I'm dating a girl
May 7th, 2025
I went on three dates, got to know her enough, and asked to commit. We're mutually exclusive.
We'll see how it goes. If it's a trainwreck, c'est la vie. If it was the greatest decision of my life, amor fati.
The language of the world - the people we engage share language.
And just like that, I've changed entirely as a human being by who I speak to. In some ways I'm popular for a man on dating apps, but for some reason I couldn't really care much for it anyways. The past me would've been thrilled, but current me seems to let it pass over.
Real estate
I've been looking a multi-family units in midwest markets (Detroit, Oklahoma City, Toledo, Columbus, Cleveland). My financials are pretty good, I have enough in bank for about an $80k down. At a safe 25% down that'll put me in just enough range for $320k loan at <8% interest rates, so a fixer-upper in the $250k-$300k range could do me well.
I can also wait until August for more down when ESPPs and RSUs vest, but I shouldn't let myself be limited. Additionally, I could wait for a mega-recession to blow across the nation and scoop up assets at discount.
Though if JPowell turns on the money printer, I'll have no option but to short the dollar by borrowing massively.
Taking a step back
I'm so busy nowadays, going on dates, planning dates, and managing relationships. I just spent $100 buying flowers for my mother for Mother's day this upcoming Sunday. I also go to therapy, take Vietnamese language classes, and read Dostoevsky whenever I get a chance to. This isn't even mentioning how much work I do and how much I think about it. Yesterday I just spent an hour yesterday from an old friend calling me up telling me he'd broken up with his girlfriend. I need to take Zyrtec and visit the allergist clinic and stop by the DMV.
Life is sweeping me up in its ebb and flow, and I can't find my bearings. I want to sink down and take a seat. Promotion this, bouldering that, time spent here, time spent doing that. Growing up in the suburbs of Texas life was so slow - most days spent doing nothing at all, but the glamour of nothing shines when everything knocks on the door.
I call my parents often now. The way they taught me to live a slower paced life, I liked it a lot more.
But this life is worth remembering too. There's all sorts of different ways to live, isn't that wonderful?
Wherever I go, infinity.
What's the worth of 5 minutes?
When I was younger, 5 minutes felt like a long time. A very long time. Some days in class I couldn't wait for it to end, yet the 5 minutes would never come to an end.
Now, 5 minutes isn't enough for anything at all. I wish to find my bearings and just settle down and focus for a little while. Perhaps all this short form content hasn't been doing my attention span any good.
Suppose each short form content is 10 seconds long. I watch approximately 100 of them per day, that's 1000 seconds or 16 and 2/3 minutes. That's a lot of task-switching I'm training my brain to do, and effectively a bad habit. A really, really, really bad habit.
If I do it for 3 or 4 hours a day, for which I have been doing, I've watched approximately 1440 videos in a single day. I've been watching reels for two years now, so I've probably seen 1,051,200 videos these past two years. Think about that for a second. A MILLION videos. Do humans even task switch that often? If I were living in the 1800s, I'd probably focus on one thing at a time for about thirty or odd so minutes instead of rushing from one thing to the next.
So what's the language I'll use next to describe this?
I'm losing my edge
My pre-frontal cortex feels like it's been developed. Maybe it's the therapy. I don't know. I'm not that edgy or angsty anymore, and I can't fathom why. But c'est comme ca.
I spent ~30 minutes writing this post. Now I need to spend a few minutes uploading it.