Week 2 of being creative
Featuring dance, writing, and being creatively constipated 💩
So I was very creatively constipated last week. After Week 1’s high productivity and spring of ideas, I entered Week 2 with self-consciousness about everything I was doing, which led to projects dragging on. Here’re the projects I attempted and haven’t finished yet.
Writing on Soft- and Hard- freedom. You can view the current working ideas here, and I would appreciate your perspective. It’s tough because I’m barely figuring out what freedom means. It’s a life-long project, and I’m attempting to figure out my life at 22 so I can focus on execution for the rest of it 🙃. But I’ve made a little progress.
Drafted on different types of freedom that each city can offer. NYC is great for reinventing yourself however you want. Taiwan is excellent for doing cool stuff without the pressure to be cool the way Americans define it. In Buenos Aires, you can be very sensual without sexual.
Finished the book “Psychology of Money” and took tons of notes. It offers many interesting frameworks to think about money and the hard freedom people often seek.
I kept meditating (mostly) daily. Not a creative process, but it feeds into my thinking about this topic every day.
First choreography
A silly project where I would look at a few daily objects and try to make a dance move inspired by them. I wanted to train my imagination and musicality.
Mood board/ Inspo:
This little reel where the dancers explore symbols in Seoul (mostly Hangul signs). I like the unexpectedness of each cut.
The hydro pressure girl: omg she can’t be more funny.
Musicality is forking hard, especially when I dug myself a hole by choosing this great electric song with an irregular tempo. I regretted it multiple times and thought I would switch to a more regular 2/4 tempo with lyrics to use my strength in storytelling dance. But I’ve committed to never give up on a project halfway through, so hopefully, I’ll finish them next week. Here’re the objects I chose
A bottle of perfume 
Lipstick 
glasses and a whale slushies, which will set the theme of the dance as “underwater.”
Oscillating between fun and terrifying trying to choreograph this piece. I’m opting for completion and iteration as my strategy.
Projects I finished/don’t give me constipation.
Wrote The one question that helps me make good decisions these days
Writing this was painful too. Last week I had a pungent flavor of self-pity and scrutiny, which translated to this writing, even when it was “supposed” to be a loving piece. I tried to be as honest as I could, but I don’t think I achieved complete honesty with it yet. Still good that I pushed it out, though.
Jimmy O. Yang funny website.
Ok, I wanted to learn React. My friend, Esther, also wanted to learn React. I agreed with her that I should pick a fun project to learn, so with the help of Nikita, who’s obsessing over JOY, I came up with the idea of making a JOY funny website. Esther and I spent 3 hours working on it today. Kudos, Esther, for being so good with debugging.
The idea is if you click on his head, he says, “Guess how much.” On his arm? He says, “Ayya,” and it moves. After we get the front end ready, we’d make a chatbot trained in JOY style so you can chat with him. This is mainly for me to learn LLM, thanks to Esther’s graciousness to teach me hihi.
What we’ve got so far: some Components, placeholders. Click on his head, and he says, “Guess how much.”
Takeaways this week
Collaboration is fun. I’m going to use this to overcome the self-consciousness phase.
I had a chance to talk to people I admire professionally this week. Big creative company A and big tech company B with great side projects with big artist C. All of them said one thing in common. “I don’t know shit about my job. I just google the time.” And they genuinely feel like they just wing it each day and learn on the job. It’s soothing, and I wonder if this level of humility got them this far in their skills.
This is the week #2 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 for the sake of it!