Isle of Skye trip! Tired, not much sleep, a lot of the places that we checked out were pretty cool! The tour guide seems interesting, is a bit direct, but also talks wayyy to much so I kept listening to music around the way and kind of just felt more and more awkward, not included as a part of Mulan’s group of friends at all really. Maybe because I was tired and not in a very social mood, but I didn’t really try to engage at all. This culminated with me sitting here alone in the hostel room, typing up these journal entries, figuring out how I want to deal with the situation of the rest of the day.
Update: after I wrote this, I had a very interesting and seemingly/hopefully productive conversation with this Singaporean guy, David Yeo. This guy, like Jath, is 24-25 ish, and had some wisdom to share with me. More than the content of what he was actually saying, which I acknowledge when you tell it to other people sounds dumb and cliched, his vibe was what struck me more—he really seemed genuinely happy and content with his place in life, and it was cool to talk to someone who was visibly like that.
Some of the tidbits/advice that he shared with me:
- I asked him about some of his engineering stuff/work, and he said that while he enjoyed it and specifically expanding his worldview on stuff that he previously didn’t know much of, it wasn’t that much of importance to him.
- His first passion/love was clearly with the military—the way that he was talking about “leading his men” in the future, and all the different subdivisions between a regiment and platoon and squadron or whatever, he seemed totally 100% bought in to the mission of the army. He didn’t seem forceful about it either though, and neither was he like that when he was talking about his religion, which he mentioned might have given him support but didn’t claim to say that was the only possible solution.
- He talked about all the different activities that he’s involved with—skydiving one weekend, going to different countries, being captain of the rugby team back home, etc.
- He said that planning things in the beginning of the week helps him a lot.
- He also said that he does things thinking what the 30-year-old version of himself would be proud that he did in his early 20s.
- He really empasized the value of the early 20’s—he said that it sort of sets your vision for the rest of your life, and you should live it the way you actually want to live.
Interesting thoughts! It sort of pushed me to go hang out with this group of people that Emma knew and that Mulan started hanging out with, while I thought earlier that it would be “awkward”.
Note about this “awkward” thing: as I’m growing towards socializing more and meeting more people/being part of groups, I have to be sure not to lose the parts of me that I really think are important to keep, one of which is not worrying about the awkwardness of things, at least not at the cost of anything of at least remote importance. I need to not think that I’m still a certain way, while lose myself in a pool of hypocrisy and think that I’m better than I am. Need to be very very careful about it.
After I got up, spent a while diddling—I need to think about the issue of me doing it in the exact spaces I’m not supposed to—I don’t think it turns me on, but it makes me more tempted to do it for some reason. I need to ask myself very carefully in those moments why I’m doing what I’m doing.
Afterwards, spent a long time ironing out some bugs that I had in my circles thing, but I finally implemented the code to process the JSON!
uid: 202003070000 tags: #journal #edinburgh