First Published: 2023 April 14
Last time I talked about my handwriting, I made the claim that the speed my handwriting changes was slowing down over time. While I think that may have been true then, a large part of that had to do with the fact that I had been working in the same journal for nearly two years.1
Unlike that journal, the journal I began around the time of my last post only lasted a few months. Also unlike before, I had no issues finding a new way to change my penmanship. It ended up being a two-fold change.
The first major change is that my handwriting has become much tighter than even before. I attribute a large part of that to the fact that I got 0.3 mm mechanical pencils for Christmas, which give a significantly smaller line, especially how I use them.2
The other major change was the deliberate change that I made. I apparently didn’t talk about this last time, but I made a goal with myself to change my handwriting in some obvious and notable way each journal.3 In my first journal, this meant writing in all caps.
In my second journal, it was all caps with the first letter of each word capitalized. In the third, I think I added my double letters.4 In the fourth I stopped writing every other line, shrinking the vertical space on my page.
And, as I mentioned last time, in my fifth5 journal, I made overhanging letters. I said then that I would do that with “t,i,s,c,g,j,f still unsure of b,p,r”. The list is now slightly different. I do it with B,C,E,F,G,I,J,P,R,S, and T.
Since I didn’t alphabetize it last time, the differences are as follows. I became sure of B, changed the way that I wrote my E so that it overhung better6. I became sure of P and R. All in all, not a huge difference between the first pages and the last.
In my new journal, all that remains, but now I write it with a slant. I’m still not sure what angle to my vertical strokes is ideal, but I think I tend to be somewhere in the fifteen to twenty degree range. Comments this week have included 7, “looks like a medieval scribe’s handwriting”, and “it kind of looks like Arabic.”
I like how it looks, though I do think it’s funny that I went from messy and illegible to pretty and illegible. Maybe my next journal’s handwriting change will be legibility to a broad audience.
It might be nearly three, but my journals are far away, and I don’t feel like finding one for certain right now.↩︎
rotating the pencil in my hand every few words so that the sharpest point is always what I write with.↩︎
when asked why, I often respond with my joking (but truly and legitimately held belief) statement that people should set arbitrary goals and then strive to achieve them↩︎
assuming that I have five. Otherwise ignore this one and treat all the numbers after it as one smaller↩︎
again, assuming there were five before my newest↩︎
i.e. made it less like an epsilon↩︎
looks like elvish↩︎
First Published: 2023 April 13
Last time that I mused about running, I talked about the Doctoral Degree Dash that I did last summer. In it, I ran further than I thought I could.1
Since then, I’ve tried running off and on. Lately I’ve been more off than on, but even when I try, I find that I can only really run around a mile in the indoor track I’m using before I lose the ability to keep going.
This week has been shockingly warm here, and it’s made me want to get outside and run. So, tonight I decided to run while praying a rosary,2 to see if that could help motivate me to run longer.
In total, I ended up running just under three miles. I think that there were likely N causes to that.3
First, I actually felt like the distance measurement was accurate. When I run on the indoor track, it claims that 6.6 laps equal a mile, but my watch seems to think it’s closer to eight.
Second, the constant variety in an outdoor run as compared to indoors. When I run on the track, I’m running in a small loop over and over, so it’s harder to want to keep going. On the other hand, when I run outside, especially in the latter half of the run, the faster I go, the sooner I get home.
Third, I actually did something with my mind to stop me from thinking about how miserable it is to run.4
I found out my watch now gives me a lot of statistics about my runs. For instance, my heart rate basically never dropped below 175 while I ran, which is an incredibly high feeling number. My pace also seems to be fairly well correlated to my stride length, which makes sense to me. When I get tired my steps certainly get shorter.
Anyways, I just thought it was interesting how different it feels to run outside than inside. I’m hoping to get in better physical shape this summer, but summer kind of starts now.
To be fair, I didn’t think that I could run 5 miles, which was (is?) apparently untrue↩︎
something I did a fair amount last summer↩︎
I’m going to try to actually write these posts without going back more going forward, and when I’m not sure how many causes or reasons or items in general lists I have, I normally either pick a number arbitrarily or put N.↩︎
So here N=3↩︎
First Published: 2022 April 12
As rapidly happens for me, I’ve run out of ideas to blog about. I’ve been drawing a lot of celtic knots again lately, though, so I suppose that’s something that I can talk about.
Something I’ve always wished and hoped for is the ability to freehand celtic knotwork. As some of my readers might have seen on my Instagram page, every one I make starts with a grid and then a grid of circles representing the holes in the design.
I don’t remember whether I started drawing them like this to practice freehand, or if the two just grew together, but I’ve started drawing celtic knots as single lines, rather than the two dimensional ribbons that I used to draw. It’s absolutely helped me with freehanding, though I’m still nowhere near as good as I would like to be.
As I tried reproducing a cross that I am particularly proud of today, I think I might have found a new solution, though. I made all of the beams going a single direction first, and only then went through and added the crossing pieces.1
It worked much better than I expected, though I was still fairly reliant on the grid of my paper. Then again, practicing on a lightly gridded piece of paper is probably my best bet for learning how to quickly find the right sizing.
if none of this makes sense, I apologize. I procrastinated my writing a little too much this week, and I’m finally paying the price.↩︎
First Published: 2022 April 11
One advantage of the Libby app is that I am able to put a book on hold so that when it is available, I can download it for fourteen days. Since many of the books I want to read others also want to read, it means that I get books spaced out, instead of needing to read every interesting book at once.
One downside of this is that I often have forgotten why I wanted to read the book in the first place. That happened with one book that I read recently, Fredrik Backman’s My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. It’s the story of a young girl whose grandmother dies of cancer.
The girl is bullied a lot at school, and her relationship with her grandmother revolved around the stories that she would tell of different fantasy lands. When her grandmother dies, Elsa receives different letters that must be delivered to each of the different people who live in the apartment complex with her. Along the way, she learns about the many ways that her grandmother was a complex person who had relationships with everyone in the complex.
I loved the book a lot. The first half or so was a struggle to get through, but I don’t think that I have ever cried more while reading a book. I couldn’t keep tears out of my eyes for around the last quarter of the book. All in all, I would highly recommend the book.
First Published: 2022 April
For a variety of reasons,1 I haven’t been going to open mics since around February. I went again tonight, and I forgot just how much fun they are. I got to sing a song that I’ve been working on for a while,2 and at the prompting of a friend I sang a great song with another friend.3 The friend who made the recommendation is also a fantastic musician and was willing to take requests. It’s really fun singing Three is a Magic Number4 with other adults, especially when everyone is over trying to look cool.
I’m really excited to make open mics a regular part of my schedule again.
First Published: 2023 April 9
Fourteen months later, another musing on writing. This month I’ve set the goal of writing more each day. In retrospect, setting that goal on the third of the month, when your first two days were 2494 and 3087 words may not have been the best choice. But, today is also Easter.1 2
I realized that there’s value in living a life outside of just writing for the sake of writing. So, while the goal continues, I’m going to be taking Sundays off. Tomorrow I will find the time to write 3600 words3.
Read: my schedule today was Mass, calling a friend for 90 minutes, and then spending from 1pm to 9 pm with another friend and their family. It was a great day, but oh boy did I do absolutely nothing approaching work today (which, to be fair, is an explicit goal that I’ve been told I should have on Sundays).↩︎
I kind of think that my footnotes might be longer than the actual text of this post (especially given this one), but they don’t explicitly relate to writing, so it’s fine.↩︎
of varying quality.↩︎
First Published: 2023 April 8
Apparently I’ve never reflected on Easter here. That’s interesting to me. This year will not be any different though. I’m heading to sing at a Vigil Mass tonight, so while it is not too late for a1 post now, I am a little rushed, and will almost certainly be too tired for one afterwards.
Anyways, Christ the Lord is Risen!
coherent↩︎
First Published: 2022 April 7
I’ve kept up with writing the novel since I last talked about it here. I’m no longer spending time plotting chapters before writing them, which is also working surprisingly well for me. I’ve written more than 100,000 words of it.1
I started posting the book to a website about the time I stopped blogging,2 and it’s gotten nearly forty thousand views, which is incredible to me. Anyways, that’s most of my update for that book.
I’ve also started writing another book, which I’m doing for a writing competition. The goal is to write 55,555 words in 5 weeks, and I’m so far on track for it. It’s been fun to try to stretch myself by writing more!
First Published: 2023 April 6
In the time since I stopped writing this blog, there have been a number of changes in my life.1 One of the most notable of which is that I am now a PhD candidate. I haven’t quite figured out how that changes my own life, but I understand that it generally comes with a few changes in a PhD student’s life.
It often means that you’re beginning work on your thesis. In theory I’ve been working on that for a while.
It often means that you’re done with classes, but I’ve been done needing classes for more than a year and done taking classes for a semester or so.
It often means that your PhD project has been approved, but at least in my program, we never actually get a formal approval for our PhD project from our committee.
Where does that leave me? More or less in the same place, except that I’ve changed my LinkedIn profile to say “PhD Candidate” instead of “PhD Student.” As I write this, I’ve already found a second use case for that! Someone asked me to write a bio for the public talks I’ll be giving again this summer.2
First Published: 2023 April 5
Wow! A year ago two days from now I wrote my last reflection on how I gave up on writing this blog. Unlike then, I do kind of regret this break. It wasn’t planned, it just sort of happened.
I have been keeping up on my creative hobbies, another difference from last year. However, I do find that I still become ungrounded and disconnected without blogging.1
So, a few updates:2
I passed my candidacy exam!
I have kept writing the book that I talked about before giving up
I started a new book
Anyways, hopefully I’ll be able to get back to doing this daily!3