Week 1
I’ve been mostly off social media for the last 2 months. Deep Work, the book, is to be blamed. Social media just didn’t make much sense for me in my current life circumstances. It’s been amazing, my head feels more like the clear sky that the Headspace dude talks about but I still do want to occupy some space on the internet and work on my writing so here we are.
- I played basketball on Saturday after two weeks and it was great. Dragging my elder sister along was a fantastic idea. My stamina did take a hit after being sick for a week but that’s okay, we move. I’m not going to continue because of the rise in COVID cases but I’ll continue with Rachel Gulotta’s aesthetic home workouts anyway.
- We had an interim demo day at the ownpath product design fellowship that I’m currently a part of. It went well but after rewatching the presentation I realized that my presentation skills are kind of rusty. I should practice a bit more before the next one and eliminate those “uh”s and “y’know”s. Aishwarya, Yashasri, and I have started planning out the next project and I’m quite excited about that as well. I’ve learned so much in the last two months. I don’t regret not going for masters this year quite as much anymore.
- I took a break from k-pop this week and listened to Spotify’s Borderless playlist on shuffle. It’s kind of amazing. Pazz Carrara’s Radar has been my favorite for months.
- As I do once every 3 months, I tried the curly girl hair routine again. I don’t get the point of the gel. It just makes my hair crunchy. I want my curls to be ~soft~. I’ve probably not figured out the optimum amount to apply yet but this routine is just way too time-consuming. I’m not a big fan of applying too many hair products anyway.
- I’ve been making progress with Creativity, Inc. It’s been great so far to help me set some expectations from a future employer. I’m probably going to leave it at this point and come back later because I’m incredibly excited to read The Dark Forest. I need to time this carefully though because I have a feeling it will be just as unputdownable as its prequel.
- I’m also working on this tuesday-friday design challenge. I’ve never really designed UI in isolation, i.e. with a limited understanding of end-to-end flows or UX. But I want to work on my visual design and apparently, this is how people do it. I wish someone would create UI exercises where they provide you with the information architecture, user flows, and maybe some background about the problem/goals. I wonder if something like that exists.
- I’ve finally made some progress with my portfolio. I’m feeling cautiously excited about it.
- I watched the second episode of Ways of Seeing and my main takeaway from that was before the male gaze was a thing in film, it was already a thing in art (mostly European though). It makes complete sense. I also watched the Snyder cut and thought it was supremely entertaining.
I think it’s wild you’ve made it this far. Thank you for reading my brain dump, I plan to do it every week. I’ll be iterating on the format over time. The first step was to get this out there and I’m glad I did. I have a feeling I’ll be consistent because I’m doing this with one of my closest friends, Raef, who is starting a weekly newsletter. Raef is easily one of the funniest, kindest, and most creative people I know and you’ll be missing out on some snorts and chortles if you don’t check out his newsletter here.
