Timog

 

Hilagang baybayin sa timog ng hangganan

productivity and simulations

Today was a good day--dusting my hands off. Pat on the back. Well done, yours truly, good job. To continue my previous post's theme of inspiration with some inserted jargon...I was inspired to simulate the ideal distribution of life events measured in frequency of days involving happy/sad events (see Figure above). We have some unlabeled bins of happy-sad on the x-axis where the left is the direction of happy and the right is the direction of sad. I simulated the data of 30,000 days which is a rounded up estimate for a life expectancy of 82 years (average Canadian in 2019). I made the distribution a count distribution with an arbitrary parameter that made the data right-skewed. Pulled to the right...so that there are more of the happy events. That's the goal. That's the dream. That's the idea. We also want some boring events to happen between our levels 6-8 in the happy-sad spectrum...but mostly happy. If you're a pundit of such charts and variable distributions...please keep your opinions to yourself. I wanted my happy-sad variable to be Poisson-distributed, mainly for convenience. Plus, poisson sounds so fancy even though it literally means fish in French. Pwah-sohn...and chips. TGIF. 

Inspire

I’d like to contradict myself when I stated a few posts ago that I have a preference for the uneventful. Maybe, on average, I prefer the  uneventful but with some overall skewness towards feel-good and inspiring events or moments. Of course, life isn’t like that isn’t it? The skewness tends to be in the opposite end of the distribution, in statistics parlance. So when an inspirational moment occurs, fully aware that it’s ephemeral, I relish it. Inevitably, the moment ends. Or a denoument. Or maybe just a cliffhanger and there’s nothing  afterwards. No chance of a reprise. Maybe it was not real and I just exaggerated it in my mind. But the fact that it uplifted me, it existed. I once read that thoughts or ideas become real once these are conceived. Conception. Ideation. Tangible? Not always. 

Regardless…I’m grateful for the inspiration.

The hang of it

 

More than 2 months ago, I bought a “mindfulness” journal on a whim at a Marshalls checkout. You know how those checkout queues are set up so that you have to pass between shelves of knick knacks so that if there’s a lineup, you end up browsing the knick-knacks on sale?  I’m sure there was some extensive market research that provided retail companies with evidence that a mini-maze of goods leading to the checkout triggers an impulse-buying tendency among consumers. Now that I’ve reflected about this, wow, yes…the drugstore, supermarket, bookstore, cosmetics retailers…a mini-maze of knick-knacks on shelves to get to the checkout! We are all so programmable. So predictable. So easily influenced.

Anyway, going back to that pink journal I now have. I don’t feel guilty at all about purchasing it. It’s great. I haven’t been writing on it daily, but  on the days that I have written on it I’ve truly felt mindful. It has repeating questions that are meant for very quick morning, midday, and evening check-ins. Each of those three parts includes 3 deep breaths. It’s great (I’ve stated that already). Plus, I can exercise my finger muscles to write. I’ve been typing on a keyboard for work or have been using my thumbs to text or write on my mobile device. I occasionally use a pencil if I need to jot something, but I feel that I need to practice my penmanship using a ballpoint or sign pen. I still have that spiritual reflection journal that I wrote about many posts ago, but I haven’t found the time (or mood) to write regularly on it. This pink mindfulness one is more accessible right now. I suppose it’s because it’s structured. I sometimes write similar things, but I don’t have to think too hard about what to write. It simply prompts me to focus on the present and my body. And my body hasn’t been feeling that fantastic lately. My meals aren’t as substantial. My physical activity could be, well, more active. Essentially, it’s my brain that’s been labouring like a slave working on building a pyramid in ancient Egypt. Lots of caffeine and sandwiches and fizzy water. A little movement by going up and down the stairs. I tried to sweep the floor and my lower back hurts. 

On a positive note, when I have mini episodes of overthinking leading towards anxiety, I ask myself (as a strategy that I was recently taught) “am I in any danger?” I know that the answer is “no” and so I remember to smile and rub my chest to self-soothe. And then I go on and watch some reviews of fragrances or lipsticks on the interwebs. We’ve come full circle. Mindfulness to capitalism to mindfulness and back to capitalism. So, not really a circle but more like a…square? Talking about 2-dimensional polygons and connecting it to mindfulness again, how about I wrap this up by suggesting that you check out “box breathing.” Do it for yourself, my friend. 

Edward Larsson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

My preference has always been for uneventful days. Average days. Days devoid of extreme excitement. You may have surmised that today isn't one of those days on the basis of an inkling. A gut feel. The dramatic tone I'm trying to establish by my excessive use of italics and periods instead of other (probably more appropriate) punctuation marks. Was that a good hook? I hope so.

Without going into the details, I had an uneventful dream and woke up thinking "That was unexcitingly odd. Was that a random message from my subconscious or just a random message? Anyway, "hello...?" I guess."  And then I forgot about the dream and went on to have a good morning. There was a mix of non-exciting and exciting, vocation-related developments during the day and this afternoon. After I dusted off my hands for a productive day, I recalled the events of this good morning. 

It's interesting how vivid a dream can be when one has just woken up, but the dream later becomes bits and pieces of intangible mind matter in which certain feelings serve as its echo. I've posted about other dreams before, and I'm sure that when I revisit and read those entries--or when I read this entry again, I will have no idea about what a dream was all about unless I really made an effort to write down anything I could remember. The human brain is truly incredible. And vain. My brain just made me compliment it. Despite its awesomeness, it's fragile. Physically fragile. Vulnerable to disease and deterioration. Such irony.  

On the topic of the brain, I remember posting about James Rollins' science thriller "Altar of Eden" which involved the concept of fractal antennae and how magnetite deposits in the brain have the potential for alternative communication. Probably remains fictional. What do you think? Surely, this is a better theory than my mind is just making up all this alternative-mind-communication-mumbo-jumbo, right? Or aliens. Since I'm going off on a tangent, might as well put it out there that I just read about the Earth spinning faster than usual, there are some unexplained tiny holes on the Atlantic Ocean floor, and that a mysterious sinkhole was just discovered near a mining site in Chile. Among other things. You can Google those yourselves, my cyberfriends. Unprecedented times. Buzz-phrase. 

for humidity

 

Image source

Humidity was my petty adversary; the perpetual cause of frizz, acne, and feelings of lethargy at the end of a full day. I have had a change of heart and consider it my friend. For over three decades, I once lived in very tropical, urban circumstances where humidity tends to exacerbate bad days. In this drastically different climate where dry air reigns supreme and postnasal drip and cracked skin can happen all-year round—humidity has become my unappreciated hero. Sleep hasn’t been satisfactory and each dry cough is accompanied by an uncomfortable yet tolerable pain in the head. Peppermint in my cold air diffuser, no air conditioning, 12-hour Allegra, multivitamins, and lots of fluids…all in the daily check box these past few days. A 2007 paper by Acharya et al. published in The Journal of Laryngology & Otology, investigated the effect of sipping ice cold carbonated water on a person’s self-reported tendency for throat clearing. I already love sparkling water so all this just demonstrates confirmation bias. Cheers.