These are my Momentos, short personal diary entries I write daily – since 2013 – and publish monthly. Some links are affiliate links.
1
My first memory is visiting my great-grandmother in a nursing home. I would have been 3 years old at the time, she in her 80’s. I don’t remember ever meeting her again. She’d have been 18 or so during the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago.
2
Read recently about a parent who watched his teenage daughter burn alive, nothing he could do to help her. He was cursing the heavens when the police arrived. Stories like that make me wonder how anyone can believe in an all-powerful and all-loving God.
3
The urge to always have more and do better is what kept our ancestors alive and reproducing. The same urge results in you and me never staying satisfied for long, no matter how good we have it. That’s only a problem if you think it should be different.
4
Going shopping is one of my least favorite things. For anything, but clothes especially. Looking forward to the day when I have a scan of my body saved online and can try on clothes virtually, see exactly what they’ll look like, skip all the changing room nonsense.
5
Feeling sluggish and sad, off and on the past few months. Lack of exercise is part of it, rarely breaking a proper sweat for fear of tweaking my back. But the pandemic is a bigger part, staying home doing pretty much the same thing every day, riding this out.
6
How convenient that the package arrived today. Three months after ordering, had to visit two post offices to collect it. Got home, opened and consumed a smidge even though it was afternoon already. Going to try a different approach with this batch, see what happens.
7
Listening to a guy talking about paying for sex. He does it when not in a relationship, finds it far more convenient to get his fix that way than to try meet women in bars or online. Makes a certain kind of sense. Still don’t think I could ever do it though. My brain wouldn’t let me.
8
They finally opened the ski resorts in Georgia, so here we are on the first day. I learned to snowboard 3 years ago in Bansko, haven’t done it since. Rough start on deep fresh snow and a twisted knee, but I’ll get the hang of it again.
9
Better conditions today and no bother with the knee. Got comfortable enough to carve carefully down a few blue slopes in the afternoon. Felt like I was actually snowboarding, rather than just sliding a bit between falls. Tomorrow I’ll practice right foot first, begin again.
10
I can now snowboard comfortably enough down green slopes with either foot first. Had to endure quite a bit of bruising to my ego and ass to achieve that. Exhausted after the three days, but glad we came. Gudauri has exceeded expectations.
11
First time social in months, a couple we met on the slopes. He an airline pilot, she a flight attendant. English and South African. Conversation flowed despite the rust. It’s nice when you get along well with people who live very different lives. Makes the world feel more like home.
12
Driving through snowy mountains, listening to Sapolsky talk about poverty. Consider yourself when you’re tired, stressed, low self-esteem; hard to make good choices that way. But that’s the kind of psychology many poor people are making decisions with every day.
13
A year since I touched down in Tbilisi. We were supposed to stay in Bali another couple of weeks, saw the writing on the wall with the pandemic, got out while we still could. The world has been in turmoil the last 12 months, but we’ve been comfortable here.
14
Working through the Fast & Furious movies during my downtime. Can’t say I enjoy them, riddled as they are with plot holes, bad acting, and a complete disregard for the laws of physics. Maybe I watch them to note all the flaws and feel superior.
15
Big work day, dissecting algorithms, slicing designs, coding pages. Fully engaged in work I find meaningful and rewarding. Tomorrow is my birthday, and there’s nothing I’d rather do than spend it like I did today. So that’s exactly how I’ll spend it.
16
Turned 39 today. Just one year left in my 30’s. Then I guess I’m officially middle-aged. But rather than worry about getting old, I’ll celebrate seeing one birthday more than the likes of JFK, Charlotte Bronte, Caravaggio, Sonny Liston, Spartacus and Louis XVI.
17
I could hire someone to do this coding work. I can easily afford it, and they’d probably do it faster and better than I can. Thing is though, I enjoy doing this stuff, gets me in a flow state. Spent close to 15 hours coding the past 3 days, loving every slippery minute of it.
18
That Alex Honnold documentary is ridiculous, the mental fortitude even more than the physical. 1 kilometer straight up with nare a rope and barely a foothold. As another climber said in the doc: it’s like trying to win an Olympic gold medal, but if you don’t win, you die.
19
Friday = newsletter day. Some weeks it’s a struggle putting it together, but this edition flowed easy. Took me the first 8 months of 2019 to add 200 subscribers. Getting that many a week now. Almost at 12k total. And the feedback continues to be positive.
20
If you’re brand new to working online, don’t go investing more than $1000 in a course. That’s like deciding to take up tennis and spending $1000 on gear before you step foot on a court. The pros are going to laugh and roll their eyes when they see you try serve.
21
Been micro-dosing Modafinil for a couple of weeks. Back in Bali I was taking 100mg every second day. That was great for productivity but it wrecked my sleep. Now I’m trying more like 15mg five days a week. Decent productivity boost with no sleep issues so far.
22
Not sure I always want to be building a business. As much as I enjoy it, if things go well, I could see myself retiring within a decade. But I’d keep busy learning new things. The Russian language, a musical instrument, gardening, carpentry, cross-country skiing…
23
The good thing about Amazon’s affiliate program is that I earn commissions for anything someone buys within 24 hours of clicking on my affiliate link. Like 6 monitors for $780 today. The bad news is the commission is 2.5%. So I only earned $20 from that.
24
That’s the coding work pretty much finished. Checked the time logs and so far we’ve put 210 man hours into this little experiment. Should be able to launch our first new-style reviews in early April. At that point, we’ll probably be halfway through.
25
Lugging home 4 of those big bottles of water, plastic handles digging into my hands. No running water at home, rushing to flush toilets and do the washing up before we head out of town. Thinking: if this is the worst thing that happens to me today, it’s still a pretty good day.
26
Up in Gudauri again, great day for snowboarding. But I’ll have to skip it. Newsletter isn’t coming together easy and I don’t want to half-ass it and send out something shit. The paradox of working for yourself: you have more freedom, but it requires more discipline.
27
Morning stretches. Same boots as before. Missing toilets. Warm-up runs. Windswept chair lift. Homemade cookies. Overheard conversations. White dog sprinting downhill, skier in tow. Wondering if I just broke a rib. Full moon rising as the sun sets.
28
An hour ago I was taking a nap on the couch. Now I’m in this tiny mountain hospital looking at an x-ray that shows a fracture below her right knee. When a little black mouse scurries across the back of the room where she’s laid out, I decide not to mention it.
29
Because of the COVID curfew here, there were no taxis to take me home from the hospital last night. Eventually they brought me home in an ambulance. As I got in the passenger side and reached for my seat belt, the driver stopped me, saying it wasn’t necessary.
30
I’m not sure you can ever truly know a city. It’s a living, breathing, ever-changing thing. Best you can do is get a feel for the vibe of a place, but even that changes over time. I guess the same is true of people. I guess the same is true of myself.
31
From A Gentleman In Moscow:
“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”