Using tDCS to Focus

The strategy I chose to get me writing is to use tDCS devices to calm and focus my mind. Research has shown that tDCS can focus attention to the task at hand and a good remedy to still the wandering mind. Exercise also has the affect or improving the mind's focus. This morning I ran a 5 k race at the local zoo, walking and jogging in the cold morning, through beautiful nature with the bright sky amidst trees of Cleveland Park. There was a good crowd of people who joined and with people from office. An old friend confided to me after the race that he is requesting to transfer to another project due to stress in the office.

The run was a welcome relief and I practiced in the past week by going to gym to run for 30 minutes, or walked around the office campus and, yesterday swam for 30 minutes after picking up my race kit. I listened to Gregorian chants while running, which was the same series of chants I listen to in bed when I wake up early in the morning. I need to listen to these chants to calm my mind and get me back to sleep. It was a interesting experience to listen to the chants while running amidst nature in cold weather. I ran with my usual partner and office worker from India.

I need these strategies to keep me focused or to reduce stress, whether tDCS devices or Gregorian chants or morning meditation to keep my mind straight. Otherwise I am reduced to doom scrolling the internet in my phone. I remarked to my old friend, a brilliant young Indian who moved here from Bangalore in the recent years, that the good days are gone. I will miss him especially the moment when I needed his help on software issues. He is fed up with the politics and being thew constant victim of 'escalation' from the new team that took over the support process.

He remarked that there is a lot of stress and turmoil in the office and I agree with him. I have moved to a new department which is much organized and less stressful as compared to my previous role as squad leader and project manager, but new role has the same stress though at a higher level. I still feel sadness and a rising anger whenever I remember those times prior to my move where my superiors where actually idiots who thought they were doing the right thing. If not for my strategies of coping, which included therapy, I would have become bitter and distraught.

Exercise and mediation is not enough to keep me straight so I have included a daily writing habit bolstered by tDCS to keep me focused as I attempt to finally write a book. This writing habit will be my savior and give meaning to my life as I enter my late years. Hopefully the effort will result in a book where I can share my stories and give a voice to a life long lost when I was young. It will be a story about my grandmother, about the war years, and my early youth when Martial Law was proclaimed, when a senator was killed and gave birth to a people's revolution that brought down an aging tyrant.    

   

Townhall Communication Stress

This morning, I attended the company's bi-annual town hall with networking opportunities to meet with my colleagues and exchange pleasantries. I usually get paranoid in these events, seeing people's faces long after the event, with imagined grievances or shortcomings in my part, of missed opportunities to speak and express oneself. Like a politician, I gravitate towards meeting people and having conversations, but in these events, one must control one's natural urges and keep to a short group.

The main speaker provided an excellent analysis of the department's situation and proposed actions, well-prepared and delivered well. The next speaker did not have the same breadth of topic and gravitas, but held her own with an honest appeal to action. Her intent was to tell all those gathered what a good job they had done under her leadership, of course. It was a welcome event, though my usual overthinking got the better of me as I went through my usual thoughts of contempt for those gathered, with imagined slights of not noticing me.

In the evening, while having dinner, I watched the movie 'Touched by Lightning' about President James Garfield and his assassin, who was well played by the actor. His raving mind and psychotic behavior reminded me of myself, especially after meeting many people in public events, as I want to withdraw and be myself to restore my equilibrium. I had lunch after the event and went back to the office to work in the afternoon, where I responded to emails followed worked via group chat.

I am still absorbing yesterday one and one meeting with my boss, where he challenged me to lead and be a dynamic leader instead of being passive, which is my nature. These one-on-one meetings are challenging as my boss gets right to the heart of the matter, of the areas where I need improvement, and says the right words to shame me into action. These are personal and challenging sessions, which I like because I respect my boss, who thinks at a higher level than most people.

I got to both absorb the internal challenge and, in my raw state, attended the public meeting where my mind succumbed to paranoid overthinking, which I managed well by keeping my wits despite the background noise of my monkey mind. Even my friends were not spared from my jealousy and contempt as I had to focus the bringing my thinking out from the gutter. I went to the gym and used the treadmill for 35 minutes, used the steam room, and had a refreshing shower.

The session at the gym was enough to restore me from the stress of today's events and the work back at the office, where even the emails gave me anxiety. I strive to be calm and have an even temperament, but this state is not really possible in the public sphere. I have to isolate myself and exercise to keep me sane. I received the overhead projector that displayed astronomical images like the moon and the night sky, and lay down and looked at the images in the ceiling while listening to the sublime music of Avro Part; an experience close to meditation and relaxation.

Pickleball Delight

For the past weekends, we have been playing pickleball with our friends in a nearby park. Usually in after afternoon on Saturdays or early Sunday mornings. These games usually end with lunch or dinner at our friends' house, where we end up sharing stories and playing Phase 10 or some other card or board games. Pickleball is a very easy game to take up and does not require significant physical exertion, so the games usually end after several changes of partners, with singles, doubles matches occurring multiple times. It is a very pleasant way to spend one's weekend with friends all the way into the evenings.

These weekend get-togethers are a welcome respite for me with the strains at work, with multiple projects that I work on. Currently, my workload is a business continuity project, an export paperwork project, an external app obso project (which is soon ending), and the recent application asset removal project at 4 different sites in the US, Central, and South America. These projects require me to write emails, organize meetings, and have several group chats in the course of planning, organizing the maging these projects to a successful conclusion. 

The work has obligated me to be more efficient and use AI tools like Microsoft Co-Pilot and tools like Loop to keep on top of things and keep me organized. Artificial Intelligence allows us to record meetings and summarize them with notes and next steps, which keeps everyone on track, as well as have tracking sheets (in Loop and Planner) to keep the team moving forward and collaborating effectively. The seamless integration into our daily workplace is impressive, like sliding into the future with these applications embedded in our software.

People don't realize how we have suddenly entered into a new world, like the Trump takeover, that is heralding a change in the way the world works.  I have had a career in the midst of globalization and diversity, riding a wave that allowed me to work in different countries and thrive, and being part of the community where I relocated, whether in Singapore or the United States. This is the old world now, it seems, with hostility to open trade and immigration and a diversified and progressive world.

The government shutdown, the divisiveness in politics and society, and continuing turmoil in Europe with the Ukraine and Russian war, ICE deportations, and National Guard units in cities paint a picture of disorder. Nevertheless, I continue to overthink and do too much, such as buying a Segway scooter, learning pickleball and racketball, running 5k races, borrowing many books, and watching movies when the proper approach is to pull back, meditate, and restore a sense of calm and balance.

But that does not seem to be the way in these times of technological breakthroughs, political upheavals, and change. One must keep moving and understand the new zeitgeist or get pummelled and buried into insignificance. In our storytelling last night with our friends, we were reminiscing about the old times, of moments with old friends in other countries on journeys in the past, of our children growing up, and our generation receding into old age and insignificance. Listening to the NYT interview of Anthony Hopkins talk about his life and book feels like a summing up and reckoning is coming with our life's meaning.

Churning Mind

Last week was another period of incessant thinking. I cancelled the business continuity test as the stakeholder requested to postpone due to another application going live that week. There was just too much downtime during the week. Stopping work at the warehouse for a few hours may impact sales especially with the promotion that is occurring every month. The fact that the economy is showing signed of being affected by the uncertainty in government.  

Such is the underlying situation with the seemingly confusion and turmoil happening at the highest level is causing businesses and ordinary people like me to have anxiety. There is too much happening from the tariff situation, Ukraine war, trade war, labor decline that some pundits are forecasting some dire times ahead. There is no immediate impact in terms of high prices as inflation is being manged by business by absorbing high tariff cost. 

The consequence is the reduction in staff or the pause in investment until more clarity is provided by the government.Contributing to the turmoil are the court cases saying these activities are illegal; from tariff, deportations and firing of government officials. Such as mess that everyone seem to be taking all these events in stride though their mental health may be suffering in the background. This is the situation I find myself reading these news while having challenges at the office.

I know a vacation is needed or at least time off when I feel agitated, where I get anxious meeting my colleagues in the office where I get paranoid unnecessarily seeing a different meaning behind every comments. My boss in our regular one on one meeting was also critical of the outcome of my project where I had to postpone the implementation despite frequent steering committee meeting. The steering committee is meant to provide guidance and approval so these actions that I made are sanctioned by the committee.

On another project that started this year, the other challenge is the priorities and capacity for the work squads who will work on this project. The squad are overloaded and at full capacity that they frankly don't have time to work on my project. I had reached out to the squad leads and product owners and had several meetings to no avail. It's no one's fault that there is a lot of work and my project unfortunately has the lower priority compared with the other project being worked on.

So I had to take the punches and accept the inevitable outcome which is to postpone or re-schedule my project activities until the team have time or at the right moment when stakeholder are okay with the impact to operations. It's been a challenging year for me that I get 'impostor syndrome' ; that I am not good enough or that I am over the hill and should retire. I sometimes regret not accepting the early-retirement package but I am also anxious of running out of money.

I helped my son moved in the townhouse that I had been renting hoping to put more stability in his life with lower rents and a larger place for him to enjoy. I should have asked him to move earlier and I though it was good to have an experience of making it on his own. I have 4 to 5 year lefts of working in the company and I am planning on my retirement or rather my life after retirement. A time where I start something new and have a new vision of myself that is refreshing and vital and meaningful instead of just being a tired old man.    

     

   

Writing Prompts

I woke up from sleep, the room still dark, and had a thought about writing prompts. Recently, I enrolled in a writing course advertised on Facebook that also had a course of writing prompts. This may be the missing piece that will help me get started as a novelist. The course I am taking right now is a series of exercises where I copy passages from famous novels curated by the teacher. Following the experience of writers like Hunter Thompson,  started his career as a writer by copying Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. This anecdote is frequently shared on the web.

I have done about seven lessons so far out of a total of twelve lessons email to me. This is an effective way to study the work of these authors, as well as get into a 'writing' habit by typing the work of the greats. The 'teacher' also places his comments on sections of these works to highlight the author's technique. While doing these lessons on a regular basis, you get the understand not only the work you are copying but also get the feel of typing a novel daily. So this is how a writer works by getting in front of the computer or typewriter and banging out a novel.

I have also been reading Peter Elbow's book 'Writing Without Teachers', and I thought this was a method to also use to start a daily writing habit. To make the effort more fruitful, writing prompts would be useful to get the juices going instead of waiting for the mind to have a rhythm of consistent ideas relevant to the plot at hand. I do have a rough draft of a plot of a novel that I am working on that I started to us a tool called Sudowrite, which is an AI-based tool that tries to help would-be authors. At best, the tool is a writing assistant rather than a tool to do the writing for you.

So these have been my attempts to start my writing career with the use of AI tools, but one does not become a writer by having a machine do the work for you. Instead, AI tools can provide writing prompts, perhaps critique the draft and offer suggestions, but not do the actual writing, which AI tools like Sudowrite attempt to do. This seems to be the dilemma of writers at the cusp of the unrelenting wave of artificial intelligence. Other experiments would be to use Gemini, ChatGPT, and tools like Notebok NLM to augment the writing craft of today's writers.;

During my early morning usings in the dark, several ideas for a novel also came up aside from my current idea of hiking with a French colleague:

• driving cross-country with my son from the South to the West Coast to begin his Army tour
• migration for work from Asia to the United States
• Further stories of my French colleagues with their families and animals

During these reveries, I thought about buying a motorcycle so I could roam the local countryside to rest from my writing labors. I used to have a Honda Ruckus and regretted having sold it when the scooter would not start. So my daydreaming started with thoughts about how to better organize my garage so that the new motorcycle would fit in; perhaps by raising the rack to place my 3 bicycles above the ground to make way for the Royal Enfield motorcycle that I planned to buy. As I get into my writing rhythm, churning out novels, motorbiking on the weekends, working on my garden, and having my sons and friends critique my drafts, using writing prompts and live the life of a productive novelist.

Soon I heard my wife's alarm sound, and I had to get up and prepare to work from home. I went to the bathroom to meditate, and I sat on the toilet, listening to binaural beats and the vibrating headpiece around my forehead, and when I finished, I did Tai-Chi to prepare for my day as I watched the thoughts swirl in my head of all the writing progress I would achieve with writing prompts. Now is the time when the actual hard work begins. As a start, I need to organize my work area on my computer and continue my experiments with AI, and create a model to help me with prompts

Keeping One's Bearings

Over the past few weeks, I have been trying to get my bearings in the work I am doing. Working on several projects is not easy, especially when one needs to dive deep and lead several initiatives in each individual project. Just keeping track of the tasks in each project, with several to-do lists, is a challenge. Using the latest tools like MS Planner is a lifesaver.  The mind has to multitask with the workload that one is subjected to. The tools that help one in this daily struggle will ensure mental peace.

One project is regional catastrophe planning, where several simulations are planned to transfer applications to a fail-safe environment. This entails coordinating meetings and workshops with multiple groups, including the customer support team, the application support team, and the external backup company, which has members worldwide. Another project is the ongoing obsolescence project, where app locations are moved to a more modern and secure environment.

This project also entails working with the customer support organization, application support, and the external infrastructure organization. This involves scheduling meetings, writing emails, planning workshops, and so on. A third project is a Logistics one where some programs need to be revised so that one's shipments to other countries are not hampered by incorrect documentation. This endeavor involved working closely with business leaders, stakeholders, and application developers.

Other smaller projects exist and are mixed into this stew of multitasking and further confusion and complexity. Decommission servers related to a previous project, coordinate backup testing for two applications in Central America and North America. Further adding stress is the ongoing request for funding for these projects due to the recent slowdown in markets that require the reduction of working budgets. Under this complex working environment, one has to stay afloat, attend department meetings, and log one's time entry before the end of the month. One has to be aware of the individual quirks of personality of the people one works with.

This is not the dreary and boring workspace of a large bureaucracy but the hot house of a major global company where initiatives come and go, crisis happens, and politics need to be played. Personal interactions are important, as one needs to be polite and follow the prevailing rules, go to the office at least for the majority of the work week, while trying to stay focused while working remotely and doom-scrolling on one's phone. Under this personal backdrop is the cultural and political chaos of the presidential office, the infighting and several divisions, which only causes more stress and confusion. It seems like a Russian plot to sow disorder in Western societies has now come to pass.  Hence, the need to get one's bearings, to restore a sense of equilibrium and balance, mainly to keep sane and continue functioning as a competent cog in the global machine of commerce.

Windy City

We spent the first week of July in Chicago, arriving on the 1st and leaving on the 5th with a day trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The weather was beautiful and the city was glorious. We spent the first morning on an architectural boat tour along the river, the guide an expert on the history and styles of the buildings. It was a very enjoyable trip under a brilliant blue sky, and as hot as we expected. After the boat trip, we explored Grant Park, listening to a free classical concert at Millenium Park. Dinner was a Poke bowl of tuna, salmon, rice, avocado, seaweed, and lettuce. 

The next days were spent visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, which had a great collection of Impressionist paintings and a short history of European history focused on the Catholic reign of Ferdinand and Isabel and the combination of the Habsburg empire with the marriage of their daughter to a Habsburg scion. It was a very large and substantive collection, and it was tiresome to look at the exhibits and, afterward, continue to explore the city and parks. The museum had great views of the Frank Gehry concert hall at Millennium Park, where we enjoyed free concerts.

The Chicago skyline and the architecture of the building were exceptional, especially the intriguing Cloud Gate sculpture commonly known as 'the Bean' and the Frank Gehry bridge crossing from Millennium Park to the Maggie Daley Park. The Cultural Center and the Design Museum were the common man's venue to display 'folk art', and I particularly enjoyed the Blondell Cummins dance exhibit 'Dance as Moving Pictures'. The center was the former City Library with impressive high-ceiling rooms, majestic staircases, and magnificent domed ceilings.

• Day 1: River boat tour on Chicago architecture
• Day 2: Art Institute of Chicago, Maggie Daley Park, watch fireworks along the shore
• Day 3: Walking tour of Art Deco buildings,  Cultural Center of Chicago, Design Museum
• Day 4: Visit Milwaukee via Amtrak train, Pabst Beer Mansion, Milwaukee park near shore, downtown, return to Chicago, 4th of July Concert at Millennium Park   

Armtrak train ride of Milwaukee oferred glimpses of the countyr side of Illinous and Minesota and a good brak and contrast from the grand urban city scape of Chicago. The Pabst mansion had incredible intricate interiors with impressive delicate wood work, great attention to detail and offered a glimpse of welath at the turn of the century. It was a large mansion but drawfed by the huge palaces that came at the turn of the 20th cenutry. We saw an NCAA fencing chanpionship as we explored the city , walking near the shore with a view of the Art Museum designed by Earo Saarnisen.

The 4th of July concett was a blast with an entertaining Irish conductor. I had brought beer and I enjoyed the music, beauty and grandueer of the concert hall and the surrounding sky scrapers. Dinner was our usual Poke bowl and Ramen soup. I did not have time to enjoy the penthouse pool in the evening as we had to pack for the early morning trip to the airport. Chicago offered a welcome break and a chance to discover something new, to see a different part of America and admire the breath of the American experience.