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I’m sad that I can’t talk to you about my first few days at work. You would have laughed at how I forgot what meaningful use is.

The sunset on the lake was beautiful tonight; I’m sorry that you never got to sit on the dock and watch it like you wanted.

I’ve been generally doing well; I don’t tear up when the fact that you died comes up any more.

There’s a poem and accompanying textpost on tumblr about the way that men love. One that stuck out to me was the man who became a cobbler because his own mother was buried without shoes.

I am not an oncologist, and I could never be one; watching even one mother die like you did would break me forever. I will work with oncology; even though better charting wouldn’t have saved you, it still feels like what I can do.

So much still hurts. I don’t use purple or pink any more. I can’t listen to the Bible or Catechism in a Year; that was supposed to be something we did together. I can’t write my web novel; that was what you said helped during chemo.

The death certificate says that it’s been a year. Of course, the death certificate is right; the world exists as the bureaucracy says and no other way. Even though it’s been a year, it’s been more than a year since the last time you held me. It’s been more than a year since the last words you spoke.

I want to think that the last thing you heard me say was “I love you”. For my sake, I hope that I got to say goodbye, even if I only meant for the night.

I think that part of me will always be stuck in bed, waking up to the sound of my brother knocking on my door. Even without him saying anything, I knew.

Part of me will always be stuck at the side of your deathbed, saying the Lux Aeterna, since I was the only one who had a prayer ready.

Part of me will be at your deathbed before you died, when you said that you didn’t care about the funerary arrangements except that you wanted them to be Catholic. I haven’t been able to sing City of God in almost a year.

One friend who you never got to meet texted me today. I think you would have loved her.

I didn’t do as you asked; I graduated before [].² I hope that you wouldn’t be mad at me. It sucks so much that not only did I have a graduation that felt rushed, not only did I have to do it without you, but all the while I was doing it I knew deep in my heart and keenly in my mind that I was disobeying your last wishes.

You gave me a task related to both of my brothers. I don’t think that you gave them one related to me.

I haven’t had these great wracking sobs in months. I almost forgot what it felt like to have tears leaking down my face as each breath catches, regardless of what else is going on.

I haven’t had anyone message me or stop me in the street to say how much you meant to them in what feels like a decade; rationally I know it can’t have been more than seven months.

You told us not to stay at your bedside day in and day out. Does it make me a bad son to have listened?

I look at the last photos we took as a family, and I hardly recognize you. When the friend asked me if I remembered your face, I could only think of the photo you used for everything; I think that it was at least fifteen years old by the time that you retired it.

At the wake, I had to walk away and sit alone. Despite everyone knowing that I was doing that to be alone, I still had a number of people stop in. I scrolled through my voice messages, knowing that I had never deleted any.

I’m sad that, in the over a year we had planning for your death, I never had you send me a message simply saying “I love you”.

The weekend I came back to Madison, or at least what feels like it, I went to a club with a friend for her birthday. While waiting outside the bathroom for a friend, I met another mother dying of cancer; she had no idea how to tell her children. I was able to tell her that I appreciated everything you did for us, and that I made it through.

It’s been a year, and yet part of me still feels like I should have covered mirrors. It feels wrong to realize that I wore a white shirt today of all days. Today was too beautiful of a day to be a reminder that you’re gone forever.

Today was far too lacking in beauty to be a reminder of the day your pain stopped.

How do I tell the people around me that the reason I don’t mention you when talking about what my family does isn’t estrangement? I guess it’s the most permanent form of estrangement, so I suppose they understand.

maybe if I say that one more time, or one time more, it will tell my heart that it can heal.

I try really hard not to swear on this blog, and I think that this might actually be the first profanity↩
I never use identifying names for my family, but it feels wrong to say my brother here, when I’m referring to one in particular↩

Review of Musicking

Draft 1: 6 October 2025

I am not irregularly asked what my favorite book is. There are any number of ways to answer it. I tend to lean on one of a few answers: the books I can read the most often, the books I have read the most, the books that have most inspired me, the books that most changed the way I move through the world, the books that I think will most impress the asker. It is the penultimate of these which concerns Christopher Small’s Musicking.

I’ve written here before about the semester I spent on an independent study focused on what it means to listen to music. I was assigned any number of readings and listenings, and many of them were great. The one that changed me most, however, was an article by Small also called Musicking. My biggest takeaway from that article was that anyone involved in the creation of music, down to the person selling tickets at the window or the movers who put the piano on stage, is a musician.

The book takes a similar, if more in depth¹ look at the question: what is music?

Small’s major argument is that music is not a noun, it is a verb. Musicking is the act we do, which is full of the different relationships we have to each other, the repertoire, and so on. This book also makes clear just how strange the modern orchestral concert is in the grand scheme of the world. Small takes aim at Platonism, pointing out the ridiculousness of an abstract perfect form. His take on music is best summed up on page 218: “just as there is no such thing as music, neither is there such a thing as beauty.” That is, although things can be beautiful, beauty is not a thing which exists independent of the experience. Likewise, music exists solely as performance and interrelation.

While reading the book, I was reminded of just how much I truly am unlearned in musical literature. I had vague notions of many of the points he hit about masculine and feminine subjects, semiotics, and the like. However, I would not have anywhere near the ability to write about the subjects² that he treated as mere set dressing.

Also in the book were some beautiful lines and thought provoking ideas. I have scattered notes, which I’m tempted to present as is³. I’m also tempted to simply say “read it yourself”. I’ll take a middle ground, however, and point to some portions I found particularly moving or thought provoking.

One of the chief points Small comes back to again and again is the idea of ritual. All music, he argues, has ritual significance. The ritual of listening to a walkman⁴, though different than the ritual of going to a theatre, is still one in itself. Similarly, there is an argument that the modern orchestral hall is sacred in the classic meaning of the word; it cannot be used for the day to day practical, and is only useful for its dedicated purpose.

Small, like I love to, attacks equal temperament briefly. Equal temperament is mathematical and abstract, completely divorced from what a human would naturally come to, much like modern society. I tend to dislike equal temperament for how it makes each key the same, which is part of his argument as well. It’s only a short portion of the book, almost an aside.

At least twice he brings up the fact that no pre-modern music was written with the idea that we would listen to it again and again. Orchestras were by and large written to be performed at a specific event, and then never again. Even those which were composed for replaying require an orchestra. Before modern recording technology, that put a hard limit on the number of times we could listen to Eroica.

Finally, I’d like to list a few quotations that for whatever reason I felt compelled to stop and write down. There are some quotes I said “find on page X”, but those are clearly less powerful to me.

124: “Those who talk of delayed gratification ought to be made to sit through all of the Terminator movies, followed perhaps by the Die Hard series. No delayed gratification there either; they grip, as they are meant to grip, from the first frame.” This quote comes from a section about how the development of the Western canon is about delaying gratification more and more.

197: “relationships between performers and listeners may be close, intimate, and even loving, as when the lover or the suitor sings or plays to the beloved or the sought.” I don’t know what about this quote struck me so hard, but something in it is just so beautiful to me that I cannot but rewrite it. I think it might be the repetition of love in loving, lover beloved?

202: “like all wind instruments it is animated into life by the breath from his body, the most intimate relationship one can have with a musical instrument”. I disagreed with this take, because I find that something like a cello can be more intimate, even if I cannot express quite why. Something about holding it and embracing, maybe?

also 202: “Simple it may be in its construction, but primitive it is not”. This, like the above quote, is about a hand-carved flute. He points out that the modern conveniences like slides and valves make playing far easier. That’s such a great point, and I am honestly kind of surprised that he didn’t tie in the whole “because the shepherd can make more microadjustments, his music is more free”,⁵ or something about the constraints the modern instrument cause for the modern composer.

212: “in my opinion any music teacher caught ... using the epithet tone-deaf of a pupil should be sacked on the spot.” I too agree that there are few who are tone deaf, and that the teacher should serve as an encourager, not a discourager.

213: “all musicking is ultimately a political act”. It’s important to remember that everything is political. By definition, the relationships we create have political meaning.

220: John Cage used to respond to interview questions he didn’t like “I don’t find that a very interesting question”. There’s a kind of power in that.

Also, Mozart apparently stopped practicing at the age of 7, because his day to day music work was enough for him to stay in musical shape.

All in all, this book was incredibly fun to read, powerful, and relatively easy, though very deep. I would highly recommend that others read it, and I have every intention of reading it again.

Draft 0: 17 September 2025

Before I start this review, I just have to say that it is wild to me how much books from the late nineteen hundreds feel both like they just happened and happened centuries ago. Small, for instance,

Draft -1: 16 September 2025

Ok so technically I haven’t finished Musicking yet, but I’m optimistic. I do find it interesting that Small frames the entire book through the lens of an orchestral concert. I was assigned an article about it back when I was doing an independent study on listening to music. It was absolutely one of the most influential writings that I’ve ever encountered, if only for how it makes me think of music.

Small’s key argument is that music is not a thing but an action. When we music, we are listeners or performers or dancers or stage hands.

I love this take because it helps me to deal with that most fundamental urge of the scientist in me: labeling what is and isn’t music and who is and isn’t a musician. Music is what we make of it, and musicians are those that make it.

I enjoyed greatly the aside on Cartesian dualism and especially the way that Small makes a point that so much of the industrialization we live and think under is like the water a fish has no name for. I hadn’t considered the mind matter dualism really at all, especially in the context of music.

Daily Reflection: 6 October 2025

as one might hope, given that it is a full book↩
hah, get it, because subject is a thing in music but it was also a subject of the book↩
the reader is welcome to request them↩
dating the author↩
not direct quote, to be clear↩
new today↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

Monthly Reflection

Draft 1: 5 October 2025

Wild, last month I posted and wrote on the 4th. This month I do so on the 5th. Hopefully this is not a trend which will continue. I’d like to get back into daily postings, but who can say if that’s doable. Still, today is the last day before I become a company man, which means that it’s a perfect time to think about the past month and my past life.

Reflecting on last month, daily follies didn’t really end up happening, nor did finding a better term for them than follies. Dictionary of terms started to happen, but only very briefly. Have yet to really start making up terms, which is a bit of a shame.

I rebound my web novel, but only read the first fifteen or so of three hundred some chapters. This month, I think that it might be more productive to instead plot out the rest of the series. I just today watched a video on plotting, which suggested that the story should be seen as a series of arcs, each of which feeds into the next, which is slightly more intense, until the very end, at which point obviously the plot peaks. There’s probably an element of that which would be good to do. At the very least, I think that it could be good to remind myself where the series is supposed to end, and then figure out how to get there. Since it’s been long enough since I wrote anything for it, I don’t think that pantsing it¹ is going to work for me. Next month is NaNo though, so there’s something to be said about waiting to start writing until that starts.

I did not write the song for the wedding, and I have only gotten about halfway through Musicking. Binding books went generally well, and that was fun. I didn’t bring yarn, but I did bring embroidery ingredients, and did not use them.

Didn’t stretch much, and do still note that I am often tight.² I did just recently come into a massage gun, and it is wild how it actually works to improve flexibility.³ Shoulder didn’t seem to be my issue this past month, nor did it feel like the issue today. Then again, I’m still not doing my historic shoulder stretches, so maybe I’m just deluding myself.

I read very little of the books that I said I would get. I ended up buying a few along the journey, so in a way I read negative of the books I brought. That being said, I have finished one of the new buys, and that is certainly something to talk about in the future.

Meditation and prayer weren’t going great, and still aren’t. I’ve recently started reading a book about Autistic Burnout, and there’s something really interesting in it. Or, more accurately, there’s a lot that’s really interesting, but one that felt immediately actionable.

When people are depressed, they don’t want to do anything, and the cure is doing something. When autistic people are burning out, they don’t want to do anything, and the cure is doing nothing. I’m trying to let myself not do anything, and I am taking a lot of naps these past few days, which isn’t something I can really keep going for much longer. However, there’s something mindful about letting myself stop for a little bit.

I did do some meditation/prayer on the trip, but actively doing the rote prayer from my past still hurts a lot, and I don’t really know why. I’ll make time to try that this month.

I did buy a sketchbook, because the part of me that wants to draw when I have nothing else going on did in fact rear its head.

NaNoWriMo term for writing without plotting↩
let’s take a quick ten to stretch right now↩
I did the very scientific stretch both legs, massage gun one, then stretch both again and noticed that the one I gunned was notably looser↩

On MoMA

Draft 1: 25 September 2025

Lasterday I went to the New York Museum of Modern Art. As I had known, but never articulated, I have a favorite kind of art: non-representational art with phyiscally meaningful texture. That is, I want to be able tosee the paint as paint, even if it is also acting as something else.¹ While looking at a Rothko, I was inspired to write a poem.² That seemed like as good of a way to consider the best arts I liked.

1:³
In the soft and subtle shading, as blue fades to deeper blue
A source of light unseen, unmentioned, seems to frame the vicious shape
These blues unseen in nature seem primed to bleed off the deep red sea
consume and so be consumed, the painting draws me in.

2:⁴
Grasping hands and wailing mouths
eyes as from a fog
Some heaven-seen corrupted
by mortal misery
That blood-pure blue cuts through the clouds,
Where Adam should be reaching out
But Adam is gone, Creator too
what’s left but bloody blue?

3:
If Rothko screams in single shades
What is this apple’s song?
One stroke of green, on deepest red
A mirror symmetry

4:⁵
An oil slick of global south
Metallic and contrived
yet strokes of brush still visible
As textures slowly wind
Or is it more auroral?
The Dancing night-time light?
Which reminds us of the dance we’re on.
When borders fin’ly cease

5:⁶
What weight can any color hold
When gravity exists?
What bloody martyrs’ final cris
Would echo on this painted shroud?
There’s something in the sunrise scheme (scene? screen?)
Which brings me to my sobbing, weakened knees.
3 necks are bound like shirts or murdered men.
3 times I must review this
3 times, 3 views, 3 forms

6:⁷
Soemthing in the martyr’s red on black
The highlight it implies
Or in the white of careless folds
Which frame on further pause
I could not but stop and stare

7:⁸
the concrete does not speak to me
too fixed in vapid form.
To swim, to dance, a gambling lifetime chance
A body broken, bent

8:⁹
What suffering countless centuries have seen
caused rudely (hah) by the sacrifice, which suffering was meant to cease
9:¹⁰
Fifteen by seven, pinned neatly in a grid
Fifteen by seven sketches of man, bread,¹¹
Fifteen by seven, so Fifty some left out
Fifteen by seven shades of life and living
Fifteen by seven by one
Fifteen by seven, once alive, now butterflies, hung.

10:¹²
The tears creation wept
The tans of toxic waste
the figure of a little boy
pulled to the cage of the sky

11:¹³
The threnody of misery
THe sextet of dispair
The chains of dying broken men
The gears of war spin ever and forever on without cease
A plane may crash
And more will die

12:¹⁴
This tryptich soon will haunt my dreams
Forms caged in static line
Yet closer inspection quickly uncovers
The forms are broken fragments
held, preserved in gem and love

13:¹⁵
It’s rudely crude, a relic from a long-held past
An animation of a woman forced
Art from numbers, tabbed and punched in cards into machine

14:¹⁶
I want to come another time
To see the mark I’ve left
in uncured light consuming
In magnetic holding up

15:¹⁷
Monuments to a fallen king
Made by his own two hands
The shape, though fixed, is rough and mixed
No two of six the same
Is man unable to imagine
Some great work not made of iron?
Or like the blood that others shed
Or like the callused worker’s hands
Or Or like the song of hammerblow?
16:¹⁸
I wish my life was just this perfect
Clean lines to be defined with popped out text

Well, fun to see that I did very much get caught on metaphor, and fun to see the way that they shifted as I kept writing. Even though this is the order I wrote the poems, it’s not the order that I approached the works. I ceased returning to the initial works after 12, because I was very lost, so 13–16¹⁹ are from the memory and terrible photo of the pieces I have. 12 was the first of the paintings written about that I saw.

Daily Reflection: 25 September 2025

yeah, of course I like rothko↩
not a good one, to be fair.↩
On Rothko’s 37 and 19↩
On Dorothea Tanning’s “Dogs of Cythera”↩
On Frank Bowing’s “Raining Down South”↩
On Sam Gilliam’s “10/27/69” (bonus fact, this one is the only one I cried at)↩
On Kay WalkingStick’s “Teepee Form Drawing”↩
On Giacomo Balla’s “Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequence”↩
On Judith Lauland’s “Concrete 61”↩
On Christopher Cozier’s “Tropical Night”↩
new line break added here bc feels appropriate↩
On Joan Miro’s “The Birth of the World”↩
On Jose Clemente Orozco’s “Dive Bomber and Tank”↩
On Morris Grave’s “English Nightfall Piece”, “French Nightfall Piece”, “Roman Nightfall Piece”↩
On Rebecca Allen’s “Girl Lifts Skirt”↩
On Lotus L. Kang’s “Molt (Toronto-Chicago-Woodridge-New York-Los Angeles-)”↩
On Richard Serra’s “Equal”↩
On Mel Bochner’s “Measurement Room”↩
happy, those who care about dashes?↩
for my own posterity, mostly. I should really start noting which pen is which.....↩

On Speed

Draft 1: 23 September 2025

Last night I went to dinner with some college friends. It was a wonderful time, and as may be unsurprising, we eventually got ontot he topic of media we consume. I mentioned that I consume my media at multiples of the nominally intended speed, and they expressed potential interest in it. Of course, I have also received any number of objections to this method from others in my life.

The most salient objection I can think of is that the speed something plays does a lot to communicate. Humor is reliant on timing, and so on. For whatever reason, I find this only to be true for me in musical terms; a song or musical interlude played faster or slower feels fundamentally different in a way that speech faster or slower does not. Perhaps this is because speed is relative in most vocalizations but absolute in music.

Regardless, I think that the point of creator’s intent is a reasonable objection to my consumption. Of course, there’s much to be said for the fact that I consume almost nothing as it was originally intended. All music written before the 1900s was intended to be played and enjoyed live. Any music outside of the Western canon is and was meant to be enjoyed actively, whether via dance, participation, or verbal appreciation.¹

When I read a book, there is almost no chance that I read the book at the exact pace an author assumes. Then again, as an author, I do not think that I have a pace that I intend my book to be read. There’s an inherent serial nature to much of this writing, and especially my web serial. That being said, given that many serialized fiction is presented and resold as a single compendium, it’s clear that’s not important either.

Do directors and creators of film and television intend for shows to be at the speed they are?

I am reminded of the finale of Game of Thrones, which is now infamously mocked for having absolutely atrocious lighting. Audio in general these days is poorly mixed and recorded, and much of the art of the process has been lost. If I am watching something where craft was not a major part of the process, how much should I respect the craft?

When we talk about the way that nothing lasts, part of it is due to intentionally planned obselescence. However, there is also the inherently craftless nature of what we produce. Few people I know can or would willingly create something intentionally subpar. It is only in this current economic and industrial model, where creation is so fundamentally removed from human touch, that planned obselescence can be possible, or that clothing which disintigrates upon washing can exist.

This is not to say that I think premodern society was better than our current one. This is to say, however, that consuming modern media at speeds outside of those the director may have designed does not feel wrong to me.

Taking it even one step further, I think about the fact that music has been almost completely subsumed in the craft of film. Music does not exist for anything except for the emotional responses we have been trained to have to it. Society² rails against Muzak, and so I see nothing wrong with railing against the emotionally manipulative nature of music in television and film.

Again, though, I can consier older works, where lighting and sound were considered. They would never have imagined me watching on a computer screen. Should I also not watch it like that?

Daily Reflection: 23 September 2025

is it clear I’m reading about music right now?↩
rightly, I’d argue↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

On Emptiness

Draft 2: 22 September 2025

Is it an absence? The absence of my mother weighs on me daily. The absence of food in my stomach or water in my system cries out to be sated.

Is it a void? Atoms in the interstellar medium can go centuries or millenia without encountering another. On days when I feel most alone, I feel like one of those atoms.

Is it clarity? Only by emptying the space between viewer and object can the object be seen. To empty oneself of doubt and fear is a power spiritual experience.

Is it calmness? In the modern society, life is defined by motion and excess. To stop, then, and simply be, feels as though it carries with it a sense of emptiness.

What does it mean to be empty? Where is the line between numbness and emotional stability? What are the words I can use to express the feeling of depression, where the weight of some unknowable and uncaring burden drags each motion. Unlike the suffering of the martyr, there is no sense of purpose.

What does it mean to rest? Is rest another form of emptiness? Should I think of it as laying down the burdens I carry? Should I think of it as a way to refill myself after carrying a heavy load?

When I write to the point no more words are there, have I created an emptiness? I often refer to the feeling as having run my well dry. Have I not, rather, filled the page and my mind with the ideas in the writing?

Thermodynamics assures that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Relativity assures that matter and energy can be interchanged. In order to empty one location, another must be filled.

Is it possible to empty a space without filling another? What about the void of space? As space itself grows, the distances between stars grows as well. Is that emptiness?

Draft 1: 22 September 2025

I don’t entirely know what my goal is here. Yesterday I started reading “Bluets”, a reflection on the color blue and a semi-memoir, at the recommendation of the bookseller.¹ Near the beginning, it mentions that there was a French author² who, upon coming to athiesm, started referring to the sky as the blue, rather than the heavens.³ I thought about that, and the fact that I too find the use of words more meaningful than they may at first seem. Does English’s general usage of sky rather than heavens point to the general athiesm of modern Anglophone culture?

Then, I got on a train. During the train ride, I did not reflect, I did not muse, I did not craft follies. Instead, I played a new video game I got.⁴ While playing, the hours did pass away. However, rather than ending the game feeling accomplished, or even satisfied, I mostly felt numb.

I went for a short walk after reading the opening 50 pages of “Bluets”, and I reflected on my own emotions.⁵ I recalled that, when depressed, there’s a painful sense of emptiness. When I feel strong emotions, it can be tempting to say that I would rather feel nothing. Remembering the words I used while feeling nothing, however, I am able to take the emotions more easily.

I do not think that I could write a long exploration of the color blue. I think that, if I was to write a color-memoir, I would use the color red.

As someone who frequently forgets to eat or drink, there exists the immediate physical meaning. My stomach growls, my throat gets parched, and my body tells me that there is a void to be filled.

When I am able to meditate, or wake up from a blissful sleep, I find that my mind has nothing within it. Unlike the negative emptiness of unmet physical needs, this is an emptiness of negatives.

When I finished playing the game yesterday, my mind was empty in a neutral to negative way. The emptiness inside was not because I had only vague senses of positive sentiment, but because everything had been pushed down.

I think that emptiness is a hard word, because to me it feels connotatively neutral. That’s good, insofar as like often we want a neutral word to describe both the positive and negative ways to have an absence.

After all, in order for something to be clearly seen, it cannot have obstructions in its way.

Daily Reflection: 22 September 2025

What’s the term for a person who works at a bookstore↩
Stefane Mallarme↩
literally l’azul, la ciel↩
spellcrafter university↩
opening section has a lot about blue and sorrow or whatnot↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

On Teaching Optimization

Draft 2: 18 September 2025

A beloved friend recently asked the question about learning pedagogy, “is it not enough to just teach well, as best you’re able?”. I think that it’s really evocative question, for a variety of reasons. Not least, what does it mean to teach well, and what does it mean to teach as best as I am able?

I am able to lift far more weight when I learn proper form. I am able to swim far faster with proper form. I can learn far more adeptly with better strategies. It is perhaps unsurprisng to me, then, that I believe that I can teach better by learning more.

Of course, the connection to better learning is probably the most apt. It’s incredibly tempting to spend hours upon hours trying to design a perfectly optimized study plan. A “less optimized” plan, by contrast, is likely to generate more learning if those same hours are used to study instead. Similar tension exists in the realm of teaching.

In my view, there are a number of things that can make it easier or harder to teach. For example, I once taught a chemistry course where we taught oxidation numbers five¹ weeks before the electron. When students asked what it meant that Oxygen is minus two² means, I had no other recourse but to say “wait a few weeks”. In general, a bad curriculum makes it nearly impossible to be a good teacher. The best I could teach there was far worse than the best I could teach in the astronomy course where I had more curricular flexibility.

Still, the research which exists tends to cover a single class or few classes of students. Sometimes these demographics are easily mapped onto the demographics of a different classroom. Just thinking about the difference in classroom dynamic between my undergraduate and graduate institutions, however, it is also clear that this mapping may not always be useful.

So, then, is it seeking optimization for its own sake to learn the current best practices of pedagogy?

I think especially at the point in career my beloved is at, where there is no expectation of designing a curriculum, let alone teaching a full course, it’s generally better to know more than less. When it comes time to create a course, however, I think that it’s likely productive procrastination at best to look for the optimal ways to design a course rather than spending the mental and temporal effort on structuring the course day by day and overall. I hope my views are coherent?

Draft 1.5: 18 September 2025

A good teacher has good curriculum, good in class presence, and forms good connections with students. I don’t think that any of these are contrary to each other, and in general I even think that the three are linked.³ So, then, what does it mean to be good at each of these?

Being good at connection seems the easiest to define, if only because it’s the hardest to quantify.⁴ Students should feel safe bringing up questions, should want to attend class, and should learn. Anything else then falls into the individual professor’s preference. As a person who has never had their place in the Academy questioned, I find it important that students do not see me as someone inherently above them. For the professors I’ve had with different identities which lead them to not have this same implicit level of authority, the reverse is often needed. Whether or not students should feel comfortable bringing up their interpersonal extra-class conflicts for advice is entirely up to the professor’s discretion, in my mind.

What does it mean to have good in class presence? I think that it means that classes are led in a way that is best for student learning. This is where a lot of the education research comes, I think. I think that it’s also important to be more than a machine, though. In order to connect to students, there needs to be flexibility in the class plan.

Finally, what does it mean to have a good curriculum? Students have clear ideas of what they should learn, an effective path to the knowledge, and ideally the professor doesn’t need to think much in the day to day.

I’d generally argue not very. In general, if professors are willing to place themselves in the role of a learner, then most decisions are fairly easy to make. After all, I know no one who thinks that they learn best from pure lecture. So, I do not need to read the literature to know that I should maybe not do pure lecture.

Of course, then we get to that fun dichotomy of perceived and real learning. If I remember correctly, flipped classrooms have significantly lower perceived learning but higher real learning. In my general view, it’s more important for students to learn than to feel like they’ve learned. In some regards, it is almost ideal that they leave the course feeling as if they’ve learned nothing, because that implies a deep level of integration for all the knowledge.

Flipped classrooms have the secondary benefit of reduced workload. Once lectures are recorded a single time, the professor is free to use them and work on in-class exercises.

Draft 1: 18 September 2025

To be clear, this folly⁵ is not about the teaching of optimization. Rather, it is written in response to a dear friend’s consideration after attending a lecture on chemistry education. The main thrust of the argument, as I read, at least,⁶ is that there may be an over-emphasis on teaching optimally. Is this just another example of the modern optimization grindset?

My initial response is that trying to change my teaching to better help students learn is not an example of optimization gone too far. One quote in particular stands out to me right now, “is it not enough to just teach well, as best you’re able?”

I’ve reflected on what it means to do something to my best ability before, likely multiple times. In light of that, let’s quickly summarize what I think that I came to as a conclusion. Just as editing and revising prose or poetry does not make it less authentic, neither does learning better strategies preclude doing the best I can. Much like with lifting, where the best I can do is easily measured as the heaviest. Learning better form is likely to improve the highest I can lift.

Certainly this can go too far, however. When I think about what teaching to the best of my ability means, I think that it’s a balancing act between more than a few different sinks. What are they? Not totally sure, but this is a great place to explore.⁷

Obviously subject mastery is part of it. There are arguments I could see for not updating material, especially introductory material, in light of new discoveries. That is, I have a vague memory of learning that SN1 and SN2 reactions are not as evenly split as we were taught in school. However, there’s also something to be said for a shared base of knowledge. Especially in science, where all knowledge is definitionally approximate, is there something wrong with the lie to children we teach being one we ourselves were taught? I’m not totally sure.

Nonetheless, it is still obviously important to know the material one teaches. If students ask questions that are outside of the lesson plan, then it is good to be able to give them a true and accurate answer, at least to their current skill level. Also, being able to point to current developments in the field gives students who are extra motivated places to explore their interest.

Course planning is another aspect. It’s generally good, in my view, at least, to have a coherent arc of teaching through the semester. This may not be totally up to the individual instructor, since I know that many places require certain skills to be taught in certain orders. Even if not that, though, it’s expected that students leave courses within a track with a certain set of knowledge. I’d like to hope that the knowledge students are expected to carry with them is clearly laid out somewhere, even if only visibly to the department instructors.

Decisions about grading, assessment, and assignment also fall here, in my view. Decisions about format, be it virtual or in-person or flipped or mixed or workshop are also under course planning.

At some very quick point, however, it’s likely that working on course planning can fall into the trap of hyper optimization. I agree that in general it’s best not to try to live life totally focused on optimization. Knowing that time is limited, however, I do also think that there’s something to be said for prioritizing time. The gains students might have between slight differences in assignment types are likely overshadowed by any number of other considerations.

At the more micro level, there’s the individual lesson plan for each class period. I’ve never had a strong one of these, but the fact that nearly every person with degrees in education I know uses them implies that there is clearly merit. It was nice having a course where the handout at the beginning of each period was the expected learning and plans for the day.

I think that it is within the lesson plans that I see most of the research, and where I think optimization can quickly spiral out. Is it better to spend five hours thinking about exactly how well the assessment tracks the pyramid structure or the same five hours coming up with other possible questions? I personally think that the latter is better.

I also think that there is something in modern education research in the idea of pre-thinking. That is, there’s a benefit to knowing exactly what is going to happen in the lesson ahead of time, rather than having to extemporize day of. If teaching the same course year after year, doing this once up front saves the time for future terms.

So, keeping up on the education literature would seem to have merit. However, student experience is going to be different than the experience of the research. There’s a joke my brothers and I bring up fairly often, “people misunderstand the Stanford Prison Experiment; it isn’t that people are monsters, it’s that Stanford students are monsters”. That is, different campuses will have different demographics and cultures. My undergraduate, for instance, prioritized teaching us the bare minimum to be able to delve deeply into our interest later. Or, at least, that’s how it felt, especially since each major was only allowed to require like 8 courses.

So talking to your students and treating them as not interchangable is important. However, the more interchangably students are treated, the more able one is to avoid falling into implicit bias. Hmm, that’s a hard one.

I feel like I’ve gotten rambly here, so let’s try again from the top. Draft 1.5 is just going to be thinking about what it means to be a good teacher, and then Draft 2 maybe bring the two together.

Daily Reflection: 18 September 2025

I think↩
two minus, I was supposed to be persnickity↩
wild how I had an identical number of characters in the first half of each of these sentences. Fun things about using a FW font↩
fun how definitions and quantification are inversely correlated to me↩
I should find a different word for these. Folly is a little too self-denigrating to be best for me, I think. Something to do with the fact that I start each one with “on”?↩
mmmm nested phrasing↩
also I love music I should never go for days without listening↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

On Mindfulness

Draft 4: 16 September 2025

One of those I hold dearest and nearest to my heart recently posted a consideration¹ about wanting to be less connected to telephones and occupy time more mindfully in general. I too, wish that I was less attached to screens and more present in my day to day. Even had my dearest friend not posted the consideration, though, I think that i might have come to this folly on my own. As I have been mentioning, I’m on a train, and have been now for more than a full calendar day. Something about the nature of riding a train feels almost designed to foster mindful usage of time.

In part, I think it is because of the fundamentally intentional nature of riding a train. Unlike cars, who nominally follow lanes, or planes which do so solely out of agreement, trains can only run on a single path. There do exist depots to change lines, but they are few and far between. The route I ride is not one which is being chosen by the train conductor; it was chosen by the backs of countless men whose labor built the rails through the empire.

Even more than that, though, the train is filled with windows. Each moment is a new vista. Each blink misses some ineffable piece of a beautiful reality.

Travel by train is also not perfectly smooth. As the train rides along, there are gentle hills and vales, bumps and turns. Each one is an invitation to remember that time, like the train passes by.

Finally, travel by train is fundamentally opposed to the modern optimization and multitasking model. Trains move around the speed of a car, though slightly slower usually. That is, they move far slower than a plane. Also unlike a plane, the trains I have been on do not have any WiFi connections. I’ve been in dead zones which last hours on end, and so there is no way for me to ignore my present with the allure of the online.

These past few weeks, I have found myself living minimally. That is, I have been making few decisions, and generally letting the flow of life move me along. I play games because they occupy my time. Partially as a response to my reflection last night, I came into this morning wanting to be more mindful of the passage of time. I think I can call it a success, given that I’ve written more than two drafts of a musing, bound a book, read eleven chapters of my web novel, three chapters of Musicking, and meditated for forty minutes.² It is not yet 1500, meaning that I still have more than 9 hours with which to continue to use the day.

Computer and phone screens are optimized and designed to draw me in. The quick rush of scrolling or watching a screen go boom are engaging to base parts of myself, and that’s something that I cannot control. This is not to let myself off, however.

What is to let myself off is the realization that it’s been two weeks since I finished the paperwork for my doctorate. Fourteen days to recenter after decades of schooling feels reasonable to me. However, fourteen days feels like enough, at least today. I know that I am most happy with my memories in days and weeks where I pushed myself. Never do I look back on days where I was gentle with myself and be happy for it; the most I can do is accept that it was likely necessary to rest.

So, in the interest of being more mindful, I look at my daily reflection. In general, the one I’ve struggled most with is the idea of not looking at screens. For whatever reason, I can often read for far longer on a phone or computer than I can with physical books. I can also write for far longer on a computer, though that is far less surprising; I both have a faster output (matching my thoughts) and can do so for longer without pain (both because less motion and ones I’m more familiar with). However, there are obviously gradations to what it means to use a screen.

Writing these follies, for instance, feels a reasonable use of the screen. I can and often do gaze out the window at the passing scenery as the words appear on the page.³ Also, it is something mentally engaging and that brings me closer to the sort of person I wish to be. Reading on my phone or computer can likely have similar benefits, but perhaps because I cannot look away from the screen while consuming, I find it far less acceptable towards the goal.

In general, I want to become the sort of person that I want to become. That feels like a tautology, partially because it is, but also because I don’t entirely know what person I want to become. There are arguments in philosophy of belief about what it means to believe something, and I more and more find myself agreeing with the idea that belief and action are intrinsically linked. That is, you can, in fact, tell what someone believes by how they act. I’d like to be someone that believes time is precious⁴, and that means I need to act like it. I want to be someone that creates, and that means creating. I want to be someone with thoughtful and well-derived opinions; that means I need to read broadly and deeply.

While I cannot choose to believe immediately, I can take the paths which branch towards a better version of me. Rather than blindly walking a rut in life, I can choose to look up, seeing the rushing river⁵ that marks many other winding paths. Mindful life is a goal, not a destination. Each day, I can try to believe in mindful life more.

Post Script
It occurs to me that I also don’t want this to fall into the trap of the capitalist “every moment must be optimized”. Treating time as precious means living actively, not always filling the day. Sitting and looking at the way the stones break the tide is just as precious a use of time as generating something for others to consume. I need to remind myself of this often, especially in context of what it means to have spent time well.

Time being something one can spend, after all, fundamentally puts time as a form of capital.

Draft 3.1: 16 September 2025

Meta-commentary

It occurs to me that the initial goal of drafts was to see the way that a thought developed. Right now, I am treating each draft more like a small essay of its own. In the past, I would title those with fractions of draft numbers. Of course, most of the time I would do so in fragmentary ways, rather than these (relatively) complete drafts. Still, I think that there are often ideas expressed within different drafts that all belong in the “final” version of a post. With that in mind, let’s try generating a full draft of what we have

Real Text

For this partial draft, I think that I want to mostly free write about what I think is important in each draft, starting at the beginning.⁶

I mention the fact that this folly is inspired by a friend’s quest towards mindfulness and better texting. I want to live better, including an idea I don’t develop about how I can read for longer on phone than on paper. I know (novel) that I can also write for far longer on computer than by hand, though that may be equally speed of typing as ease of writing; my hands do not cramp when I type.

I point out that I am generally happiest when I drove myself like a task master. I reflected on the fact that productive is not the word I want, though it is at least close to the idea I want.

Or, really finally, I end with the note from my brother, who is exploring meditation.

I comment on how passive I am experiencing life, and again run into the fact that my words paint a picture of me as capital. Overstimulation becoming stimulation, and the way that double media consumption means that the odds of both ending together are minimal. Found a typo, but discussed a way to maybe be better at playing the game by stopping when it stops being fun. (new) it did work.

I reflected on being scared of boredom, but I don’t actually think that’s resonant with me. I think that I’m just bored of being bored. Might be worthwhile to try just turning everything off for an hour and staring out the window? (novel)

I went through to see how much media I wanted to consume. Perhaps because I did so, I then consumed the media more quickly.

I reflect on the difference between intentionality and mindfulness, especially in relation to trains, which cannot move as freely as other forms of transport. I also point out that trains are slower and more divorced from the broader world.⁷

I point out the comfort, and the way that I am becoming more connected with physical, rather than digital, time.

Finally, I end with the note that I am generally mentally engaged. These past weeks are probably better seen as recovery from the effort of my dissertation, rather than my new norm, when it comes to how I learn and grow.

Now to try sitting mindfully for an hour looking out the window, and then to write Draft 4.

Welp. Made it 36 minutes, but then the train came to a stop. Hard to stop thinking and not sleep.

Draft 3: 16 September 2025

This next draft⁸ may belong better in my folly On Trains, but it will lie here instead.

I am not entirely sure where the line between intentionality and mindfulness lies. Certainly they describe two different modes of operating in the universe, as they are two different words.⁹ I wonder if it may be a causal relationship. By living with intention, life becomes mindful. Or is it that when approaching life with mindfulness, intentionality comes out.

I suppose in setting the causal relationship, I can start to tease a difference out. Intentionality requires action, while mindfulness does not. I can intentionally sit and do nothing, but the absence of doing becomes the action. Mindfully sitting, however, may result in doing nothing.

It is perhaps unsurprising that I find myself playing with the border between these two terms. Trains are, in many regards, the most intentional of forms of transit. They can only move along perfectly prescribed paths, and only those trains which are constructed with rails at the exact same distance are able to ride. Contrast this with cars and motorcycles, which though nominally bound, can still at least in theory break from the street. Abstracted further, boats follow what they call sea lanes, but they are not fixed nor mandated. At the final level, planes fly in three dimensional space. Even though constrained to go in set patterns, there is nothing in the form itself which requires the movement.

And yet, despite the fact that planes are theoretically freer than cars, modern travel makes cars the freest option. I suppose that if I were able to fly my own plane I might feel differently, but. If I were to do this trip via plane, there would have been a similar number of locations that I could go to, with similarly constrained scheduling. Of course, planes are faster than trains, so what is a daily or sub-daily arrival can happen hourly.

If I were to have driven this, there would have been functionally no constraints on the way I traveled. Far from being intentional about when I reach and leave each location, I would be able to even choose where I travel on a whim.

It is perhaps this freedom in cars that makes driving feel so much less intentional to me. Even though there is almost always a best route, rare are the roads which do not at least allow for a diversion every few hours.

On a train, however, the touch of the maker is everywhere. I pass by the same route that has been tread countless times by countless others. Unlike in a car, I know that my train follows the identical route; there is nowhere else its rails can take it. And, the train seems almost designed for intentional travel. In today’s fast-paced world of planes, the train travels no faster than a car. In a world where even planes are beginning to get high-speed WiFi, all of the trains I have driven on either removed their WiFi or never had it to begin with. Hours at a time see me unable to reach cellular service.

Unlike in a car, however, this inability to connect to the outside world does not leave me feeling a sense of fear. I am not in control of the motion, and the system is designed to make it hard or impossible to collide with another train.

Too, the train has a viewing deck. Even outside of this area with chairs facing towards the windows, the seating area has windows larger than in my home. My view of nature is just obstructed enough to remind me that I am enlosed in a climate protected shell. The scenery passes me by, and because trains were laid with linear intention, we pass through the mountains, rather than looping around them as cars are oft to. Because trains do not turn well, the track does not whip me about.

And so, even though I find myself fighting to break the habits which call for me to live mindlessly, the mere act of riding a train pushes me towards a mindful state. While I can wander up and down the aisles, there are still only four cars. I can stream non-local media when there is service, but it is so variable as to be difficult. I can waste my time away¹⁰ by playing games, and yet even still the not-infrequent bumps mean that I am never able to completely escape the reality of motion, unlike on a plane or while stationary. The passage of time flows by me, and though I am untethered from hours and minutes, I am much more tied to the time of day. I watched the sunrise from dawn through nearly noon. I watched the sunfire sky fade into night.

Of course, this may equally be that I am simply finally recovering from the burnout of writing my thesis. I often found¹¹ that I would only make it a few days or a week into any given break before I would be done with rest and once again yearn for motion and action. Or, at the very least, I become able to sit with myself again. I want to play the games right now, but I think this is a legitimate want, rather than simply a question of filling my hours. I’m going to try asking myself after each round whether I actually enjoy the gameplay loop still. If the answer is no, then I will set the game down and find another activity.

Draft 2: 16 September 2025

One of my dearest friends recently posted a consideration¹² on the theme of mindfulness. It made me think about the fact that, despite my own goals to experience this month more mindfully, I have really been fairly passively spending my time.¹³ I am on the way back to the middle from the western portion of the trip, which makes this as good a time as any other, if not a better one, to think about how to better use my time.¹⁴

I do enjoy playing the games that I play, at least at first. However, much like the joke of “oh no, there’s milk left over after I finished my cookies... oh no there are cookies left over after I finished my milk”, I never seem to end the games in sync with whatever media I’m consuming. There’s a form of the hedonic treadmill: neither listening to the podcast nor playing the game feels stimulating enough on their own, and so I tie them together. Perhaps in the same way that I consume media¹⁵, I feel that it’s less unproductive to consume more media in the same time period. Of course, there’s nothing about this phase of my life that requires production.

I suppose one answer to the wasting time is to reflect after each game whether or not I’m still actively having fun. If not, I can stop the game. I do know that decision fatigue is a real thing, however. Then again, I’m kept in this train for the rest of the day. Assuming that decision fatigue is reset at sleep, there’s minimal that I can choose other than being mindless.¹⁶

Boredom is scary. It don’t think that I’m yet in a great mental place in regards to the death of my mother and the death of the part of me that is a student. When I stop to let my mind go where it will, I worry that I’ll get stuck somewhere darker than I can escape. Writing it out, though, I hate that option. Fear will not define me unless I let it, and I refuse to let it right now.

Other than fear of boredom, ease of getting trapped in loops, and a vague feeling of wanting to consume, is there anything else that drives me not to be mindful?

Lack of inspiration maybe; there’s nothing I have with me that I particularly want to give my time to. I suppose that I have yet to do the philosophy books, and those would likely work really well. I enjoy book binding, at least in theory¹⁸, and I said that I wanted to learn philosophy. That’s still true enough, and so maybe when I finish here, I’ll once again work on reading the web novel, and then bind the book. For now, I’m comfortable goign through the media that I have until I’ve caught up¹⁹ on all the things I said I would do. Then again, 160 items is a lot. I’m curious how much time they’ll take.

At single speed: 86 hours, 15 minutes if I include the audio drama, 56 hours, 45 minutes if not. At 3x speed, that means about 28 hours 45 minutes or 19 hours. By the end of the trip I’ll have absoluitley gone though the first of those, and likely the second as well. However, it’s enough that I don’t think that I need to pace myself lest I run out of content.²⁰

For now, let’s see what book binding feels like while listening to some of the videos. I’ll come back and reflect on that then. maybe then also read some of the books I’m binding. Current time as of sitting down to bind intro to phenomen and musicking: 758. 16 folios for musicking later: 806. One hour later, the other book is folded, and musicking is finished. Listened to about 1.3 hours of 3x speed, which feels about right?

Draft 1: 15 September 2025

One of my friends is considering ways to live more mindfully and to also be better at texting. Despite the fact that these two goals feel almost intrinsically opposed, I cannot say that I don’t understand. I think that I would benefit from being worse at texting, but both of us share the sentiment that we would be better served by using phones less. So, why do I want to live mindfully?

At a gut level, I think that it’s probably generally better to live life experientially than passively. When I’m on the phone or media-maxing²², I don’t have time to sit with myself. Even when just on the train, I find myself getting bored after just a few minutes. For some reason, I can read for far longer on my phone than on my computer.

I’m not entirely sure what the solution is. On the one hand, most of the platforms I use to contact people also have space for me to mindlessly scroll. I also enjoy being up to date on the trends of my generation. On the other, I do really love the concept of living authentically. I’ve talked a lot with some people about how I may live too much for the future. That is, I rarely look back at myself and wish that I had been gentler on myself.²³ Rather, I find that I am most happy with my life when I was pushing myself.

I’m just over a week into my journey across the country. I’m just over two weeks into my journey as a Doctor.

In that time, I have been far less productive than I have desired. Productive is not exactly the word I’m looking for, however. Much as I would have liked to do more posts or get back into my web novel, I also wanted to be on my devices less and be more present. I wanted to bind the books I’ve packed and read them.

Maybe the word I’m looking for is actually mindful. I have not been as mindful of my time and place as I’ve wanted.

Something about riding on the train is fundamentally geared towards mindfulness. The scenery is constantly passing by, and so each sight out the window is different from every view before and after. I’ve seen countless stunning vistas that passed away before I was able to get my phone out to photograph them.²⁴ Whenever I look up from a screen or book or nap, I find my breath almost taken away by the beauty of the land.²⁵

So, as I get ready to end my day²⁶, I think on the ways that I can be better going forward. There’s a philosophy channel I follow who talks a fair amount about belief. Apparently, there exists a fairly large strain in the philosophy of belief that claims belief is fundamentally tied to action; if I do not act a way, I do not truly believe. From that, being better to me means equally setting better beliefs and acting in accordance with those stated beliefs. Looking at my daily reflection, I think that there is something to be said for the goals I set. I will try to go stretch and pray now, and then I’ll lie down and see how I feel in a few minutes. Maybe I’ll be up again for some composition, maybe I’ll want to read my web novel. Maybe I’ll want to use my screen and need to remind myself that while the base parts of me want to spend all day staring at media, the rest of me does not. As my brother said, “it’s about making the media in your mind.”

Daily Reflection: 16 September 2025

much as I have chosen follies and my father chose musings↩
not quite forty, but↩
thanks touch typing practice. I should like to get back into you↩
not the right word, I think? Or maybe i just put too much capitalism thought into the word↩
the train has been going along the Colorado River for hours now↩
ooh, counter to the way I post!↩
a folly about the sacred nature of trains would be interesting, and is something to consider in the post on trains↩
init. reflection, changed before starting Draft 4↩
I am a firm beleiver that every word is uniquely meaning bound↩
whittle? spend? waste just feels wrong↩
oof, I wrote find, but that is no longer true, now is it?↩
inspired by my questioning of what to call these writings, I think↩
hate the fact that my metaphor is so steeped in capitalism.↩
experience my time? work with my time? hmm↩
as fast as I can↩
is mindless the antonym for mindful? great question↩
better? Nah too poetic↩
for some reason the thread has been a huge pain for me lately. Maybe I just need to use more strands↩
if that’s the right word↩
also ignoring the whole “all the content creators are still creating content”↩
because wow this window seat is boiling hot↩
3x podcast and bright flashy game↩
my thesis is a shocking counter example↩
I’ve been asked to take photos of my travel. Also, while preparing my thesis, I realized that I don’t take photos with people as often as I might like.↩
with the obvious exception of at night. For whatever reason, Amtrak uses blue lights at night, and so my night vision is effectively nonexistent. Unlike on highways and freeways and interstates, there are few lights along the path a train travels.↩
it may be 2000 right now, but I do find that there’s something really nice about just kind of lying down and vaguely letting my thoughts flow↩
or should I call ppl from Virginia virgins?↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

On Kindness

Draft 1: 15 September 2025

Today in the Uber from my brother’s apartment to the train station, the driver asked why I was in town.¹ When I said that I was visiting my brother, he replied “Oh, that’s so kind of you.” That made me think about the word kind.

It was clear pretty quickly that English was not his only mother tongue.² It’s totally possible that kind is just the word he has for general sense of positive action. However, I then started thinking about one of the conversations I had with my mother and family. She expressed that she did not think of herself as nice, and the rest of my family disagreed. I generally agreed with her, since and kind are different³.

In reading Brene⁴ Brown’s “Atlas of the Heart”, I was glad to see that she had the same opinion. While I did not agree with all of her emotional definitions⁵, I did greatly agree with her distinction between kind and nice. Kindness is helping others, not just by doing what you think that they need, but doing what they actually need.⁶ Niceness, by contrast, is not rocking the boat.

My mother was a small first-generation college-educated woman. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that she learned not to be nice very early on in her career. If she was unwilling to rock the boat or be a nuisance, then there was no way that she would accomplish any of her professional goals. She was more than willing to tell people when they were wrong, and was more than happy to stand up and disagree with others.

However, she tempered this general lack of niceness with the greatest amount of kindness I think I have ever seen in someone. My entire life, old farmers would come up to us when we were in public to ask my mother for medical help. She always made time for them. One day I asked her why, and she explained that for many of them, not only is the act of going to the doctor something incredibly time consuming, but it is also an uncomfortable environment.⁷ By helping them with their questions when they came up, however, she was able to monitor them and make sure that they were doing ok.

Whenever someone collapsed in church,⁸ she was the first to respond. At one of my football games, a player hurt his neck, and she leapt over the fence and onto the field almost before anyone else noticed.

So, then, other than gushing about how great my mother was, what’s the point of these past paragraphs?

I’ve written a fair bit lately about the meaning of words, and so spending some time distinguishing kindness and niceness feels reasonable enough. I think that this can honestly be a reasonable enough short musing. Maybe it’s just that I want to make sure that this post gets posted, and I know that I won’t if I keep waiting. Still, I’m starting a sixty⁹ hour train ride, which means now might very well be a great time to start binding books again!

Daily Reflection: 15 September 2025

side note: the number of people who just immediately assume business when they see me is wild. The one time I think someone assumed I wasn’t traveling for business lately was when I was doing an outreach talk (so actually doing business)↩
whether or not English was his mother tongue, not totally sure↩
or, as Andrew Lloyd Weber reminds us “nice is different than good”↩
I don’t believe in diacritics in English language writing, because I’m a monster in some regards↩
especially the fact that she found anger to be a fundamentally negative emotion, while I’ve mostly seen it as neutral bordering on positive↩
which is what separates it from like pity or charity↩
as I think a little more, unsure if this is a real memory or just something I synthesized↩
which I’m told is not a normative experience for everyone↩
I think?↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

On Creating for Myself

Draft 3: 12 September 2025

As I was packing for my train trip, I found myself also wanting to pick up reading again. In addition to the books of music theory and epistemology I printed, I also brought a few print books that I’ve wanted to read. So far as I can remember, the books came from my mother, who gave me most of her theology collection a year or so before she died. It hurts to realize that I was the only one of her children who was holding to the faith then, even more because I no longer hold as closely. However, even though all that I do is fundamentally colored by both the way she raised me and her current absence, that is not what the point of that anecdote was. Rather, it was to explain how best I think that I came into a copy of “The Nonviolent Alternative” by Thomas Merton.

At first, I had thought that it was a full tome with one coherent through line. Instead, it is apparently a posthumously collected series of letters, reflections, essays, and the like by Merton. It opens with a fairly lengthy essay by the collector, which puts Merton’s work in the broader context. Given that this book came out just a year or so after Merton died, though, there was not much room to see the long term ripples. I don’t normally spend two full paragraphs on background, but for some reason, I feel the importance of noting what brought the essay I read to me. The first Merton writing in the book is “Original Child Bomb”, subtitled “Points for meditation to be scratched on the walls of a cave”.

In 41 verses, Merton tells the story of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Unlike every other framing of the story I have seen, the science plays almost no role. The scientists exist solely as phantom figures who occasionally oppose the bombing of a civilian populace.

In 41 verses, Merton shows the way that the modern war apparatus fundamentally precludes a just war.

My first two drafts today focused on the reasons I create. Reading the biography of Merton at the front of the book, I was reminded of the real reason I should do everything: I am called to do so by my faith.

The struggles that I have with the Catholic Church, especially as it exists in America, are not unique to my current age. Indeed, Zahn noted back in 1971 or 1980¹ that “scandals abound, not least of which involve bishops who have never found it within themselves to express pubic concern over the napalming of innocent civilians but who are quick to publish fervent denunciations of the napalming of Selective Service records.” Merton saw this same secular theology that the bishops of that age had. Where I find this fact hard to face and find myself struggling with my face because of it, Merton remained a faithful and obedient monk.

It seems as though “Original Child Bomb” was just many of the writings that Merton put out over the years. From the implications I have seen, it was not a particularly long project for him. I wonder if it required drafting, or if by that point in his life Merton was just so filled with the Spirit and had such a well-formed voice that the lines came out at once. I had meant to read the entire book in a sitting, but I found that I could not keep reading after the first.

The hobbies I want to do I want to do because I think that I can make the world better.

If Merton failed to do so, despite being so clearly a man of faith and being someone in conversation with leaders, what hope do I have?

On the other hand, despair is the easiest option. I may not have his reach or his fluidity with prose, but I have my own unique view on things. Merton’s view on Just War Theology seems as though it was relatively unique, and so far as I can tell, it remains relatively unique. He wrote “Original Child Bomb” near the eve of his earthly life, I am² near the beginning or early middle of mine.

So, what does creation do for me? Creation gives me a way to scream at a world gone mad, hoping to restore some sense of semblance. In prose which hopefully lacks polemics, I aspire to my writing bringing others closer to truth, love, and beauty. In making art, I hope to create beauty, which by its nature orients humanity towards the beautiful and true. In creating anything at all, I reveal my spark of Divinity, which will hopefully light myself and the world aflame.

Wow that was fun. I could do some drafting about what I want to do, but that doesn’t feel quite as meaningful or necessary right now. I’m happy with the way that these three drafts have helped me to come to an idea of not just what I want to do, but also why. I don’t know if my web novel currently does anything to be beautiful or lead others to truth and love. Rather than stop it, however, I guess that it would be better if I was to focus on that.

So, then, I suppose that what I have taken from today’s folly is that I don’t create for myself, nor do I really want to. Instead, I want to create so that I can bring the world to a better place. The only way that I can improve my ability to create something beautiful is to practice. And thus, my practice will continue.

Draft 2: 12 September 2025

There exist the obvious answers: the spark of the Divine within me kindling the world around, because I like all people fear my mortality and respond by trying to leave a legacy, my belief that I am better able to do things than others, the impacts I have sen that I can make. There are probably less obvious answers which would come to me if I thought more or deeper about the question. What I am nearly positive of, though, is that I do not create for myself.

Even though I do want to grow as a person and in my skills, I don’t think of what I do as being for myself. Although that’s a fun contradiction for me to explore, I don’t think that’s what I want to use this draft for. Rather, I want to explore the different forms of creation that I’ve either lost, fallen away from, or simply want to begin ab initio.³

This site is the obvious place for me to begin. If I was writing this for myself, I don’t know what that would mean. Would I SEO the site to make money on the side? Should I be posting my most extreme views, so that everyone around me can learn about the most radical takes I have? Should I be curating a clean image of myself, such that no employer, regardless of how dedicated, could find something negative about me? Should I be making it something that helps me to think about the world?

SEO is a special kind of hell. As I’ve listened to some videos⁴ about the platform culture, I more and more believe and see that there is something fundamentally broken about the idea of platform as service. That’s something I can explore later, but for now simply knowing that I hate that concept is probably sufficient.

Much as I enjoy testing the limits of my freedom of speech, I don’t know that this is a good idea. At the very least, I have seen the way that writing angry and inflamed⁵ posts has made others in my life less happy and more angry. That’s not really a goal of mine. Also, I quite enjoy life on this side of prison walls. Given the current political climate, I do start to worry about the things that I say coming back to cause me demonstrable harm.

At the other extreme, though, I do not want to push myself into a mold. I don’t want to stay within the lines solely to avoid being beaten down by someone else.

Alas, the remaining paragraphs have been lost somehow. In general, I think that I said that I want to write for a variety of reasons, and that’s ok. However, since then I’ve read a bit of Thomas Merton, which has been really life changing, and so now we go on to draft again.

Draft 1: 12 September 2025

I just read a beautiful piece of prose on writing from a dear friend of mine. In reading it and doing my own daily reflection, both digitally and on paper,⁶ I found myself thinking about how hard it is to start any hobby, maybe especially one that I’ve dropped before. I spent a fair bit of time⁷ considering what I wanted to title the post, and I ended up deciding that a post about trying to shift the reason I write would be a good one. After all, much of the advice I see about creation says that we should not work for the adoration of crowds, but rather create for the sake of our own muse.

I do not exist alone, and so it is ridiculous that I should create for myself alone. Even though I’ve met almost none of the readers of my web novel in person⁸, I still should think of them as complete and beautiful humans. Life lived in service of the other is the most fulfilling, so many theologies say.

So then, what does it mean for me to create something for myself? Is that something that I should even try for?

I think that generally when people say that we should create art for ourselves, it comes from a place of saying that we should not focus our muse on some hypothetical audience. Instead, we should create the art that we are called to. However, the fact that what I consider art at all, let alone what art I craft by nature is culturally constructed rarely enters the equation. Neither does the fact that, especially if I have an audience, there is an argument that I have some kind of duty to them. I of all people am always a fan of the idea that we owe so very much to each other and that we have a duty to fulfill.

By confirmed viewership, my web novel is by and away the most engaged with art that I create. By positive impact to the intellectual⁹ world, the science communication videos I’m planning will likely be the greatest.¹⁰ By self introspection, this site seems the best. By positive impact to the world, knitting and donating hats is probably the best I can do.

There exists in economics the idea of relative advantage. That is, even if organization A is better at production of everything than organization B, they may be more better at one than another. In that case, economics says that A should produce the thing that they’re most able to outperform in and then purchase the rest. There are clear benefits to this approach, especially when taken at small scales.

If I have a neighbor who is great at sewing and I am great at farming, then the two of us can both have nicer clothes and food by sharing. Atomizing the roles we have ends up reducing the atomization of people, because I am then reliant on his sewing, and he is reliant on my farming.

When this same approach is taken to the global stage, however, there are any number of issues.

I don’t like that I live in capitalism, or whatever the current system which holds me is. Rebellion takes a number of forms, and art is almost always among them. I do not think that I can generate art for the state, regardless of what the state is. So, then, does writing this site for myself end up doing good by virtue of speaking truth to power?

Am I speaking truth to power? I doubt that anyone with political strength reads this.

I don’t know the answer, and I don’t know that this current draft is taking me anywhere good. I had also wanted to muse on the idea of what hobbies I want to get back into and why, and these words have probably been helpful in framing my mind. As I’ve been writing these past few follies, I do find myself realizing that there’s a lot that I gain by simply word vomiting free association on the page. Second drafts find themselves hitting places I don’t know that I would have otherwise found. Since the goal of this site is to help me explore myself, thought and idea, that’s the best that it can do.

Daily Reflection: 12 September 2025

I think, depends on edition↩
Lord willing↩
I don’t believe in italicizing loan phrases because I think that it has semantic meaning in English, not simply as Latin↩
don’t ask↩
or inflammatory, I suppose↩
how’s that for nested lists?↩
read, less than thirty seconds↩
something that I’m happy to continue being true, to be clear↩
this word added after self introspection↩
my dear brother requested that I start a podcast, which also seems fun↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

Musings

I'm just copying my father

Draft 1

Draft 1: 6 October 2025

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Daily Reflection: 6 October 2025

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