- Told myself to not abuse phrases like, "can you stop worrying about this?" the problem is with the word can. Of course I CAN, many things are possible. But also its just a complaint. If I talk to myself, I should just ask me to do something. like "stop worrying about this, please" I know the can-question is also a request, but i don't want to make false statements or ask questions I already know the answers to.
- In deciding things, came to the idea of separating effects into primary effects and secondary effects. Like what will definitely happen because of this, and what may happen indirectly. Also, to suspend judgment about the goodness of something when discussing what will happen. Just list the consequences and effects, and then judge later what'll happen.
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Progress today:
- made it to the finishing line with my mild cold
- read a little LOTR and tried to visualize with high resolution the scenes
- did a little practicing my new voice
- did typing with the TouchStream incorporating homerow, d, i, g, and p
- Sat down my position on various priorities in anticipation of lifestyle choices I'll be making this year RE graduation and jobs
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Conclusion on Priorities...
Money is only important to me inasmuch as it gains me financial independence. Anyting more is superfluous
Pure pursuit of passion in absence of any practicality is not as good as a small dose of practicality. A little bit of "selling out" for one thing, can preserve your passions in the long-run and can heighten the desire of your passions.
(I've been trying to educate myself to be a more rational thinker, here's a sample of some progress)
We went bowling this past night and I got a chance to see rational thinking in action.
Here is a simple "before" and "after" of my thought space to show what effect may have been gleaned from imprinting rational thinking into my mind.
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oooo|||||BEFORE
(This is a more emotionally locked in phil)
- I'd spend a lot of time getting into gear or mode before swinging. In between shots, I'd be trying to get myself "relaxed" or into a "confident mode" hoping that that would affect my swing.
- I'd spend a lot of time analysing the score, looking at where the game was going. I'd also be looking at competing bowlers in other lanes, thinking about how well I was doing in comparison to them.
- I'd score a strike and think that I'd be doomed to mess up on the next one.
oooo|||||AFTER
(This is a Phil that is willing to look the Truth in the face and accept it)
- I understood that the primary determinant of my success in bowling was the attention and effort I put while I had the ball in my hand and was on deck. I then stopped focusing on how I was going to bowl and put my attention to the bowling process itself
- I convinced myself that the outcome of this game, in the larger scheme of things, was a trifling. Believe it or not, this was hard for me to swallow.
- I tried to convince myself that I CAN score a strike. Just knowing that you are ABLE to do something in a lot of cases can help you actually do it. This made me more confident
In addition, I had a more case-by-case self-correcting of my game. I'd tell myself, okay, you need to focus more on your aim now or maybe I should use more energy. i.e. I'd distribute my thoughts toward things that actually helped my game.
My scores improved. In addition, I recognized I was tired in the 4th game, and just took it easy. I switched balls and threw in weird ways to get me from being competitive--an attitude which was making me a little stressed. And when I went home, I didn't think much about how I did relative to others.
Describing this event may seem petty. But, oh well. It's progress in my book.
(I'm doing all this "Progress Tracking" BTW because I read somewhere that keep a journal of your progress helps you stay on tasks. It also reminds you of minor successes which are helpful in obtaining happiness)
I've mentioned earlier that I'm trying to find a voice that is most natural to me (this involves my pitch, accent, rhythm, cadence, and timbre when speaking).
Unfortunately I have a mild cold virus so I can't spend hours reading nice prose outloud to synchronize myself. However, I have had opportunities to test it out around people. I also spent some time weighing the costs and benefits to what I'm doing.
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In my cost-benefit analysis, I saw that the costs would be that for the remainder of the school year, people who knew me, but weren't my close friends, would think I'm weird. The benefits, short and long term would be that I would be in my most natural voice and that it'd be something interesting for me to do. I figured it was worth it, even the accent change. This was my initial analysis.
In practice, this is what happened...
Keeping my new voice up was actually hard--which is counter-intuitive because it's supposed to be "natural." When I'd spend time with friends, initally I'd remind myself to be as natural sounding as possible, and I would start with my lower voice and my non-regional accent. However, before I'd let the first peep out, my fear of looking silly would creep in and I'd abandon my accent. My voice would also be halfway between my natural lower voice and my old higher voice.
I could then consciously push myself to my natural voice, but then I'd regress to habit every so often. I practiced so much, though, that I don't think I'd ever fully regressed into my old voice.
So, is my natural voice then my older one or is my new voice my natural one? I'd say that my newer one is the natural one. These early experiments that show me speaking otherwise shouldn't be evidence against it. There can be a distinction between what is habitual and what is natural. And since I'm earnest in private to speak as natural as possible, I think this is a case of habitual v. natural.
From about three long sessions with friends, so far nobody has noticed any change.
I'd attribute this to the limited resolution of voices in memory. If my deviation from what they're used to hearing me as is not that big, then it will pass through them unnoticed. Subconsciously they'll assume that I'm either sick (which I am), that the environment is different, and/or that their memory wasn't as good as they thought it was.
This affects my cost-benefit analysis because I can ease myself into my new natural voice. My voice will change gradually to my natural one over time, and people won't notice the difference. As a result, people won't think I'm weird.
I lose the benefit of having a rapid shock to my voice. But negative attention for stunts like this are the kind of thing I'm trying to avoid. Plus the "coolness" of pulling it off like that should be overrated. In reality, the presiding benefits are being truly natural in my voice and doing something unique.
When I recover from my cold, I'll do more practicing. With school coming back into session, I'll have more opportunity to get in gear in public. And voila, there I'll be, new voice and all.K
Why should we be averse to things anyways? I think to have an automatic avoidance of something. Otherwise, you're better served if you're not averse to things because you can have more freedom in selecting them in cases when you need to. You can be more rational, instead of emotional, when determining whether something is in your best interests or not, rather than relying on a knee-jerk bitterness you feel.
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If people give me flak, should I let myself feel irritated or shattered? There are people who just don't get a rats ass when people criticize them or show their displeasure toward them. They have much more freedom. Now I'm not talking about being uncompassionate, the two aren't mutually exclusive.
So then I asked myself, when is it useful to be averse to flak? Probably if you don't have enough motivation to be sensitive and caring to others, or if you don't care enough about social graces or being nice. In that case, having an aversion to people hating on you motivates you to be a more positive person.
If you are aleady socially comfortable and motivated to be a gentleman, then you don't need to be averse.
I find that I already care more than enough about how I am in social settings, so there is no "need" for be upset when people get upset at me or ridicule me. Since I'm trying my best already, whatever gripes people have with me, are their own problems.
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Okay, day twoish of trying to find my voice.
If you recall, this is my desire to find my natural voice, which involves accent, pitch, cadence, rhythm, etc.
I practiced last night reading out loud Baudrillard's Hystericizing the Millenium. This guy's on crack btw.
How do I achieve my "natural voice" ?
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Well, the first part is simply trying and being motivated to speak how I feel most natural speaking, the most comfortable. Invoking words such as comfortable, natural, ease, pleasing, and personal imbue the mind with a motivation that carries itself into your voice.
Then, I try to read words out slowly, and try to "let myself go." To let my body, throat, stomach, chest, jaws and tounge feel relaxed. And then close my eyes and try to let out the word with the least amount of stress. To let my body speak in its own tongue without my interference.
So those two things carried me pretty well last night.
I found myself getting scared, actually, to speak in my previous voice.
My new voice, sounds a little british, is less rambunctious in its sound, is lower, more calmer sounding, and sounds deliberate and thoughtful.
My previous voice is higher and kind of piercing. It's a straight up San Diego acccent, which emphasizes a sort of "eeah" when you pronounce a's.
In the morning, I woke up, and recieved a phone call. I was thrown off guard since I hadn't practiced since the previous night, at first I said "hi" in my previous voice, but then I relaxed a little, and went on with my "british" self. The person didn't recognize me at first, but she was an old acquaintance so it wasn't too weird for her. But I was nervous. What could this person be thinking? Would she think I'm being fake?
I had my own doubts too, about whether I was faking a new voice just for its own sake. But then I realized that I'm really motivated to speak in my own natural way, and I wouldn't see it practical to just invent a voice for fun.
I also started to worry what people would think of me who knew me. Whether they'd ever get over the change and give me hell about it. But then I said screw it, this is more important to me.
To test whether my new voice was truly natural, I tried pronouncing in all sorts of different ways, seeing if there was a more comfortable equilibrium, and I haven't found it.
My security is that I'll often practice my "naturalism" techniques to reaquaint me with my true center.
So far, so well.
I love singing, I just kinda suck at it.
Anyways, I started tonight with a project I call, "Finding my voice"
In my fantasy world I'm some rocker/rapper/whatever, and so I think of what makes stars successful and incorporate it into my life (relevant or not)
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An example is having a unique voice. My favorite singers, Gallagher (Oasis), Daltrey (The Who), Yorke (Radiohead), Molko (I think) (Placebo) all have distinct voices.
So, my goal, is to "find by voice." To experiment with different accents, cadences, whatever, and see which ones feel most like me, feel the most comfortable.
First jump report:
It's scary. I first wrote some song lyrics, and tried to sing them, but I found myself just singingy like singers that I love, mainly like gallagher or the guy from Filter. So I quit that, and then I tried reading outlout my blog, but in as relaxed a voice as possible. I then focused on parts of my voice that I thought were distinct, and amplified them. Like, sounding nasaly, or dropping words quickly, or prounouncing a's with like an ah.
After a while, then I started singing and soliloquoying around the house, and I was in a totally different voice--And I felt really comfortable in it! This was scary because everybody I knew, knew me in large by my voice. If I were to discover my true voice and that became my actual voice, ppl would be like WTF. Change is scary.
Anyways, I dreamt up some technological thingies I want to do to aid in this process. Like getting a microphone. But also like setting up a wiki and like recording bits and annotaning them like, "oh, I like how I strike my k's, or this is my most natural A" In addition, I would like to memorize the different characters for different pronounciations of the same letters. You see these like umlads over o's and what not when you look up words in the dictionary. I love learning new characters and shit (just like I love learning new HTML colors etc..)
Summary: New Meditation Strategy Implemented -- Sit still, and then mentally travel from muscle groups to muscle group, consciously trying to relax the muscles one by one.
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I spent three hours in Church for xmas in a foreign country and couldn't understand the lyrics to the sermon (it was in tagalog, phlippines tounge national). So, I decided to try this new meditation technique I heard.
The technique is about trying to relax the muscles of your body, one by one.
So I started with my pinky, and tried to visualize a connection with it, and tried to relieve the tension in that area. After about 10 seconds, this process seemed hopeless. "My pinky's already relaxed," I thought. 10 more seconds later, and it moved limp. It felt kind of weird, but nice. Like my finger had become jelly.
I then proceeded to mentally force relaxation onto the rest of my fingers and over my palm. Since it was easier to relax the muscles used for opening my hand, my palm started fluctuating from open to close rapidly. I could attribute this to the strong muscles for closing not having opposing resistance to keep my palm open.
Doing this process to my whole body made time fly. It also relaxed me and eased the pain of being in that hot, crowded, foreign church.
After this exercise, I felt more in touch with my body. How did I recognize this? Well, after I got bored of medtating, I started having sexual fantasies. And voila, fantasizing physical touch came with greater facility and intensity. I really felt I was somewhere else. The teleportation into my daydream was so full I felt scared that I was mistaking my virtual body for my physical body, and was moving around lasciviously in the pew.
No visible sin was executed on my part, fortunately. The experience was great.
I'm guessing that the process of focusing attention to individual muscles for a long period of time made the mental activation of my skin-sensors easier.
Who knows, there could be large neural tunnels to my muscles, laying domant, and waiting to be activated.
// The idea of becoming a lucid dreamer while awake sounded really nice. Like what if I could visualize something so well that my real-world vision becomes oclluded?
At least now I have something to work on when stuck in those situations.