Checkpoint, January 07 2024

I’ll break the checkpoint format briefly to recap my 2023 holidays. I spent Christmas in southern Poland with some of the friends I made in Fulbright, then new year’s in Iceland solo trekking.

Suggested music: Dredge - The Restless Town

Christmas first: we spent two nights in Kraków and one night with my one friend’s mom. Whenever there’s a social gathering like this that has some build-up and anticipation, it never quite goes the way I want it to (and I think this is down to me overthinking, not something fundamentally wrong with any of the social gatherings I’ve gone to / hosted). Still, my memories from those three days are of warmth. This was my first time experiencing a family Christmas, even if it wasn’t my own.

If I’m being honest, at some point I stopped wanting to be there. Not because it became unpleasant or because I disliked the warmth, but because I became afraid of making everything colder. Part of me wanted to stop participating and simply observe, to slip out the door and look in through the window. Take notes. Avoid contaminating the scene.

In my heart, I do want to be inside. It’s just…hard. I hope they understand.

Peace is a gently running creek.

I dallied back to Łomża for a few days before flying to Reykjavik. Pro tip for people who haven’t vacationed in cold places before: wear double layers, especially socks!

I went whale watching with a tour company called Elding. I liked that the crew included marine biologists and folks who knew what they were doing - they provided commentary on animal behavior as we went from spot to spot. I’m sure there’s other good companies that offer whale watching tours, but I’m happy to recommend Elding if you’re heading to Iceland at some point.

Most of these photos were taken by the crew, not me (my lens doesn’t zoom enough for high-quality animal photos).

A brief intermezzo…

I tried to hike up a mountain, barely missed the bus, and walked around a nearby suburb instead before hiking on an artificial island in the dark. My reasoning was that I wanted to try and catch the northern lights; not only did I not catch the northern lights, I came 10 feet from walking off the edge of a cliff because I thought it was a beach shore instead.

I got some okay city shots but nothing exceptional.

That one light in the bottom-center? That’s lighting the bridge back to the mainland.

I planned to ring in the new year by walking to a lighthouse on the southeastern tip of the city, setting up my tripod, and recording my thoughts to the camera. I meant for it to be a much longer, more philosophizing thing, but then a firework show started nearby and I said “screw it let’s record that instead”. Sitting in -6 C weather for 40 minutes and not moving meant that I could barely get up when I finished recording, and it took a while for my left pinky toe to respond. I was panicking hard enough to consider the unthinkable: beg a stranger for help¹. I ended up walking back and being fine.

Here’s my rambling interrupted by fireworks. The videos are a bit crap because I was unintentionally taking them at 30fps instead of 60fps. A shame for the fireworks display, but at least there’ll be plenty of philosophizing coming from me later this year anyway.

After my two near-death experiences, I decided to do something calmer for my last day and hung out at a cafe with some cats that absolutely did not respect my personal space.

Here’s a selection of the food I had. I don’t recommend eating any shark, whale, or puffin² in Iceland; from what I understand, “real” Icelandic food³ doesn’t use those ingredients, and they’re all endangered.

And then I left. The moral of the story is that if you want to go explore Iceland, just rent a freaking car. Also don’t count on seeing northern lights :(

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Back to the checkpoint. Obligatory music…

(If you’re not familiar, there was this one YouTube video of this song from the Donkey Kong Country 2 soundtrack where people left “checkpoint” comments about how life was going, and it became this nice little semi-town square thing for people to reflect. Nintendo has since taken down the video for copyright infringement - which is a whole other conversation - but I’d like to keep the memory of the checkpoint alive.)

Suggested music: Donkey Kong Country 2 - Stickerbush Symphony

Have you read Jack London’s To Build a Fire? There’s a link if you haven’t read it before; it’s a short read if you have a spare 30 minutes or so. I like it because it succinctly reflects my beliefs on my relationship to the world: life is harsh, mistakes are costly, and if you die, no one’s really going to care⁴. I think this is why I also like gory horror stories and war novels: they feel more honest than the bright, colorful, cheery atmosphere of typical pop culture media⁵.

But happiness is real, too. I don’t like the saying that life is a shade of gray, because to me, it is not a single color; it alternates between flashes of white and black. I have a hard time with light. The point is: I’ve been struggling to just be happy and do good things. It has been far easier for me to shy away from people and be on my own, even if a part of me wants us to be together.

I’ve had a lot of joyful moments since coming here, don’t get me wrong. More than anything else, my students trust me and I’m able to teach them meaningful things, and I’m very happy about that. But on most days, connection to the outside world has been limited to what comes through my screens, and there’s only so much entertainment you can derive away from the physical presence of others.

Fulbright offers a few complementary therapy sessions for folks who are having a hard time integrating into the country. I’m going to sign up for a session because I’m really not doing as well as I thought I would be. I don’t know if it’ll get me anywhere; I feel like I’m struggling with young adult life more than Poland specifically. Additionally, my thoughts are difficult for my American friends to follow⁶, so woe be to a non-native English speaker trying to understand me. Oh well, it’s worth a shot.

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Death awareness…timor mortis conturbat me.

Assuming an average American male lifespan of 76.2 years, I have about 215 of these checkpoints left to write. This could be an underestimate because I am Asian-American (we tend to have longer lifespans compared to the average American), I was raised with enough money for healthy food and shelter, and I completed the right education for a financially stable adult life. (Other factors too.) However, it could also be an overestimate because I have high calorie consumption⁷, I have an inconsistent sleep schedule, and loneliness has similar health effects to smoking a pack of cigarettes each day⁸. (Other factors too.) I might also develop dementia or another disease that destroys my mental faculties, and as far as I’m concerned, I won’t really be alive if that happens. All that’s theoretical anyway; I could die alone in my room from an aneurysm tomorrow for all that the universe cares⁹.

I’ve lived by memento mori more or less since the age of 20, and it’s hard to say whether this has had an overall positive or negative effect. It’s harder for me to convince myself to plan and commit to things, which is positive to some extent because I was overcommitting and overdoing things in the past; however, time is going to pass regardless of how I feel about it, and there’s no reason not to do something in the meantime. I’ve become extremely sappy towards my friends; it’s easy for me to say deep and caring things towards them, but it’s a little harder sometimes to just relax and have fun. I know some of them recognize that and are concerned, and I would like them not to be concerned…but that requires me to actually be having a good time, which I don’t think I am.

I feel like this will take a dedicated essay at some later point, but the nature of death is that you can talk about it as long as you want without making any progress on learning the truth. So I’ll try to be a little less morbid going forward.

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Most of the issues I’ve been dealing with I don’t think are particularly unusual. I imagine that most healthy, well-off recent college graduates tend to have issues with connection and existential dread. I don’t think I’m doing amazing, but I don’t think I’m in crisis either.

I think the main problem is that I’ve been trying to figure out life by thinking and coming up with ideas instead of just…living. I would like to do more things instead of just sitting here and thinking. With that in mind, this is what I’m committing to for a bit:

• 30 minutes of Polish Pimsleur course for 30 days
• 1 hour (max) of LeetCode every day for 75 days
• 30 minutes - 1 hour of guitar every day for ? days

I think throw in some reading here to replace some internet time, plus some project coding time…I want to improve my discipline before adding those on though.

In terms of broader goals, I have more concrete plans for Hey Falcon, Hey Dragon¹⁰. I haven’t started picking up Godot, and I’m honestly unsure whether that’s the place for me to be spending my time. Right now I am a teacher first and foremost, and the most attractive side project ideas are the ones that would benefit my students. More fundamentally, I don’t think I’m providing enough value to most of the people in my life right now for them to want to keep up with me, so I want to work on that a bit.

To be honest, productivity-wise I have been disappointed with myself these past three months. I’m working on adjusting my mentality going into January to get more results out of my time here and be able to walk away saying “hey, while I was here I did this”. Maybe I’m not ready, or maybe I’m too worn out. Maybe this is all a burst of passion that will be crushed like a flower under a boot.

There’s no shame in failure. That is life. But I’d like to try a little harder.

1. I did ask a friendly gentleman if he knew how to call a taxi, but he shrugged his shoulders, said he wasn’t from here, and recommended I go to some nearby houses instead. I did not go to said nearby houses ↩

2. I did joke to my friends about eating them because I’m a little twerp and I think it’s funny when people freak out about me eating cute things. But there’s a big difference between eating a cute thing and eating an endangered thing that has a positive impact on the ecosystem. ↩

3. Not 100% sure, but Iceland was very poor for a long time, and back then people just ate what they could (which sometimes included shark, whale, and puffin). Modern Icelandic people eat pretty standard fare; you’ll only see those ingredients in touristy restaurants in Reykjavik. ↩

4. This might sound concerning, so to clarify: I think if I were to drop dead tomorrow, a lot of people would be deeply hurt and would have a hard time dealing with that loss. However, everyone else would barely notice (about 150,000 people die every day and I don’t really think about it), and in 100 years I would be completely forgotten. It’s not that I don’t matter to the people I care about / the people who care about me; it’s that I don’t matter to the world as a whole. ↩

5. They are more unhinged and ungrounded, but it feels right to make your mind a little chaotic and inconsistent. Order is a lie invented by this accident called life, and [in due time, whether we like it or not, the truth prevails]https://www.britannica.com/science/thermodynamics/Entropy-and-heat-death). ↩

6. (and I do take some perverse pride in this) ↩

7. Likely to go down soon, maybe in 2.5 years? But I believe this is the strongest predictor for lifespan. ↩

8. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/loneliness-poses-health-risks-as-deadly-as-smoking-u-s-surgeon-general-says ↩

9. It’s valid to ask here (and to all American realist literature from the 19th century): why do you care what the universe thinks? My answer is that I am a part of the universe that is briefly able to observe itself, and the feeling of being completely unimportant to the universe is similar to the feeling of abandonment by a mother. It is not a rational feeling, maybe it’s not something I should care about, but I feel it nonetheless. ↩

10. I’m most disappointed with myself for falling behind on this. It’s hard to justify being in Poland over a different country if I don’t produce results here. ↩