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N.B. In the interest of showing chronology of my thoughts, any rough drafts will end where I end them on a given day and start as a new section or draft afterwards.

The phrase Fides et Ratio means many things to many different people. To those who are not Catholic and speak¹ no Latin, the phrase likely means nothing. To those who know Latin, it translates perfectly to Faith and Reason.² For those who are familiar with their Papal Encyclicals³, it is the opening phrase⁴ to Pope Sain John Paul II’s writing on the way that faith and reason⁵ overlap. It is also the name of any number of catholic and catholic adjacent groups who focus on that same overlap.

If I’m being honest with myself, I think that Fides et Ratio, and the worldview it professes, are what makes Catholicism so fundamentally different from most other forms of Christian thought.⁶ It is not that Faith and Science occupy different spheres and never overlap. That story, while often told to young children, especially those with questions, is only true in the way that most stories we tell children are.⁷

Faith and reason both give us glimpses into the truth. As such, JP2 writes, they cannot contradict each other. If there is an apparent contradiction, one of the two must be wrong.

For me, a great place to point to for this is the concept of the death penalty. It was long taught as licit for nations to have capital punishment, with one of the primary justifications being that it reduces crime rates. As more and more modern research has shown that not to be the case, however, the Church changed her stance on the issue.⁸

On the other end of the spectrum, we have what is allegedly taught as one of the great sticking points of modern Catholicism for atheists: transubstantiation. That is, the bread and wine that the priest holds at the altar does, in fact, truly become the body and blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. However, absent other miracles⁹, it is still indistinguishable to mortal eyes. A chemical analysis would not show that they have changed.

There are two ways of¹⁰ disputing this. First is the way that I feel least comfortable with, which leans close to the God of the Gaps heresy. That is, just because the Host remains unchanged by any technique we currently have available does not mean that it is unchanged. New equipment or forms of measurement could be¹¹ developed which would account for the difference.

The other is a much easier argument from a theoretical basis. The second argument is, however, far more difficult to convince someone of. It is to claim that there are truths that cannot be measured via scientific inquiry.

Of course, we know that this is true. Science cannot prove its own validity. Even outside of that, though, philosophers¹² since Godel¹³ have proven that there is no way to construct a set of truths that can prove every truth.¹⁴

Before I drift too far into my “multiple methods of inquiry are good, and what do we mean when we say science anyways” rant, let’s pull back to faith and reason. The two should be thought of as supporting each other, rather than existing independently or in opposition. For instance, because I know that the Lord created the universe to follow rules,¹⁵ I can perform scientific inquiry. More than that, though, because the universe we were created can be studied from within itself, we are capable of showing when things are, in fact miracles.

This is a fine line to walk, of course. Just because something cannot be explained by modern science does not mean that no science is capable of explaining it.

On the other hand, the Lord helps those who need it. I am fully willing to believe that in days before antibiotics and immunizations, far more miraculous healings were performed. This is not the God of the Gaps, whose power diminishes as we learn more. This is a G-d who loves us so dearly that he gives us what we could never hope to have on our own accord.

So that is one way that I can use faith to increase my ability to do science.¹⁶ How can we do the reverse?

Truthfully, that is where the spark for this musing came. Yesterday I was talking with a friend who knows that I was raised Catholic.¹⁷ The friend asked me if there was any way that I connected the work I do to the faith that I was raised in.

If faith and reason can both complement¹⁹ each other, then the system needs to work both ways. As someone who does science and reads reason, how can that enrich my faith life? There are the obvious places like reading great works of speculative theology or works like the Summa.²⁰ However, that feels like a cop out.

Today is a Saturday musing, and those are supposed to be deeper delving than my usual musings. So, let’s take some time and stew for how my science makes my faith grow. There’s the fact that it forces me to remember that there is beauty on every level? That’s true but an easy answer.

There’s the stock answer that I give people, which is that you cannot hope to understand a sculptor without understanding his sculpture, which feels on the right track, if still a little too pithy. Can I take that a little deeper?

Let’s see, I study the bible²¹ because it helps me to understand G-d, since it’s His divine revelation. The universe, however, is just as much a creation of the Almighty, and it is sustained constantly through his active choice to keep it. In studying the universe, we get glimpses into something deeper? Is that true?

Sometimes I find that questions are best answered by approaching from another angle. When learning about the vastness of space, it is common to fall into a state of existentialism. The universe is just so vast that it defies words and explanations.²²

When I learn about the vastness of the universe, though, I do not feel smaller. Instead, I understand that the Lord created such a large space for us. Why, exactly, he did it is a mystery, but I guess that I can take some stabs myself.

The earth is so big that it feels almost infinite. The Odyssey, for instance, takes place completely within the Mediterranean Sea. Moses and his people traveled for forty years inside of a small middle eastern desert. I can absolutely see how there could be a motivation to treat the concept of infinity with less grandeur if the universe was as small as the earth.

There’s also the concept of harmony of the spheres. I know that science has more or less entirely moved past²³ the concept, but science has also seemingly given up on animism. Animism means a lot of things to a lot of people.²⁴ In general, though, when I think about animism I think about the idea that the inanimate, isn’t.²⁵ One of the biggest flexes that modern scientists try to have over prescientific thought is that we now know that lightning doesn’t come because the gods are angry.

On the other hand, every explanation of more or less any scientific concept does rely on the idea of animism. We say that atoms form bonds. In part, this is because we are taught to write in the active voice, which requires an agent and therefore agency. However, when we speak in that way, we end up defining our thoughts.

I knot that there’s more for me to say, but I can no longer find the words. As much as I would like to keep going or post this next week, I think that I need to throw in the towel.

Draft 1: 29 December

Fides et Ratio are the opening words to an encyclical by Pope St. JPII. It is also the name of various faith and science groups that I have friends who take part in. After a conversation with a friend today, I find that I am thinking a lot about it as a concept.

I’ve mused before about the way I find mysticism and science to be intrinsically linked, but this is something different. Mysticism, after all, is a tradition that nearly every faith has. As a scientist, I do believe that there is objective truth. As a Catholic, I believe the same.

As far as I have ever been taught, the two domains should never intersect. Or, as JP2 put it, truth cannot contradict truth. That’s probably the better way to frame the differences. It isn’t that science and faith cannot answer the same questions, it’s that they should come to the same answer.

For instance, we have the Big Bang. It’s the most famous example that I can think of where science and faith absolutely agree. We believe that the universe was created ex nihilo²⁶, and that seems to be what the Big Bang suggests. Because the universe was created out of nothing, it makes sense to me that there would be no way to predict what came before the Big Bang, much as scientists might try to speculate.²⁷

But, there’s far more to it than just that. I am getting a Ph. D. On some level, I do believe that this involves dedicating my life, at least in part²⁸, to science and teaching. Even if the rest of the world and field no longer thinks that Doctor means teacher, I still do.

But, of course, I also find that I am continuing to grow in my faith. On some level, everything that I do should and needs to be oriented towards the salvation of the world. As someone whose favorite research questions do not heal the sick, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or house the homeless, that means I have to find another way that the research points to salvation.

As I reconnect with old friends and meet new people, a common question I am asked is what my favorite part of my research is. Of course, they rarely actually mean the research, and tend to mean my favorite part of being a graduate student.²⁹

read, most likely, if we’re being honest↩︎
insofar as anything can actually be translated. There is (are) so much literature about how translation is inherently imperfect. However, given that this document was written by a Pole who my Latin professor actively criticized the Latin of, probably not relevant here, given that the thoughts were likely in Polish, translated to Latin, and then translated into English (I should look up how encyclicals get translated, actually, it seems like an interesting experiment)↩︎
a venn diagram which is not a circle with Catholic, much as I might wish that all Catholics were within the set of people who are familiar with them↩︎
the incipit, if you want to sound fancy↩︎
science, often↩︎
I’d say religious thought, but wow is it hard to define religion I learn more and more, especially because the least credulous kosher Jew and the most credulous lottery ticket buyer probably end up grouped opposite of where most would feel like they should be at a gut level↩︎
which is to say, it helps explain a concept at the level they are developmentally ready for. I’m very pro lies to children, if that wasn’t clear. I just think it’s important for us to move past them at some point↩︎
now, there’s the whole “infallibility” which states that the Church can never be wrong. However, there are so many layers of nuance to both my statement and the meaning of infallibility that I’m not interested in getting into now.↩︎
because transubstantiation is, itself a miracle, as far as I’ve ever known↩︎
somewhat legitimately. There are infinite ways of arguing anything, depending on how honest and non-sequitored you’re willing to be (less and more for more arguments, respectively)↩︎
theoretically, and for the example here. I, being steeped in the scientific tradition, can no longer really think of a technique that this would be true for↩︎
mathematicians are philosophers. On this hill I remain willing to die↩︎
I may never learn how to do diacritics↩︎
If this isn’t what the incompleteness theorem shows, I apologize for my misunderstanding↩︎
which I know because He is definitionally All Good and would not make something misleading↩︎
kind of? I at least see that as faith means I know reproducible means I know I can do science↩︎
they did not know my current relationship to the Church, which is fair↩︎
obviously, given that we’re 1600 words in and I haven’t really touched the topic at all↩︎
I think that this is the right word. compliment means to say nice things to, while complement is more usually used for completing↩︎
Summa Theologica, Doctor of the Church St. Thomas Aquinas’s book for Dominicans to learn how to teach catechesis. There’s a musing somewhere about the fact that most of the best documents for learning your faith are not meant to be read by the laity.↩︎
in as much as you can call what I do studying↩︎
in the same way that a quintillion is technically a number but I have no real way of visualizing what it is↩︎
passed? no you move past I’m pretty sure↩︎
as most philisophical concepts, to be fair↩︎
that sentence may or may not be a great sentence, but I refuse to rewrite it↩︎
from or out of, depending on context, nothing↩︎
I’m not going to get into the whole “it was also created by a Catholic priest”, because truth is truth, and it shouldn’t matter who discovered it (outside of the whole “know the biases of the author so that you can be aware of blind spots they may have or framing that they may be using”)↩︎
can you partially dedicate something? Great question↩︎
I hope. If not, I feel really bad for not answering their question↩︎

What I Read and Wrote

Draft 1

As I mentioned yesterday, Thursdays are going to be reserved for what I’m reading and writing lately. It is currently a form of vacation for me right now, which means that I am doing far less of both than normal.¹

That more or less sums up the reading⁹ that I’ve been doing. In terms of writing, I’ve written a fair amount of code, though that’s been a lot of writing long functions just to delete them when I realize that I don’t want the functionality they provide.¹⁰ I’ve recently been taking a break from Jeb, which has been really restful, though I am excited to get back to writing it. I wrote a fair number of sonnets this month, and I finally got to the point that writing a sonnet is hardly an effort, even if it isn’t good.

Oh! I suppose that I’ve also been reading the book on writing, Writing Well by Sven Birkerts and Donald Hall. It’s a fantastic book, and I’m really enjoying the way that it’s making me think about the way that I write and consume language. I just finished the section of words, and one piece of advice they kept repeating in that section is that “a change in style, however slight, is a change in meaning, however slight”. I feel like often, at least in my experience, people don’t treat rephrased sentences as different meaning. As someone who does legitimately believe that no distinguishable wordings are fungible,¹¹ it was nice to have that take explicitly stated. Even the difference between “I read a book” and “a book was read by me” has a shade of difference, even outside of the taste. Of course, the taste of words is not something that they underestimate. One piece of advice they stress almost as much as not mixing metaphors or using dead cliches is having sentences flow. I’ve just started the sentence section, so I haven’t heard exactly what they mean by it, but I am excited to find out.

I also just started the first of my Saturday Musings, which is focused about copyright. I don’t know if it will end up being the first Saturday Musing I post, because it’s a lot to write about, but I hope to do the subject justice. I’d also like to start plotting out the next few chapters of my web serial, and now is as good of a time as any, I suppose. Plotted out the next three and a half chapters, and I’m excited to write them again. If I was smart, I would find a writing guide that actually teaches how plotting works, since right now I just kind of free associate what I want to see and then write in details.

or at least reading. Oddly enough, I do tend to read more when I’m busier, probably because I have more downtime and less time with people, which makes it easier not to be social.↩︎
i.e. December 2023, according to my reading logs↩︎
re-serialized? since it did initially appear as a serial. Nowadays it gets sent as a weekly email, which was nice↩︎
or at least the books available in audio format currently↩︎
in terms of being able to reference it in the future, not in terms of any desire I have to actually continue owning it↩︎
and he did make the very fair point that records (apparently, I’m not going to fact check) show poor white Southerners still enjoyed the benefit of not being the lowest class↩︎
OH! That YouTube channel might be the reason that I spell it grey not gray. I hadn’t considered that↩︎
I can discuss other web novels I’ve been reading if anyone actually wants to know. Feel free to shoot me a message if you want any recommendations.↩︎
and audiobook listening, I guess,↩︎
do functions provide functionality? I think so, at least.↩︎
oof that’s a jargon filled sentence. I should change that, according to them. Then again, I am trying to be formal, so distinguishable, and I’m trying to push against the commodification of language, which fungibility brings to mind, at least to me. Maybe it did work↩︎
smart here meaning knowledgeable in the specific domain and nearby enough for me to pester↩︎

On Schedules

Draft 3

I’ve mused a few times about schedules on this blog. I have also mused more than a few times about writer’s block or general struggles to find a prompt for the day.¹ Finally, I’ve started realizing that I want to try writing better essays, and that the most effective way to do that is by spending more chronological time with the essay as a work in progress. There’s an old expression about birds and stones that feels relevant here.

To write better musings, I need to be able to spend more time on a musing. The amount of mental energy that it takes to come up with a prompt and start exploring it is such that I cannot really dedicate myself to writing two completely disparate and unique musings at once.² Additionally, I do better with deadlines. There’s an expression I once heard in a class³, which goes something like “a work of art isn’t finished until it’s wrested from the author’s grasp”. Or, in slightly more real terms, as Jim Butcher once said, “I don’t have a muse, I have a mortgage”.

All that to say, I think that it is important for me to schedule not just a day where I post more in depth musings, but also a more scheduled way of musing overall so that I have the mental space to write it.⁴ Having spoken to my family, they still think that it is too ambitious to write a blog post every day, keep up with my research and work, record an album, and keep up with my web novel.⁵ However, I think that I have the space to be able to do so, at least for now, as long as I make some changes.

Moving forwards, I will reduce the mental load on myself by scheduling each day’s activity. Sundays, as you might expect, will continue to be dedicated to Reflections on the Readings.⁶ Fridays, as well, will remain focused on Flash Fiction Friday musings.⁷ Saturdays, I have decided, will be for long form writing.

Now, this is three of seven days. Even that is more planning than I have been typically doing⁸, but that’s not enough. Also, as mentioned, my family is worried about my ability to remain focused on research. To help with that, I will be dedicating the Monday Musing of each week to Thesis Work.⁹ My thought there is that starting each week with writing explicitly focused on my thesis will help me to remain focused on my life goal.¹⁰

On Wednesdays I will muse about the progress on my album. Wednesdays tend to be one of my freest nights, which gives me the space to do some last minute writing or recording if I feel behind. Additionally, since it will often be a short reflection, that will give me more time for writing.

Thursdays will be dedicated to quick recaps of what I have been reading or writing. Partially, this is because Thursdays tend to be busy nights for me, and often what I read and write does not change week to week. However, I do also want to be more intentional about what I’m reading and writing, and I think that needing to reflect on them weekly will help me with that.

The astute among¹¹ readers may note that this only describes six days of the week. The week, however,¹² is seven days long. I know that many musings that I might be interested in pursuing do not deserve or warrant¹³ a full week of consideration¹⁴, and I want the freedom to be able to write about whatever I want at least once a week. I think that I know myself well enough to know that I do best when I have some freedom, however constrained. Giving myself one day a week to let musings die will probably be a good valve for my stress to escape.

Draft 2

I’ve mused a few times about schedules on this blog. Additionally, I have mused more than a few times about writer’s block or general struggles to find a prompt for the day.¹⁷ There’s an old expression about birds and stones that feels relevant here.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that schedules generally make my life better. I not only prefer to know where I’m going and what I’m doing when, but also find that it makes me more productive. As I’ve grown older, though, I’ve also gotten more and more freedom to set my own schedules.

Because I know that I need schedules, I have begun to find ways to govern myself. At least once every few months, I try some strategy to keep me productive through every minute of the day.¹⁸ Without fail, these plans fail. However, I’ve gotten better at following the advice of some random blogger somewhere, who said that it’s far far healthier to reframe that. That is, rather than saying that I failed to keep up my tracking activities to the minute, I could instead say that for the week I did track my time, I was more productive. Things can serve you for short periods of time without becoming permanent fixtures.¹⁹

However, there are kinds of schedules that I do find I can keep myself on, at least in general.²⁰ In general, things which occur monthly or weekly are much easier for me to keep up on. Daily activities that don’t need to be done in a schedule can also be easier to keep up on, which isn’t really relevant here. The fact that I can do things with a weekly schedule is the way that I can kill the birds with a stone.

Sorry, I have written about 500 words in footnotes for this draft, and I find that I’ve completely lost the thread of this musing. Time to try again (if you didn’t read the footnotes, they’re a time).

Draft 1

I’ve mused a few times before²¹ about schedules. As I come to another day where none of the prompts that I have feel particularly good, I’m going to jump the gun on 2024’s New Year’s Resolutions and start talking about my schedule. I’d like to start writing one really good essay a week.²²

I think that one way I can get through that is by scheduling other blog posts to be more mundane, and therefore require less energy, with the goal and expectation that I then use the extra time and mental space to write parts of a longer and better thought out musing. So, what are things that I want to keep up on every week?

Maybe I should take a step back and ask what things I want to prioritize in the next year.

There are seven days each week. If Sundays are reserved for Reflections on the Gospel or Readings generally²³, and I want to spend Saturdays on a more in depth writing, what do I do with the other five days?

I want to do more composition, so one day a week could be reserved for my progress getting through species counterpoint. Actually, let’s take a moment and decide whether I actually want to keep learning species counterpoint. The choir I’m in has implied that it would be willing²⁴ to let me compose some music, but I don’t really know if that’s something that fits into my life. Right now writing is really becoming a huge part of it, and I think that I would like that to continue.

One day a week could be reserved for me to reflect on the writing I’ve done over the past week. I think that monthly and daily checkins might be the wrong level for me to be motivated to outwrite on my web novel.

Since I want to make progress on the album, one day a week could be reserved for talking about it. Right now, I need to write and record and all the other parts of songs, so there’s bound to be stuff to talk about re: difficulties, fun parts, etc. That brings us to four.

If I continue doing open mics semi regularly, talking about them could be fun. When I consider that open mics tend to run opposite a DND campaign that I’m in, we get Mondays taken care of. Then again, I don’t want to have to force myself to do those activities or muse about them.

Still, four days a week of musings is better than one. One day a week could be a brief review of everything that I’ve read.²⁵ That actually sounds really fun, especially because I can also jot down my notes somewhere more cogent. On weeks that I feel like reviewing a book, it can go there, and on other weeks I can just discuss the reading that I’ve been doing.

One day a week devoted to working on my thesis would probably not go amiss. Since I want it to be fairly long, I do need to get a lot of writing done. I do worry about the fact that I would like those to also be edited, and the musing format tends to be more informal than I’d like. Still, I am sure that I could find at least one thing to quickly talk about each week, especially since I want to work on making a lot of my research more approachable to the general person.

Oh shoot! I also have flash fiction fridays! That takes up my whole weekend, so then we should probably get rid of one of the seven so that I have time to have one day free? There are absolutely topics I want to discuss that I don’t think deserve a full length essay.²⁶

For all that this feels very ordered on the page, a retrospective note should say that I wrote it in order: Sunday, Monday, Friday, Saturday, Wednesday, Thursday, Tuesday.

if you just iterate writers-block-n, you’ll find a bunch of them↩︎
assuming that I want to keep up with the rest of my work, which I do. Also I know that nothing I write is really unique or disparate, but they feel like it to me↩︎
I think it was composition, but it may have been art↩︎
them?↩︎
ok yes, when I write it all out it does feel like a lot. Then again, I find that I thrive when I am doing a lot. As long as I recognize that this is my lowest priority overall (even if the album tends to be the lowest priority on any given day), that should be fine↩︎
Musings on the Mass is also probably a title that I could work with, since I love alliteration↩︎
something that I’m very willing to not do, if I need↩︎
not really, but I kind of forget about Friday and Sunday most of the time.↩︎
oh Thursday Thesis Work would have been some fun alliteration, as would Tuesday Thesis Time, but alas↩︎
ok, so honestly, it is not my sole life goal, but at this point in my career and life, it is absolutely one of the highest priorities↩︎
I keep wondering what the difference between among and amongst is. I remember seeing part of it is formal and informal or new versus old. I know that there is also something about British and American English. Looking it up, Garner apparently believes that amongst is needlessly pretentious in American English, being as it is, an Archaism. Alack, nigh, and wot are all also in that list, which is kind of funny and interesting. Cambridge, on the other hand, suggests amongst is just the more formal version. I guess that I never really write formally enough that amongst is viable, except maybe in my thesis writing.↩︎
contrary to the Beatles’ claim (wow that was almost funny enough to put in the main text of this musing)↩︎
ooh the concept of a topic deserving anything is interesting. I need to figure out how I feel about anthropomorphizing and animizing inanimates like ideas (wow my spell checker doesn’t believe any of those are words), warrant is also an interesting choice, because I would not have expected practicing scales to become a musing on love. However, most of the time I feel like I have a good grasp↩︎
or honestly, multiple weeks, I could always start two musings one week and then give the voices in me two weeks to finish a final draft (or n and n, for any positive integer)↩︎
how it decides wpm on a letter isn’t exactly clear to me↩︎
assuming I can bully my brother into helping me↩︎
if you just iterate writers-block-n, you’ll find a bunch of them↩︎
ok, not actually, but to reduce the amount of time that I waste, at least, and often to become more productive.↩︎
for all that I’d rather have my life be at a 7 in terms of progress at all times, I should accept that I want average to be a 5 and that means that definitionally my median (or mean, I suppose, but hopefully my mood is level enough that there’s a single monomial distribution of days) has to be a 5. Whether that means reframing the amount of progress I consider for 5, or if that means decreasing the amount of progress I feel like I need to make is a conversation for another day, another time (I don’t know where that quote comes from, but “another day, another time” is something that feels like a brain worm I once had. The fact that the melody around it in my head is something only fragmented and without any timbre (as most of my conjured voices tend to be (not like that (well a little like that sometimes), in the sense that I try to think about what music I write should sound like, not that I have voices in my head)), it’s entirely possible that it’s just something I’m making up wholesale. Apparently there’s a concert based on a Cohen brother’s movie with that title (the concert not the movie), so that’s interesting. I also feel like there’s a voice in my head trying to make it a quote from Rent, but I don’t think that’s accurate)↩︎
there are periods of my life where I cannot keep myself doing anything, but those are hopefully going to be fewer and farer (farrer? I don’t think that English has a comparative for far. Oh wait, duh further or farther. Time to quickly read cambridge’s take on it. For those not interested in reading that, the tl;dr (too long, didn’t read) is that further is more common, farther is more commonly used to denote distance from a speaker, and further is the only word which can be used to denote greater or at a higher level) between↩︎
remember to hyperlink next draft↩︎
really good may be an overstatement, but you know what I mean↩︎
which they are↩︎
ok, the director has implied that he would↩︎
and feel comfortable admitting that I’ve read. For all that I make fun of one of my friends (hi) about it, there is absolutely content I consume that I would rather not be associated with↩︎
though, maybe that’s just because I haven’t written them. I didn’t expect practicing scales to be a discussion of love↩︎

On Practicing Scales

Draft 2

I’ve talked on this blog many times about the fact that I often struggle with finding a topic for my musings. Today I began to look for inspiration in that best of places, my own blog.¹ I found an old footnote about the fact that I don’t really like the phrase eating your vegetables, and prefer practicing your scales.

There are a variety of reasons for that. Obviously, there’s the fact that I tend to enjoy vegetables,² which makes the expression not resonate for me. Additionally, there is the fact that³ I tend to hear eating your vegetables in the context of things which are beneficial to a small domain of tasks, while eating vegetables is something which is generally good and helpful for overall life quality. And, most importantly,⁴ I tend to find that people use the expression not as a way of expressing need, but as a way to emphasize the difference between Amateur and Dilettante.⁵

I mean that I’ll be using the words as they initially were meant⁷, or for those less comfortable with that, I’ll be using the words based on their Latin roots.⁸ That is, an Amateur is one who loves a craft, while a Dilettante simply enjoys it⁹. What’s the difference?¹⁰

Well, what’s the difference between love and enjoyment? Love, to me, at least, has an element of growth. Enjoyment, on the other hand, asks and assumes nothing of that.

To practice scales, then, is to accept the unpleasant parts of a craft because you understand the benefits. As someone¹¹ says, you don’t get to choose whether you go in the dirt, only what dirt you go in.¹²

I think it’s an important distinction, and one that really will be helpful to me as I continue framing my life.¹³ What does it mean to practice scales?

On almost every instrument, one of the assignments that an instructor gives fairly early in the pedagogy is practicing scales and variations thereof.¹⁴ Why?¹⁵ Even though almost no song is exclusively a scale,¹⁶ the majority of most music, especially music in the canon¹⁷ is primarily written in a scalar fashion. The reasons for that are ancient and long enduring, but it is generally easier for most people to sing scalar melodies.¹⁸

However, unless you are dedicating yourself to the craft,¹⁹ you almost never need to work on scales. If we move to the kitchen, one of the first tasks that I’ve heard every culinary institute or restaurant requires of its chefs is chopping loads and loads of vegetables perfectly and uniformly. As someone who merely enjoys cooking, I will probably never bother to do that. However, I also accept that the fact that I do not practice julienning or any other technique on countless thousands of carrots does mean that there is a level of reproducibility and refinement that my cooking will never have.

So, as someone who does not believe that it’s necessary to practice scales, I can choose to do so. When I practice scales, it is with the knowledge that, assuming my goal is to improve at the craft, the best use of my time is probably spent working on scales. However, there are many things that I do but do not love doing.²⁰ Even if I enjoy them, it is not worth the effort of getting better for the sake of getting better.

When I work on embroidery, though, right now I am actively striving to improve. There may be something questionable in the fact that I intrinsically tie love with desire to improve, but I don’t know if I want to unpack that right now.²¹ Since I am dedicated to improving, I am willing to take time to simply embroider a specific stitch or test swatch over and over until it’s perfect.

In crochet, however, I don’t really care about getting better. Right now I know that I am good enough at crochet to make anything that I want to make. As a result, I’m not going to spend time, energy, and yarn, working on a specific skill simply to be better at that skill, even if it would be generally helpful to my overall craft.

Woof. This musing got away from me a little. Eh, I think that I got somewhere good, even if it’s only coherent to me.

Draft 1

As much as I do trust the book on writing, I want to write my musings as essays only. So, despite the fact that they recommend writing my essays where the first draft is not a full essay, but as pieces, I will not be taking their advice. Of course, I am starting my musing²³ from a much further point than normal. I already know what I want to muse about, and I already even have some concepts ready.

I was struggling to come up with a musing idea today. I read through some old musings that I made, and found inspiration. Today I finally started embroidering again. I thought that could be a good place to start, so I read through my old musings on embroidering.

In the footnote of my second musing, I mentioned that something good to muse about could be the concept of practicing your scales. Practicing your scales, to me at least, is a better metaphor than eating your vegetables. There are a few reasons for that.

First, I honestly tend to enjoy eating vegetables. The concept of eating your vegetables tends to be something unenjoyable but necessary.

Second, and far more importantly, I tend to think of eating your vegetables as something you do that is undesirable but good for a specific activity. Eating your vegetables is²⁴ something that you have to do for general life purposes.

First, I don’t know that I’ve ever actually met someone who enjoys working on scales.²⁵ Second²⁶, working on scales is not, strictly speaking, necessary.²⁷ Scales make music far easier, especially when you take scale not just mean playing the notes of a given key up and down stepwise, but also with some small intervals, like thirds and maybe fourths.²⁸ The fact that they are not needed but make life far easier and better is really where this metaphor works.

So, at this point in the musing, we can either go for how we can use the metaphors or why scales are helpful. Or, I guess that the initial musing talked about how I’m only now enough of an adult to practice my scales, so I suppose that I could focus there. I think that I want to go with the first.

What are other domains? I suppose that for many athletes, cardio or strength is the equivalent. If you enjoy running or lifting, though, that metaphor breaks down a little.

Other domains include writing? I suppose that the practice I’m doing typing could count. Let’s talk about that (in the next draft).²⁹ What else could count? In some regards, the reading about writing that I do is practicing scales.

Oh gosh, there’s a concern now that I could treat the parts of my craft I’m comparing here to practicing scales as something that is less than enjoyable. I assume that this will not be an issue, since I don’t plan on remembering this.³⁰

Ok so reading about writing, practicing touch typing, arguably even the writing that I’m doing right now.

In cooking, there’s repeating recipes? Practicing cutting? Oh yeah that’s the equivalent. Practicing just cutting to make everything perfect.

Oh hey, that makes me think that practicing scales is what separates masters from amateurs.³¹

As the above footnote points out, to be an amateur is historically to do something for love. Where did that shift come from? Oh duh, the word was initially used to refer to the rich gentlemen of England, who pursued a craft out of love, rather than to make a living. When we shift to the fact that America doesn’t really believe in class³², it makes sense that there would be a semantic shift. Dilettante is apparently a similar word.

Because of how fully the world has shifted to thinking of amateur³³ as non professional, it’s hard to think of the type of person who does the work primarily for the need. Oh wait, my opposite is not one who works for a living, but one who does not truly love a craft.

Dilettante³⁴ works great for that. It comes from delight, with connotations historically and always as one who does something because it’s fun.

Ok so practicing scales is what separates the Amateur³⁵ from the Dilettante. Great! That sounds like a good musing idea.³⁶

Practicing scales is similar to something that other people talk about: eating your vegetables.

Ok so as much as I want to focus on dilettante rather than amateur, I do still want to title the file practicing scales. I also do want to muse about that, for all that it doesn’t take much to do that. I feel like one hundred words is enough to explain it. Let’s try second draft and see what it looks like.

accusations of plagiarism are much easier to beat when you can cite your own footnotes. For that reason, if no other, I’m glad that I have my footnotes. Given that I keep my different drafts, it may or may not be needed to have footnotes. I also think that there’s something to be said for the fact that my putting drafts above each other just means that I end up rewriting the entire thing, paraphrasing myself, rather than copy pasting. I don’t honestly know if that’s a good or bad thing. I think that my words tend to be better on repeating, but. Onto the musing list it goes (since I’m now being a smart and compiling a list of things that I want to muse about).↩︎
there’s something to be said about the fact that people often enjoy vegetables more when they’re prepared better↩︎
I do love how I sometimes say there is and there’s and I do not know when I use either. If I had to guess, I contract the first use and spell out future uses. Not worth my time to look up right now↩︎
at least for this musing, if the first draft doesn’t make that clear↩︎
capitalized because I am redefining them, and I tend to find that essayists redefining a word capitalize it↩︎
this is a rhetorical device I need to kill within myself before I start writing my thesis in earnest↩︎
or, at least, as I’m choosing to believe that they were initially meant↩︎
ok so Latin roots are not the end all be all for definitions. However, making up words as needed, even if they are already extant words, is not something that I am the first to do. Where was I? Right↩︎
delights in it, one might say. I shan’t (shant?), because I don’t have that word in my own lexicon↩︎
oof, I’m really using a lot of questions today. Maybe redraft again? We’ll see what time it is when I finally finish this draft of the musing, especially given the fact that I have so very very many words in the footnotes here. I’m clearly too distractable. Maybe put the musing aside for a moment? Yeah that’s good, let’s just try not to have too many more sideboards (it’s not sideboard? It’s uh sidebar. That’s the word)↩︎
I do honestly think it was in Atomic Habits↩︎
he said something a little more vulgar, but the point remains↩︎
future tense is so hard in English. Prophetic future is a tense that I want to incorporate at some point, but↩︎
like going up and down in thirds↩︎
gosh this is feeling awful didactic today. Wonder why↩︎
opening line of Joy to the World is not an exception, because it’s not an entire song (n.b. I came back to this paragraph because I realized that the way I wrote the rest of the sentence and the next few didn’t let me put that joke in↩︎
i.e. not popular music from the past 140 years↩︎
now, the chicken and egg question comes up here, because most children’s taunts or child made up songs that I can think of are far more leap based than scale based. Hard to know for certain, and I live in a society and all↩︎
dedication is a better word for love versus enjoy. If I rewrite this in the future, keep that in mind↩︎
cooking, for instance↩︎
should that have been a footnote? unclear. it is needed to bridge the implicit love is improvement that I hadn’t stated before (new draft absolutely needed). Dedication also works as a term↩︎
or, as this monstrosity implies, blogging↩︎
today at least↩︎
arguably↩︎
at best, I’ve heard that it’s enjoyable because you’re playing an instrument, with the implication that they’d rather be doing anything else↩︎
I don’t really like the numbering, so I’m going to drop it here↩︎
except maybe on piano, but it isn’t really like I ever plan to learn piano, especially not at the level where the advice for a piece is “take a year or two off and learn other music until you’re good enough to start learning the music”. I’ll say that I’ve never met an instrument where scales were unarguably (weird that it’s inarguable but unarguably) needed↩︎
sixths and larger are just good for practicing leaps, which tend to happen very rarely. A common warmup I’ve done on basically every chromatic wind instrument (wind in the sense of blown, not just woodwinds) is to start on the fifth and then play down by half steps (e.g. G, f sharp, g, f, g e, g d sharp... g c g), so that I can practice intonation and leaps at once. Often I’ll go for an octave after that. Initially the post said fifth, but I feel like fifths are a weird interval where you almost never see them stacked in a melodic line.↩︎
I think that this may be the first in text parenthetical that I’ve ever used↩︎
I mean um. no that’s right, I suppose↩︎
ok so amateur is the wrong term here, because I like it meaning one who does it for love, and I think that it takes a level of love and dedication to actually do the writing. Ok actually, let’s see if we cannot restart the piece with that in mind. Ope ok this should be main text↩︎
in the same way↩︎
one day I’ll learn how to spell↩︎
another word that’s going to kill me as I continue trying to spell it↩︎
we’ll use capital letters to denote my usage of the word, rather than the standard usage of the word↩︎
the fact that I’ve been working on the post for an hour and only now got to here does do something to imply that the book on writing is right about at least some of the stuff↩︎

Christmas 2023

Draft 2

This is now my third musing on Christmas. As with the other two, I’m publishing it on Christmas Day.¹

My previous musings about Christmas have been fairly short. The first² was four sentences. Half of those were less than four words a piece.³ The second was a little longer, but focused almost exclusively on the liturgical readings.

Today, I’d like to focus a little on the traditions that my family has kept. As I grow older, I find that I’ve been thinking a lot more about what parts of my life I’d like to keep forever, what parts I wish never happened, and what I think served its purpose and is no longer needed.

Our Christmas mornings tend to start with cinnamon rolls. This past Thanksgiving, my little brother⁴ and I realized that we both had fond memories of orange rolls as children. We still are not entirely certain which family member we had the rolls for,⁵ but we do know why we stopped having them. In short, none of the extant adults in my family like them.⁶ I did not remember that, however, and got orange rolls for the morning after Thanksgiving.⁷ My little brother and I loved them, and so this year’s Christmas morning breakfast also included orange rolls.⁸

Moving slightly back in the chronology, we get matching pajamas as a family every year. We open them on Christmas Eve, and then we all wear them on Christmas day. A related tradition: the children take a photo with Santa every year. Once we reached an age that it stopped seeming reasonable to go to the Santa in town,⁹ we started taking them as a family on Christmas morning. We’ve now merged the two traditions, and it’s really fun getting to look back and see the siblings in matching clothes.

We do a gift exchange after the photos¹⁰, and then we make a quick breakfast and eat it. After that, we play a board game.¹¹ By that point, we’re all tired of each other¹², so we tend to be free until dinner. For some reason, I have no memories of what we historically eat for Christmas dinner.

All in all, I love the fact that my family’s Christmas is what it is. I’m sure that at least some portion of my attachment to the traditions comes from the fact that they’re the traditions that we have. If I had grown with others, I am sure that I would have loved them just as much.¹³

Draft 1

This is now my third musing on Christmas. As with the other two, I’m publishing it on Christmas Day.¹⁵ Apparently both of my musings on Christmas have been fairly short.

My initial musing, published in the initial iteration of this blog, was four sentences, half of which were under four words. My musing last year, being a combined Christmas and Reflection on Readings, was a little longer, and focused more on the liturgical aspect of the season.

This year, however, I am writing this musing early enough that I have time to actually think,¹⁶ and not on a Sunday.¹⁷ As a result, I find that I have more time to consider what I want to muse about.

So, what do I want to muse about? The book on the craft of writing suggests that it’s best to plan to spend half the time you have allotted to an essay on planning and half on actually writing. I don’t think that will be a part of my life for a while, but let’s try some of what they suggest.

One piece of advice was to do some free association. Christmas to Christmas movies to Scrooge. Christmas, advent, awaiting, Christmas, stockings, family, loved ones.

Texted wishes for a happy Christmas to friends¹⁹, and had some nice digital conversations with them. I spent time with family, which was lovely as always!²⁰ In particular, we played games as a family, had some meals together, and did a small gift exchange.

I’ve started writing this musing, which is something. I honestly think that may be literally everything that I’ve done today. Ok so maybe musing about today as a thing isn’t a great idea. My family’s reaction to me saying who all I was texting today makes me think a musing about that might not be welcome either.

That’s really it for today. So, let’s think about what Christmas in general means to me? Let’s see what that sparks. I guess the question is if I want to focus on the cultural or religious connotations that Christmas has for me.²¹

Having now made, eaten, and cleaned up from dinner, there’s probably something I can muse about combining my post about family recipes, the fact that we only use red potatoes for mashed potatoes, and the fact that no one on the internet will say they’re meant for that. However, I don’t really know if I can connect that to Christmas, especially today. It might be a good idea to think more about it for future musings about family recipes.

Ok so let’s try to make a coherent draft. I still haven’t figured out what I want to muse about. The writing book says that you should spend a few days on this process, but acknowledges that you may not always have the option to do so.

There’s the obvious, that the weather is changing as the climate gets worse. There’s the way that family traditions change. There’s the voice in my head that says this might be the last Christmas we have together.²² There’s the fact that life hasn’t really returned to a stasis since Covid? Idk let’s see what happens if we just go like that.

well, the 25 of December, at least. Whether I wrote them before the morning or after night began is up to consideration↩︎
2018↩︎
fewer than? in theory I know that words can be counted↩︎
hmm is this too much information to have publicly available? the existence of presumably two brothers↩︎
though we have some good ideas↩︎
adults means generations older than me. Yes, I do know that I’m an adult in basically any sense that people use. However↩︎
another tradition we have as a family↩︎
which I did promise to bring to a friend. I need to make sure to do that↩︎
ok, if you look at the photos, a few years after that point↩︎
there’s a few more photos that we take. I enjoy them, but would not be heart broken if they ceased↩︎
most years, there is a new board game in someone’s gifts. In the rest, we play a family favorites↩︎
in the “everyone is an introvert” way, not the other ways↩︎
though with the family that I have, I feel like some of the traditions we have are the carcinization equivalent↩︎
allegedly↩︎
well, the 25 of December, at least. Whether I wrote them before the morning or after night began is up to consideration↩︎
unlike 2018↩︎
unlike last year↩︎
might be something that’s worth thinking about sometime in the future↩︎
initially kith, which is obsolete except for kith and kin, which is like aid and abet. It means those familiar, and is same as couth, where we get uncouth from. Wow I love linguistic drift. I wonder how much the spelling versions of linguistic drift will stop in this literate, digital, and prescriptive era. Then again, we’ve had radio and audio recordings for a while and we still have shift of pronunciations and meanings, so it probably won’t prevent it. I can’t think of any words that have changed spelling in my lifetime, though. Maybe a few double words got broken, but that’s about it (a la alright versus all right)↩︎
we got the coziest set of matching pajamas ever! (note that coziness is comfort related, and so is actually somewhat negatively correlated with how warm the pajamas are, at least in this household↩︎
yes, I know, I should not have divided parts of me, just me. However, I live in 2023, which means that the secular and the sacred are fundamentally separated for nearly everyone↩︎
which will not be included, because still too personal↩︎

Reflections on Today’s Gospel

Draft 2

Today is the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It’s a strange set of readings, especially when we look at the readings that we have had for the past few weeks. The first reading, as expected, is a reading from the Old Testament. Unlike most of the other readings, today’s does not come from one of the explicitly prophetic books. Instead, we have an excerpt¹ from the Second Book of Samuel. We follow David, who wants to build the Ark of the Covenant a better dwelling place.

Of course, as Catholics, we know that the Ark was a foreshadowing of Mary, who carried the Christ into the world.² And so, it’s only fitting that the Gospel today focus on Mary. In particular, we see one thread continuing from the time of David the king to the time of Christ the King: The Almighty’s angels. The Angel Gabriel delivers messages both to David and to Mary. And so, in the final hours before Christmas³, I think it’s good to reflect on what Mary said to the Angel of the Most High, “may it be done unto me according to your word.”⁴ The Pater Noster may be the perfect form of prayer, but Mary’s Fiat⁵ is bound to be a close second. David wanted to build a fitting home for the Ark, but did not know what to ask.

Draft 1

It’s the fourth Sunday of Advent, and it almost feels like Christmas.⁹ Today’s readings were pretty standard “be ready for Christmas” readings. The first reading comes from the Second book of Samuel, where we see David trying to pay homage to his Lord. He looks around, realizing that he lives in a beautiful home, while the Lord is being kept in a tent. The prophet of the day¹⁰ assures him that the Lord will appreciate any efforts that Daniel puts forth.

The Lord, however, comes to Nathan in a dream,¹¹ and tells him to tell Daniel not to build a temple. More than that, though, the Lord says that he will establish an eternal kingdom from David’s descendants. As Catholics, we know what that kingdom is, and who the heir is. The Gospel, of course, makes that explicit.

The angel¹² Gabriel¹³ comes to Mary. Importantly, he is the same angel who came to Daniel to interpret his visions. It’s something that very rarely comes up in homilies that I’ve heard, probably for some good reason.

Of course, one reason could very easily just be that the Ave Maria¹⁴ is allegedly a very unpopular prayer among Protestants.¹⁵ The fact that the opening line comes directly from an angel¹⁶ of the Lord should, in theory, help assuage concerns about the prayer. Then again, I don’t know if anyone attending Mass on the Fourth Sunday of Advent¹⁷ needs to be convinced that Mary is a good and holy person, worthy of admiration.¹⁸

Advent in general, as the priest today reminded us, is a season focused on Mary. It feels a little strange to me that we only really care about the last month of Mary’s pregnancy, but I suppose that otherwise we’d have to start Advent as soon as Easter ended.¹⁹ I’m sure there’s something to think about in the fact that we only really talk about Christ as a newborn child and as a thirty three year old. It is a little strange to think that, were I Christ, nothing that I’ve really done with my life so far would have been recorded.

Post writing note: I’m not really happy with the musing right now, for all that I don’t really know what else there is to reflect on in the readings. Maybe I should come back to this in a little bit?

I mean technically like 5 excerpts, given that the reading comes in many parts↩︎
Ok, so here’s my inane question for the day: Christ means anointed. Is there a historical moment where He was anointed? I guess the only biblical scene I can think of is when he’s bathed in funerary oils, but that might not be what people are talking about↩︎
personally, I’ve already been to Christmas Mass, so I guess it’s already Christmas for me↩︎
Luke 1: 38 B↩︎
I do love that the best way to figure out a prayer’s name is just to take the opening word or words from its Latin text↩︎
him on grand piano, me on guitar↩︎
year↩︎
or, after posting the musing, at least↩︎
the joke being that today is Christmas Eve (though arguably eve implies sunsetting, which may or may not be a part of the actual requirement here)↩︎
Nathan↩︎
We skip through different chapters in the book, so some of the message is left up to implication, rather than outright stated today↩︎
archangel, technically, or maybe Archangel. Angelic divisions have never been clear to me↩︎
literally: “G-d is my strength” or “G-d is strong”↩︎
I do love that so many Catholic things are just named from the first few words of the Latin (the incipit, if you want to sound fancy). It’s fun then how often the same holds true when we translate into English (ex. The Our Father, the Glory Be, the Hail Mary, the Angelus (which I guess we don’t translate))↩︎
I say allegedly because I’ve never heard accusations that I can remember↩︎
literally messenger↩︎
especially when that’s also the same day as, but a liturgically distinct day from, Christmas Eve↩︎
I think veneration is the ok one and adoration isn’t but I’m not 100 percent sure and don’t really want to look it up↩︎
or even before, most years↩︎

On Family Recipes

Draft 3: December 23

Holidays are a time to remember. For many, it is a time when the entire family shows up in the same space to share a meal and fellowship. Traditions form as people bond to a specific food or ritual. As older members die and newer people join the family, traditions mutate and change.

Sometimes, however, traditions last until they are questioned. I’m reminded of one from my own family, where we used to trim the ends off of each roast before cooking. When we finally reconstructed the narrative, it turned out that the only roasting pan one of the family owned was too small for the roasts. Even as we got larger pans, however, we continued trimming the roast.

Yesterday, I was reminded of this as I prepared the only family recipe I get from my mother’s half of the family. Now, earlier drafts¹ focused far more on the specific dish. I think that it’s worth taking a step back and thinking more about what family recipes tell us in general.

Until just a few years ago, for instance, I thought that we had a family recipe for green bean casserole. In some regards we do. We prepare the meal the same way, and it’s a recipe we use for every important meal.² However, it turns out that the recipe we follow comes directly from the French’s Fried Onion box.

I have read a number of so called family recipes that adapt³ from a recipe book that someone’s mother or grandmother or aunt read. In the times before the internet, it was difficult to source information. If someone brought a dish you liked, asking them for a recipe would not necessarily come with the recipe’s provenance.

Honestly, my mind is blank today, and I do not know what else I could say. I’m sure that there’s more I could muse on, but I don’t know what.

Draft 2: December 22 (abandoned part of the way through)

Holidays are a time of memories. For many households in modern America, holidays are the one time a year that the entire intergenerational family is under one roof. Flavors and specific preparations can be handed down from the people with the greatest attachment to them. As the oldest members of the family die and younger family members are born, recipes and meal plans change. Sometimes, things continue to be done the same way, simply because there is no need to question the way things are always done.

Sometimes, however, someone new⁵ will ask what the point is of some tradition. I’m reminded of one from my own family, where we used to trim the ends off of each roast before cooking. When we finally reconstructed the narrative, it turned out that the only roasting pan one of the family owned was too small for the roasts. Even as we got larger pans, however, we continued trimming the roast.

In my own household, we have very little of this generational memory. In part, it comes from the fact that many members of my family in recent generations have disowned or been disowned by their relatives.⁶

Draft 1: December 22

Today I made one of⁷ the family recipes I’ve inherited. We’ve always called it halishki⁸: a dish of dropped egg noodles in a chicken and cream sauce. When you google the word, I mostly find a Polish word for a dish with noodles and cabbage in a pork based sauce. There’s more or less nothing in common with my family recipe and that.

However, this presupposes that my family recipe is Polish. We really don’t know where most of my family came from, especially this part of the family. I’ve always been told it was somewhere Slavic, but that really does not narrow it down too much. If we start searching for Polish drop noodles, we find kluski. Wikipedia for kluski takes us to a similar dish in other portions of Eastern Europe, halusky⁹. Halusky is small dropped egg noodles, which does accurately describe the dish that I make, for all that it is also described as typically being served with cabbage.

However, I know that many members of my family have been unable to eat cabbage. That could explain the lack of cabbage in the family recipe. At this point, though, I was excited to learn more.

I got the last name¹⁰ of the person we initially got the recipe from.¹¹ The last name does come from the areas listed in the second Wikipedia article, which is pretty cool. One of the two variant spellings is allegedly Jewish in origin, which is interesting. I’m sure that there’s a fascinating history there that is now lost to the mists of time.

So, what is the family recipe? As far as I can tell, the recipe is more or less just chicken and dumplings in a cream sauce. I don’t see many recipes for chicken and dumplings that call for cream sauce.

How do I make it, though? I think that every time that I have been personally a part of making it¹², I’ve followed a slightly different recipe. However, this time through I think will be my recipe going forwards.

I started by melting some butter in a large stock pot and then browning some chicken.¹³ The goal was really just getting a bit of color on the meat and a touch of fond on the pan. Once the chicken was browned, we put some butter in the pot and then some white onion. Once the onion looked soft, I added in the chicken stock and let it come to a boil.

We made a very simple dumpling dough¹⁴ out of egg, flour, salt, and pepper.¹⁵ We then spoon some portions of the dough¹⁶ into the boiling stock, chop some celery and add it in, and add the chicken¹⁷ back. From there, I let it simmer covered fora bout an hour, and then uncovered it to let the stock reduce a fair amount. Just before serving, we taste the broth for seasoning, and then add cream to taste and texture.

This time around, we made a huge recipe of it, which should be really nice for leftovers. Historically, it’s tasted far better the next day, as all of the flavors have had time to meld together.

As I look at the past six hundred words, I realize that I want to focus more on the family recipe aspect than the specific recipe we followed. Let’s see how that goes, moving from the specific case to more of a general one?¹⁸

I think that there’s something to be said for referencing earlier drafts in these musings, since they’re still available. Idk how I feel about it, though, so we’ll see if this ends up being a one off↩︎
that’s not entirely true, but it feels like it’s true, which is something↩︎
if even that↩︎
the chord, which is needed for the key of E Major↩︎
often a spouse↩︎
family here only refers to the ones who we are not estranged from↩︎
apparently the only from my mother’s side, because her mother didn’t really like to cook↩︎
spelling nonexistent because oral tradition.↩︎
which has a diacritical over the s, making it pronounced more or less how my family’s recipe is↩︎
or the potential spellings for the last name↩︎
who died when my mother was newly born, which means there’s no way to question anything↩︎
three times now↩︎
today was boneless skinless breasts, which I’m less thrilled about, but that’s ok↩︎
or maybe batter↩︎
as we joke, we make peasant food, and so use black pepper instead of white pepper↩︎
batter↩︎
after chopping↩︎
also, as you might have guessed from my musing yesterday, my goal is always to write a few more words at a time↩︎

Flash Fiction Friday

Draft 1

Another Friday, which means it’s time to try to answer another prompt. The prompt this week is among any option. I had no idea how to respond to this prompt, and reading the description didn’t make the prompt any more sensible. However, it did give me some ideas.

The prompt implies a choice. If we keep that in mind, then the prompt shifts to choosing between any option. What could be a good response for that prompt?

My mind is falling immediately to love, but I have to wonder how much of that is just me choosing a new creative rut. I think that the last few times that I’ve written a FFF, it’s been about romance of some sort. What else could we set as a number of choices?

I mean basically anything can be a set of choices, which makes this prompt feel almost too broad. I guess that more or less any writing I produce will be good for the prompt. A part of me really doesn’t like that, though, because part of my ideal for prompts is that it constrains my writing.

Given that we did a family recipe for dinner¹, I’m finding that I’m thinking about choosing foods. As the new Percy Jackson television series² is coming out, there’s choices about media we consume, hero’s choices, and the like. Since we play board games as a family, the idea of what game to play comes up a lot.

The hero’s choices feel like something that I want to interact with. What do heroes do? Or, rather, what terrible choice could a hero be forced into?³

I’m still circling around the idea of romance, which may be something that I could do?

So, we have a hero⁴ who needs to make a choice. Maybe there’s something to say about like deciding between the person you love and the work you need to do? Alright, how can we frame it in a way that hasn’t been done to death a million times?

Or, just as much in the choice, how do we do what we want to do with our full self, ignoring all the self doubt and negative self talk?

A hero has a choice. How explicit do I need to make that? I think that at this point I really need to focus on the writing, which means I need to stop writing about writing and start actually writing.⁵

Actually, wait, let’s think about the normal questions we have. Do I want to have first or third person? I don’t really know. I think that we should write it and see what happens.

Ok so about five hundred words of writing later, I find that I got too far from the prompt. I more or less wrote a retrospective, ten years later. I think that I focused too much on the retrospective, rather than the actual set of choices. Maybe I could do something looking forwards instead?

Ooh, I actually really like the FFF I wrote. Let’s see if there’s anything I can do to spice it up for take three, but if not, I am actually going to be ok with it. I assume that I’ll see something that I want to change, but you never know until you try.

Ooh, wow, the revision is way stronger, I think. I more or less replaced every word, which is kind of funny when you think about it. The scene played out more or less the same, though, which is interesting. I do still feel like I rushed the ending, which is more and more something I realize I struggle with. The ending of a story always seems to come too quickly, and I don’t quite know how to wrap it⁶ up satisfyingly.

musing partially written, ready to be finished and posted tomorrow↩︎
musing to be made at a later date, once I’ve consumed the content (I’ve read that people are against the phrase content consumption, and I don’t disagree with them, but I find that it does accurately describe the way that I feel (might be worth figuring out how I think and why I think about the things I do)) about the media I engage with↩︎
the fact that I want it to end in tragedy probably says something about where I am right now, but that’s the nature of life↩︎
I read a dictionary once that defined heroine exclusively as the female accompaniment to the hero, which was shockingly formative. As a result, I treat hero as a gender neutral term↩︎
terrifying, I’m not going to lie↩︎
honestly, any narrative↩︎
look at me rhyming↩︎

4thewords Review

Draft 2

I’ve talked a fair amount in these musings about the new site I’m using for writing. As I’ve mentioned on more than a few occasions, I often have trouble motivating myself to write.¹ You may have also noticed recently that I’ve more or less been able to put out a post basically every day. There’s a few reasons for that.

I’ve been writing every morning with a friend, for one. I found an internal reason to write daily, for another. Both of those, however, are why I am able to write a blog post every day, not how. Today, I’d really like to spend some time discussing how I’ve been able to write so much more.

Since apparently mid august, I’ve been using a website called 4thewords.² I guess that knowing I’ve been using it since August doesn’t exactly lend credence to the idea that it helps me write. However, it is working now.

4thewords is a few things bundled into one. It is a fairly lightweight word processor³. There’s a fairly active and incredibly positive forum. And, its real selling point, 4thewords is also an RPG.⁴

That is, you play as a character exploring through the world, completing quests and getting rewards. Like many RPG⁵, 4thewords also lets you decorate your character, both with stat boosting and completely cosmetic items. In what I think is a really brilliant choice, they have completely separated the two. That is, you can choose to equip the best equipment for statistics without compromising on your artistic vision.

At this point, you might be wondering how they manage to combine a word processor with an RPG. Most quests are completed by fighting monsters. Monsters are fought by writing words against a time limit. Unlike in a lot of RPG, there is generally no way for the monsters to strike back.

Most of the monsters require a certain number of words written within a given number of minutes. They tend not to require a pace faster than ten words per minute, which is nice when doing something slower than free writing. Even when I’m at my most type a few words and delete, I still average more than ten words typed a minute. There are a few monsters which are called endurance monsters. Rather than requiring a certain number of words, it requires a constant clip. I generally dislike them, because I’m more motivated by “here’s the number of words you have left” than “this is the amount of time you have left.”

However, fighting does not an RPG make. Another important aspect of an RPG is items. Most RPG have both decorative and functional items. 4thewords is no different.

Unlike more RPG, however, the form and function are completely separated. You can choose to equip whatever items give you the stats you want along with whatever items give you the appearance you want. Both sets of items are purchased in the in game stores for mostly in game available items, which you can get by fighting monsters and finishing quests.

Functional items feel a little strange in a game like this. It seems odd that a game where the only combat is writing words within a timeline would have items that affect the gameplay. And, thankfully, there are only three stats: attack, defense, and luck.

Attack follows a formula, where the higher your attack, the fewer words it takes to take down a monster. It doesn’t change the stated numbers, but two words might count for three. Defense increases the amount of time that you have to fight a monster. Unlike attack, it does change the number of seconds that you have to write. A second still lasts exactly⁶

Finally, there is luck, which nominally affects the drops that a monster gives. There’s some variance to what monsters can drop, though there is usually a floor and a ceiling, and the two numbers are not always different.

First and foremost, I like the fact that there are a series of small goals that I can set to automatically start. Writing 500 words is often a reasonable amount for me at once. Especially if I’m writing quickly, I can generally get through one in about ten minutes. Small monsters, with around 100 words to complete, give an almost constant source of dopamine.

After writing two paragraphs, I tend to take a break for a second or so, because my mind needs a little bit of time to process what I said. Four paragraphs is almost always at least 100 words, which means that after I write them, I get another monster.

The time also helps. Without deadlines, I find that I procrastinate almost indefinitely. Every so often, I’ll look and see that there’s only two minutes left to write 100 words, or twenty minutes left to write 1000. When that happens, I put my nose to the metphorical grindstone and start working as hard as I can to get the words out.

Those two facts do a lot to help motivate me to write. However, there are also a lot of small little features on the site that make it more friendly for me. The overall design is fairly unobtrusive, which means that I’m not horribly distracted while I write. However, the overall design is also very bright, which makes it fun, and I get pretty pictures to cheer me up.

Also, the site is explicit that their goal is helping users to meet their own writing goals. Unlike some sites, which track incredibly hard to make sure that no one is doing anything that could even begin to think of cheating. Even though there are some community aspects to the game, it’s almost exclusively single player. Because of that, the developers are very clear that you should use the site however works best for you.

For some people, that means copy pasting a few hundred words of lorem ipsum after they’ve done some editing or chores. Personally, I tend not to copy paste, though I’ve started thinking of situations where I feel better about it.⁷ There are also almost no negative consequences in the game. Losing a monster doesn’t affect you in any way except for a single tally somewhere fairly hidden in the game.⁸ I find that negative consequences can make me want to avoid a situation, and so the absence makes it nice.

And, finally, the game is in active development! I don’t mean that in the way of “the site is full of bugs and major gameplay changes happen daily”, but in the “the developers clearly care about they’re doing, and they add lots of new and exciting seasonal events.” Right now, we’re in the middle of the winter wonderland, which has a few time limited monsters and some special snow themed quests. Just before that, however, was a really exciting quest series for NaNoWriMo!

Anyways, if this inspires you to try the application⁹ at all, please reach out.

Draft 1

I know that I’ve talked a fair amount in my daily reflections about the site that I’ve started using. Since I don’t know if I’ve explicitly named the site, I use 4thewords, which is a site that tries to gamify writing. The central concept of the game is that you choose to fight monsters, which come with a set number of words and time to defeat them. By and large, this is not terribly difficult. Most of the monsters require around 10 words per minute in order to defeat them.

Of course, like all good RPG¹¹, there are stat boosting items. In the case of 4thewords, there are three stats: attack, defense, and luck. I’ve listed them in that order in large part because that’s the order that they’re relevant to me. Attack means that each word you write has a greater effect on the monster you’re fighting¹². The site gives vague approximations, but the fan site gives the explicit formula.

The words it takes to kill a monster are its default words times one hundred divided by one hundred plus your attack. So, one hundred attack means that it takes half the words to defeat a monster that it claims it should. The part of me that remembers math tells me that n divided by n plus x shrinks very slowly. I think they call it exponential decay. That makes sense, because in order to halve the words again, you would need three hundred attack, and then seven hundred, and so on.

Defense, unsurprisingly, does a similar thing. Defense increases the amount of time that you have to fight the monster. Although it will still say the same amount of time when its waiting in the queue,¹³ when the monster fight starts, the timer will show a greater amount of time. I prefer that to seconds not ticking down at the same rate, if only because I like to be able to use the timer as an egg timer of sorts.¹⁴ There’s a similar equation somewhere, though I have not looked it up.¹⁵

Finally, we have luck. As this is an RPG, monsters drop loot when they die. Luck affects the amount of loot that is dropped, though last time I checked, it was less clear exactly what the mechanism is for that. Unlike with attack and defense, there is an optimal value for luck.¹⁶

Now, I’ve been saying monster in the generic term. There are a lot of unique, hand drawn monsters.¹⁷ One question that you might have is which monster to kill.

I’m actually realizing that I’m falling way too far into the weeds. Let’s restart, this time focusing more on the fact that I want this to be a review.

I don’t know if that’s quite the right statement, but it’s more or less true↩︎
I hate that there aren’t any spaces in the title, but I really haven’t seen it written with a space anywhere↩︎
as someone who writes almost exclusively uncompiled LaTeX (and soon Markdown), that’s much more of a pro athan anything else↩︎
role playing game (not to be confused with TTRPG, where the R stands for roll (not really but I wish))↩︎
I never know how to pluralize initialisms, because games starts with G.↩︎
i assume, I don’t know if they’ve made it exact, but the ticks feel like around a second↩︎
mostly in situations where I hand write a letter to a friend, or writing out a derivation. I still feel a little icky about it, but whatever happens happens, I suppose↩︎
even that can be removed with an item that becomes very easy to gather by the mid to late game↩︎
I’m trying to stop saying app unless it’s for mobile, since that was once the difference↩︎
could have mused on that, I suppose↩︎
role playing games↩︎
though, thankfully, not anywhere else that it actually tracks wordcount↩︎
you’re allowed to prequeue ten monsters, though that number may increase↩︎
let me tell you, I’ll write until the pasta finishes boiling gets a shocking amount of words finished↩︎
unsurprisingly, if you know anything about me, the only think that I care about is damage output, because it means that I can get through monsters fast. All that defense gives me is an excuse to procrastinate↩︎
I cannot remember whether going over that just stops counting or whether it starts harming, but I do actually think that it’s the latter.↩︎
I am almost positive it says that the fan site says new monsters are hand drawn. The aesthetic on each monster does absolutely show a sense of care, and the fact that none of them are animated makes it feel even more likely↩︎

On Why Versus How

Draft 5

Why and how feel like such close questions. And yet, there is an unseen gulf of meaning between the two. Far too often, we stop the mind from looking upward by focusing it downward.

Why asks the reason, the cause, the philosophical reason that something is. How, by contrast, asks the mechanism, the physical description of what is. That is, why is to metaphysics what how is to physics.¹

Children are always gazing upward, considering the nature of the world.² Children ask why the world is the way it is, not how it is. When we tell them that the world is the way it is because of history, that reduces all of creation to a series of forced events. We lose agency in this world.

Why is the sky blue? Rayleigh scattering is true, but it is how the sky is blue. Rayleigh scattering explains that some light is diffracted differently.³ If physics is all that makes the sky blue, then there must not be anything more than physics, is what our minds are lead to believe. By answering questions of why with how language, we fall into the trap of scientism.

More than that, though, we fall into an issue endemic to computer science. Computer scientists are famous for creating solutions to problems without considering the secondary effects, or the reasons the problems may exist. The most famous example that I can think of is a Stanford student who found that when you challenge a parking ticket, most jurisdictions will just drop the charge, because it isn’t worth the hassle to fight it. So, the student wrote an app to automatically contest all parking tickets.

Deep down, the question being asked was how do parking tickets work, not why do they exist. I think that we can all agree it is generally better to not park in disabled spaces⁴ or in front of fire hydrants. This why and how can also lead to an intellectual stagnation.

Let’s take the example of the research that my group does. We look for the origins of life in star forming regions. From now on, each statement will have an implicit how question attached to it.

We use telescopes such as ALMA and NOEMA to measure the radio frequencies emitted from star forming regions and tie them to specific molecular transitions.

We have catalogs of molecular line information, which we can assign to the spectra coming from space.

We can shine known wavelengths of light on known molecules and detect whether or not the molecule absorbs at that wavelength.

We can see a change in voltage, which is directly correlated to the change in light.

Notice how even here, we’ve fallen almost completely away from the actual research goal of searching for the origins of life in star forming regions. All of the how questions are absolutely essential, because without answers, we would not be able to measure transitions or assign them. However, imagine if instead we start asking why.

We can see a change in voltage, which is directly correlated to the change in light. (Why?) The software we use is designed to function with an instrument that has a variable resistor. It measures changes in photons as changes in temperature as changes in resistance. V=IR, so that can make a change in I or V if you hold the other constant. (Why?) It’s a detector very similar to the ones that astronomers use? (Why?) Calibrating based on temperature is easier?⁵

We can shine known wavelengths of light on known molecules and detect whether or not the molecule absorbs at that wavelength. (Why?) We want to know what frequencies the molecule absorbs light at. (Why?) When we know what frequencies the molecule absorbs light at, we can assign its spectra using a limited number of rotational constants. (Why?) Rotational transitions are low energy, which means that a lot of the cold regions of space still have active populations in multiple rotational states, which allows us to quantify temperature and density. (Why?) Knowing what space is like helps us to model it, and can help us learn where we come from. (Hey look we got to the question of origins)

We can purchase molecules and collect their rotational spectra. I feel like this one follows the same train of thought.

We have catalogs of molecular line information, which we can assign to the spectra coming from space. This one follows the same starting from “rotational transitions are low energy”.

So, one thing that I notice is that how questions lead me deeper into the subject, reducing the scope of the question, while why questions bring me higher. There is absolutely a space for both, and I think that both are needed. The ideal is to have feel firmly anchored on the ground and a head floating in the clouds, after all.⁶

It is important to look deeper at the question. Physics as a field is built on the concept of reductionism. For all that it has limits, as every other method of discovery does, it is an incredibly powerful tool when applied correctly.

However, the same is true for why. Without motivating the work we do, there is no way to connect it to others. Since all that we do is for the greater glory of G-d, and we are called to bring all creation to Him, we need everything we do to be in connection to the rest of the world, especially the rest of humanity.⁷

Draft 4

I often find myself considering language. There are a lot of reasons for it, as I come to realize more and more with each passing year. One of the more common issues that I find myself considering is the shade of difference between similar words. Two of these words are “why” and “how”.⁹

Why is focused on the reason behind an act, and how focuses on the process behind it. This distinction, for all that it took me far too long to find, rather than simply looking it up, is a somewhat subtle one. Often, we treat the words as interchangeable.

For example, think of that most basic scientific question: “why is the sky blue?”

Most often, we answer this with mechanistic answers. The sky is blue, we explain, because of rayleigh scattering¹⁰, or because air is blue¹¹, or any of a number of other answers. That is, we tell children how the sky is blue.

I think that it’s a subtle thing. By answering questions where someone looks for a reason with a mechanism, we start to point to mechanisms as reasons themselves. That is, the world we create when why questions are answered with how lacks transcendence.¹² When we see the world as nothing but a machine, moving thoughtlessly along, we feel as though actions cease to matter. After all, if the why is the how, then free will makes no sense.

We can look and see the issue from the opposite perspective. If we answer a how question with a why answer, we fall down to fundamentalism.

We celebrate Hanukkah because Hashem preserved the Jewish people before, and He will continue to do so in the future.

I don’t know if that quite works. It feels almost like a non sequitor, and I realize now that there are ways to frame the question that start from a science question, rather than a religious point.

How does a computer program work? We write computer programs to make life easier. We can, hmm no.

By adding the work at the end of the sentence, you cannot really substitute a why.

Computers make life easier because they can do a lot of math really quickly. As it turns out, problems which are easy for people to solve tend to involve concepts, while questions that are easy for computers to solve tend to involve caluclations.

That doesn’t answer the question. I think that this is showing me my own bias. I have a far easier time accepting that a process explains a reason than that a reason explains a process. Then again, I find myself incredibly uncomfortable with fundamentalism as a concept. What do I mean by fundamentalism?

That’s a fantastic question. Fundamentalism is answering how questions with a why. When finding the way that something works, we can always delve deeper.

If we answer “how do molecules form” with “because it is favorable for them to do so”¹⁴, we shift the question from mechanisms to reasons. Actually, as I think about it, the framing of an answer is often the difference between why and how. Why do molecules bond? It’s energetically favorable. How do they bond? Two atoms draw close enough that they release energy by drawing closer.

I don’t think that’s the point I’m trying to make, though. Let’s try one last time, focusing entirely on the whole “using a how to answer a why kills belief in greater workings and makes the world as though automata.”

Draft 3

One question that children stereotypically ask is “why?”.¹⁵ One question that children ask far less often¹⁶ is how. To be honest, I think that the lack of distinction in children’s questions is the start of every issue that we have in communication.¹⁷

Think about explaining grass as green, either because it reflects green light, or because it has chlorophyll. Each of those answers would satisfy the question of either why or how grass is green. And yet, to me, at least, these two sets of responses feel different. If they don’t to you, this musing is only downhill from here. Be forewarned.

In basic terms, I generally feel like how is looking within, while why looks without. Or, how asks the mechanism by which something operates. Why assumes that there’s a broader meaning to it.

If so, it does lend credence to the idea that why questions are questions of faith, while¹⁸ how questions are questions of science. This definition, of course, relies on science being defined as a mechanistic search for the way that the universe functions, while faith is concerned with understanding the reasons which make the universe.¹⁹

Something that I keep needing to remind myself is that there needs to be a takeaway from whatever I write. Given that I don’t know what the point of this musing. I guess we can ask the two questions of this musing?

I am writing this musing because I have a vague sense of dis-ease²⁰ about the difference between the words, their meaning, and their use. The two words need to be different, if only because they are different words.

I don’t think that there’s a deeper meaning to this musing, at least yet. So, let’s assume that the why has been covered.

I’m writing this musing by making different drafts of the musing. I’m writing this musing by trying to think about what I think the differences are. I’m writing this musing by figuring out what I think the words mean in connection to other words.

Any other ways that I’m writing this musing? I honestly think that may be it. That’s how I’m writing it.

So I guess the way that I responded to the questions confirms my thoughts about how they differ. Why does seem to point to meaning, and how seems to point to methods. Great.

Let’s move past that though. That last sentence in the how feels striking to me. Words have meaning almost exclusively in how they relate to other words.

When we answer a why question with a how answer, or a how question with a why answer, we do a disservice to others. Or, instead, let’s take the other view. Most of the people that I know do not care so much about the precise usage of language. Instead of saying that the rest of the world is wrong, let us see if I cannot find a way that I can shift my own views of language.

After all, as Randall Munroe once pointed out, language and communication requires two people. What is different about the language that others use where this does not feel like an issue? Only now, twenty five hundred words later, do I feel like it is a good time to look up and see if there’s anything that others would think

Oh gosh someone pointed out that why and how come have the same usage, though how come is less formal. If we put it into my framework, how come is also a mechanistic explanation? I think? Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it. Oh good, the rest of the internet generally agrees with me that the difference is between process and reason.

I feel really dissatisfied with this end of musing, however. Why? Because I kind of feel like I’ve gotten nowhere after all these words. How? I have failed to answer the question, which is difference in usage.

I probably have time for one more draft. Let’s do everything in our power to focus exclusively on why I think it’s a problem that we answer process questions with reason answers or vice versa. I’m sure that there’s a reason if I stop to think about it.

Draft 2.5: metawriting to figure out how I feel

I have talked about this a number of times. In short, I muse because I find it helpful to my life and growth as a person.

I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly thought about this. This question can be answered in so many ways, with varying levels of granularity.

I muse by posting my thoughts on the blog. I muse by coming up with an idea, writing about it, revising it²¹, and then posting it. I muse by typing words on a digital page. I muse by having thoughts and expressing them.

Because it’s filled with chlorophyll, which is green. That’s also still a mechanism.

Because it doesn’t absorb green light. Because it’s filled with chlorophyll, which is green.

Somehow, despite the fact that both of those answers are the same, it still feels vastly different to me. I don’t actually know if there’s anything more that I can say about that. Let’s try, though.

Draft 2

I’ve been thinking recently about the difference between why and how. The two words have to be different²³, but I’ve been struggling to figure out in what way.²⁴

How feels like something descriptive. That is, I figure out how to end a sentence, because I already know that I’m going to end a sentence. Why, on the other hand, feels prescriptive. If I am figuring out why to end a sentence, it is because I don’t know what its purpose is.

Maybe that’s the way to figure out the difference between how and why: write a few sentences that could use either word and see the way that the meaning changes.²⁵

I’m going to restart this musing, and I will try my best to use either word only intentionally.

Draft 1

While writing my reflection on the readings, I mentioned faith like a child. As I drove to religious ed, I thought about faith like a child, and I thought about faith and science. One half formed memory I have²⁶ was that the difference between faith and science is which questions they seek to answer. Science seeks to answer how, while religion seeks to answer why.

Of course, I then immediately thought about the question that a young child asks. Children do not²⁷ ask how. They ask why. When a child asks why the sky is blue, however, we tend to give how answers.

That bothered me, for a reason that I’m going to try to work through here in this musing.

Ok, so the most obvious bother is that if the difference between why and how is science and faith, and the two live in different domains, then it’s wrong to answer a why with a how. Now that I’ve expressed the concern, I can set it aside.²⁸

I’ll trust that the sentence above describes my concern. At least one of those claims is untrue, so let’s list them.²⁹

Are there other claims? I don’t really think so.³⁰ There may be, however, so I’ll be willing to add to the list if I need to.

Alright, let’s try to answer the claims one at a time, and see if we can’t find the one that isn’t ringing in tune.

There is a difference between science and faith. No, that’s absolutely true. For all that I’ve talked about how science and mysticism are intrinsically linked, the method of discovering knowledge is inherently different. Science is different than math is different than faith.

By that, I mean that science gains knowledge³¹ by measuring and reproducing measurements. Mathematics generates knowledge by testing hypotheses using logic. Faith generates knowledge by divine revelation.

Oh! A claim in there is that why and how are fundamentally different questions. There we go, that’s the sticking point that I have right now.

So let’s see what the difference is between the two. How describes process, while why ascribes meaning? That feels kind of resonant.

That is, how is a descriptive thing, while why is a prescriptive. Ok, that does also work with the difference between faith and science, so let’s run with that take. Now then, what’s wrong with answering why questions with how or vice versa?

Ok, let’s remove the explicit case of the children’s question. Let’s look at the election.

We have a president because we set up a system wherein we elect someone to run the country. That is a why answer to a why question. Oh, yeah, no, that’s definitely the issue.

When a kid asks why the sky is blue, we treat it as though they’re asking how the sky is blue. The sky is blue because air is blue.³² But, why is the sky blue? That’s a much more difficult question to answer. Honestly, there isn’t an answer that I know of for why the sky is blue, other than the fact that the universe was created in such a way to cause the sky to be blue.

When a child asks why we have to go to school, on the other hand, we do give them a prescriptive answer. We have to go to school because it’s good to learn, or something.³³

Ok, so I guess my issue is really just with the answer to why the sky is blue. That is, however the only children’s question about science that I can think of.

If not, does that show me the issue? Is there a way to frame scientific questions that are why based, rather than how based?

I guess those are shades of different meaning, for all that I cannot really point to anything specific about it. However, what is the difference between a child’s response to each of those?

If we assume that a child is an automaton, the child will ask why in response to everything else.

Because the sun emits light across a whole wavelength, maximizing at the green. Why?

Ok that’s also not great. That also does cover the actual why answer, which is slowly leading me to the actual issue I have. Despite the fact that I have different senses of the meaning, my impulse is to answer the why questions more or less interchangeably.

I think I might have fallen too far into the weeds. Let’s pull back and re evaluate.

philosophers and physicists please don’t hate mail me↩︎
in my imagination, at least↩︎
I think↩︎
assuming that we are not disabled↩︎
I assume, and this is where my knowledge falls apart↩︎
I hope that’s a common saying and not one that I stole from I think Discworld? I know that it’s somewhere in the Tiffany Aching series, but I cannot quite remember where↩︎
there we go, it took all day (literally, I’ve spent more than 12 hours working on this musing off and on), but I finally got a why for the post↩︎
wow that’s wild to think about↩︎
as you might expect from the title of the musing today↩︎
true, kind of↩︎
also kind of true↩︎
hmmm this might be the day for the rant, for all that I feel like it’s probably not the musing for it↩︎
I’m not sure whether I went to the most recent Jewish holiday because my family just watched An American Pickle, because the holiday just passed, because my Jewish identity is something I’m forced to reckon with almost daily, or almost any other reason↩︎
even though this is itself somewhat of a mechanistic answer↩︎
I don’t know if the . should be there, but I’m going to leave it, because it’s a statement↩︎
if stereotypes are to believed↩︎
ok that’s a little strong, but I’ve been working on this post for a lot of words and still have no clue what I’m trying to say, so I’m going to go with it↩︎
while is a word that I’m going to be using far too much for the rest of this musing, sorry↩︎
not using why or how except very intentionally is so very hard for me. I’m being very brave.↩︎
ill ease? disease? huh is that where disease comes from? That makes sense↩︎
optionally↩︎
hypothetical. Right now I’m very comfortable↩︎
because otherwise we wouldn’t have both↩︎
why and how both came up in my mind when I tried to figure out how to end the sentence (though not there, which is a clue)↩︎
I just wrote that sentence with a how unthinkingly, and that might be a part of the issue. I’m too thoughtless about the way I use my language.↩︎
which I think I first encountered in a children’s book series about someone who’s a clone of a dead girl raised by the initial girl’s parents (have asked my resident librarian what book that could be -Update: Double Identity by Margaret Peterson Haddix (also wow she wrote a lot of books, many of which were formative to me. As the resident librarian put it “She has written so many objectively twisted but deeply compelling plots”)). Wild how my memory links. Also, now that I’m down the rabbit hole, wow early 2000s child lit was filled with a lot of wild dystopian literature. Then again, I also read Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, which though not children’s lit (I think) or from the early 2000s, was still messed up. Ok back to the real musing (but new idea just dropped). Also I need to reread and then write about the Patternist series, because there’s so much in there that’s immediately relevant to modern political discourse.↩︎
stereotypically, at least↩︎
because clearly something in that statement is wrong, so I should figure out what↩︎
I’m treating this first draft as something slightly more formalized than free association, but only slightly↩︎
one thing I’m realizing is that the raw tex file that I write contains its own information that gets removed when I convert to HTML. Most of the time, I’m on team line break after each sentence (since a professor taught me how much easier it made editing and seeing edits), which LaTeX ignores (I don’t know if the many conversions I use will break if I try to have special formatting for the word, so I’m going to pretend that the normal orthography (which may or may not be the proper term, depending on how important the positioning of letters is to the meaning of the word) is acceptable). However, every so often I find that I have two sentences that feel like a single thought, and so get to use a single line. Also most footnotes tend to be a single line, which makes me think that I really do use line breaks to signal thought shifts. Wild↩︎
as a discipline, nominally↩︎
among other issues. Generally, though, it’s something about rayleigh scattering, which may or may not be something I’ve vaguely forgotten about.↩︎
the law tells us, or whatnot. There are plenty of other reasons we could give for why kids have to go to school↩︎
because it doesn’t absorb green light↩︎
or scatters, I suppose↩︎
though that’s why chlorophyll is green, I suppose↩︎

Musings

I'm just copying my father

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On Faith and Reason

Draft 2: 30 December

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What I Read and Wrote

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Christmas 2023

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Reflections on Today’s Gospel

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On Family Recipes

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Flash Fiction Friday

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4thewords Review

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On Why Versus How

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Draft 2.5: metawriting to figure out how I feel

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