overworked

I’m getting old man––no longer capable of working as much as I used to. I’m not really sure if this is because of my procrastination habits, I genuinely have too much on my plate, or because I don’t have the proper motivation to want to work. Whatever the reason, I felt pretty stressed before so I dropped a couple of responsibilities, and things are a little better now. Hopefully, after recruiting/GRE is over, my stress levels will go down to more manageable levels.

The good news however is that I’m perfectly content with my Airbnb situation now, and I have good work setups now. When I wrote my first post, I was little miffed at the time since we had literally no desks, so I was trying to work, hunched over my laptop on a couch. Not very fun.

productivity update

I haven’t blogged in a while nor have I really considered my own productivity. With the GRE coming up next weekend and classes starting to ramp up, I probably have to start getting more cognizant of what I’m doing from moment to moment. Sleep is definitely going to be essential for this coming week, and I need to find some activities to help reset my brain in a good way between work sessions.

Aside from that, long readings for history is making me realize that MAN my attention span sucks. This is pretty apparent whenever I try to read stuff that’s not very entertaining, and I’m noticing it more than ever. This was also funny, because for quant interviews, I had to take a brain test, after which I realized that I scored a solid 8 in attention span/concentration. It was out of 100.

I have some thoughts regarding how to increase my attention span: we’ll see how it works. I think working in >15minute blocks will help me greatly––I think one of my greatest problems with procrastination is that I never hit my flow state, which normally hits around 15min. My attention span won’t allow for that (too much stimulus), but perhaps keeping in mind my brain’s stimulus levels will help me reach the flow state more often (like right now while writing this blog post). To achieve that, I think things like: walks, short blog posts, easy todo list tasks, doing mandatory non-academic chores/tasks, all could help me.

Again, with important deadlines coming up, I’m already at a point where I’ve procrastinated, so I’m going to be in cram mode regardless.

mechanical keyboards

It first started with fountain pens, now we’ve moved onto mechanical keyboards.

At the start of quarantine, I was reflecting and realized that I was a “competitive contrarian.” I think deep down, I’m fairly competitive in the sense that I care a lot about how well I’m doing (I have some fear of not living up to my potential and also a really strong desire to get good at stuff). I am definitely not someone who’s competitive in the sense that I’d wish for my peers to do poorly (I hate that kind of competitiveness). To conflict with that, I’m also a contrarian; as a kid, I picked clarinet, then bassoon because nobody played those instruments. I literally picked French (ended up being a shit decision) because it was the less popular of the languages between French and Spanish. And now, I’m super into fountain pens/mechanical keyboards for some reason. And the fact that mechanical keyboards are getting more mainstream kinda irks me ngl, but at the same time, as a beginner to the hobby, it’s probably good for me/I’m literally a data point in why it’s recently becoming mainstream.

I’ve been thinking a lot about building a new keyboard, and I have several ideas of where to begin. The reason why I want to build a keyboard so badly is more than just functional purposes (I already own a mechanical keyboard that I like a lot). I want to do it because I’ve been searching for a long time about how to get into a hobby that’s related to design/content creation, and I think mechnical keyboards might finally be a hobby that I care enough about to motivate myself to get through the growing pains of having to learn design/video editing/content creation/photo editing (all things that have been really tough for me to learn in the past).

Some preliminary ideas (and I know these are all nerdy so chill):

  • I’m a really big Star Wars the Clone Wars fan, and I especially like the 501st Clone Legion. Their colors are blue and white, and I’ve already looked at a keyset that matches those colors. It’s not the most aesthetic keycap set in the world, but it could be a decent first build. I know I’m capable of building it, and looking at the price of everything, it’d probably come out to around 200 bucks ish. Why is this hobby so ridiculously expensive lmao.

  • I’ve been eyeing this bamboo case for a while now. The contrarian in me really wants a wood case––the only issue is that I haven’t really found a nice matching keyset yet. Honestly, not a lot goes well with wood, and if I’m making only one or two keyboards, I want it to be something that I really like.

  • Other keyboard ideas have honestly just been me looking at various keycap sets, and then thinking whether or not I like them. A lot of them look really sick, but without a specific motivating theme, it’s hard for me to justify purchasing them.

  • There are some really sick Star Wars keycap sets, but the issue with this market is that things are only sold once. Soooo I’m probably never getting them rip.

Anywho, if you’re reading this/are interested in mechanical keyboards, hmu! I’m definitely planning on getting into this hobby, so I’m probably going to have a lot of surplus keyboards in the future that I’ll need to sell off so if anyone is interested in blowing a crap ton of money for aesthetic, high quality custom keyboards, just wait a couple months and we can talk :).

Damn I’m really about to become a quant to fund my mechanical keyboard addiction.