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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↩

On Trains

N.B. Draft 2 is rambly, sad, and generally disorganized. That is to say, Draft 2 is like me right now.

Draft 2: 8 September 2025

When I was in high school, I talked with my best friend about doing a road trip across all of Interstate 80. We didn’t end up doing it before undergrad, because we were too busy. In the summer before my graduate school, then, I really planned on doing it. That summer was 2020, however, and suddenly the idea of going cross country by car became both more and less feasible. I am now done with graduate school, and by most objective standards have reached the pinnacle of schooling; this is my last chance for a post graduation travel celebration. Even though I haven’t been writing as much here as I would’ve liked this summer¹, I do feel like the fact that I traveled a lot is still clear. From June 1st to yesterday, I put more than 6000 miles on my car.

I’m pretty sure 6000 miles gets me most of the way across the US. Even if it was mostly in a spiderweb shape, rather than a line, then, it’s as though I did what I had set out to do. So, trains felt like the best way to visit friends, because I had the hope that they’d be less of a nightmare than flying. In what is no surprise at all, they are.

I’m hoping that these weeks of travel can be for me a kind of resetting. I will be entering corporate America starting in October, and while I am very excited for the fact, I am also somewhat nervous. I don’t know what that life will be like, and I feel like I’m kind of wasting my degree. However, I am also almost entirely burned out of thinking, especially about chemistry. This month will, if nothing else, be a period of time with no obligations on my mind.

I’m finding myself more and more emotional as I think about the trip. I think that part of me is still feeling cheated by the fact that my mom was unable to watch me graduate. Another part of me is just generaly worried about not having a place I can retreat to for the rest of the month; normally when I feel like life is too much I can either go to my apartment, or if things are particularly bad, back home. I suppose that since I’m only doing my bookings a week or so in advance, I can always cancel, but that feels like the worst answer.

Anyways, trains are great because they’re way more spacious and travel feels much more real than on a plane. When I see cars pass by slowly or be passed by slowly, I am connected to the sense of getting between points in a way that airplanes cannot do. Unlike driving, I can stand up and stretch, take a nap, or just close my eyes for a bit without negative consequences.

The train is just now hitting the part of Montana responsible for having mountains on the horizon.² This is not my first time seeing the Rockies, or even my first time traveling through them. I do think that this might be my first time going through the Rockies³ since what feels like my family’s last great road trip. I must have been ten or so, and we decided to drive to the West Coast to see my mom’s family. I remember watching math lectures on DVD with my brothers, far too much Homestar Runner, and listetning and singing along to so much great music. I remember going to see family, and I remember the lawyers in my family telling me that I should become a lawyer. I think that I remember going to a National Park or four.

I don’t remember my mom’s voice as we drove. I don’t remember what I wore. I don’t remember the feeling of love as she wrapped me in a hug, back when she was still taller than me.

Life is a train, I’m sure I’ve heard said before. While being on these first hours of train time, I’ve been thinking about the 1970’s song “City of New Orleans”, which is about a train. It’s also about America, the death of small towns, and the loss of innocence.⁴ The train stopped for a half hour or so in some middle of nowhere town in rural Montana; we were ahead of schedule. With the town less than an hour behind me, I have already forgotten its name. I remember that there was an Ace, and that they were fundraising for some children’s event.

Last night I slept through all of the state of Minnesota. Or, at least, I have no memories I can pin to the state. It is more than possible that I was at some point awake, whether complaining to myself about a neighbor⁵ or just bemoaning my inability to sleep through the night. How much of my own life have I slept through? What vast swaths of temporal land have I just let pass me by completely unnoted?

If life is a train, I would have said that my mom was the conductor. I don’t mean this in a domineering way, she was just the person I went to for all my questions and life concerns. Without her, I find that I don’t know who to turn to when I have questions.

That feels forced, but I’m thinking about how trains are so far from a faith object. There’s a comment on my web novel I think about a lot, which caused me to learn that concrete the noun is much younger than the adjective. That is, someone looked at concrete and went “yeah that seems pretty definite”. Similarly, trains are behemoths of steel and oil. They travel with no freedom, bound by the tracks that countless men laid. I have been thinking about my own relationship to faith a lot lately. Am I like the train, living a life not just needless of faith, but in active oposition to it?

Draft 1: 8 September 2025

I’m officially just over a day into my post graduation⁶ celebratory trip. I decided to celebrate by going on a long train trip.

Mostly, that decision came because I’ve been feeling really burned out of driving lately.⁷ I want to visit many of the friends that have asked me to visit them through the ages, and I wanted to not deal with flights, because I hate planes in many regards. I had a memory of one of the guys I dove with while studying abroad⁸ talking about how good the train system in the US is for getting around the country. Since I didn’t want to drive, didn’t really want to fly, the old classic trio left me with a single other option.

And so, yesterday I drove down to the singular city which Amtrak uses to connect the east and west⁹, saw a friend¹⁰, and boarded a train to follow the advice once given to the founder of my home town “go west”. My initial thoughts upon getting onto the train were that trains are just miles away better than planes. Each seat is more than large enough for me to comfortably sit, there’s no judgement for wandering, and there was literally no security. I brought what I’m pretty sure is more bags than I was supposed to. I’m the only one in my row of two seats, which is also really nice. I love that the seat assignments are hand-done still.

Anyways, perhaps because of the nature of the novelty of train tripping, perhaps because of the absence of WiFi, and perhaps because semidaily¹¹ musing is my jam, I did not write a folly. With that in mind, given that it’s currently not yet 11 am central and that I am in the mountain time soon, I figured now would be a good time to blog aobut trains. Except, having written these three and a bit paragraphs, I realize that I don’t really have that much else to say about trains. I guess it’s time to go ahead and flip the coin between finishing binding the book and reading a paper book. I think that I’ll start with binding the web novel because I am enjoying a podcast¹² and want to finish it. We’lll see what I feel like doing by the time that the podcast is over. Likely either sit and silently do the binding, another podcast, or read “the Nonviolent Alternative”, which I think was in my mother’s theology collection before she gave it to me. I’ll be back for draft two!

Daily Reflection 8 September 2025

thanks thesis↩
I assume that what I see are mountains and that I’m still in Montana↩
rather than over, as in a plane↩
I think↩
seriously, do you need to call people?↩
both undergraduate and graduate↩
shocking what driving 6500 miles in three months will do, especially when you took most of June off↩
I’m pretty sure as I think about it that it was one of the two men in my adult lesson class, before I was immediately recommended to just join a club team.↩
as far as I can tell. I’m willing to believe that there’s a way to go between them without using Chicago but it would be more constrained for sure↩
and left my car with him↩
feels like bidaily should be twice and semi should be every other day↩
technically? I’m listening to a video which is also streamed as a podcast. It’s very fun, and would highly recommended. I’m learning about China’s only female emperor.↩
or, at least, the one he recommended me to read. (Geometry of Music)↩
read, as far back as I can think of, so at least a year↩
I think that it’s currently on chapter 900 and I just finished 600↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

On Words for Rare Knowledge

Draft 2: 6 September 2025

Now that I’m officially a doctor, I get to live the dream that I’ve had on some level motivating me since I was a child: the power to define and redefine words as I see fit.¹ I’ve also been thinking a lot about knowledge, and since I was unable to get a chapter on theory of knowledge and science in particular in my thesis², this next period of the page might be filled with my attempts to come to one.³ I’d like to find some like fundamental set of reading for theory of knowledge, and it just as writing that occurred to me I can do that. Turns out “epistemology” is the study of theory of knowledge, which is definitely something I once knew. Although I am a firm believer that reading primary sources is often useful, as a chemist I am also a firm believer that often there’s synthetic information⁴ that is not easily or often transmitted in the original sources. With that in mind, I’ve found a few texts that might help me with my epistemology, which is great!⁵

As a doctor and a person interested in knowledge, I want to be precise in my language usage, especially here.⁶ The world, at least as I’ve known it, loves the idea of secret and hidden knowledge. Or, being fully clear, it loves the idea of rare knowledge.

It can mean any number of things to any number of people. From last draft⁷, we have that this knowledge can be hidden,⁸ require the learner⁹ to change their view on reality¹⁰,¹¹, be understood at some intuitive and uncommon level,¹² or be mysterious.¹³ In that set of distinctions, I did of course level the fact that knowledge can be hidden of its own accord (it’s not always obvious to people the outcomes of their actions) or by an agent (as is popular in conspiracy thinking), the fact that the intuitive knowledge may be ancillary or required, and the fact that mystery means many things to many people. Still, these are some good starting places. Let’s see what other words people use for rare knowledge, and see how we might use these distinctions.

I think that magic might be for things which aren’t known but are actionable. That is, if I have a box that tells me the weather, that’s magic. For most people,²¹ a computer is magic. Magic is that which is not known.

Do I want to somehow distinguish the weather box that is unknowable from the computer, which is theoretically knowable? Do I want to distinguish being able to understand parts but not the whole²²?

We’ll see if it comes up. Why is this relevant? Oh, that’s probably a great thing to cover too.

I think that knowledge is not commonly held for a number of reasons. I was talking to friends last night, and one of them mentioned that in Psychology, there’s a growing idea that it is useful to learn about the emotional words with no direct cognates in a given language, as they can potentially help others to better understand or name their experience. Even before that, though, the idea of unknown or not-widely known knowledge being for a number of reasons is something that’s entranced me.

Is this related to my faith questions at all? Honestly I don’t know. Probably, since on some level it’s also my whole “what do I know and what do I believe?” thing. I’m hopefully²⁴ never going to be a pure Descartian “all I can prove is that I am having thoughts”, and generally am completely fine with the idea of knowledge, objective reality, and the transmission of both.

That’s probably a good thing to have printed on the top of each page of philosophy I read. There’s something to be said for “touch grass” as a general catch-all for “if you have an issue with acting in the world from learning something new, maybe you shouldn’t base your life on it”. Then I do get to the whole concept of a useful lie, which is ope another whole thing I need to consider.

Model is a word, useful lie is a term. I think that both ill serve my purpose for now. A lot of esoteric knowledge is recondite because learning the useful lies which prepare you for understanding the occult knowledge hide the deeper fact. As an example, people hate the idea of the electron cloud because we learn the ball and stick model, and then the orbital model. The fact that electrons co-exist in the same space feels even harder to understand because we have explanations for the behavior. Should I try to come up with an example of each form of hidden knowledge and explanation?

Let’s just write up the words here and call it for the day. I don’t want to burn out on writing, and this is a solid more than two thousand words.²⁵

Draft 1: 6 September 2025

Something that’s bothered me for a while is the idea that we have so many words which mean the exact same thing. In general, words have slightly different flavors of meaning, which is totally fine for me. When talking about knowledge, especially knowledge which is not widely held, there does not seem to be this same distinction. Since I’ve already accepted that what I write here is going to be explicitly and intentionally²⁶ using language in a way that is not the norm. With that in mind, I want to start distinguishing the words for rare knowledge, especially because I am about to embark on a train journey where I have the intention of reading a number of philosophical works.²⁷

So, then, what words do I need to find a specific flavor for? I’m going to go through them as I can think of them, and then compile at the end.

Having just watched a video about Albert the Great, I will accept that occult means hidden. That is, occult knowledge is not simply unused by virtue of being boring or just undesired; it is actively suppressed or kept from sight. I feel like I want a way to distinguish knowledge which is hidden on its own account and knowledge which is hidden by some deeper power. That’s something to keep in mind going forward.²⁸

I really want the word eldritch to come with connotation of causing a fundamental change in the receiver. That is, knowledge is eldritch when being able to understand it means that you must see the rest of the world differently forever. I have a whole idea of a post about the idea that all knowledge is fundamentally eldritch, but then I think that I’ll get into something circular. For now, I’ll just stay with eldritch knowledge cannot be learned without changing oneself in a deep and permanent fashion.

Gnosis is a popular term whenever you talk to Gnostics or annoying Catholics.²⁹ It’s the Greek word for knowledge, but generally has a connotation of being secret. It also has a denotation, according to the internet, of being intuitive. From this, I’ll take the intuition portion. Knowledge is gnostic³⁰ when it can only be understood at an intuitive level. Or, at least, it is gnostic when it is understood at an intuitive level. Hmm, I feel like there’s a difference between fundamentally gnostic and practically gnostic words. Another place we might have an option.

Arcane is another word. Arcane just comes from “arcanum”, a second-declension noun meaning secret or mystery. I don’t really want to get into the whole “mystery means something different in the Catholic tradition”, but I’m happy for arcane knowledge to be information³¹ which is counterintuitive or mysterious.

Ok I realize now (see above footnote)³² that I need to reframe this entire post. So, Draft Two, here we go.

Daily Reflection 6 September 2025

or as I see absences in the lexicon, who can say which it used to be or even what context it originated in↩
dissertation?↩
really bringing the term folly to be meaningful↩
synthesized?↩
no, there is not an entire suitcase of my three dedicated to books and loose pages, that’s such a ridiculous assertion, who would even consider that question? (ignore that when I studied abroad I had three cases, one was school, one was clothes, one was musical instruments of course)↩
I want to be precise independent of these two considerations, but ignore that fact please↩
dear new readers, I apologize for the self-referential nature of the site↩
occult↩
student? seeker?↩
nature? the world? these are not the same I guess↩
eldritch↩
gnostic↩
arcane↩
Merriam-Webster↩
what is an axiom?↩
can you tell I’m not directly quoting?↩
likely revelation/ revealed↩
hmm, do I want something for natural but non-agentic? Like “I understand this because I stared at this rock forever”...eh see if there’s any other words↩
yet another option↩
which I use often, saying things like “as a scientist” versus “as a musician”↩
myself included. I get logic gates and I get electrons and I get (kind of) coding, but the in between terrifying↩
no, that’s just emergent properties?↩
me, and future me↩
The desire to make the word a parenthetical or footnote was great, don’t worry↩
I’d ask where this writing speed was during my thesis, but the answer is equal parts this is fully what I want, this is unfiltered, burnout, and it doesn’t need to be accurate in the same way↩
both in the sense of using intention and the sense of it not being an accident↩
yes, for those who have seen what I packed, I do consider music theory a form of philosophy↩
at this point I remembered that my tradition in the follies is to reflect first, write second, so there I go↩
with love, as an annoying Catholic↩
lower case to separate from the religious sect↩
oh wait is knowledge and information actually synonymous? (are knowledge and ... ? I don’t know grammar anymore, and I am doctor, so do not need to. Shoot, I should probably bring that up.↩
I do wonder how rare my parentheticals are↩
more and more it bothers me that we capitalize it when it stands for nothing↩
if luck goes my way↩
No, I haven’t heard of a hot spot, why do you ask?↩
if other common prayers get to be called by their first few words in Latin, so does it↩
wayyy more e than I thought that word should have↩
though there is something to be said for the fact that pre-writing like that will mean that my thoughts are inherently miles away more filtered than they could be here... Eh, something to consider↩
for my own posterity, mostly↩

Monthly Reflection

Draft 1: 4 September 2025

I finished my defense, which in retrospect was probably as all-consuming as I should have expected. Sadly, I did not keep up on this site, nor did I really do much of anything else. This next month, however, I have nothing scheduled other than travel and seeing friends, which means that I can get back to the things that are important to me in general situations. I don’t realllly feel like doing a look back at last month’s stuff, but that’s a part of the tradition so.

Oh, so the only stuff that I looked forward to was my defense and my birthday. Wait wait, my birthday was also last month. Wow that feels so very long ago, even if I can intellectually recognize that it wasn’t.

Anyways, I defended, and am therefore Dr. Let’s spend this space thinking about my monthly goals and daily goals and whatnot.

I want to do daily follies, and since I have nothing else scheduled, that should be doable? I have an idea to start making a dictionary of terms as I’m going to use them, because I don’t really care what the standard meaning of words is, especially in context of wanting to distinguish similar ideas. The more I learn about philosophers, the more it seems like that’s a thing that they do a lot, so as a Doctor of Philosophy¹, I too have that right.

As a child I used to be told that doctors get the right to make up new terms, which is something I plan to take advantage of as well.

I want to get back into my web novel, which will likely involve reading some emotionally charged notes from readers.² In order to do that, I should like³ to reread the book, because I have forgotten much of it. Since I’m generally trying to be on screens less⁴, I think that I’ll set it up to print and print it out today? That could be fun.

I have to write the song for a wedding, so that could be a thing that I should start on basically right away? I have the few books on composing that I have been wanting to read for a while, so can treat them together. I plan on binding the books for the different things that I want to read, which is a related, though distinct hobby.

Could be fun to bring a ball of yarn with me and just see whether I make anything fun out of it?⁵ Might as well.

I want to improve my physical health. Mostly, I think that means that I want to be stretching much more than I am, because oof am I unflexible and tight⁶. Eating better is also an idea, though the fact that I’m traveling more or less non stop might make that a bit of a nonstarter. I could spend some time thinking of a good stretching routine. Right now I’m too inflexible in my shoulders that my default shoulder stretches seem terrifyingly difficult.

I want to read more, and especially more high brow stuff. With that in mind, I did also print out a bunch of books, and I have even more I’m planning to pack with me.

I should absolutely get into meditation and prayer again. I think that it would be good to attempt a few minutes of meditation and a few minutes of intentional prayer a day. I’m finding myself more and more unsure of my faith, and hopefully some thinking and sitting will help with that.

None of the other things in the daily reflection really speak to me, even if the pen list will probably stay because I am enjoying it right now. I don’t love the journals that I’m using for journaling right now, so will probably spend some time exploring different options. Might go back to my old one, might go to one of the many I’ve been gifted lately, might find some third option.

no, I don’t think that I’m going to be tired of saying that for ages↩
last time I logged on, someone sent me a private message expressing worry about me saying I was in a tough spot and then going radio silent↩
mmmm should like and would like feel different in some way↩
which I realize is antithetical to doing these follies↩
oh, I didn’t say that here but I’m going on a train trip and I’m beyond excited↩
distinguished here by tight having connotations of notable pain in normal movement↩

Musings

I'm just copying my father

Draft 1: 25 September 2025

Daily Reflection: 25 September 2025

Draft 1: 23 September 2025

Daily Reflection: 23 September 2025

Draft 2: 22 September 2025

Draft 1: 22 September 2025

Daily Reflection: 22 September 2025

Draft 2: 18 September 2025

Draft 1.5: 18 September 2025

Draft 1: 18 September 2025

Daily Reflection: 18 September 2025

Draft 4: 16 September 2025

Draft 3.1: 16 September 2025

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Daily Reflection: 15 September 2025

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Draft 2: 12 September 2025

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Daily Reflection: 12 September 2025

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Daily Reflection 8 September 2025

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Daily Reflection 6 September 2025

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