I’ve been on an erratic blogging schedule, and an erratic life schedule in general. I realized that my bedtime (and waking time) creeps up if left unchecked. This is fine for a day or two, but I’ve slowly went from going to sleep in Europe at 10 pm, to 11pm, 12 am… and this past week 2 am was the norm. Thanks to the power of caffeine and blue lights sleep feels optional until it isn’t.
Part of staying up late is dinners/drinks with different groups of friends which has been fun. There’s always a shared sense of obligation to hang out one last time properly before we take off. The tradeoff is my schedule has disappeared, and I’m at the mercy of my impulses/late waking time constraints to get things done.
I’m heading back home to Puerto Rico in 2 days, which feels a bit strange. I’ve nomaded here in Stockholm twice now, and each time was a bit longer than my entire stay in Puerto Rico. I am looking forward to pressing the reset button on my life in Puerto Rico though. There are plenty of social activities to do, but I can hideout for a week or two while I clean up my eating/training/working habits.
It’s been great being in Europe when I look back overall. Even though I have fallen off in some areas of life (health and my creative writing output), I have had the space/inspiration to figure out a lot of things, and feel like life will be a lot better all around when I get back to normality soon.
Two things I’ve been working on the past week have been a new trading algorithm (a tiny bit of money and new grey hairs to show from it so far, but hopefully can remedy both the stress and profitability over the coming weeks), and filming things my girlfriend and I like in Stockholm. My friend Jeff gave us the idea to create some type of travel show from our trips, and it’s been a fun project to work on together. We’re still figuring everything out, but I hope that we can get something up on Youtube by the end of August. I want the show to be practical (give the advice we would have liked before visiting) and entertaining. I’m sure it will be pretty short to start with as I need to work out of my laziness when it comes to pulling out my phone for pictures/video.
When I’m back in Puerto Rico I plan to fix all of the broken things. It’s always easier to start next week, but I’ve been as productive as a Monday morning after a Vegas trip, so I can’t do much worse. I need my routines so I can go to the gym, meditate, write, and cook/get outdoors on Sunday (beach in Puerto Rico usually) without having to make a decision. Sunday meal prep and using an alarm clock are two things that are missing in my life. I’m really bad at getting work done at night, except for brainstorming ideas.
On the entertainment front I watched two movies that I liked: “You Were Never Really Here”, and “Annihilation”.
“You Were Never Really Here” was a great indie revenge thriller. I’m a sucker for a violent revenge movie, but I’ve seen a lot of them now, and it’s rare that I see anything breaking new ground. YWNRH surprised me several times defying genre conventions, and it was refreshing. Part of me wants this high body count and to watch the bad guys get tortured, but I’ve seen plenty of that, and putting in the poetic/emotional moments in this film made it really stick with me. There was one really beautiful family moment in the middle of the film that was one of the more touching scenes I have scene in a while.
“Annihilation” was enjoyable too. Completely different type of movie, but also full of surprises. I really like evolution and thinking about how things could be different, and this delivered on that. The last 20 minutes in particular were awesome.
Will be back next week from Puerto Rico, and in the meantime here is a pic from the Swedish Archipelago (get on a boat and check out the islands if you have a chance, so quiet and beautiful).
Andrew Manser 