thanksgiving never felt more empty

it’s not that i have anything against this thanksgiving, but to celebrate we talked about things we’re grateful for and cooked elaborate foods, and both of these are things that we sort of do pretty frequently in the house (at least once a week) so i didn’t really feel any different, but that’s okay. expressing gratitude more often is probably better anyway so i don’t really mind if thanksgiving feels like an ordinary weekend

i had some free time last week and didn’t feel like starting a new project or learning more stuff yet, so i decided to read a book. i was considering between when breath becomes air and man’s search for meaning and decided on the latter; it was pretty short so i finished in 2 days and learned a lot about logotherapy and concentration camps and etc. and liked it a lot 🙂 i guess the book is really about how to deal with suffering and nihilism and these are probably things i care a lot about? though i still want to read eastern books about this subject and don’t really know where to start; send recs please! if i don’t receive any my next book will probably be either when breath becomes air or thus spoke zarathustra

jonathan and i finally launched our discord bot from 2 posts ago here. it got a lot more attention than expected, like ~130ish servers, so now we feel obligated to actually maintain it properly and resolve some particularly annoying bugs involving song generation 😡 i think it’s more or less done at this point though

our house also had a second hackathon last weekend but it was not as productive as the first. i worked with some people on trying to classify and search through all blogs on the internet which i guess was a bit ridiculous to attempt, but pretty fun regardless and i got more experience with scraping and mongo which is nice. the hackathon was supposed to be saturday + sunday but on saturday night the rest of my group started playing minecraft and i didn’t feel like sleeping so i wrote the previous blog post. we ended up going on a 7am run in flip-flops to watch the sunrise and honestly i’m surprised it took 7 weeks for me to finally pull an all-nighter here

there’s a very adorable husky from one of our neighbors that keeps coming to our house, often more than once a day. she is the first large dog i’ve ever met that is both cute and friendly and it’s literally my first time petting a dog; i’ve avoided touching dogs up until now because of bad childhood experiences

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so we went to white sands national park, which is around a 5 hour drive from truchas. there are all these giant > 45 degree sand inclines you can sled down, which is a lot of fun, but when you’re done you have to carry the sled back up for the next person to use. so you do your best but the slopes are pretty steep and you keep sinking so after a few iterations you just start collapsing halfway up the hills and lying in the freezing cold sand but it was still the happiest i’ve been in a long time. and the whole time i was thinking, would sisyphus be sad if he had to keep carrying a sled up a hill for his friends to ride down? what if there were no friends and the sled was just for himself? and at that point how different would it be if the sled was a boulder instead? camus says sisyphus is supposed to be happy anyway, but in practice that’s hard to actually internalize, but i think i’ve been getting closer to it recently, and i think visiting white sands helped with that

in my daily journal i rate every day as being very good, good, ok, bad, or very bad. and honestly, there have been some days at truchas where i’ve been pretty lonely or pretty sad, but i haven’t had to rate a single day as bad or very bad yet. like, i don’t know, i think i’m getting better at processing negative emotions while also learning to appreciate that even a few good conversations or interactions can be enough to make a day ok even if i’m not feeling great the whole time

some people here are also big fans of negative visualization, which is essentially when you imagine or temporarily enact a life without certain luxuries you’re used to, like food or freedom or being alive. and although i haven’t done much negative visualization myself, i think it’s still been mildly useful for putting feelings in context and better appreciating each day

i think there’s a lot more to say about this, but it’ll probably have to wait until i’m home again and i’m mostly just including this sentence to make myself commit to writing a longer post later

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more movies recently watched:

• 2001: a space odyssey was interesting. the movie is pretty slow apart from the opening and closing sections, but the vision of humans and ai and evolution definitely felt very fresh and ahead of its time, especially if you believe the somewhat implied analogy that modern humans playing with ai are as clueless and helpless as ancient humans experimenting with sticks. i also really enjoyed reading about all the different reactions various audiences had to the film and it just seems very influential for sci-fi in general 🙂 
• close encounters of the third kind also suffered from being pretty slow apart from the beginning and ending sections. i think this might be a general issue with early sci-fi films because they introduce all their cool effects early on and resolve everything late and can’t afford to do too much in between. the visuals and ufo lighting effects were cool, but i didn’t find it as interesting as 2001
• jojo rabbit was a funny kids movie about the holocaust i guess? it doesn’t have very good reviews but i thought the character development was nice. i guess the only other holocaust movie i’ve watched is schindler’s list which obviously takes a very different approach from jojo rabbit but i enjoyed both
• it’s such a beautiful day is the first film i’ve watched in a while purely for personal enjoyment (ie. not for class or a group activity here) and it was one of the most unique and captivating films ever, about mental illness and death and enjoying life. the animation style is extremely well-done, it’s only one hour, and the last section is incredibly beautiful 🙂 
• so people here finally got me to watch crazy rich asians and it was… a lot less bad than i expected it to be? based on what i heard i thought it would just be a giant romcom meme about asian people and asian stereotypes and it ended up having more coherence and depth than that. i still don’t think it’s particularly great eg. the only scene i appreciated the actual writing for was the mahjong scene and the appeal to most of the other scene designs was primarily just extremely lavish sets or cool actors, but yeah i think it was okay. i know the singaporean mom is supposed to be the antagonist but i have been wondering for a while if eastern philosophies actually lead to longer-lasting creation than western ones and i think this is a point in the movie that people don’t discuss much despite it being one of the central arguments presented?
• arrival was good, but unfortunately i received spoilers for the movie a couple years back so i don’t think it was as impactful as it could’ve been 😦 anyway the pacing and language exploration throughout the movie was great but i didn’t enjoy the ending scene as much as most people seemed to (i felt like it could’ve been stronger? but maybe that’s just because i’m young or don’t have kids or something) and they were able to incorporate a lot more implied offscreen action than most films due to the unique timeline, which was super cool