I just came back from standup paddleboarding and I feel really really good. Everything is clear and easy to see. I need to find a way to go and play on the water more.
I also was thinking about how if the eye is constantly in a state of contraction, we might need to do some sort of massage in order to help loosen and relax the ligaments and the muscles. I don’t know yet what kind of massage will work. All the current massages only target the areas around the eyes.
I wasn’t able to test my vision on my phone because it is out of battery but I tested on very small text on a book an the results are mindblowing.
Yesterday I returned to Valorant and I wanted to learn a few things since being washed before I get back fully into the Valorant grind.
I want to learn how to have comfortable hand positioning
I want to have greater certainty of where all the enemies are at any point in time and a clearer understanding of the game
Class One: Hand positioning (90 minutes)
UNIT ONE: Figure out why
UNIT TWO: Explore Movements
UNIT THREE: Explore aids and relief
Class Two: Greater certainty (3 hrs)
UNIT ONE: Document VOD areas of stress and find equivalent situations in ranked
UNIT TWO: Try to predict decision making
UNIT THREE: Document another VOD
Class One: Hand positioning (90 minutes)
UNIT ONE: Figure out why
I’d say I have a little golfers elbow along with just muscle fatigue. No carpal tunnel syndrome or trigger finger syndrome thankfully.
UNIT TWO: Explore Movements
My perfect position seems to be legs balanced on the floor, chest forwards, armrest angled outwards and level with the desk and pushed backward so I can sit farther forwards.
The results on my sheriff-only account:
I feel mild soreness in my hand and forearm. My whole body feels a bit cramped as well. Overall, massive improvement.
I used a new aiming mentality, which I call the “Zoom In” Method where you pretend you are zooming into where your crosshair is and on the target, sort of getting mental blinders on. It seems to help especially with aiming for very far shots.
Then I played a rank match:
My “greater certainly” class was me looking up at how Som played vs me.
I was really helpful to see the util usage. I ended up using a lot of this information in future matches.
However, I spiraled after playing ranked because I was so frustrated with how I was performing. I ended up playing non-stop from Friday until Sunday sleeping not as much as I would like and always livid from anger that all my opponents were so hard to beat.
Today I woke up feeling really tired. I felt undermotivated to do the things that I want to do: take walks, write in my journal. I think I’ve also been finding it hard to retain purpose for some reason, or motivation or energy to power that purpose.
I realized this morning that a big reason as to why is simply health. I felt too much discomfort in my stomach in my head, too tired.
Today’s goals are simple:
Clean up my apartment to a level that I could invite people over and feel good about it
Focus on my health and wellness, drink lots of water and take naps, eat good food
Move around a lot, I have a lot of todo list items, and I can take them different places
I’m really excited for the last one, to get outside my apartment a little more. I have more money now to do these sorts of things, so I would like to explore austin a little more, go to the library, parks, coffee shops and just have a good time while I’m working through all the different to-do list items. I have some truly excellent protocols for figuring out how to work on the move and I want to use them.
So before I even started using the syllabus method for challenges, I drew a bunch of drawings:
Professor Sova concept
Perspective, standing above
Second perspective, standing above
Sova portrait study
I want to focus on the Sova portrait study first as I feel it is quite close to a finished product. I can post it on reddit as my sort of test.
The main issue I’m contending with, is how to make it an awesome poster. I feel that it requires some sort of lettering. So I found the Valorant font here: Valorant Font | dafont.com
Here are my main steps. (45 min recommendation)
Unit One: Find the design
Unit Two: Complete the painting
Unit Three: Liquify any strangeness
The steps I actually ended up following:
Make everything grayscale
Add font and play with scale until everything felt right
I started this challenge on October 8th. Now it is November 21st. And I can say with honesty that I really followed the challenge very very well.
A couple of notes:
I was forced to go to bed later on two separate occasions, once for work, when I finished a production deployment at 11:30 and went to bed at maybe 12:30
Another time when I was helping my girlfriend with her project and I was up until 12, I cheated by “sleeping” on the coach by the computer at 11 but since I didn’t actually go to bed until much later, it wasn’t that good
After these cheat days it got really hard to stick to my schedule for a few days, but now it is easy again. There were a few times that I went to bed at 1 or 3 am because I didn’t go to sleep and I often go to sleep at 12 or 1, but I get to my bedroom by 11:30 usually and almost always start washing up by 11:10.
Overall this is a smashing success. I have genuinely changed for the better and I think this time the change might actually last.
I do want to still apply some of my earlier ideas and focus on different needs and try to meet them better every day.
I can also work on turning off screens earlier and stopping eating so close to bedtime. But the eating has definitely gotten better and the screens are just hard since I like to play Valorant with my friends at night.
“When you look at things that are far away, muscles in your eye relax and your lens looks like a slim disc.
When you look at things that are close, muscles in your eye contract and make your lens thicker.”
So the key is to relax right? Well, yes and no. Muscles always work in groups. If certain muscles are constantly too tense, then there are certain muscles that must be weak (since if one set of muscles never relaxes, the other set must always be weak).
After researching further, I found the muscle responsible for focusing the lens of the eye. It’s called the ciliary muscle and it looks like it doesn’t actually work in pairs but is like smooth muscle tissue of the stomach.
An interesting article is here and I signed up for the guys course to see what was up.
Today is not the first day working on the Profit in Peace challenge, but it does FEEL like the first day I am living it.
Today is the first day when I dedicated my morning to finding my magical life. For some context of what that means:
Something that I still don’t really understand or feel comfortable with applying is the values that I believe in every day.
I think that writing honestly and focusing on myself in this blog every morning might actually hit all of these points:
Honesty – well, this blog isn’t called unfiltered for no reason! I do remind myself all the time of the “if they don’t like me please leave” mentality.
Imagination – for me, this blog is dedicated to all my imaginative parts: art, YouTube, philosophy, poetry etc.
Intuition – this is the place where doing things “my” way is celebrated and I tap into what is the best way to do something (according to my intuition) rather than how everyone else does it.
Empathy – this blog is a lot for my feelings where I process feelings through words, video, and images. It is a part of honesty too, honest emotion where this is my place to express everything imperfect.
I also like using the blog as my way of living out all my values and being the person I want to be because it really feels like I am sacrificing something to do this…in a good way.
JT Franco talks about if you aren’t willing to sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice. In the end, I had no idea whether I would sacrifice time talking to my girlfriend, going on YouTube, working, playing games, or making YouTube videos. Those are the things I spend most of my day doing anyway. But none of those things seemed right. It was too blunt on an idea, how could you sacrifice all of YouTube? How could I sacrifice all of work?
But by sacrificing my mornings, in a way, I am also sacrificing all of those things. I resist the urge to listen to audiobooks, watch YouTube videos, check messages, or work in the morning. I dedicate all my time to working on my blog and all my challenges, thoughts, ideas, and philosophies.
I also feel a deep unease and anxiety keeping pace with me this morning:
I’m Afraid I My Boss Will Check
I’m afraid my boss will check
See I’m not working
It won’t matter that I have bigger dreams
it won’t matter if I did a bunch of planning
On the weekend
Feverishly, desperately trying to
Make my workday
Productive, efficient enough
To make up
To make it easy
For me to balance
I remember the look on his face
When I told him
I like to meditate
Skeptical
And
I also wonder
If finding my magic
Will make me feel sad and lonely
Like I did yesterday
I feel tired as I
Let go of trying to change the feeling
And accept it instead
Another anxiety that I have about this challenge or this “morning commitment” is just the sense of lack of clarity. I don’t know what I should be working on, or what I can work on. I think is the pressure of time. Or maybe its because I completed all the prework for the challenge and I don’t exactly have something to work on right now. I’m afraid every action is not “right”.
Is it the right thing to:
Work on challenge videos?
Work on editing videos?
Work on reaching out?
To focus on my body?
Wow there is so much here and I feel that I may be stalling. Scared to make a decision so I’m just rambling on a super long blog post that doesn’t really say anything in particular.
Well all I know right now is I feel like doing a bit of freewriting, fantasy writing or something of that nature. So I’ll go do that.