I’ve had a nagging illness the past two weeks, sinusitis that started with the usual stuffed-up back of the nose but turned into an earache that made my jaw throb whenever I chewed anything bigger than a crumb, and a dull headache, with attendant surface tenderness, localised roughly in the same area of my skull. Not nice at all. So forgive me when I say the fortnight’s been quite a blur, of working and waiting and a missed solar eclipse, all around and in between that discomfort.
Missed a couple of gigs, too, only dragging myself out of the flat to see the Cannon Films documentary at JDIFF last weekend (I’ll reblog my take on that shortly). I did however get it together for a couple of film reviews, for Insurgent and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. Two of my better-written reviews in recent memory, I feel. Would’ve had another one but I messed up my release dates and missed that Kajaki was out in mid March. Ah well, I’ll save my thoughts for the home video release in June.
Week 708 will be a week off of sorts: WrestleMania at this end (watching it live for the first time in a few years) and Easter at the other. I’ll have the usual freelance things to do, and a screening here and there, but that’s grand.
Any other news? I don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere with Reporter. I think I was right when I suggested I don’t “lead the kind of lifestyle that would lend itself to such analysis”. I thought having the app ask me a few times a day ‘How do you feel?’ would prompt some kind of rewarding self-reflection, but no. My moods are too manifold to pin down to keywords. And not to get all quantum theory here, but I think it’s an appropriate analogy when it feels like the act of observing my emotional state affects that very state, thereby corrupting the results. But hey, at least I gave it a go.
That’s not to knock on the Quantified Self as a principle, but I think this situation for me only underlines that some things can’t really be quantified, or at least produce data that isn’t really useful or meaningful. Cycling distance? Step tracking? Weight loss? Keeping a food diary? Sleep monitoring? Those I can get behind, because they produce figures that are graphable and trends easily grokkable. Much more valuable in terms of learning about myself than a list of random feels, because I know my own mind. Or I think I do?