What Am I Doing Here

Frequently random thoughts about life.

[mccutch]

Is it a coffee break or just a regular break?

It’s barely after 11 am, I’ve only been at my desk for about 20 minutes and taking a coffee break is already on my mind. Just a few more minutes, or one more 30 minute block and a few more tasks is what I tell myself. I cut out after 20 and head out.

On the walk to the coffee shop, I think about work, and what I’m trying to do. The walk is a little cold and the rain is just drizzling a little as the trucks whiz past in this industrial part of Brooklyn. I turn the corner towards where the shops are. I already see the coffee shop and wish it was further away.

The barista is wearing a bandana (corona). “Can I get a large drip with oat milk,” I tell him. He pours it from a metallic flask and casually drops in oat milk and sets it on the counter.

I try and pay but the green light on the Square reader isn’t on. “Did you put the payment through?” I ask him. “Sometimes it takes a while,” he says as he taps on the screen and the green light comes on. I’m pretty sure he never did originally. I pay. He goes back to his phone and forgets I was there. 

On the walk back, I think about my coffee. How I don’t even really want it. It doesn’t taste that good in the afternoon anyway - not nearly as good as it does in the morning. I realize no one really wants the coffee, it’s just a socially acceptable way to get out of working. I can only imagine how much money is spent on coffee when all people really want to do is get out of the office. Why don’t we just do that lol.

[mccutch]

Why Looking at Old Photos is Hard

It’s because we think that the moment is distant rather than feel it within ourselves, as if it’s still there, which it is.

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If life doesn’t freak you out, you’re either a monk or know very little.

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It’s hard to explain...but when you’re depressed...often the last thing you want is to get better.

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No feeling is worse in life than feeling like you wish you could go back

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Between Code and Poetry with Lai Yi Ohlsen

What frameworks shape our perspective of the world? Algorithms or poetics? Lai Yi Ohlsen shares her projects, code poems and 100 scores, and discusses how the frameworks of tech, poetry, and movement intersect.

[mccutch]

Giving up and letting go are very different things

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Life is the sum of all parts, not just a few

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“Fear can be expelled with knowledge” - someone else’s quote

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Remember that game Marble Madness? It pretty much sums up life

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Fashion is essentially the production of mood rings

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Plans are how our future selves influence our present selves

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The one religion or spiritual path that seems to make the most sense...the one I wish I could better follow

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Being an adult means being able to deal with your emotions

[mccutch]

Working and (Over)Thinking in the Time of Covid

I sat at my desk and tried to work while the COVID pandemic ravaged quietly outside the window, somewhere, everywhere, in the little studio that I share with a couple friends who were at home. However, I truthfully spent most of the time staring at my fingernails, which I picked at as I sank deeper and deeper into my memories and feelings*.

But then I got up and sat on the couch and things seem a little bit better**. But I thought right away about ordering weed. I wonder if they’d deliver to my house later or if service was still suspended. Maybe later I’d find out; I probably would.

But in that moment, I just sat and watched the sun come in through the window.

*It’s a weird hole to get into.

**Sometimes moving to a new place helps with shifting your perspective and feelings more than it should.

[mccutch]

The First Time I Got High

With alcohol, you know the first time you drank. You either had a little and got kind of buzzed and it was fun or you had a lot and you still definitely remember it mostly for the embarrassment you probably felt the next day. The strange thing about smoking weed is that you may not even remember the first time you smoked, but you definitely remember the first time you got high.

Smoking weed for the first time is oddly uneventful in my experience. For the very fact that it’s hard to tell if you’re stoned because you don’t know what stoned is. Getting drunk is an immediate, kind of sledgehammer type experience. But getting stoned is almost literally like a feeling coming over the horizon like a cloud and suddenly occupying the space above our heads. We saw it coming but kind of forgot it was there. This was how I was the first time I smoked weed. I was in a friend’s Jetta. He was wearing one of those fuzzy Patagonia vests. The car was a POS but he had a kicking CD player and two speakers in the front that were only about 4 inches wide but top quality. Anyways, we were sitting around smoking a bowl out of a pipe feeling dangerous. I went into someones house and ate some chips and told someone I wasn’t stoned. That’s kind of all I remember. The first time I got stoned though, I remember a lot differently.

To be continued...

[mccutch]

This question occurred to me as I was attempting to form an answer to this question: Where does the word “spliff” come from? In answering his own question, tchrist points to multiple sources argu...

On the origin of the term ‘spliff’...it begins as a synonym for spiffy and winds up being used to refer to a ‘ganja cigarette’ in the early 20th century. I had only learned about it in college in California from a friend who’s British.