Discord
Current location: Baltimore, MD, USA
Reading: Nothing (for the first time in a very long time!)
Listening: All the news podcasts piling up in my feed
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Discord
I had grand ambitions for this roadtrip: to be totally in the moment while traveling with my girlfriend, visiting my family and hers, checking out interesting little places in between and enjoying the landscape as we roll through under-explored portions of the country.
That has kinda sorta almost happened.
I was able to plan, prepare, and produce a bunch of work ahead of time, scheduling mountains of writings and podcast episodes so they would go out as usual, keeping my various projects ticking along at their usual publishing cadence.
One of my projects, though—One Sentence News—is publishing Monday through Friday, as both an email and a podcast. It's also focused on of-the-moment happenings, which means I can't produce and schedule them too far ahead of time.
I cobbled together a little portable audio rig that's less-good than my fancypants at-home setup (though far superior to my previous efforts at the same) and told myself that each night after a long drive and full day, I would set aside time and cognitive energy to get an OSN curated, analyzed, written, and recorded—ready for consumption the next morning.
Reader, this did not happen.
I love a roadtrip. I love travel in general. I love meeting new people and catching up with friends and family and having long, meandering conversations with a partner.
As it turns out, though, switching between that loose, liberated mindset and the analytical, deadline-oriented focus necessary to produce a daily news publication and podcast is not easy.
My initial day-or-two off from OSN sprawled into the better part of a week.
Even now, from a relatively calm, chilled-out, stable setup in Baltimore my brain is rebelling against the work I'm doing: it wants to keep wandering—but I need it to concentrate and parse and construct thoughtful, intelligible sentences (something I'm managing, but only with greater-than-usual strain, energy expenditure, and time-investment).
Attempting to blend opposite, discordant mental postures can lead to strain, exhaustion, and frustration.
These sorts of priority-reality incongruities, fortunately, also sometimes serve as catalysts for better balance in the future.
I'm now in the process of developing an arsenal of efficiencies I can apply to OSN in the future, for when I need to meaningfully reduce the cognitive weight I have to carry at the end of a travel day but still need to produce something of value for folks on the other end of that publication.
The idea is to make this balance more sustainable: I don't want to disincentivize my favored flavor of travel, but I also don't want daily projects to become perceptually unattainable.
An enduring equilibrium may take a while to establish, but I tend to find the process of establishing such steadiness strangely satisfying, if a bit frustrating, draining, and panic-inducing, at times.
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Things I've Made This Week
Select, recent works from across my project portfolio.
Aspiring Generalist: Simple Exercise
Brain Lenses: Down Time (podcast version)
Climate Happenings: Transformers, Executive Actions, Efficient ACs
I Will Read To You: Laugh and Be Merry
Let’s Know Things: Other Conflicts
Curiosity Weekly / Daily: August 23 / August 23
One Sentence News: August 24 (podcast version)
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Interesting & Useful
The World's 25 Largest Lakes, Side by Side — www.visualcapitalist.com This interesting map graphic uses the Great Lakes region as a point of comparison for the top 25 largest lakes in the world.
Kooky, weird, and hilarious stock and slideshow images about the internet.
Turning The Simpsons into songs to slowly clap to.
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Outro
To all the OSN readers out there: thanks for being so understanding of my roadtrip-related abeyance :)
I'm already wondering if my Climate Happenings newsletter might make a good daily publication at some point, but then I remember just how tricky it can be to maintain even a single publication at that cadence (maybe someday though? Once I figure out how to manage OSN from the road more consistently and sustainably?).
It's been really lovely driving around the country (my old Prius gets excellent gas-mileage, thankfully) for the first time in a long while, and it's been a blast meeting some of Ariana's family and catching up with my own (my new niece is just adorable, and I'm looking forward to meeting my new nephew up in Seattle next month).
I'm looking forward to catching up on sleep a bit in Baltimore as we'll be crashing here for several days. I might try to visit some museums down in Washington DC while in the area, too, and if I do I'll share some of what I see on Instagram.
How's your week been? What've you been up to lately? Planning any trips (road or otherwise) in the near-future?
Send me a quick message and tell me what's been up. You can reach me by replying to this newsletter or by writing to colin@exilelifestyle.com.
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