Flexing My Embarrassment

The Hobonichi Techo (ほぼ日手帳, "almost daily planner") is a Japanese planner brand with something of a cult following. I think I heard of it first back in 2018 through rave reviews and hype for next year's planners on a synthesizer forum; that's the kind of product it is. I think this is my fourth year using one—I initially purchased one for 2018 or 2019 and failed miserably. In 2024 and 2025 I experimented with the "Weeks" variant and a larger-size page-a-day variant.

Of course I always purchase the Japanese version. Each of the main pages of the planner has a little quote. Some of the quotes are inspiring, some merely cute, like a story about misremembering the name of a brand of instant rice and purchasing instead a brand of tsukudani, a pickled condiment. Here's today's:

ひっきりなしに考えてみろ、恥(は)ずかしげもなく試せ。
四の五の言ってないで、どんどん書け、出せ、歩けだよ。
恥ずかしいほどのヘタクソなものやら、とりかえしの
つかない失敗作やら、気張りすぎてみっともないものやら、
無駄(だ)に難解ぶったものやら、凡(ぼん)作やらを、山ほどつくれ。

—糸井重里(いといしげさと)が『今日のダーリン』の中で

The quote is by Shigesato Itoi, who appears to just do a ton of cool stuff—he's the creator of an influential and now-classic series of video games, he voiced the father in My Neighbor Totoro, that kind of thing. Interestingly, unlike all the other quotes as far as I can tell, my Techo does not add the honorific さん after his name. At first I was confused by this, but then I realized: this is because he started the company that puts out the Techo. In fact, the quote is from "Today's Darling" (今日のダーリン), a daily column he writes for the company's site.

Here's how I'd translate that quote:

Try thinking about it incessantly, really unabashedly try. Without grumbling, just keep writing, putting it out there, and taking steps forward. Make stuff so shitty it’s embarrassing, make unsalvageable duds, pathetically try-hard stuff, uselessly abstruse poser stuff, mid stuff—make a mountain of this stuff.

In some ways, continuing to buy the Japanese version of the Techo after my first attempt is kind of in line with the quote. I think I had taken at least a semester and maybe a full year of Japanese classes when I got my first planner. In my excitement, I figured I would be then about where I am now: able to read and understand the daily quotes with a little work. Instead, to my chagrin, I couldn't even sound out more than half of the words I saw in every quote, since the Techo doesn't have even the few small phonetic furigana I added to the copy above.

It wasn't possible for me to see this at the time, but despite having no furigana, the Techo is still attempting to be a little gentle with its orthography: there is a way to write the quote above with about ten more kanji, some of which I know already, even. Apparently I can recognize about 98% of the most common 500 kanji, and about 60% of the next most common 500. Since most quotes are like this one: they have one or two kanji that I don't recognize, and the name readings are always a toss-up, it's fair to suspect that the Techo is deliberately restricting its kanji use to only some of the most common.

In Defense of Mere Familiarity

Recently I read How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. If you've heard of the Zettelkasten method of note organization, the book is in some ways a manual for using the method. Ahrens credits Niklas Luhmann with inventing this method, and the book is almost a little too reverent to his usage of it. Since I'd previously only heard of Zettelkasten via third-hand accounts on the Internet, a book-length exposition of the method and some arguments for its efficacy was welcome, and I found reading the book in the morning would often get me very excited to work on my own projects, which is a great outcome.

Ahrens, a little bizarrely, seems to think that the use of this note-taking method is really confined to people working in research or writers of nonfiction. Some of this makes sense: he wants to set it up against a model of writing embodied by Anthony Trollope, who would write daily with the goal of meeting a word-count quota. It is in my experience so far true that I cannot make linear progress on the writing of a math paper as measured by number of words written per day. Although I wholeheartedly agree that writing is thinking, often in math I think wrong thoughts or need to break a bunch of matches before one really sparks. If you're telling a story, at least in theory, you have none of these problems. Of course, a few seconds of thought will reveal that there's no reason for progress in story-writing to be linear.

However, one of the main things Ahrens crusades against that I think he's wrong for is the idea of the mere-exposure effect whereby repeated exposure to an idea will increase one's feeling of understanding, when actually what is increasing is familiarity.

To be sure, being able to recognize words like "Teichmüller space", "character variety", "adjoint functor", "HNN extension" and so on is different from being able to use and apply those words correctly. I've seen the kanji 興, for example, many times in Chinatown and know that it appears in the word 興味 ("interest" in the sense of finding something interesting), but until I looked it up just now, I wouldn't have known that it has two on'yomi ("sound readings", for Sino-Japanese words), for example. Familiarity is not the same thing as knowledge.

But dude, how much easier will it be to solidify that familiarity into knowledge when I reach the time to learn 興? How much easier is it to build deep understanding of a math concept when you have the faces of people who think and write about that concept today in your mind and can recall the way they talk about it? In some ways, what is learning a language? Nothing more than shallow familiarity starting to assemble into deep and personalized knowledge through exposure to comprehensible input—messages that you can understand.

So, go make it familiar

I avoided going to the gym as much as I could for about 15 years. In college, I was required to take two P.E. classes and pass a swim test. The swim test I took my senior year (granted, I was taught how to swim as a child, so for me it wasn't difficult), and I jumped at the chance to make one of my P.E. classes a dance class, Contact Improv. After graduating, I spent most of a decade as a trans woman, and considered the problem of locker rooms satisfyingly unsolvable and sufficient reason to not attempt anything too physical.

Interestingly, this did nothing to solve the core problem of the gym for me. Uhh, probably for many of you this is not a problem that has even occurred to you. But for me, I found (find) jocks, guys with muscles, even things like basketball shorts, running shoes, tank tops, white crew socks—all of that's hot. Hot and somehow "not my world", being, as a kid, more naturally part of the skinny braniac set. The desire is sort of twofold: "I want that for me. I want to look like that," plus "you're hot, I want to ... spend time with you" and the combination of the two is—I would argue—both extremely common, as is the disavowal of the combination.

But like, right? Certainly having mirrors is useful to get visual feedback on your form while doing an exercise. But more to the point, who else has the opportunity to gawk at every time you flex your biceps? Nobody else is there with you every time—just you yourself—and nobody else has the same experience of your "pump".

So, how do you resolve a problem like Maria this?

Well, for one you might not, you might just get used to it. The other week a guy in the locker room asked me to take photos of him, and I hope I did a passable job of not drooling while I did, but it was a near thing. I gotta imagine I'm not the only one wearing headphones for equal parts wanting to pair working out with listening to music or an audiobook, but additionally having the psychic armor of being in a separate sound world from your surroundings.

A lot of the time, the fear for me is about doing something embarrassing. A month or so ago I learned that my faculty ID gets me into the gym on campus. I didn't have a lock for the locker, and it took me a good hour split between a dystopically poorly organized Burlington and a chaotic-good stuffed-to-the-gills mom and pop to find one. After that, I played my "I'm new here" hand quickly swiping into the gym and needing directions to find the weight room, so I decided to just stick to the treadmills there instead of further poking around to see if there was an indoor track. (In the end, there doesn't appear to be one anyway.)

That's the thing about looking stupid. You gotta do it anyway, but you do have some control about how frequently you go near it. Maybe it's like a muscle. Try flexing it. Really, unabashedly try. Do all kinds of dumb shit. Act embarrassingly dumb, make unrecoverable errors, act like a pointlessly erudite poser, just be mid-dumb. It might not get easier, but the difficulty overcoming that might get familiar, which is I suppose in the end, the same thing.