Building habits, bit by bit

Yesterday, after I finished my post for the day, a habit that I’m trying to build after years of not sticking to writing every day, I got down to work on Seesaw.

It’s another habit I’m trying to build. Working daily on my own music, with the intent of making at least small steps in finsihing things. Not necessarily getting done with one song in a day (as some electronic musicians seem to have the habit of), but more like setting an achievable goal (every night) and achieving it.

So I’m quite proud to say that I finished the song as a draft production, and it has come out surprisingly well. This basically means it is yet another song that I could choose to professionally produce and release whenever I get around to doing it.

As usual, I shared the song with the three people that I share my works with, and all three had shared positive (varying levels of) feedback about it. The most positive one came from my ex-colleague, and hers felt more like how I had felt about the song. So I chatted with her a bit about the song and the whole creative process.

That’s when it struck me that I could write a blog post about the song, the process, and the habit that I’m trying to build. Here it goes.

Seesaw has been in my life for about 8 weeks. It was born on the day before my knee surgery. An idea had seemingly floated into my brain, inspiring me to grab the guitar to write a hook and record it on my phone.

I remember having checked out the recording after dinner at the hospital, before Jay would leave for the night. It still had it. It had me. It had the potential of being a catchy song that would easily find its place is my top 10 dance/pop discography.

I came back to it on the second week after surgery, when I was finding it difficult to sleep one night. By then the melody for the three parts of the song was set in my head, and it was easy to write lines of the right meter to fit it.

The next day I sang it for the first time, and it was a bit of a let-down because I wasn’t getting the poppy punch that I was hoping it would have, right out of the gate.

Cut forward three more weeks, and I was able to sit at my music work desk for a long enough duration to start working on my productions. Mind you, I had a good excuse to not work on this song. My pop bass was away with my bandmate, who was sub-bing for me during my recovery period.

Yet, somehow, picking up the bass that I generally use for thrash metal gigs out of storage, I started laying down the parts.

The guitars were simple. Clean Telecaster with middle-of-the-neck riffs with a lot of syncopation and muting. Drums were too. Straight up one-two kick and snare with hats. A pickup loop and claps for the chorus. Reverse cymbals for transitions.

Keys were more difficult. I needed some nice sounding pads and a gentle arpeggiator. Pads were a disaster and eventually went on mute. The arpeggiator was found after a few hits and misses. Then came the bass.

For producers/musicians out there, if you are wondering why I’m tacking bass the last before vocals, I really don’t have a good answer.

The best I can come up with is that when I lay down a bass groove after the other elements come in, it's almost like I’m jamming with a band, just like how I would in a real band. That seems to give me enough freedom to loop and come up with some bass line ideas, one of which will eventually make it to the song.

It wasn’t easy at all. Because of some damned pick-up, earthing noise I have at my desk with that bass. It was frustrating at best, and over the course of three days (not consecutive by any means), I had three versions of the bass line, each noisy in one way or the other.

Of these, the last one had manageable noise and was groovy enough for me to want to sing the song in the way that I had always imagined it. That’s how I had left the session three days ago.

So when I wrapped up my post here and opened the song session, I had no idea that it was that groovy. Also, before sitting down to write on the blog, I was jamming some songs on a new acoustic grand piano VST I had downloaded (Autograph Grand; thank you, Spitfire Audio).

Since I’m about a year into playing chords on keys (it means that not proficient at playing piano), I had to slow my chords down so that I made fewer mistakes, which also forced me to sing the same melody in diferent ways.

Finally, I had hit the right vocal texture for Seesaw. Then I tried the vocal texture on the guitar at the right speed, and it sounded good. So much so that I came up with a backup vocal hook that had the potential to fix my arrangement as well.

Voilà, in about an hour, I had done the vocal tracking and done the basic mixing. Then I did some more editing for getting the dynamics of the arrangement right and did a quick master, before cranking out a mix-down.

My first listen on my MacBook Pro speakers was a disaster. Terrible cut-through noise from the bass (instrument) over the bass (line). It had sounded so good on headphones and on the monitor speakers!

A couple of listens on some bluetooth earbuds eased my anxiety, and the song did sound great in the choruses, especially the second one, which had the new backup vocal hook glueing everything together.

By the time I was in bed, adrenaline was high, and I was expecting another night of difficulty in falling asleep. But I had some podcasts as lullabies and despite sleeping 2 hours later than my schedule, I did get a decent night of sleep.

So, after a terribly busy workday, featuring me doing a lot of re-reviewing things—because the original review’s comments were ignored—I was left with choosing to take a break from the new habit. I am tired. I was tired when I had the option of not sticking to the habit-forming habit.

I resisted. I went back to a song that I wanted to improve on. And I started the process. Before I had my dinner. That’s because I knew that I ought to give myself an early night of sleep.

So, here I am, after dinner, feeling the first waves of sleep, finishing this post, proud of having two habits with unbroken streaks.

Tomorrow will be a challenge because Jay and I are headed out to the country house over the weekend, after a late-evening physical therapy session. I do have to wake up real early and get my reading and exercise done before a whole workday and the evening shenanigans.

I’ll wish myself luck, but I’m fairly confident that I’ll keep the street intact, for I can choose to write for both. Maybe I can write about what I wrote for my second habit. We shall see tomorrow evening.

Creativity after a creative workday

There is a problem with spending your entire workday being creative, especially if you have to continue being creative beyond the workday.

Months ago—maybe years ago at this point—I was researching on the best routines for creative individuals to not get stuck at creating. The consensus answer seemed straightforward—make use of the best part of the day for your creativity.

For me, this happens to be the morning. Early morning, actually. When things are quiet and when there is more hope than the bottom of the barrel.

I still remember a period about a year an half ago. It had felt like I had come upon the gentle slope that would lead one out of a trough of depression. It was not. At this point, the trough seems more like the freshly minted ocean floor that surfaces as the ice age deepens.

There was this one morning when I had woken up before dawn and I had written a song about suicide called The Night Ends at Dawn. Within a couple of days, I was able to render it in a draft recording that somehow made me sound less like how I used to be. It has turned out to be one of the best songs I have written.

Anyway, at the end of this recording, I came to the conclusion that the more I used the mornings for music, the more I would feel satisfied being a musician.

Then my reading routines changed. I was reading more and it was easier for me to settle myself for the day if I were to have read with my morning coffee, before my morning exercise routine.

It felt okay to change the routine because I still had the evening, hopefully, after a busy but rewarding workday. And it did work, for a few months, until I started doing creative audiovisual work at work.

Coming back the full circle. Today, at work, I spent a lot of time outlining, prepping for, recording, and early post-production for some videos that I’m making as part of a video series at work.

But unlike other days, today I was positively triggered (?motivated/?inspired) by a new piano VST plugin that I could download. So right after logging out, I installed the plugin and started singing (no surprise) Dave Matthews songs. And that led to other songs and that led to me singing Seesaw, the song that I’m struggling to complete.

By the time I reluctantly peeled myself off my desk to grab some questionably safe dinner (leftover yesterday’s prawn biryani from the fridge), I had already sort of worked myself into a mindset of hope/determination to be able to make some strides on the song.

That’s what I’m about to do now. Wish me luck. And maybe hope and determination.

Frustrated Inc.

It is so easy to let frustration build up. You never really know where and how it started. In fact, I don’t even realize that it has started until it sets in.

I get frustrated when I hear sounds that I don’t want to hear or when I heard things that I don’t expect to hear. These can range from mobile phone buzzes and notifications to Blu meowing to attract attention. It can be the next-door neighbor’s kid screaming or it could be the fight between two women from the slum behind my building. It could be the sound of the air-conditioner malfunctioning or the drip from a faucet that is not closed properly.

One of my wishes is to be in an environment where sounds are absolutely under my control. Almost like have a mute or a kill-switch button for everything that could possibly create sound. Something like a sound-proofed studio for a living environment. I guess I am still okay with ambient sounds, even those that are characteristic of a city like Mumbai. But they have to be nondescript. Something that can be figuratively swept under the carpet of my fucked up mind so that I don’t feel accountable righting the things that are wrong.

As a musician, feeling frustrated with technology seems like a given. I am also starting to feel like I’m getting old enough to feel like an older man who finds any new things in the environment frustrating. When I’m working on a song on my digital audio workstation, I get frustrated when I’m unable to achieve what I want quickly. Because I haven’t had formal training in audio engineering, it is easy to get lost in the maze of parameters and controls and lose sight of the art that I’m trying to create.

I get frustrated when I make typos. I’m increasingly making typos in whatever I do. I fee like my dexterity on the keyboard (for typing) and my ability to pick errors that I have made are waning. It is such an embarrassing situation when someone who has had over 20 years of touch-typing experience and over a decade of experience in academic proofreading and copyediting make mistakes after mistakes after mistakes.

These are some of the sources of frustrations that I have. Right at this very moment, at least the noise and typo frustrations have set in. Blu is begging for food after being fed and J is on the phone in the same room, getting some work done. He has moved out into the other rooms a couple of times, but he still starts conversations in my auditory range.

Maybe I should work on this pervasive frustration issue with my therapist more than anything else.

So much to say

There is a lot of that I feel like saying. I don't know if I will be able to say them all. But I feel like I should give it a shot.

Over the last several months (during the COVID-19 lockdown), life has changed for me. Some for the better, some for the worse. I'll start with the better before moving on to the worse.

I have learned so much more in music production. Finished a course and I'm just starting my last in the series. Wrote some songs, produced several others.

I upgraded my home studio setup. I got myself a powerful laptop, monitors speakers, a good electric guitar, and a cheap MIDI controller (that's not working too well).

My home studio setup

 

My new guitar

I have at least two active projects, both of which might end up releasing songs to the world soon. I have been working on songs for close to two decades, but haven't ever released something substantial in a trusted platform. I had a couple shots at it -- one solo and another with a band -- but both didn't quite materialize the way it did.

Now, with about 50+ full songs in the bag, about 300 more rudiments that could be fleshed out into full songs, and the ones that I could write moving forward, I think I could start the process of releasing them consistently over the next several years.
 

One of the projects is with a band, the members of which are part of another band that I love dearly. Over the last several months, we have been working on these songs remotely and some of these are starting to come to life.
 

The journey forward is challenging for me because I think I will be exposing myself to social situations where I'll need to spend a lot of time working on this music as a producer and engineer for this band, which I think is not my strength. Plus, I'm decidedly an introvert at the core, and spending long periods with people (even if they are my friends) will be extremely taxing.

So overall, this seems ambitious but I think it is doable. All I need to make sure is that I should not burn myself out, which I have a tendency of doing.

I have watched a lot of quality content, both movies and TV series. These are the things that generally inspire me to be creative, and I have conceded to the fact that they are not merely entertainment for me. These things make me think in ways that other forms of communication and media don't.

Among these, I must mention my dive back into the wondrous world of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, and the charm of good-quality Malayalam cinema. I still remember the time that I started watching Stargate with my friends and work back in 2014 or something, and they ended up finishing the series (the whole pantheon) in a year or so, where I languished in SG-1 for several years until I picked things up earlier this year.

I have rediscovered my love for gaming. I have started off with explore Xbox Game Pass on my Windows PC, but I think I am headed the way of purchasing an Xbox console when I can.

But I haven't been able to read too much. That's something I want to fix. I'm still stuck in Judas Unchained by Peter Hamilton. I have managed to read a few hundred pages in the last few weeks.

Amazingly, I started this book on New Year's day in 2018. I haven't read much other than a few non-fiction books and comics then. I want to finish this off before I start something new, something that will inspire me.

At work, I have gone from the manager of a team to someone who is primarily involved in creating, ideating, and troubleshooting. I'm currently in the last phase of creating an online training course for copyeditor trainees who join my company. This involved a lot of creative processes (with a lot of opportunity for seeding, farming, and harvesting self-doubt, which has more or less brought be back to a phase of full-fledged depression and anxiety.

To add to the mix is the work pressure and stress. I love working but I seem to have a problem with taking care of myself. This sort of thing has been happening at work for over 3 years now, and I have contemplated quitting or seeking other opportunities (less stressful). With my music revenues drying up during COVID-19 lockdown, with very little hope of things getting back to how things were before, I need to have this job to sustain myself and to work on my music.

Working from home might be easy in the sense that I don't have to travel or meet people. But it is difficult to plug yourself off the grid. Plus, after a 10 to 11 hour day of tiring work, I have to spend time to do the household chores. Then there is the music work. This leaves me with not enough time of rest, relaxation, sleep. I am trying my best to achieve that balance by trying to take short breaks to do some chores in between my work tasks.

The one aspect of work that is challenging but sufficiently rewarding to balance the negative effects of stress is the talks that I give to students from various universities about the academic publishing industry and related topics. These tend to be the highlights of my otherwise productive, but stressful and self-doubting, weeks.

I have had a relatively steady state of therapy sessions over lockdown, and I have decided to step up the fortnightly frequency before to a weekly one, considering that I almost fell apart in the last few weeks.

During the lockdown, I spent a LOT of time holed up in my apartment with my partner J. Before lockdown, I never thought I could comfortably spend more than two days with anyone, especially J. We had a stretch of about 4 months together. We were with each other night and day without any breaks!

We were both surprised to find out that we could hold out for this long. Of course, we had fights and arguments, but we also had wonderful shared moments, with lots of wonderful food and shared TV/movie experiences. We regularly had our evening tea on the balcony, with the backdrop of mountains and clouds (on good days) and the cacophony of avian noises at dusk.

For this duration, however, I lost my sense of personal space more and more, and that also has contributed to my triggering of stress, anxiety, and depression. My apartment is tiny by world standards and average by Mumbai standards, and I need the space for my music and to feel free that I can do things I want to do when I want to do. When I am with people, I give away all my space to them. They become the primary beings of the shared space. This is probably why I could never be with people for over a few days.

During the lockdown, I gave up my bedroom and desk to J for most of the day, which limited my access to my recording setup. He might do the cooking, but the cleaning responsibilities were harder and took longer. There was less quiet overall, and J was more or less in charge of the auditory environment.

When I'm alone, I usually have a variety of states where I'll play loud music or have absolute quiet, and I listen to podcasts and talk radio when I am not concentrating on text-based work. This world is shattered when another person shares the space with me. I don't feel like I should destroy their peace by auditorily invading the shared space, which is something that I don't usually get reciprocated for. This builds the tension and anxiety of losing control of the space. I don't know how to get out of this or have the feeling of a truly shared space.

I have finally started finding YouTube useful, especially to learn more about technology, music production, and my niche interests. I often dive into the YouTube maze and come out with learnings and best practices. This also happens with podcasts. In fact, the fact that I'm writing this post is because of the simple strategy that a songwriter espoused on a podcast.

They recommended starting the day and working on something creative. Maybe listening to music or writing. Writing songs or prose.

Because of the work-from-home situation, and because I want to try and finish my work as soon as possible, I end up starting work as soon as possible, which leaves with less creative energy at the end of the day. Today, I wrote some lyrics for a song that I'm working on, recorded a scratch version of it (both for the course), and I felt like writing this blog post.

Some of the lessons that I learned from the things that I read or seek out is how to do music production better. But the problem with knowing more is to find it difficult to get more done with less time. You tend to get lost in what you think you should do instead of what you should do. I used to wrap up demos in hours. Now, that has gone to days, if not weeks. That's not good and I need to figure out a way to make things manageable in terms of time. The latest course that I'm doing has an exercise that mandates that you set timelines for finishing a project. I will try to implement that moving forward.

My therapist tells me that I should try and stare out at nothing (or something pleasant) for short periods during the day. During our sessions, I found out that this activity made me feel like a heavy weight has been lifted off my body. My eyes started feeling relaxed and I felt like drifting off to sleep. This morning, I did that by staring at the mountains for a bit. I need to make it a point to do this more often than I have been doing.

I have been finding it difficult to fall asleep at night, especially when I am with J. I don't know why it is that. I tend to feel sleepy if I'm reading something or watching something, but the act of needing to switch off the TV or put away the book and switch of lights wakes me up.

One of the reasons could be the anxiety/stress overall, but I think the frustration of not feeling like I have done anything meaningful in the day is a constant contributor. Thanks to my wonderful upbringing, I have a tendency to feel I'm not good enough for anything or that I haven't done enough to merit existing.

This is both for things at work as well as my music. I know that I'm doing good work, but I always feel like I am not doing enough or that I could have done way better. At work, there is hardly a system where such anxieties are considered and taken care of. Many have left the company because of the unaddressed issues, with more leaving soon. I feel for them, as much as I should be feeling for myself. But as I said above, I need this job at this time.

Over the last year or so, I have more or less pulled out of most social media. The only thing I check occasionally is Twitter. I have also stopped sharing photos. In fact, the joy of photography has somehow been sucked up from inside me. I guess I should treat this as a phase too. Or maybe it is because I don't get to get out of my house anymore.

I am planning to switch of 8-year-old Nexus 5 to something more modern. Something with a decent camera and photography software. I'm not sure if I should go for Pixel 4A or something more expensive and flagship (like the OnePlus 8T or some version of the iPhone).

During the lockdown, I have rediscovered my interest in writing (physical, literal writing) with fountain pens. I have refurbished the ones that I have and I have purchased a couple of good ones. Now, I can even write lyrics paper with real pens!

My not-so-good handwriting

One of the unsettling aspects of lockdown has been finding out that I relate and empathize with the heinous characters in some movies. These characters show psychopathic characteristics. They are murderers, cannibals, and sadists. I don't think that I have any of these characteristics, but I have the sociopathy. What they say about human beings, their sufferings, and how things should end resonates with me.
I'm talking about Dr. Hannibal Lecter (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins) and Jame Gumb (Buffalo Bill, played by Ted Levine) from Silence of the Lambs, Tavis Bickle (played by Robert DeNiro) from Taxi Driver, and the young woman (played by Jesse Buckley) in i'm thinking of ending things.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter

Jame Gumb

Robert Bickle

The girl in i feel like ending things

I haven't talked much about Blumenthal. She is as pretty as ever. As I write this, she has gotten under the covers after having had her mail meal for the day.

Blumenthal in all her glory

So that's where I will end this for the moment. This was fun. This was refreshing. Maybe I'll follow my own advice and do this more often.

I wrote about photography earlier. Since drafting the post, I added some photos to it. These are the ones that I feel I should share or I should have shared.

Nudges

Everything nudges you. Sometimes ever so slightly. Things that you see, read, do, and think--all of it does. And I guess these nudges change you.

Technically, everyone you meet and interact with you should too. In my case, it's not so. Probably because I go out of my way to limit my interactions with people. People are one of the most consistently disappointing things that I encounter in my daily life--the reason could be high expectations that I set for them, low returns that I get from them, or a combination of both. I find myself checking out of conversations somewhere between 20 minutes and 45 minutes after meeting someone. Even with people I love and that I care about.

And yet, at least one such interaction has resulted in a nudge.

A few days ago, J told me that he was moved after reading my then last post on the blog. He, I guess, could relate more to me as a person through my post because I'm particularly pitiful in conveying emotions in real life. I appear cold and distant. But it is representative of what I feel like these days.

J also said he was exploring some of the older posts after having conversations with AV. They get along well with each other on Facebook, thanks to their shared interest in photography. In fact, they interact way more with each other than I manage to interact with AV.

When I asked J about what they were talking about, J said that it was not about my depression. AV had brought up some issues that he was having with some posts on my blog with him and that's why he had started reading my blog.

Parallelly, AV and I have also been having conversations about how to get people to not find those posts about him on the blog. He said he gets a lot of shit from antagonists on Facebook photography groups, where he posts his idiosyncratically brilliant photographs and engages with people in fiery comment threads (with questionable political correctness). He now wants me to ensure that such posts don't show up on Google searches.

One of my most popular posts was a photobiography of his life. This was my attempt at showcasing his art to the world. His photography, through which his incredible mind shines, had remained more or less inaccessible to the real world thanks to his social anxiety/phobia. Within a few months of meeting him in 2007, I wanted to help him display his photographs in an art gallery in New York. I thought I could do it. I thought I could help him leave a legacy in the real world.

He had scoffed at my cherubic optimism. I couldn't do it like how I wanted to, but I did manage to push him into opening accounts on Flickr and Facebook. His Flickr stint didn't last too long, but he stuck with Facebook. It is probably what keeps him going these days. He uses Facebook to post photos and get comments and reactions from his friends and, more importantly, from strangers. And some of these strangers look him up when they are upset with something he posts or says, and that leads to my blog posts.

I have been naive and careless about the internet all my life. In 1997, I started warming up to HTML. In 2002, I created a website for my medical school batchmates. I had copied all the content available in a book that was published after we graduated and then started posting updates on their whereabouts. The website was hosted on GeoCities and the content still comes up on Google searches. Some of my classmates are pissed by it, and I'm still trying to find my way out of that mess.

Back to nudges. I guess everyone is figuring out how to find a way out of their labyrinthine miseries. Like how I am trying to get past my current low phase. I have heard a lot of people talk their way out of things with superfluous stuff like, "It's all about the journey and not the destination." Thanks to these nudges, the path that I take (and thus the journey) deviates ever so slightly from what seems like a course of certain doom. Mabye the destination doesn't change and it's just a slight detour. But the journey does. Or it has.

Back to J. So when J brought up my blog, I felt a certain sense of pride. I have always felt that I communicated better in writing than I could ever do in any other mode of communication. Hell, I have met more people by making people laugh and entertaining them on gay social networking chat rooms. So I went back to the blog(s). I hadn't posted in a while. And then I posted All I Want is Solitude, Slide-show, and The Last Best Things.

I felt satisfied. I felt closer to how to I used to feel. I felt like I had done something meaningful. I don't feel that too often.

There were other nudges too. Two weeks ago, during the commute to an outstation gig, I spent most of my time listening to an audiobook. It was the audio version of Judas Unchained by Peter Hamilton--a book I had started three years back. Sometime during the ride, I felt like switching to something else.

I looked for music in my dumber of my two smartphones. It's dumber because it's older and it does not have access to mobile internet. It is a Nexus 5 whose motherboard must feel like a teenager thanks to the number of fixes it needed to keep it going. It does not have a functioning mobile radio antenna and hence does not have a SIM card. It might be dumber, but it is the one that I'm more fond of and feel more safe with. I feel that it is safer because it is not the phone on which I have to interact with people. People tend to bring bad news. Communicating with people make me anxious. That overwhelming sense of expectations and responsibility.

So my dumber phone functions like an iPod. It has everything that I might want to listen to. The vast majority of what I want to listen to is podcasts--on combat sports, science, technology, astronomy, skepticism, conspiracy theories, etc. Audiobooks occupy a much lesser, but significant, chunk of its limited memory. I have a few folders in it with some music. Mostly music that I have to listen to for preparing my sets. But there are also some folders with versions of some of my songs. I keep these folders so that I can remind myself that I can be creative.

I switched to listening to my songs. Mainly because I wanted to check out how they sounded on my new Bluetooth headphones, which have the necklace thing along with the earbuds. As I guess is the case when artists revisit their unfinished pieces after a long time, I was pleasantly surprised. I was enjoying listening to the songs that I had written, recorded, and produced. They were so out of my consciousness that I was intrigued by them initially. I remember smiling and chuckling at the lyrics that I had come up with. If you are wondering, I can't remember my lyrics to save my life.

This whole experience was another little nudge because I had revisited something that I was proud of. I felt like I had done something worthwhile and I was capable of doing something that could also help me leave a legacy. I don't think I much care(d) about leaving a legacy, but I have always wanted to showcase what I could do—at what I think I'm good at doing—to the world. I guess I would also like some recognition, but that's not the most important reason. I would like to think that I want people to feel what I have felt, and I truly hope that I have translated my feelings and thoughts sufficiently adeptly into these songs.

Another nudge happened around that time. Since starting Judas Unchained in 2017, I have just finished about 400 pages. It is the only book I'm officially reading. It's fair to say that I was not reading much. At J's best friend's farewell party, which I reluctantly agreed to go for,  I found myself checking out of people and conversations fast. In the middle of the party, in one of several attempts to separate myself from the raucous conversation, I walked into J's friend's bedroom and found a copy of Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil. I read the the first 30-odd pages. The sheer pleasure of opening a paperback, sifting through pages, enjoying the different angles that one could gaze the pages at, and getting lost in that brilliant chapter are all cliched mediocre aspects of reading a physical book. But for me, it was another nudge. I had suddenly rediscovered the joy of reading a new book, which opened up the possibility of reading many more.

The next night, I found my Kindle Paperwhite and charged it. I logged out of my .com Amazon account and logged in with my .in account so that I can access the books that I have been reading on my other Kindle.

Yes, I have two Kindles. The Paperwhite is mine, and the other (a much older one with a physical keyboard) is a gift from Blummer. It was Blummer's father's and Blummer gave it to me after his passing. In the last three years, I have preferred reading on the older Kindle because it felt more like reading a physical book (because it does not have a backlight) and because I loved its physical page-turn buttons. But it is a problem if I wanted to read in bed with the lights turned off. I either have to use my dumber smartphone (because it has kickback stand in its case) or the Paperwhite.

After the Narcopolis experience, I wanted to get back to being on my Paperwhite because I could read in bed and drift to sleep. Instead of watching something and having to turn that thing off. Since then, apart from continuing Judas Unchained, I started a John le Carre book. Some progress.

Reading goes hand in hand with writing. The more I read, the more I want to write. That meant more posts, of which this, hopefully, will be the fourth.

There have been other nudges too in these past two weeks.

Buying those necklace headphones meant that I could listen to my podcasts with my helmet on while riding my bicycle, which I primarily use for commuting to work and grocery shopping. Listening to podcasts while cycling is liberating!

In another conversation three weeks ago, J had asked me to figure out a way to restart therapy and make it more regular. I had managed to get the first session done two days after I posted my first post in a long time. I don't consider the therapy itself as a nudge, but my efforts for fomdomg a fix to remedy my current situation was one.

My maid has been giving me a fresh set of problems since she started coming a few months back. Despite me requesting her several times to do dusting and other types of cleaning more than sweep/swab and doing the dishes, she was just following her usual routines. This past week, I had a conversation with her explaining what I wanted her to do. The next day was a no-show from her. I was frustrated and I wanted to set an example.

I spent about five hours in cleaning up the apartment so that she could see how things looked if things were done properly. The next day, I did the dishes and cleaned the counter and made the bed before I left for work. She must have been surprised that I had done all of that. Today I met her and explained that things are not working out the way they are being done. I proposed an alternate strategy of focusing way more on dusting and deep cleaning on a fortnightly rotating basis around the apartment. I also said that I'll continue doing the things that I can.

The five-hour cleaning run was a nudge. I felt good after doing it. I had tangible results of something that I had a lot of fun doing. I have always felt a sense of satisfaction and pride after cleaning. This feeling is why I volunteer to do dishes when I go to my friends' place for dinner.

So many nudges. Most will sound inconsequential to many. But they did change the way I was doing things. The way I was thinking about things. Those nudges changed me and my future. There I said it. Every time I come across a sci-fi reference about the lack of free will, I chuckle on the inside. I guess I chuckle(d) a lot when I used to watch Passengers or think about Trafalmadorians.

Last night, I found myself telling J that I might be past my current phase's nadir. Maybe I have. That's where I am now. Feeling better. Thanks to these nudges.