what I’m doing now #30

I feel I need to update my internal image of myself. As a thirty yearold man, my role in society and in my communities is distinct from that of a young man in his late teens or early twenties. I’m not sure what my new role is but I suspect my sense of age needs to adjust. This subtle and ambiguous process will accelerate and clarify when I become a father.

What the next few years will look like has been a question hanging over me for many months, years even. As time passes the picture gets clearer. More and more Z sees babies in person and on social media and more and more she says – playfully still – I want a baby… And then she says she doesn’t want one yet but I know and she knows that at some point pieces of an invisible puzzle will click into place and all of a sudden the fancy will precipitate into real consideration. She says she has always known when the time came for taking the next step in her life. It’s true. She’s intuitive and decisive. I’m not waiting for her like she jokes I am but both of us feel the growing proximity of parenthood. And as it gets closer the pressure grows on us to settle other aspects of our lives.

We spent

three weeks in Indonesia

. We visited Z’s maternal family in Bandung for a week then vacationed in Bali and Labuan Bajo.

I bought a few books last August when visiting Ireland and England and this summer I started reading them. While flying to Montreal in July I read the little book of short stories by Shirley Jackson I bought at a thrift store in London and while in Montreal I started the little copy of Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka I bought at the same shop. In Bristol I bought a cheap copy of Dubliners by James Joyce but ended up reading a digital copy on my phone during our visit of Indonesia. When I was in Dublin I chatted with a guy roughly my age working at a little bookshop and I told him Cormac McCarthy was a favorite writer of mine and he recommended The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. A few days later I came across a copy at a thriftshop and bought it. Today, the day we are flying back home, I started reading a digital copy of it.

It’s like a little game, reading books I own and moving them from my larger collection of unreads to my slowly growing row of reads. I also justify owning copies of books I’ve read by intending to revisit them in impulsive bouts of reading. I don’t expect to read them all anew but instead to drop into them at arbitrary positions and read delicately in little pieces.

Something in my mind relishes scoring points and swapping players and climbing up the leaderboard. I consult charts that estimate the difficulty of upcoming matches for each team and review recent and impending changes in player prices. What is it about games that lights up the human brain?

In addition to reading and playing fantasy football, I have been dedicating mental energies during my vacation in Indonesia to organizing our strata’s efforts to add new bylaws. We’re trying to create visitor parking stalls and prohibit Airbnbs and ban smoking inside units but our property manager is not orchestrating these efforts and neither is any other council member. On our first few days in Bandung in the early mornings I found appetite to catch up on all the different email threads and write several emails and set out a plan. Our property manager is unwilling to request documents related to our building from the city because “that’s not what [he does].” Hmm. So I have had my first experience of communicating with the city bureaucracy. It’s frustrating and confusing as expected but luckily the staff has been responsive.

My numbed reaction to the unexpected passing away of a friend recently alerted me of how strained was my connection to my feelings. Like anybody else I don’t like feeling difficult feelings and also like many others I sometimes disconnect myself from myself to forego suffering. Months ago I wrote about the chatter I habitually feed into my consciousness throughout the day in the form of podcasts and videos. Writing about it brought about the usual benefit: I developed the observation into a coherent idea on top of which I could make further observations. In other words, by noticing a pattern and writing about it I distilled it into an abstraction which then freed my mind to zoom out and observe “higher level” patterns: ways in which that abstraction fit into larger patterns. Then I noticed that my tendency to eat and drink at night before bed fit into this pattern of consuming external stimulus for the sake of psychophysical regulation. Finally, I intuited a relationship between my impulse to consume with my aversion for going to bed.

In bed, in the dark and quiet, thoughts and ideas and fears and observations and worries denied throughout the day their time in the spotlight push out onto center stage. Finally, because they can find no hearing otherwise, they command attention. All those difficult feelings neglected await treatment. At no point am I conscious of this. All I know is I don’t want to go to bed. I eat and drink and watch TV and delay sleep until it’s so late I am likely to fall asleep quickly. Once in bed I put an earbud in and listen to something funny and distracting until I sense sleep is ready to take me out of consciousness.

These habits make it obvious something is amiss. But other than myself there is no arbiter responsible for observing and challenging them. My wife and other loved ones can only say so much without embarrassing me or feeling like nags. It’s up to me to confront myself about how I’m treating myself. But there’s a conflict of interest because I’m the one benefiting from these unhealthy behaviors. I’m the one asking to be treated this way.

So I’m pulling the stopper and letting all that’s clogged in my subsconscious flow out. While I cook my lunch I no longer put on earbuds and listen to podcasts. Instead I play instrumental music aloud in the background and let my thoughts predominate. (I think secondary stimulus like instrumental music softens the edge without compromising the activity.) And now instead of eating my lunch at the couch in front of the TV I eat at the dinner table facing the patio. In short, I’m reducing external chatter so that I can process my internal chatter.

what I'm doing now #30

turning thirty

ruminating on the next few years

visiting Indonesia

trip to Indonesia

Sunday 08/23/2026 – Vancouver → Tokyo

Monday 08/24/2026 – Tokyo → Bandung

Tuesday 08/25/2026 – Bandung

Wednesday 08/26/2026 – Bandung

Thursday 08/27/2026 – Bandung

Friday 08/28/2026 – Bandung

Saturday 08/29/2026 – Bandung

Sunday 08/30/2026 – Bandung (Kawah Putih)

Monday 08/31/2026 – Bandung

Tuesday 09/01/2026 – Bandung → Bali

Wednesday 09/02/2026 – Bali (Canggu, Tanah Lot, Kedungu Beach)

Thursday 09/03/2026 – Bali (Canggu and Ubud)

Friday 09/04/2026 – Bali

Saturday 09/05/2026 – Bali

Sunday 09/06/2026 – Bali → Labuan Bajo

Monday 09/07/2026 – Labuan Bajo

Tuesday 09/08/2026 – Labuan Bajo

Wednesday 09/09/2026 – Labuan Bajo → Bali (Seminyak)

Thursday 09/10/2026 – Bali (Waterbom)

Friday 09/11/2026 – Bali (Seminyak)

Saturday 09/12/2026 – Bali → Vancouver

reading

playing fantasy football

working for our condo’s strata

distracting myself less