TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Interesting, not interesting

I often think I'm not very interesting. This doesn't so much bother me but will probably make it uncomfortable when I start dating. But at the same time I think I'm at least somewhat interesting. The problem I still have though is that what makes me interesting now is the stuff I did in the past, most of which I'm no longer doing.

What am I doing right now? Well that means the recent past, so let's say in the past month or two. Most of my time is spent working. My job's not very interesting to talk about, at least with non-programmers, and with programmers I'd rather rant about the ways my job doesn't satisfy me than what makes my job great enough I'm not seriously looking to quit soon. Besides work, I lift weights, but that's currently very flaky. (I have completed the Strongman 5x5 challenge before (again something in the past) but I'm weaker now than then.) Besides weights, I'm casually learning Japanese. I'm going about it very lazily -- this is a pattern you'll see a lot if you look at my history. I've managed to memorize the kanas and am slowly gaining speed at deciphering sequences of them, and I've started learning kanji (but very few so far), and a few more bits of vocab, and have outlined future lessons and resources, but that's it. My current plan is to learn more kanji -- at least 1000 -- and then make an attempt at grammar and building vocab. It's unconventional, but I'm an unconventional person. I also took 5 years of French and 3 of Latin so I'm aware of conventional ways to learn a language. (Yet again something in the past.)

Besides weights and Japanese, I'm working my way through a bunch of books. My 'tsundoku' grows. Primarily I'm working with a book on Lisp, a few Go (the game) books, and Prof. Hanson's book. I'm also playing video games. I just finished The Witcher 2 and Ys VI and am working on Fallout: New Vegas. I'm only really making game progress because I've been on a work break. Besides that, I'm lazily learning how to play guitar. My birthday present to myself was an electric guitar (since prior to that I've only noodled on an acoustic) and related gear. I haven't been very diligent lately in studying but I'm getting another guitar in the coming months (I pre-ordered it a few months ago) that will hopefully inspire me to put some more time in again.

Besides all that? Not much. Is that enough to make me interesting, now? I'm not sure, and so I'll default to "no", but maybe it's enough. Now let's talk about some stuff I've done in the past.

Actually one thing I used to do a lot more of is write poems and later on attempts at raps (mine tend to come out as weird poems though because I can't really rap myself). I've been sort of freaking out the last couple days since I don't think I've done a single creative bit of writing in this entire year. I've got the rest of today to come up with something and hope I will, but even at the pace of "yearly" can I really say I do creative writing as something that makes me interesting now instead of in the past? I used to write fictional stories too, and role play, but haven't done either of those in years.

When I was much younger, I played sports. Pretty much just baseball and basketball though. And I watched sports too so I can still sit through games of sports I didn't even play (like football) without too much agony or boredom, and can appreciate good plays, and can understand a lot of the lingo. I'm not sure this makes me interesting, but knowing people who are almost entirely ignorant on all forms of sportsball I can only say I'm glad to not be ignorant.

I also took tae kwan doe when I was younger. Interesting, right? But I don't remember any forms.

I could go on, but I don't want to turn this into some sort of autobiography. My point remains that I hold experiences of varying detail that let me talk about a variety of topics and seem interesting, but if you look at what I'm doing day-to-day right now, my average day must seem exceedingly dull and boring and uninteresting to most people.


Posted on 2016-12-31 by Jach

Tags: personal

Permalink: https://www.thejach.com/view/id/330

Trackback URL: https://www.thejach.com/view/2016/12/interesting_not_interesting

Back to the top

Back to the first comment

Comment using the form below

(Only if you want to be notified of further responses, never displayed.)

Your Comment:

LaTeX allowed in comments, use $$\$\$...\$\$$$ to wrap inline and $$[math]...[/math]$$ to wrap blocks.