[W40-43] Delulu is the solulu

Finally. You can check it out at https://trangdoan.vercel.app/.

If there’s a sugar parent willing to buy me a domain I’ll take it 💰.

I did a crazy thing - I turned down an interview offer. It’s because I know I wouldn’t want to work for the company even if I got an offer, despite it being well-paid and flexible and good colleague yada yada.

I was so scared to send that email. Who am I to be choosy right now? Isn’t the job market super harsh? Don’t I want to stay in the US? But it doesn’t feel right to find a whatever full-time job. It doesn’t feel right to invest my most brain-active hours on something I don’t care about when I already have things that make my heart sings. I realized that for me coding isn’t a fulfilling craft in itself towards the end of developing this website. It’s only fun when I’m developing something I badly want to exist in the world. Then I won’t care about feeling stupid for not figuring out a bug, then I’ll have a good time.

My family is going through a mutual grief. Must be a strange year for us because each also carries their own problem on top of this - I got laid off, grandpa is sick, x y and z. Being Asian as we are, none of us knows how to talk with each other. So the calls just end in 5 minutes of “have you eat?,” or erupt in an ugly fight if we dared to pry any further. But even without the elaborate emotionally mature conversations, I still know that they care.

I wanted to make some art out of this, but I’m scared. Not only does genZ overshare cringe me, but I also wonder if my brain will go bonkers if I think too much about this stuff 😵‍💫. But I need something cathartic. I need a way to tell my parents I care even though I can’t put them into words, at least not in a language they can understand. So maybe a short film. Maybe a dance short film where I can get vague enough about what happened but still get to the emotional truth.

I brought this idea to a creative circle in NY. Here are insanely accomplished videographers (they’ve won Emmys!). It’s still unreal that I get to hang out and share creative ideas with them. My ears were burning red as I went through the film’s synopsis - a group of intimidatingly talented people were staring at my most vulnerable emotions. But they held my ideas so lovingly and creatively. Maybe because we abstracted that grief as an “art project,” we just focused on what’s another way to express this grief. There was no pity, no sense that I was burdening them with my …bad news.

In Forgiving Self, Robert Karen described the biggest challenge of moving on was the ability to mourn fully. "Successful mourning confers emotional resilience upon the child. Future losses can thus be dealt with creatively." Is this why I had the urge to venture into this project? Is this the role of art, to channel the trauma from the medium of interpersonal relationships into a “safer” medium of fiction? Or so my therapist says 🤷‍♀️, I just wanted to sound deep hohoho.

As I got started on it, my friend’s bf, who’s a nerdy cinematographer, happened to be in town. I bothered him for an in-depth camera workshop. In a non-condescending manner, he explained all the camera specs that had confused me for months till midnight. My brain was so happy that I remembered giggling in my dream that night teehee. Again, it’s so good to learn from masters. And it’s so good to ask for help! I can just reach out to experts and ask them how they do it. How nice!

Just brainstorming and inspo gathering for it right now. Send me any of your good recs on the topic.

I only have 2 months left in New York if my job search + visa don’t pan out well. So I decided to be even crazier and go all in. In the next 2 months, I want to try out this experiment of just learning and doing lots of creative crafts, do bare minimum on job search, and see where the universe will take me. I’m going full delulu. Perhaps because so many batshit crazy stuff has happened to me in 2024, I’m wholly embracing “no one knows what tomorrow holds”, so Imma YOLO and just do whatever I want.

I developed myself a 2-month curriculum based on martial arts training.

Drilling is a set of small movement combos, do repeatedly, ideally with feedback from a coach, until the movements become muscle memory.

I listed all the crafts I want to learn, break down the smaller, drillable skills from each of them, find overlaps, and assign 1 skill for each week.

Each week, I would pick out some unit from the topic and practice 1 exercise. I’ll get at least one person to give me feedback on the exercise (ideally an expert but peers also help). Then iterate based on the feedback.

The key of this drilling part is (1) Practice, and (2) Feedback. I hoarded lots of typography and design knowledge from books but my designs look 💩 because I don’t practice. I’m afraid of my designs looking ugly. But for every creative project, the magic lies in iterations. Iterations get better not out of sheer number but because of insights from feedback. When I self-studied for National Chemistry Olympiad or dancing, this was the key inflection point in my skill development - when I slowed down and identified where I got things wrong. So I’ll get someone each week to help me identify even just one small weakness and improve upon them.

Shoutout to Shenghan for giving me many insights on the curriculum.

This is where stuff gets nasty. You’re thrown into an unknown opponent where you need to apply the drills dynamically.

The Sparring project will be of bigger scale, less defined, combining different skills. I aim to make 2 sparring projects happen in 2 months. But honestly would be happy if only 1 is realized. The short film above is one such sparring project.

Friendos, you can expect some sprint-like report from this newsletter. Each week, I’ll outline an exercise I want to learn and report on last week exercise + feedback + iteration.

This is week 1, which means Typography. I finished reading A Type Primer by John Kane. I’ll do a layout exercise for a tabular information from the book.

It’s both scary and thrilling to fully direct myself these days. Thrilling to get to know myself at an exponential rate → I’ve felt more grounded, alive and energized than I’ve ever been (discount childhood i guess). I’ve also gotten so much more action-oriented. If I have an idea, it’s getting much easier to reach out to people, validate my hypothesis on whether it’s possible to do what I want to do, and move on.

But it’s still scary. I’m still a kid who wants some parental authoritative figure to tell me I’m choosing the right path. Some reassurance, you know. But I had this conversation with Sasha Chapin, my favorite internet writer, where he told me the desire to “pick the right path” is ultimately the fear to look stupid. It’s true, in the “worst case scenario” where my current venture fails, I’m still not homeless or lack food security. It’ll just be embarrassing. My parents, as annoying as they are, will house and feed me. Then I can still teach some English, flare my “American education” in some Asian countries and get an easy pass for a while. My worst case scenario is many people’s dream lives. It’s quite liberating to try things and fail when I think this way.

• How to know when to rest cuz you really need rest vs just your brain making excuse to not do the hard thing?

• How to find people to give feedback to you each week?

This is the week #40-43 update of my daily creative challenge, as outlined in the Re-manifesto of this blog. I’m inspired by MỞ - Mơ và Hỏi’s course, Writing On The Net 2 (#wotn2), and all my friends who write and create consistently!