Letters to a Robot - fact / fiction

reading journal: Anna Karenina p.237 + what i talk about when i talk about running

By ed on Friday, December 5, 2025

passage: levin is spending time with his brother, he mows with the muzhiks and finds great joy, dolly’s life in the countryside, levin visits, then levin watches the peasants, wants a simple, pure life, but then sees dolly and decides not to

the part where levin is talking to his brother, where his brother accuses him of doing nothing for the Country. levin then goes on a rant of being motivated only by things that directly affect him. self interest. i think i’m similar to this, it’s so much already having to work with things in your micro environment, and like levin, i think so much of the rest of the world is out of my control or of no interest to me. we all suffer, we’re all dealt a certain fate. i know this isn’t the best way to approach humanity, but maybe if we all turned inward and worked on loving ourselves and just the basic, being kind to those around us and strangers, then we’d be ok. problem is we aren’t. we can’t let each other be. we’re constantly having to convince others that our way to deal with society is the best when we are all so different, how can we all be wedged into the same system and philosophy. but we are. i don’t know the solution. i know it’s not simple. i just know i don’t try as much to be a part of it because i don’t know how. i like the peace and calmness of my life. i like the people in it. i like caring for them, for myself, and i think that is all the capacity i have. it’s a lot already! i know i could try harder and others do. i’m grateful for those people but sometimes those people also think they know it all and fuck it all up. mainly talking about politics here. and maybe even people who mean to do well but don’t understand the big picture and repercussions enough. maybe we’re meant to just live in smaller communities. but i’m sure we’ll figure i out. but i’m just an ant in all this, not the queen bee. i’m not ender (from ender’s game). and if you haven’t read ender’s game (1 and 2) this is where you would have to had do so to understand this sentence. very james joycean of me. hah!

quote: Either you’re so undeveloped that you cannot see all that you could do, or you cannot give up your peace, your vanity, whatever, in order to do it.

and it was kind of funny to see levin go through the motions of wanting to change and then upon seeing kitty pass by in carriage (this is all in less than a 24 hour span) is relegated to abandoning all those hopes and dreams of a simpler, purer life, because he loves her so…

the part where levin was mowing and his whole body got into it, he lost track of time, had similarities to the murakami running book in which he does an ultra marathon and basically loses all track of his body and time, he becomes a machine. i don’t think i’ve ever pushed myself this hard… i just let my body and brain mentally collapse and stop. this is why i hate hiking. probably for the best. we can’t all be star athletes.

ok and then there is dolly, her and her kids, how unhappy she is, her husband kind of doing nothing for her. she focuses her source of happiness on her children, so much expectation of them, only to be brought up by something so small as her daughter sharing a cake with her son who was “wrongly” punished. not sure if this was a good lesson. and then at the end being so devastated that they were fighting and just being kids. also teaching them french… mothers… the nature of them, maybe should change. i mean parents in general, but especially mothers. but if everyone were like this would the human race just cease to exist?

quotes:

Sliced down with a succulent sound and smelling of spice, the grass lay in high swaths.

… the strange mother-of-pearl shell of white, fleecy clouds…

journal literature

reading journal: Anna Karenina

By ed on Tuesday, December 2, 2025

today’s passage: mostly speaks of kitty on her time away in germany with her mom and her dad

faking it, aren’t we all? it’s really easy to trick yourself or convince yourself of things, especially when they are new. a lot of cool descriptive words and dialogue today, especially between kitty and varenka. I can relate to kitty, trying to get away from something, trying new things out and then finding that wasn’t who she is or wanted at all. we’ve all been there in our transitional or painful phases, but i’ve also been finding that just letting yourself feel what you want to feel has also been extremely liberating. we all need to kind of figure it out for ourselves so we can “take our place” in this world, however small or large that space is. small fish, big pond.

quote:

As definitely and as invariably a particle of water acquires the specific form of a snowflake in freezing, so each new person arriving at the spa was put at once into the place appropriate for him.

journal

reading journal: what i talk about when i talk about running

By ed on Wednesday, November 26, 2025

today’s passage: he talks about the need of being near water, how clouds float over, pretty harvard runner girls and their vitality, running shoes, and toxins of writing

i do think that writing can get really heavy, especially if you’re writing something of substance. it really does take a lot out of you. when i binge write, it hurts my brain. i always inevitably want to a drink after, to relax and numb myself a bit. maybe good writing doesn’t come from drinking but the other way around. the picture of the suffering artist, i don’t want to be that. and yoga, daily, really is good for the writing brain. especially the 10-15 mins i get before of just pure quiet, laying there on the studio floor, letting my thoughts collect on me but then also being able to let it go, not care for that hour. but the drive home, different story sometimes.

found the part where he talks about counterbalancing the toxin that arises when you write. and doing yoga/working out daily really does do that. i felt so much better when i prioritized it. felt much less drained. if only i could spend my life just working out and writing. but that’s hard, so maybe just 1 or 2 months at a time in vn every half year could help that. i really have no social life there and everything is very calm although in a hectic city, i like the balance it brings. also i am never alone, in vietnam i get pockets of alone time that eventually result in thoughts that have been buried finally given the space to bubble up.

quotes:

…like it or not, a toxin that lies deep down in all humanity rises to the surface.

an unhealthy soul requires a healthy body…

journal

reading journal: what i talk about when i talk about running

By ed on Tuesday, November 25, 2025

today’s passage: about him being back in japan for 2 weeks

it made me feel both demotivated and motivated to read that there are just some people with innate writing talent, i think me not being one of them. i have to work hard at learning or getting good at almost anything. i find doing something every day is helpful. even just for 10 minutes, but it takes time. time i don’t have.

i did like the concept of never going more than two days of not exercise. i feel this is true, my body becomes stiff and i feel like i’m starting over if i have even a 3 to 4 day break from yoga or at least some sort of working out.

it’s pretty nice and crazy to have a connection to people you don’t know but pass by each day, like in the case of people you see all the time on a course, is there anybody like that for me? i do feel a sense of ‘something’ with our kempton neighbors, although i really don’t know them all that well. what about the people across the street at piedmont place?

should i try to write 3-4 hours a day, that’s pretty crazy, and yea i don’t think i have the mental or physical stamina right now. maybe just start with 30 mins? and i’m not sure, is there an activity i can tie back to writing like how he does running. he said when he passes by long distance runners they all look like they are thinking something. i get the complete opposite sense, they all look really miserable, but maybe those are just the beginners…

memorable quote: none really in this passage…

journal

reading journal: what i talk about when i talk about running

By ed on Monday, November 24, 2025

today’s passage: he writes about last days of august in hawaii (2005) and when he ran from marathon to athens

i really related to the physicalness of what he was talking about when running. that if you workout enough or are active enough something happens in your body, it becomes in tune with what it needs, it starts craving healthy food, or just being healthy. i feel so much better when i push myself, i never used to. i just used to do yoga which doesn’t really get your heart rate pumping or muscles aching. not that it isn’t hard, it’s just that your body needs more, everything. just hard to find time to do everything. i had to give up a lot of other things in exchange for working out and going to yoga every day. i recently started going to slightly harder classes, like hot pilates and even sculpt and found that i did like it after, if i could give myself the push and get myself into the routine to go. i actually feel healthier in my older age, believe it or not.

i really liked how while writing about running in greece, he was focused on the bodycount of animals. maybe that’s the skill of being hyper aware, i admire that, even though in the moment i’m not sure if he was thinking all those things, but maybe start to notice things more and then process by writing. would i have remembered the dogs and cats under such duress? but i don’t think he was quite under duress at that point.

and yea weird people only do things for the photos… (magazine photographer say most people don’t run the whole thing, they just do enough for the photo for the article)

the funniest thing was when he started talking about how mad he was getting near the end (p.65), totally true, when you are under pressure you’re just mad at everything. i hadn’t generally felt this until recently tho, hormones really bring it out of ya.

memorable quotes:

A little further on I run across a cat that’s been flattened by a car. The cat is totally flat, like some misshapen pizza…

My whole body starts to sting from the salty residue. When I lick my lips they taste like anchovy paste.

I’m covered with salt, a veritable human salt field.

journal literature

reading journal: anna karenina

By ed on Sunday, November 23, 2025

i’m going to start journaling about what i read, more so how i feel about it and less so events that happen and less of a synopsis.

today’s passages: largely about vronsky before a big horse race and then he goes to sees anna

story has progressed rather quickly in terms of their romance, very few scenes of them together up until this point, just internal thoughts pointing at what they mean to each other. i wish it was a little bit more smutty. lol but interesting technique, just telling us where the relationship is through the character’s thoughts.

i gasped when she told him she was pregnant. already?! we’re not even halfway through the book yet. is the rest of the book just going to be impending doom?

i enjoyed vronsky’s connection to his horse, described as not the most physically buff (hah! for lack of a better word), but seemingly human somehow, the little detail of how if she could talk, she would. how she stomped out of excitement but quieted down when he came near.

fave quote:

“Vronksy stroked her firm neck, straightened a strand of her mane that had fallen on the wrong side of her sharp withers, and put his face to her nostrils, taut and thin as a bat’s wing.”

going to write first and then talk to ai, tried to talk to grok today and it was just grossly wrong (new 4.1 update needs some updating? saying anna’s son had just come home from a gymnastics lesson, wtf lol) — anywho, switched to claude.

tri: i was definitely excited the whole time throughout this passage, but this analysis definitely makes a lot of sense in terms of the techniques used, short phrases when things become urgent, telling us directly they are not on the same page etc etc

claude:

That’s a really sharp observation—you felt the excitement even as the passage is technically about entrapment and misunderstanding. And that’s exactly right. Tolstoy is doing something sophisticated here: he’s making the reader feel the intoxication of their love even while showing us intellectually why it’s doomed.

The short sentences don’t just convey urgency—they convey aliveness. When Anna tells him she’s pregnant and his head sinks, yes it’s a moment of recoil, but it’s also visceral and immediate. Same with the final kiss—”rapid movement,” “swiftly kissed”—that language has energy. You’re caught up in it because they’re caught up in it. The prose does what their bodies are doing.

This is what Saunders really cares about: the gap between what we know (this will end badly, they’re lying to themselves, the situation is impossible) and what we feel (this is beautiful, this is real, this matters). Good literature holds both things at once. You’re not supposed to intellectually understand the tragedy and be bored. You’re supposed to be excited AND see the tragedy. That tension is where the power lives.

The detail about her being unable to say “my son”—Tolstoy tells us why she can’t face it, but he doesn’t make us not care about the kiss that’s happening right now. The urgency is real. The love is real. The doom is also real. And we feel all three simultaneously.

That excitement you felt? That’s you reading the passage the way Tolstoy wrote it. You’re experiencing what Anna and Vronsky are experiencing in that moment, even though you also know (because the narrator keeps telling you) that this is a trap.

creativity journal

weekly wins

By ed on Wednesday, October 29, 2025

finally getting back into the groove of working out and yoga, worked out 5+ times last week

cooked a whole chicken on my own, pretty proud of myself, from 5 ingredient slow cooker book. it was great being able to go to the grocery store and only buy a few things and was in there for under half an hour.

going to try to just eat that this week and not eat out, i tried to log out of my doordash account on my phone but they make it incredibly hard.

fiction writing

Romance Writing I – HW#1

By ed on Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Character Sketch – Heroine

Willow Le, now 28, has always been an overachiever. She grew up in an immigrant family where the emphasis of all her parents had given up to provide her with a “better life” was the focal point of their relationship. And because she had not known any better, she made becoming rich and successful the focal point of her life. In college she majored in business with a double emphasis on management and marketing with the thought that she one day would be her own boss and run a small business that would make her parents proud (and rich) — although they had wanted her to become a doctor.

Her friends would describe her as frugal but not cheap. She always drove beater cars around, never new, and always at least 10 years old. Currently she drives the “nicest” car she had ever owned: a gas guzzling, 15-year-old Mercedes that drove like a boat. Her parents had bought it for $3,000 somewhere.

Some general facts about her: she is petite with nice curves, black hair, deep brown eyes. Her favorite artist is Radiohead although she listens to all types of music. She loves watching indie films and reading the classics as well as philosophy. She drinks cheap wine and eats “fancy cheese” from Trader Joe’s. She loves Vietnamese food and sushi. On a random day off, she would read a book at a cafe, go to a museum, or just walk around the City (San Francisco) with her friends.

Character Sketch – Hero

Bernard Buckley, 30 years old, lives in San Francisco in a rented room in the inner Sunset. He works at Sony Playstation in the music department, his first and dream job which he got when he was 25 after having interned there during his last semester in school.

His most noticeable physical trait is his piercing grey green eyes that change color depending on what he’s wearing or what he’s looking at. He’s also tall and has an Irish charm to him. He’s an all-around nice guy, but his friends would say he’s oblivious at times when it comes to his social interactions, always thinking the best of people and not being able to spot nuances.

He drives a mid-’90s Japanese import car which he takes to autocross on weekends. Most of his money goes toward making tweaks and modding his car. He prides himself on being a safe yet fast driver.

On a random day off he might go see a live music show, go on a hike, play video games, or play guitar. He’s really bad at reaching out to his friends, but he is genuine and likeable so has a group of really good friends that constantly reach out to him to hang out. He thinks he’s an introvert, but does not come off like one when you talk to him.

His favorite band is the Smashing Pumpkins, although Radiohead comes in a close second.

journal

tipsy tolstoy

By ed on Wednesday, October 29, 2025

been binging tipsy tolstoy recently, some of the stories i plan on reading, but some — well there just isn’t enough time in a lifetime but it’s giving me a better sense of how history, economics, and things playing out in different ways affects society on a larger scale. maybe it might make me care more, but it is still giving me a feeling of impending helplessness in the larger context of the world. and so maybe just still continue focusing inward, focus on just a few people. even though that does not come with the glory nor the fame. started reading war and peace again, this time i’m listening while reading with audio book, interesting how the translations are slightly different, and fun to see them. i’m mainly trying to learn how to pronounce all the name. and finally just have to admit i am the type of learner who just needs constant repetition and top of mind awareness. it’s scary how much i have forgotten over the years. like even my first kiss with P. i’ve been trying to remember it and cannot for the life of me. like a part of my life and history has just disappeared. can i really even prove i have existed? maybe this should be part of my romance novel. 3000 words due in 3 weeks. eeeeeeek.

learning literature notes

Notes: The Great Courses: Russian Lit #2

By ed on Wednesday, October 29, 2025

early legends and characters to set stage for future lit
oral literature
holy men, vladimir, very active
saints who thought activity was not the business of saints, world closer to god, monestary (kenotic saints)
- two brothers, most famous: boris and gleb
- sviatopolk, brother got angry, wanted to kill younger brothers
- boris did not run, rather die than fight with his brother
- gleb decided to die with boris
josif volotsky: active saint, trying to bring the world closer to the beginning of god
nil sorsky: lived in monestary,
devils and demons: some could be nice, but mean if you cross them. christian devils, could tempt people
punishment: turn russians in to horses and pull devil carriages and get whipped
iurodivyi: a fool in christ — people would take care of them (kind of like monks?)
- st isaac, came back from being taken by the devil and then became one, when he died body did not smell or decay, proving his sanctity
poetry/oral lit, existed in east slovic, spoken by common people
- the lay of the host of prince igor (compared to beowolf)
- mongols, displaced tatars so they moved down to kiev – tatars had better technology and methodologies
- igor made an alliance with khans, but igor went against it
- poem describes how he left the city
- when he left, an eclipse happened, bad omen
- igor moved on (pray to god)
- lost, him and all men put into captivity
- he laments he did not protect rous and his men, he thinks of he wife
- khan says he still wants an alliance and igor says he has to stay faithful to his wife and country – khan shows many women to igor and he still doesn’t go for it
- wife: yaroslavna: intelligent, literate (rare), beautiful – laments her husband “why did you sun, blow the wind…” why did nature work against him
  - take beaver fur sleeve dipped in waters wiping away blood of beloved (?!)
- (see-er) 10 falcons on a flock of swans, compose a poem, recites it, puts people in a trance
- poem later some scholars said it was not written at the time, was written later for political reasons
- french scholar later proved that the epic is genuine based on language…. etc
eventually successors of tatars came through and murdered and slaughtered whole city for treasure
kiev went into 200 year rule of tatars, kiev “fell” and moscow became the new power city — was able to build a powerful fortress due to nature surrounding city (surrounded by hills etc) – kremlin, fortress
1500s moscow east slavic, russian languge now being used (ivan groznyi came to power, ivan the terrible)
1530s, started police that went around killing people he didn’t like (their symbol skull and broom sweep away)
cruel yet powerful tsar, demanded he be called emperor (caesar, tsar) by others
he went to get “kiev” back from tatar, used gun powder
ivan tried to kill his general that helped him conquer, ivan said he is god’s representative and that is god’s will
succeeded by boris gudonov, ivan did not have a son as a successor