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On Feeding Myself

First Published 5 April 2025

Draft 1: 5 April 2025

A potentially concerning percentage of the posts1 I’ve been writing are about food. I want to be feeding myself, and I want that feeding to go quickly and healthily.

I did realize today, though, that I want this post to encompass more than simply feeding my stomach. I want to make sure that all parts of me, body, mind, and soul, are being fed. Still, I’m going to start with feeding the body.

Breakfast and lunch, at least during the work week, are getting better and better. Breakfast of oats with berries is a great breakfast,2 and I’ve generally been eating a decent lunch. Dinner remains a mixed bag, though, which isn’t great.

I think that there are a few interwoven parts to that. For one, I still have some part of me that really thinks that dinner should be a production, or at least something effortful. I don’t really know what that means, and interrogating the idea isn’t really giving me anything either. However, I guess it is good for me to know that I have that gut instinct, so that I can start confronting it. I think that the other main issue with dinner is that I do not have a schedule, which makes scheduling exactly when I will be eating what in my home more difficult.

Still, I’ve done any number of hard things, and this isn’t as hard as that.

Third issue is that I don’t have a microwave, so anything I want for dinner kind of has to be stove or oven meal, which also adds some time to the prep.

Potential solutions:

I guess there’s also the tertiary consideration, which is that I can also just keep more easily consumed food at home. If I do that, then I can just grab like a handful of peanuts when I feel hungry, rather than needing to either just suffer or make something effortful.

Ok with my thoughts laid out like this, I think that I have my answer for now. Night before, I will cook dinner for the following day. If, for whatever reason, I am not able to get the meal done, then I’ll just grab two lunches to work, and eat one for dinner.4

I’ll also get some peanuts the next time I go shopping and then have a snack that I can consume at home. Goal part two of feeding my body is explicitly getting some, if not recipes, then at least food things that I can do, knowing that a past me has found their macro profiles to at least resemble something decent.

(N.B. I wrote everything from here until the start of the list after the second entry, because I realized that I want to do the back of the envelope protein content for what I’m getting from breakfast and lunch).

Assuming that I eat my oats and box lunch like a good child, I should be getting about5 my entire daily need for protein in the first two meals I eat, so I can go entirely based on vibes!

Ok cool, I do love japanese curry, and I have been wanting an excuse to buy potatoes.15 So, the to do list is:

One thing that I know about myself is that I cannot rely on weekends for cooking. I can rely on it for shopping, which is maybe strange, but. I guess there’s also the fact that I will have an incredibly different schedule in a little over a month17, and will be visiting friends18 over the summer, so I guess I know that it won’t be a forever thing. Still, probably good to give myself the bare bones of how I would feed myself going forward.

So:

Ok cool, that’s everything I eat I think? Oats and frozen fruit I of course need to buy as I run low, but they last forever, and so don’t need to be considered in terms of perishables.

So, I’m going to be making Japanese inspired curry on Tuesday.26 Oh wait, I do also want to get through my beans.

Um.

Ok so for now let’s try curry beans and rice, as much as that’s not really a thing. I’m still going to be doing potato, carrot, and onion, since those are all delicious and my heritage yearns for me to eat more potato. This means my shopping list is carrot27, onion28, potato, curry block, fruit29, and crunchy green30.

I’ll also inventory my fridge and freezer and toss the expired and rotten food.31 What food is not expired, I will also attempt to eat quickly, in such a way as to get rid of it.

Great!

Now, about feeding the rest of me.

I want to get back into typing practice I think. Two of the rate limiting factors for me right now are legitimately my typing speed and accuracy. That feeds three things: the part of me that loves quantifying growth, the part of me that is writing a bunch, and the part of me that likes being good at things.32 On weekdays, I think that this will mean that I spend the five minutes immediately after daily reflection doing typing practice. Goal in that space is of course accuracy and correct finger placement.33 Actually, if I start with the practice, then I will be primed to get the finger choices and placements correct, so five minutes before doing the reflection are to be spent on the practice.

What else am I trying to feed?

I absolutely need to do guitar every day and work out every day. A forty minute workout in the morning is a lot, but forty minutes is forty minutes, and I’m no longer finding that I am only productive in the morning. If anything, it kind of feels like I’m having the waking version of the previous me’s experience with alarms.34

Five minutes of stretching at night and five minutes of guitar in morning and evening means that in total I’m scheduling less than an hour of my life right now. I’m debating whether or not I should let myself catch up on content during the morning stretch, but am leaning towards no. I’ll absolutely get more workouts in if I only let myself catch up on content when being stretching or cleaning, especially because I do want to keep up with content.

I want to read more. If I just say that I’ll read each night, will I? One issue is that I very much cannot read or write by candlelight, at least with it as flickery as it is. Apparently trimming the wick can help with that.35 I think that I will! But, I also don’t want my nights to be filled with a number of activities, even if they are nominally restful. I think that reading analog nonfiction will help me to bed, as will writing poetry.

As the end to the previous sentence implies, I also want to write more poetry. Doing so after reading might actually be the best, because it gives me a space to process what I read and get my final thoughts for the day onto the page.

Woo! Look at this, I have plans for how I will feed myself. Now I just have to actually go to the store, get the food, clean the fridge, make the food, and keep to the schedule. Basically nothing!

Draft 0.5: 4 April 2025

I’ve mused more than a few times about how I would like to improve my mental and physical health, especially in context of food. In the past, I’ve focused more on the higher level concerns, like the overall macro and micronutrient profiles that I should aim for. The other posts have generally been focused on individual recipes that I made a single time, mostly so that I would have a point of reference in the future when I forgot what I did. However, the most important part of keeping myself eating healithily is actually having a sustainable way of feeding myself. With that in mind, this post is focused on how I’m getting nutrients now, how I’d like to be, how I think that I should be, and what the differences are.

So, let’s start with what I’m doing right now.

My breakfast for weekdays is a bowl of oatmeal with frozen36 berries, usually blueberries but sometimes mixed berries. These days, my lunch on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday are a block of pork37 and cheese38, along with a romaine heart and one or two apples or pears, depending on what I got at the store that week. Dinner, on the other hand, has no regularity

Daily Reflection: 4 April 2025)

Daily Reflection: 5 April 2025)


  1. interesting that I’m more and more using post instead of blog or musing or anything that others I know use. Worth thinking about, so onto the pile (list of things to write) I have

  2. accusations of it being horse food aside

  3. ok that isn’t true, I do also literally have the small countertop oven that I brought into the office a few years ago.

  4. I should really get through the bag of rice that I brought in at some point

  5. ok so one ounce of oats dry is apparently 120 calories, which is about 5 grams. Another site has it as cups of prepared, which is weird to me, because that’s entirely based on the amount of water I add, and (unfortunately for my diet and fortunately for basically everything else) the water I consume is not appreciably protein filled. Still, I think I probably eat 2-4 ounces of oats a day, so 10 to 20 grams of protein. Probably about 50 grams from the 200 grams of pork I’m now eating a day (I was still hungy after eating the 100 gram bits, so). I’ll assume the cheese that I’m eating right now is fairly representative, and so I’m getting like 25 grams from that. Oh Wild, I don’t actually need protein at dinner! Cool

  6. because wow I should be cycling through them

  7. read: measure cayenne with your heart

  8. as I kind of have to do, especially if I’m going to be using dry. I guess there’s nothing actively making me cook the entire bag at once, but let’s be real. I will not cook a half bag when it is no extra work to cook a full one.

  9. don’t ask me how I know that the stages of a bean dish left in the fridge tend to stall out at the fermentation step, rather than ever molding.

  10. double checking that this isn’t offensive

  11. yet another option over rice

  12. Japanese curry block over rice

  13. I won’t because I don’t really care that much about palm oil, but it is still good to know. Then again, if I do something resembling a block, I can instead keep roux blocks and spice mix ready to go in my freezer, which is also fun! Let’s plan on that when I get an afternoon, since I like being able to completely choose my flavor profile. Does mean I would have to splurge for dry mushrooms, but.

  14. which is true

  15. they spoil at nearly normal vegetable pace, but I treat them like onions (indefinitely good) or apples (also good forever if u do it right). Maybe I just need to treat them better?

  16. read: get rid of the food which is clearly bad and or that I know I will not eat. Food waste is bad, but it’s a smaller sin than self harm, which not feeding myself is at least a passive version of

  17. read, no longer have most of the demands on my time that I have right now

  18. hopefully. I do need to schedule that!

  19. on Wednesdays I often treat myself to a bagel and on Fridays I don’t eat meat, which means that I do kind of need to feed myself differently because of the missing seventy five grams from the two pieces. Then again, it’s ok if one day a week is protein deficient

  20. and, despite my reservations about food restriction, I think that it’s still probably better for me to follow the guidance of abstinence on Fridays

  21. ok I do realize that 200 grams of meat a day is not, by almost any American definition, a high meat diet. It feels high, though, because I’m eating meat daily, and usually as a block of its own. If I put it in curry, I suppose that would make it more spread out. Off topic though, return

  22. there’s the ever available and expensive option of simply adding gelatin

  23. oof that back of the envelope math feels like XKCD’s joke, but it also is probably true in the end. Back of envelopes here, not precision

  24. holdable in my hand, fittable in my mouth, crunchy, generally dense

  25. am I currently literally googling (using it for brand dilution) “things like lettuce”? yes. Yay! I can eat chard still, but it’s a little bitter. Collard greens are also very bitter when raw. And tragically, they like so many of the remaining leafy greens are related to mustard, which I have an allergy (allegedly) to. Ugh.

    Endive!! Not super bitter! Not a mustard!  Escarole is like endive, and also an option.

    Iceberg lettuce is always a popular choice for a reason, though I tend to find that it’s too flavorless (no I will not consider dressing)

  26. I honestly think that Tuesdays could be a good food prep day of the week for me, though it does mean that Mondays are the old day. Also depends on shopping day. If I shop on the weekend, waiting a few days to cook is fine

  27. assuming (likely accurately) that the ones I have aren’t great. They’re also a decent choice for the munching sensation of romaine, but different enough that I don’t think interchangeable

  28. assuming (with who knows what level of accuracy) that they aren’t good

  29. read: apple or pear unless something calls to me

  30. lettuce or endive probably, though chard is an option. Leek? That’s almost certainly wayyy too oniony

  31. please don’t judge my life. If it helps, the rotten food is often like homemade pickles that I was curious the lifespan of (and forgot to eat)

  32. two of those are the same, so how can we break it into something else? I don’t really know, honestly. Uhhhh what was the third thing initially?

  33. how useful is working for a few minutes a day when I spend the rest of the day teaching myself bad habits? Great question.

  34. roughly speaking, for every minute earlier I wanted to leave the house, the alarm had to go two minutes earlier. So, getting up and being ready an hour before normal meant the alarm was two hours. These days that is not super true, but I do find that my productivity crashes when I feel like I’ve done a task and spent a decent amount of time. If I do it right, that break happens at lunch which restores me to work again.

  35. which can’t hurt to try?

  36. read: they are frozen initially, they thaw out as I mix them with the oats

  37. approximately 200 grams

  38. approximately 150 grams of a semi hard. I apparently don’t like Jarlsberg, which makes sense because I have more and more found that I dislike swiss cheeses as I grow older.

  39. oof the agonizing pain of grief hurts so very very much

  40. as evidenced by my sleeping all the way until the overly generous alarm I set.

  41. note to self, you are not allowed to work on derivations until you’re finished with the day’s work and completely caught up.

  42. honestly, that’s got promise for a musing. What is the difference between a fugue and a flow state?

  43. Is to have been written is I think the construction I need for agenda’s construction in Latin, but I may be wrong, since it has been the better part of a decade (oof I’m old) since I took the class and learned that content

  44. to get to anything resembling the goal I have for the length of my thesis, I need to be writing thousands of words a day every single day. While I have absolutely had periods of doing that, I don’t know if they’re the pace I have right now. Also, like I guess the thesis is a higher priority than almost any other research I would be doing, so that should leave me more space for writing, especially once the term ends

  45. at least one more reason

  46. this is not me being data shy or coy, I just don’t entirely have in my working memory right now what the two ideas are.

  47. I think that about half the functions I wrote in the code aren’t actually called anymore.

  48. because I have the goal of getting work done, and I still don’t let myself work at home.

  49. I really feel like that’s a word, but my editor assures me that it is not. Weird

  50. oof, I wrote the rest of my home at first. I promise that I do not live in my office nor mentally think of the office as my home

  51. see: me constantly kvetching about the amount of writing that I am to do

  52. things I think or hope will be in my thesis, popscience, actual philosophy, and books I thought might be popsci but look to be much lower reading level than I thought

  53. I keep wanting to animize or anthropomorphize my guitar. Is it better to say she? he? they? xi? Great question. I think it is still good for now, because i still know it is not