This crisp morning air greets me as I clean out some coffee grounds from yesterday and prepare a new pot of coffee for today.
"Siberia"
There is a corner of the yard in the place I am renting which I call Siberia. When I first moved to that location, there was a pile of broken stuff there—rotting wood stakes, a broken broom (the straw bristles of the broom were almost gone, though the handle still was intact), and a trash bin thing filled with spider webs 1.
It is to Siberia that plants with harmful fungus/insects are sent, where occasionally coffee grounds are dumped, and where an occasional unappetizing potato or onion beyond cooking is cast. In this way, it serves as an informal compost heap. It is also a place where plants which might get thrown out as to not infect other plants are given a fighting chance to rid themselves of their sickness and emerge stronger than before. Siberia is a chance for redemption.
When I pace to-and-from in the yard—perhaps while trying to find some solution to some technical problem—I arrive at Siberia at one end of my route. In the winter, it was rather barren. But as spring arrived and now as we head towards summer, Siberia teems with life.
It is not ordered; there are no plants arranged in nice rows, no vines climbing allocated pole things. It is a garden cultivated in chaos. The plants living there take what they can get and they fight to organize waste into a chance to live, prosper, and reproduce.
The plants of Siberia need no instruction from me; they will be well-behaved carbon off-setters regardless of my input. This is very unlike websites, which I build for my day job. Neglect of websites means decay. Abandonment means growth stops. A website that is not frequently updated makes visitors wonder "is this still a thing?". Plants are still a thing even if we ignore them and stomp on them as they grow between sidewalk cracks.
The Smell of Frugality and Civic Society
It is seven something AM; I realize that the "vibe" around me reminds me of my (K-12) school. In California, most students have to wake up around 7 something. They will experience the "7 am air" as they hop in a car, loiter around the school gates, ride a bicycle to school, etc.
There is no stop to a luxurious coffee shop today (as we are under COVID-19 lockdown). During college and grad school, I would do stuff like that all the time—pay a couple of bucks to loiter somewhere before carrying out my duties.
Now, I get a similar feeling to being back in grade school because I am being frugal and not going out to buy stuff; I can scrounge around the kitchen for whatever if I am hungry or thirsty. Or I can just sit on the floor and type away at my computer, transcending the "material realm".
Today feels very... not corporate. It feels "civic" in a nice way. The world is not screaming at me with advertisements because I've set up my computing/media stations to get rid of that 2. Maybe, I can say it feels more "martial" in the sense that I am not really thinking much about market pressures and stuff. I'm planning and preparing for the week ahead, keeping logs like this, and organizing and maintaining stuff. I'm not thinking about what to consoom.
What is the opposite of "abstracting"?
I will not concern myself with some silly hyper-verbal discussion about whether today feels more "civic" or "martial"; I am here to describe stuff—feelings dump, narrate diary style this-and-that. The text analysis ("Natural Language Processing") programs can conduct whatever classifications they want on what I write here.
The plants of Siberia care not for my abstractions or yours. I pace to-and-fro thinking of solutions to technical problems. When that is tiring, I can interact with other people and enjoy the human realm.