wake a bit ahead of alarm
caf + hydro surge by 7:30a
on-track w/shower, overdue shave, fresh clothes by ~8:30

brekarito 9:15 because holding off gym sesh until after Mrs tele-tech interview
catch-up with thumb+cloud backups

* * *

Thinking more about what BASB (buildga2ndbrain) says about personal interests... Forte views these as the primary actionable units of life, as opposed to career/job-specific stuff. Job-specific notes do of course deserve their own container, and maybe some projects as an employee do overlap with personal, as when my self-education in 3-layer (M-V-C) web app design supported development of both my student-aid eligibility analysis software (on-the-job project) and my blog engine (personal project).

BASB describes a cycle where we encounter inspiration (whatever "resonates"), take notes about it, massage the notes into structure, summarize / distill, and figure out what's actionable about it. In my case, I can and sometimes do take a lot of pics while strolling through a museum, of works that resonate ... without ever really having identified what I'm looking for in a museum. Techniques I admire? The mysterious, evocative, whimsical? Things that trigger my own memory, or inspire to entertain new directions? Maybe all of that.

That's rather removed from what people usually think of as personal interests/projects, unless you happen to be a practicing artist. Not everything that "resonates" will directly feed or blossom into an actionable personal endeavor. Science has made some inroads but has yet to fully explain how "connecting with nature" or "art appreciation" support mental health and personal creativity. So, it's not a complete waste of time or digital resources if I keep a list of songs to source or if there are books in my reading list that I will almost certainly never get around to actually reading.

Housesitting last week, it occurred to me - I like cats, it makes me feel better about life that cats exist - but not enough that I would have taken it on myself to adopt a cat if Mrs hadn't pushed for it. And I could say the same about children, it brings me durable measures of joy that my nieces and nephews exist but that never translated into a desire to father children myself. In my young adult years, having marinated most of my life until then in the transcendent joys of the literary art, maybe I felt like becoming an author would be apotheosis too? In the intervening decades I've come to accept that maybe I don't have important stories to tell. Or (since of course my stories are important to me and to everyone whose stories they intersect) maybe a better way to phrase it is that there are already so many colossally important stories, from Aechylus's Prometheus to Atwood's Handmaid, that the bucket doesn't particularly need whatever modest drop I could add.