrenia voices, and Babel passage. I know this is peanuts for now, compared to what high school me was capable of doing, but at least I’m getting somewhere. Baby steps.