Xiluluke's Weekend Letter Vol. 06
- No.
- 157
- Date
- Read
- 9 min
- Words
- 1,896
Life is not the days we lived, but the days we remember. — Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
It's two in the afternoon right now, and honestly, my head feels foggy, even though I slept a full ten hours last night.
Compared with last week, this one was a little dimmer.
The big things that happened this week:
- On Monday I published the first real installment of Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works, and 12 readers subscribed. That's worth celebrating
- On Tuesday I had the first MRI of my life
- On Thursday I stopped working out and started resting
- On Saturday a post got taken down after it went up, so I actually broke my streak once
- On Saturday I wrote a column piece I'm really happy with
Writing the Column
Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works actually started as a spur-of-the-moment idea. It took me half a month to make it real. I wrote the opening note last Saturday and published the first installment this Monday.
It's the first time in my life I've planned a column. But what I'm writing about has been in my head for almost ten years. This is just the first time I've written it down in such an honest way.
Part of why I planned this column is Fanfan's influence. This year I joined the writing camp Fanfan runs and learned a lot about how to approach personal writing. The Weekend Letter itself was born directly out of that camp. When the weekly reached its fourth issue, I started planning my paid column.
All of it has been a process that keeps evolving. I just don't know if this pace is fast or slow for me.
I've read plenty of posts on making money from writing. They all say you should launch your own product as soon as possible, and almost all of them also say your first product will be hard.
Dan Koe, for example, who I like a lot, is a big believer in putting out your own product first and growing by improving it.
I agree with that, because I think you grow fastest when problems keep coming up.
Growing while solving problems seems like the path that fits how things develop. So I didn't overthink it and just went ahead and launched the paid column.
After it went live, 12 people subscribed. Eleven of them are my friends, and one is a reader I don't know.
Yes, only one stranger paid for my column. But honestly, that's enough. I feel fully motivated to finish this column for that one reader. And of course, I'm grateful to the eleven friends who support me.
The MRI
On Monday I was working at a client's site. It happened to be a pretty big hospital, so during my break I signed up to see the rehab department.
I asked the doctor about my iliotibial band syndrome and wanted her to confirm it. After a few quick questions, she said she couldn't confirm it from that alone and told me to get an MRI to check whether my left knee's meniscus and so on were damaged.
So I got an MRI order and booked it for Tuesday afternoon.
Before this, the most intense medical exam I'd ever had was opening my mouth and going "ahh" for a doctor when I had a cold. I'd never had an MRI. On Monday I was still asking a coworker about it, which is kind of funny looking back.
I asked him: "Do I have to lie down?" "Do I have to take my pants off?" "Does it take long?" "Do I need a shot first?"
I had lots of questions about the unknown, but not much time to prepare. The next afternoon I showed up at the hospital on time.
In the scanning room, the technician had me stuff two cotton balls in my ears, then lie down on the machine. She put my left leg on a cradle that seemed to be made for the area being scanned and strapped it in place.
Then she told me: "During the scan, you absolutely can't move."
That's the scariest sentence I've ever heard. Because the moment she says it, you can't help focusing all five senses on your left leg during the scan, while trying as hard as you can to keep it still.
With a mechanical whirring, my body slid into the huge MRI machine. When it stopped, my head was still out far enough to see the ceiling, plus an LED display above the machine showing waveforms I didn't understand and a number that kept changing now and then, mostly 0.something.
Before leaving, the technician told me the whole scan would take twenty minutes.
That's a really long time. For those twenty minutes I had to put my attention anywhere else I could, anything but the left leg I wasn't allowed to move.
Every muscle in my body felt tense. Whenever I felt like I couldn't hold on, I covered my face with both hands and took deep breaths, again and again. It worked. It helped me relax.
I don't know how many times I covered my face, maybe two or three. Then the technician slid open the door and I could get up. It was a bit quicker than I'd expected. I still don't know if the scan took the full 20 minutes, because I'd put my phone in a locker a while before it started.
Since it was my first time, it wasn't a great experience. If they'd put my head in the machine, I'd probably have been even more nervous and anxious.
It made me think of my mother. Because of her health, she has to get an MRI of her head every three months. I don't know what that's like, but she's gone in again and again.
The final report was full of "normal" and "no abnormality." Other than a little fluid, there was nothing wrong. So I'm not planning to go back and see the doctor. I'll keep treating my knee as iliotibial band syndrome and keep doing the rehab.
Stopping Training, Starting to Rest
As luck would have it, on Thursday, the day I started resting, I listened to a podcast episode about overtraining syndrome while working that morning. I'm not saying I have it. But that same day I felt sure that taking this break was exactly the right call.
One very clear sign told me so. The weather's been steady lately. Usually when I'm sitting at my computer at home in loungewear, I never feel cold. But on Thursday afternoon I definitely felt chilly.
That feeling told me my body was worn down and badly needed rest. As of today, Sunday, I still haven't gone back to the gym. In fact, after I started resting on Thursday, it wasn't until last night that I got my first truly good sleep, a full ten hours.
Right now I'm still pretty drowsy.
Not only that, since the day before yesterday I've had some mild cold symptoms, like sneezing a lot and a bit of a runny nose. When I noticed, I remembered something from that podcast:
"How can you tell if you've overtrained? There's a really simple way: you start catching colds out of nowhere."
I didn't dwell on it. What's done is done, and the important thing is to deal with it. So I started taking Ganmaoling cold granules the day before yesterday. Today, other than a slightly foggy head, the sneezing and runny nose are gone, which is something of a win.
So for readers who work out like me, please learn to assess your own fitness and plan long-term training and rest cycles. That's how you get stronger the smart way.
Never try to push through accumulated fatigue with so-called willpower. Even professional athletes rest scientifically.
A Post Taken Down
Yesterday I wrote a post introducing an AI tool I've been building lately. But after I published it, I never got the "published" notice. When I checked, I found it had been pulled for breaking the rules.
So I revised it four times before it finally went out, and then less than five minutes later it was taken down again. That left me irritated and let down.
But looking back, I don't really mind. If anything, the experience helped me grow a little. At the very least, I now have a post that you can't read on my WeChat account and can only find on my blog.
At first I hadn't even uploaded that post to my blog. After it was taken down, I put it up there without a second thought. Call it a little surprise buried in the blog!
A Post I'm Happy With
How do I define a post I'm happy with?
It's simple: while writing it, do I get an urge, a strong urge to send it to someone right away?
Yesterday afternoon I was writing my column piece, and halfway through, I got that strong urge.
Usually when that happens, I feel the piece is so good I have to send it to someone immediately. It's the most intoxicating moment in writing.
But now I can't publish it right away. I have to wait for its scheduled day to make it public. For me, that's practice in restraint.
When I was posting daily on WeChat, there was a stretch when I kept a backlog, writing today the post that would go out tomorrow.
But it didn't take long to notice a very obvious downside: what I wrote yesterday, today's me might not care about anymore. But what I write today, I definitely care about today.
So before long, I stopped writing ahead. Writing down my fresh thoughts and opinions every day feels really satisfying. It might mean some posts are thin or the streak breaks for one reason or another, but nothing written ahead can match the thrill of writing and publishing on the same day.
I Bought an iPad mini
This week I bought an iPad mini (2025 model). My last iPad was an M1 iPad Pro back in 2022. Honestly, I now think that for a product in the iPad's niche, an ordinary person has no need to spend over ten thousand yuan on an M-series Pro.
The iPad mini cost me ¥2,500, which is already on the pricey side for me, because for a bit more I could get an M4 Mac mini. In terms of productivity, the iPad's only productivity is leisure. Its value is giving you downtime.
No doubt leisure is part of productivity too, because good downtime helps you produce better. It's the same reason companies give workers coffee.
The day after I bought it, I started wondering what I'd actually use it for. Videos, comics and books are definitely much better on it than on a phone, but that doesn't really seem like a reason to buy a tablet just for those.
After thinking about it for a bit, I just stopped thinking about it, because it really does do those things better than a phone. At home I now force myself to use the tablet instead of my phone, and so far it feels pretty good.
I wonder if this will turn out to be something I keep using for the long haul?
That's everything for this issue.
