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On the Path of a Life

First Published: 2025 April 7

Draft 1: 7 April 2025

I think a lot about the way that my life is and will be, especially these past few months. In part, I am absolutely sure that this is because dealing with a death, even one which is far from sudden, makes anyone think about the way that they’re spending their own time on the earth. In part, I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m closing a chapter of my life. Before I turn to the next section, I would like to think that it will be a better one.1

I remember watching a video a few years ago that really changed the way that I view a lot of the goals I set. I am well aware of the SMART2 method, but I find that a lot of the things I want to do are fundamentally not either of the first, and as a result, hard to know the achievability or timeline for. When life doesn’t work with a plan, one can either change the plan or the life. Since goal setting is to help me live, I want the goals to reflect my life, and not the other way around.

I think that the video was initially set about new year’s resolutions, and it talked about how, at the end of the day3, most of these goals, even when framed as SMART ones, are not really the actual goal. A goal to stop eating sweets, for instance, is more likely the method to meet some real goal, such as improving health or managing blood sugar. As someone pointed out once4, a measure stops being effective when it becomes a goal. We see this all the time, such as how standardized tests effectively became the curriculum taught in public schools. The goal of a standardized test was to see children’s general knowledge. Instead, it becomes about how well a student has been prepared for the specific exam.

Also, especially with New Year’s Resolutions5, life circumstances change rapidly in a way that makes SMART goals bad. If I twist my ankle on the fifteenth with a goal of running daily, then I’ll have to stop. If, instead, the goal was something broader, like improving my physical fitness, I can instead start rowing or swimming or anything else. In general, the author stated confidently, themes can be the answer to your life.

As I’ve grown, I find myself trusting common wisdom about change less and less.6 While I have not had much luck with themes, something he said was very impactful.

Butchering the metaphor, as is my right as an author, think of your life as a road. We cannot change the path we have taken. And, in general, any choice we make does not truly diverge us that much.7 However, each choice we make turns us slightly more into the kind of person who makes those kinds of choices. Every time we eat a salad, our brains are a little more tuned to eating salads. Every time that we do a kindness for no reason save itself, we become slightly kinder.

Is that a particularly deep or profound metaphor? Maybe not to the average reader. However, I find it far more helpful to me than thinking about goals. I do not really want to be a runner, so practicing running doesn’t make a lot of sense. I do, however, want to be an older person who is described as “shockingly, almost horrifyingly spry”, and so want to practice the exercises that will both lead me to being spry today as well as lay a good foundation for me to age.

A habit is, by most definitions, something we do without conscious thought. That is, it is when we follow the twists in the road without consideration. A metaphor I used in my web novel was the river of fate.8 We are all riding rafts down a stream which never ends. Following the path set for you is not just easy, it is effortless.

Like any other source of flowing water, though, the more you wish to diverge from the main flow, the more effort it takes. Rerouting the river itself is nearly impossible, especially the wider and stronger the river is. The metaphor gets a bit strained here, because each action we take is making the riverbed ahead of us, so I suppose that a better analogy might be a river shrouded in mist. We get to decide what comes next, but rivers tend to flow a specific way.

All this to say, not making choices is the default way people go through the world. Better habits lead to better lives because choosing the good is difficult, not because of the word good, but because of the word choose. All choices take effort, and so the goal for me is less any individual good habit or virtuous thing and much more about shifting who I am to become the sort of person who does not have to think about doing good. Everything yearns to rest, and so making the good easier is the best thing that I can do.

Hmm, I’m not super happy with this, because I don’t really think that I said anything that meaningful, and what shreds of meaning may have made their way in are obscured by the filler of my stream of consciousness. Still, it is also important to accept what is, rather than what I wish would be.

Daily Notes

The astute reader might note that this has changed. I don’t think that spending twenty minutes a day on the daily goals is necessarily serving me well right now, so I tried to pare it down. I will likely pare down even further before the time is through

  1. not that this stage (other than the obvious) was bad, just that I always want better for those I care about, and I care about myself.↩

  2. specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound↩

  3. end of the year?↩

  4. I don’t remember where↩

  5. note the capitalization! Fancy.↩

  6. partially because survivorship bias, partially because I am not the average person, partially because I find myself trusting other’s knowledge less and less (wow I really need to do reason and revelation already↩

  7. obviously like jumping out of a plane will impact the shape much more than like red tie versus blue tie for a day↩

  8. I think fate is not real, but the normative Catholic stance is that only humanity (and some non-corporeal beings) have free will. It’s not a large leap to say that this means the universe is predictable for any system without human connection, and I think that I’ve seen talks with that exact thesis. I don’t know where I stand on the issue, generally thinking that we should err on the side of treating animals with compassion, as they too are G-d’s creations, but↩

  9. is it a publisher for audio? I think so↩

  10. even if it’s making other parts of me tighter rather than the parts I think I’m stretching lighter.↩

  11. lifts?↩

  12. obviously↩

  13. oh duh, if I move dishes into there, at worst I end up with nice warm plates to serve my meals. Nice how thinking through things by typing helps me come to answers↩

  14. meaning a snack and 2 meals is good or three meals, etc.↩

  15. rice and bratwurst and gravy for dinner, which was shockingly good. Gravy entirely because Japanese curry starts from a roux and I forgot how much I love both making and consuming roux based sauces. Lunch was a pot pie from the local gas station chain. Breakfast was a rice krispie treat and a protein bar.↩

  16. which I think isn’t used as a term any longer. Maybe script↩

  17. right? because it’s the singular one there?↩

  18. it’s a really dystopian progression fantasy series, where the main character is poor and wants to cultivate, and ends up joining a horribly abusive fighting ring just to be able to pay off his debts. Not that I want to write more dystopic fiction (if anything, I want the reverse. I want writing to return to an era where we have hope. Society influences art and art influences society. I want to do my part to make both better), but it was enjoyable, and I’m curious if I’ll still enjoy the themes on a second read through.↩

  19. would it have been faster by a lot and also easier for everyone if I had just written it? yes. Did the undergrad necessarily want to write the script? no. Does the undergrad need to know python? no, but I think that the more tools one has, generally the better.↩

Reflections on the Gospel

First Published: 2025 April 6

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that I have only one other reflection on a Lenten gospel, since I’ve never been good at this blog in the springtime.
Note 7 April 2025: By mistake I uploaded the monthly reflection again. Whoops!

N.B. Oof this one got rambly and also weirdly aggressive and uses second person more than usual. To any and all of my readers, I promise that the you in the writing is the generic you, not you specifically.

Draft 2: 6 April 2025

“Has no one condemned you?”

She replied, “No one, sir.”

Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”

Of the lines in the Bible, I don’t really know why this one doesn’t get the same sort of, if you’ll pardon the pun, religious fanatacism that others like John 3:16 gets. What better encapsulates Church teaching than Christ’s final line there?

We are a faith of hope, of belief, of love. G-d does not condemn anyone to hell, nor does he condemn anyone generally. We choose hell.

However, this is not free license to act how we please. We are also commanded to sin no further.

Who has the authority to make such statements?

The Lord, the G-d of Abraham and Isaac, the voice of the burning bush, the soft call on the wind.

I cannot understand why the beauty of this line is not commented on more often.

I do, however, understand why so many non-and non-practicing1 Christians use this as a cudgel. I have primarily seen it used in reference to homosexuality and abortion, the two hot button topics of the era for believers.

When the crowd is gone, and the woman is standing alone in front of her Creator, as we all will do, He asks if anyone condemns her. If she had been wracked with guilt over her actions, she could still have condemned herself. She does not, however. Looking around, and seeing the space empty of herself and Love Himself, she responds that no one does.

While the crowd arrives and ultimately leaves, Christ is writing in the sand. Folk legend says that he was writing the sins of everyone in the crowd, which, even if I do not agree with on principle, points so something we too often forget. In the parables that find themselves recreated in our lives, we are not Him. We are not the father from last week, gladly welcoming his son back. Most often, we are not even the prodigal son. We are the other son, the one feeling jilted because his father is celebrating the return of his wayward son.

I think that we should all take part in a thought exercise. Imagine the worst person who has ever lived. Pray for them.

That’s not the exercise, but it is a good reminder. The exercise works just as well with a fictional person, assuming that you can still bring yourself to feel the same level of disgust and horror at the actions of the person. Imagine that when you die, and the Heavenly Father receives you into his warm embrace, you find yourself face to face with this person. I am not asking how the you of then would feel, I am asking how the you of right now would feel.

Or, take it a few steps closer to home. Think of everyone in your life, repentant sinner trying their best, person flaunting their sin, the annoying person who always takes forever to order their coffee. Would you be happy spending an eternity in heaven with all of them? Would you be happy spending an eternity in heaven if the two of you alone were saved? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you do not have the heart that Christ demands.

Too often, people who claim to be Christian will speak of justice when they mean retribution. We need to remember, all sin is public sin, because we are all one body. You cannot harm one part of yourself without harming the whole. If, in the gym, one arm gave out before the other, you2 would not shame the arm. You would give it the extra attention that it needs in order to be as strong as the other.

The Church does not teach equality, but equity. “To whom much has been given, much is expected”, reminds us that those who have been blessed with more or seemingly greater3 gifts are expected to give more to the world around them. In direct opposition to Calvinism, the Church teaches that those who have received more from the Lord are actively sinful if they notice someone suffering. St. Basil, one of the early Church Fathers4 put it so strikingly. We would condemn someone stealing the coat from a homeless man’s back. What then, is the coat that we do not wear?

As with every Gospel passage, it can return to love of neighbor. However, this passage is specifically about justice.

One argument people use for retributive “justice” is that it works as a deterrent. If you cut of thieves’ hands, then you will have less theft. If you kill the murderer, others will not lash out in anger. This is not, however, a matter of faith and morals. This is a matter of fact and evidence.

The research is resoundingly clear that retributive justice does not work for anything except causing suffering.5 All punishment should be oriented towards the salvation of a person’s soul and the souls of all in the world.

An argument for life in prison or capital punishment is that a country may be unable to keep someone effectively detained. If a murderer escapes and kills a dozen people, wouldn’t it have been better to have killed him to prevent that? The Church is incredibly clear on that point.

No.

The Church rejects any way of quantifying the value of human life, as to put a price on something of infinite glory is to inherently devalue it. We are crafted, lovingly and individually, in the image and likeness of the source of all good. By saying that twenty lives is worth more than a life, or a thousand, or any number, you are inherently saying that there is a worth to human life. One life is worth one life.

Something mathematics has right is the idea of infinity. What is infinity plus one? Or, getting to the direct thrust, what is infinity times twenty, or a million?

Infinity remains infinity.

There is more to be said. One could speak about how jury nullification, at its best, deals with the fact that laws are black and white but circumstances rarely are. One could speak about how we can never know the state of another’s soul. One could speak about how kings had, or at least claimed, a divine right to rule, which gave them the power of choosing death. One could speak about how, if the goal is to cow a populace into not murdering, it is truly less relevant who is hung, as long as a body swings from the rope.

This Lenten season, I invite you and myself to truly think on the meaning of Christ’s passion. He willingly died for each and every one of us and our sins. My sin and my sin alone condemns Christ to the Cross.

But, as Lent becomes Easter, so too does Christ rise from the dead, showing the path forward. We should not condemn those around us, but in all things should strive to love everyone as Christ loves us. After all, just as two infinities is the same as one, half an infinity is as much too. Loving any fraction of the amount that Christ does means having an infinite well of love.

Draft 1: 6 April 2025

Wow, sing of an age past but not forgotten Sunday!6 It has been ages since the Gospel really spoke to me like it did today. With that in mind, I’m going to reflect on it.

Today’s Gospel is probably one of the more commonly7 cited passages of the Bible, especially by non believers. In it, a woman is caught in the act of adultery. The crowd,8 seeing an opportunity to entrap The Lord, ask Him what they should do. Obviously Mosaic Law says that she is to be stoned, but something something, Roman government said that Jews can’t do their own capital punishment or something.

Christ does not respond at first, instead writing9 on the ground. They repeat he question, and he says that the one without sin should cast the first stone.

In the Catholic joke version of this parable, a stone flies through the air and Christ exclaims “Mom! I told you not to come today!”

In the Biblical10 account, the crowd leaves one by one, until it is only the woman and Christ standing there. He asks if any condemn her, and she says no. Christ says that he, then, will also not, and tells her to go forth and sin no further.

Now, there’s a lot that I want to unpack here.

First, something I don’t know if I have ever seen is that Christ implicitly is asking the woman if she condemns herself or her actions. I feel like there’s something really important there, especially in the context of how people use the passage. However, I’m not sure what it is yet, so I’ll try to figure out by the end of this reflection.11

Second, there is a popular Catholic belief that Christ was writing the sins of the crowd on the ground, and that is what caused them to leave. I think that this is a bad faith reading. I do not know a single person who would be able to confidently state that they were perfect and without blame, especially in the context of explicit entrapment. Too, there is the point to remember that they asked Him this to cause trouble. I do not think that they would have stoned her even if He had said that all must follow the Mosaic Law.

In this reading, it is simply a waiting game. At some point, the provocateurs get bored or have other obligations, and are so forced to leave. Christ, waiting patiently12, does not address the woman until the entirety of the crowd leaves. I also don’t know what to make of this, except that we should never make choices about judgement and punishment rashly.

If I had been attempting to goad someone I thought of as a false prophet into choosing between two terrible choices and he just didn’t give a real answer, I think that I would be relatively patient. I surely would believe that he would become uncomfortable with a crowd looming over him, anxiously awaiting an answer, far before I would have reason to leave. I don’t know if that’s true, but, if the leaders had that belief, they would have been proven entirely wrong.

Third,13 there is something really interesting to me about the way that the Law is fundamentally changed in that instance. Nothing in the Mosaic Law, so far as I am aware, requires the dispensers of judgement to themselves be pure.

In Catholic teaching, sacraments are effective “ex opere operandi”; the holiness of the one providing the sacrament has no effect on the efficacy of the sacrament. There’s something really interesting to me about the fact that we have decided that expecting perfection from those who have been called and chosen to lead the people of G-d14, and yet Christ seems to be demanding that we be perfect in order to enact justice. Regardless of whether we feel it is merited, the crowd was correct that the explicit punishment laid out in the Law was death by stoning. Again, I don’t know what to do with this thought, so I will leave it for a little as well.

Moving to the more immediately applicable interpreting, this passage is often thrown by non-believers15 when Christians attempt to enact policy or seek punishment for violations, especially moral violations. The common response is that Christ said that she was to sin no more, and so telling people to stop bad actions is still ok or something. My most charitable reading of the Christian response is that the Christian legitimately believed that the other person was unaware that they were violating moral law, and out of perfect love and charity were simply informing them of a new Truth.16

Of course, we know that is not the case. Especially in the context of homosexuality, where I feel like the verse was most popularly used, no one is unaware that the standard belief in Christian society has been that homosexuality is inherently sinful.17 I think that, truly, this is an example of just how much Christian morality on justice is nonexistent among nominal believers.18

What is the goal of a punishment? To me, the answer is simple: as with literally everything that we do, the end goal of a punishment should be to bring the entire world to G-d and Christ. What does that mean in this context, though?

Generally, it means that reform based punishments should be seen as objectively better than retribution based punishment.19 The Church, in “Fides et Ratio”, was very clear that religious and scientific truth do not disagree. The idea that anyone has the right to end another’s life, whether explicitly by capital punishment or implicitly by life sentences, comes from the belief that Church Fathers had that deterrence was an effective way to reduce crime.

That is not a question of faith and morals.

Deterrence’s effect on crime rates lies exactly in the camp of a question that rational20 thought can answer. Even the federal government, whose recent administration is explicitly in favor of retribution based punishment, still acknowledges that harsh punishments do not reduce crime. So, then, how can a Catholic support retribution based punishment?

This is not a rhetorical question, for all that its presence in my writing makes it inherently rhetorical.21 I legitimately do not know of an argument for retribution based punishment that does not rely on the argument of “the Church Fathers said it was ok.” The Church Fathers are often wrong. Aquinas, the argumentative Catholic’s favorite cudgel, famously did not believe in the immaculate conception. We don’t question the validity of this.

We don’t22 question that daytime is bright because of the sun, as Augustine did. So then why is it that we question the Holy Father, who, seeing this, recently reminded all Catholics that we cannot support the death penalty. I have seen that some say that we still should allow it because we may not be able to keep someone imprisoned. Why is someone being imprisoned?

In the Christian ethical framework, we are punished only in so far as it is beneficial towards leading us to the Gospel. If we believe that crime is bad for getting all souls to heaven23, then we should work to stop crime in whatever way is most effective. The data show that means catching people, and giving them ways to rehabilitate.

If a murderer escapes custody and kills again, this is not somehow worse than killing them. If a murderer escapes and kills a thousand people, it is still no worse than killing them. All lives are infinitely precious.

Despite what we may have thought as children, infinity times one thousand is still infinity.

Of course, this line of thought quickly leads to pure pacifism.

Unfortunately, I now have a meeting with a friend, and so cannot finish the thought. That’s probably fine, since I am on a huge tangent right now.

Daily Reflection: 6 April 2025)

I’m realizing that the way that these goals is structured is not entirely what I want right now. It kind of came up in yesterday’s musing, but, while I don’t think that today is going to be the day that I work to fix it24, I think that it’s still probably worth thinking about. Right now I’m kind of leaning towards obligations25, growth, both autotelic26 and means27, and how to improve in some other regard.28

Anyways

  1. Because once baptized always baptized, etc↩

  2. hopefully↩

  3. remembering that the only greatness in heaven is He Who Is. All that we do on earth is just in attempt to model ourselves after Him↩

  4. since for some reason there are people who think that those born centuries ago have wisdom that we lack by virtue of coming later↩

  5. which, I will admit, is some people’s stated goal↩

  6. unlike wayback wednesday or throwback thursday or flashback friday (I’m going to start playing with capitalization, I think. I’m thinking about how to change my handwriting again, and capitalization is a thing that I play with a lot there so may as well do here), I don’t know of any pithy ways to say that for satur or sundays. If you know of one, please let me know↩

  7. intentionally. I know that we all have tons of Biblical allusions in everyday speech that go completely unnoted↩

  8. wow I realize what Jewish authors mean by the New Testament being really Jew Hatey (I’m no longer using antisemitism, because we should call it what it is) more and more lately↩

  9. I swear I’ve seen versions that say drawing↩

  10. read, more likely to be what happened↩

  11. something something, if I had more time I would have written less↩

  12. and who among us hasn’t whittled a day away writing on the nearest available form?↩

  13. both the first and third points here are things that I didn’t think about until I started writing here. Wild how consciously taking time to consider something makes it easier to consider↩

  14. who, remember, are told it would be better that they have a millstone tied around their neck and be cast into the sea than to mislead↩

  15. or believers in something else. I’m not totally sure that it’s a fair way to characterize someone. Non-Christians? Hmm↩

  16. see my future musing on truth, reason, and revelation↩

  17. Though I did recently encounter an interesting argument that says more or less that the anti-homosexual stance the Church has taken is relatively modern. The Bible is more than okay with slavery, but we banned it when society said that we must. Even in America, the Jesuits (ugh I need to muse about my issues feeling called to Ignatian spirituality) owned, bought, and sold enslaved people as chattel. Something something, cultural norms aren’t always right, especially arguments which are entirely “well we kind of always felt like this”. Like yes there are a few Biblical passages which explicitly decry homosexual actions, but those are also generally surrounded by any number of admonitions that we no longer follow. I should think on this longer↩

  18. nominal here because there’s the whole Catholic thing of “faith without works is dead”, so if you don’t change how you act based on information, do you really believe it?↩

  19. I say punishment not justice here, because starting here I mean Justice as a fundamental and independent of human belief thing, not simply what we have agreed as a society↩

  20. since it’s faith and reason, I’m using reason and rationality↩

  21. because there’s no way for another to respond in the moment.↩

  22. or, at least, I hope that we don’t. Given how much people hate the ratio part of fides et ratio lately, I’m not confident↩

  23. which I don’t think anyone explicitly states, but it is frequently assumed↩

  24. because I have far more obligations than I thought that I did↩

  25. things that some external source expects from me. E.g. my thesis, the guitar with a friend↩

  26. things that I want to get better at for their own sake. (I say this having yet to write the post about intrinsic motivation), but like composing, I want to be better at for its own sake, and I guess singing or guitar, etc↩

  27. things that I want to get better at to help with something else. E.g. I want to be faster at typing mostly so that I can get back to having my brain be the rate limiting step in my writing, rather than my keys, as it is right now. The site I’m training on helpfully lets you express speed in characters per second or minute, which makes far more sense to me than words per minute for a specific letter, even though I intellectually know that they’re just linear conversions↩

  28. e.g. eat better, write letters, etc. I guess those go in self improvement, but... (you see why I have this issue)↩

  29. wait that’s such an easy fix since I have some 3 inch binders now. Woo gerbil hour is slightly more back. Issue is now that in order to have water bottle in good place, I also have to have hands in bad place. I really need a split keyboard, and then water can just go in the middle.↩

  30. I realize now, and am very comfortable with↩

On Feeding Myself

First Published 5 April 2025

Draft 1: 5 April 2025

A potentially concerning percentage of the posts1 I’ve been writing are about food. I want to be feeding myself, and I want that feeding to go quickly and healthily.

I did realize today, though, that I want this post to encompass more than simply feeding my stomach. I want to make sure that all parts of me, body, mind, and soul, are being fed. Still, I’m going to start with feeding the body.

Breakfast and lunch, at least during the work week, are getting better and better. Breakfast of oats with berries is a great breakfast,2 and I’ve generally been eating a decent lunch. Dinner remains a mixed bag, though, which isn’t great.

I think that there are a few interwoven parts to that. For one, I still have some part of me that really thinks that dinner should be a production, or at least something effortful. I don’t really know what that means, and interrogating the idea isn’t really giving me anything either. However, I guess it is good for me to know that I have that gut instinct, so that I can start confronting it. I think that the other main issue with dinner is that I do not have a schedule, which makes scheduling exactly when I will be eating what in my home more difficult.

Still, I’ve done any number of hard things, and this isn’t as hard as that.

Third issue is that I don’t have a microwave, so anything I want for dinner kind of has to be stove or oven meal, which also adds some time to the prep.

Potential solutions:

I guess there’s also the tertiary consideration, which is that I can also just keep more easily consumed food at home. If I do that, then I can just grab like a handful of peanuts when I feel hungry, rather than needing to either just suffer or make something effortful.

Ok with my thoughts laid out like this, I think that I have my answer for now. Night before, I will cook dinner for the following day. If, for whatever reason, I am not able to get the meal done, then I’ll just grab two lunches to work, and eat one for dinner.4

I’ll also get some peanuts the next time I go shopping and then have a snack that I can consume at home. Goal part two of feeding my body is explicitly getting some, if not recipes, then at least food things that I can do, knowing that a past me has found their macro profiles to at least resemble something decent.

(N.B. I wrote everything from here until the start of the list after the second entry, because I realized that I want to do the back of the envelope protein content for what I’m getting from breakfast and lunch).

Assuming that I eat my oats and box lunch like a good child, I should be getting about5 my entire daily need for protein in the first two meals I eat, so I can go entirely based on vibes!

Ok cool, I do love japanese curry, and I have been wanting an excuse to buy potatoes.15 So, the to do list is:

One thing that I know about myself is that I cannot rely on weekends for cooking. I can rely on it for shopping, which is maybe strange, but. I guess there’s also the fact that I will have an incredibly different schedule in a little over a month17, and will be visiting friends18 over the summer, so I guess I know that it won’t be a forever thing. Still, probably good to give myself the bare bones of how I would feed myself going forward.

So:

Ok cool, that’s everything I eat I think? Oats and frozen fruit I of course need to buy as I run low, but they last forever, and so don’t need to be considered in terms of perishables.

So, I’m going to be making Japanese inspired curry on Tuesday.26 Oh wait, I do also want to get through my beans.

Um.

Ok so for now let’s try curry beans and rice, as much as that’s not really a thing. I’m still going to be doing potato, carrot, and onion, since those are all delicious and my heritage yearns for me to eat more potato. This means my shopping list is carrot27, onion28, potato, curry block, fruit29, and crunchy green30.

I’ll also inventory my fridge and freezer and toss the expired and rotten food.31 What food is not expired, I will also attempt to eat quickly, in such a way as to get rid of it.

Great!

Now, about feeding the rest of me.

I want to get back into typing practice I think. Two of the rate limiting factors for me right now are legitimately my typing speed and accuracy. That feeds three things: the part of me that loves quantifying growth, the part of me that is writing a bunch, and the part of me that likes being good at things.32 On weekdays, I think that this will mean that I spend the five minutes immediately after daily reflection doing typing practice. Goal in that space is of course accuracy and correct finger placement.33 Actually, if I start with the practice, then I will be primed to get the finger choices and placements correct, so five minutes before doing the reflection are to be spent on the practice.

What else am I trying to feed?

I absolutely need to do guitar every day and work out every day. A forty minute workout in the morning is a lot, but forty minutes is forty minutes, and I’m no longer finding that I am only productive in the morning. If anything, it kind of feels like I’m having the waking version of the previous me’s experience with alarms.34

Five minutes of stretching at night and five minutes of guitar in morning and evening means that in total I’m scheduling less than an hour of my life right now. I’m debating whether or not I should let myself catch up on content during the morning stretch, but am leaning towards no. I’ll absolutely get more workouts in if I only let myself catch up on content when being stretching or cleaning, especially because I do want to keep up with content.

I want to read more. If I just say that I’ll read each night, will I? One issue is that I very much cannot read or write by candlelight, at least with it as flickery as it is. Apparently trimming the wick can help with that.35 I think that I will! But, I also don’t want my nights to be filled with a number of activities, even if they are nominally restful. I think that reading analog nonfiction will help me to bed, as will writing poetry.

As the end to the previous sentence implies, I also want to write more poetry. Doing so after reading might actually be the best, because it gives me a space to process what I read and get my final thoughts for the day onto the page.

Woo! Look at this, I have plans for how I will feed myself. Now I just have to actually go to the store, get the food, clean the fridge, make the food, and keep to the schedule. Basically nothing!

Draft 0.5: 4 April 2025

I’ve mused more than a few times about how I would like to improve my mental and physical health, especially in context of food. In the past, I’ve focused more on the higher level concerns, like the overall macro and micronutrient profiles that I should aim for. The other posts have generally been focused on individual recipes that I made a single time, mostly so that I would have a point of reference in the future when I forgot what I did. However, the most important part of keeping myself eating healithily is actually having a sustainable way of feeding myself. With that in mind, this post is focused on how I’m getting nutrients now, how I’d like to be, how I think that I should be, and what the differences are.

So, let’s start with what I’m doing right now.

My breakfast for weekdays is a bowl of oatmeal with frozen36 berries, usually blueberries but sometimes mixed berries. These days, my lunch on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday are a block of pork37 and cheese38, along with a romaine heart and one or two apples or pears, depending on what I got at the store that week. Dinner, on the other hand, has no regularity

Daily Reflection: 4 April 2025)

Daily Reflection: 5 April 2025)

  1. interesting that I’m more and more using post instead of blog or musing or anything that others I know use. Worth thinking about, so onto the pile (list of things to write) I have↩

  2. accusations of it being horse food aside↩

  3. ok that isn’t true, I do also literally have the small countertop oven that I brought into the office a few years ago.↩

  4. I should really get through the bag of rice that I brought in at some point↩

  5. ok so one ounce of oats dry is apparently 120 calories, which is about 5 grams. Another site has it as cups of prepared, which is weird to me, because that’s entirely based on the amount of water I add, and (unfortunately for my diet and fortunately for basically everything else) the water I consume is not appreciably protein filled. Still, I think I probably eat 2-4 ounces of oats a day, so 10 to 20 grams of protein. Probably about 50 grams from the 200 grams of pork I’m now eating a day (I was still hungy after eating the 100 gram bits, so). I’ll assume the cheese that I’m eating right now is fairly representative, and so I’m getting like 25 grams from that. Oh Wild, I don’t actually need protein at dinner! Cool↩

  6. because wow I should be cycling through them↩

  7. read: measure cayenne with your heart↩

  8. as I kind of have to do, especially if I’m going to be using dry. I guess there’s nothing actively making me cook the entire bag at once, but let’s be real. I will not cook a half bag when it is no extra work to cook a full one.↩

  9. don’t ask me how I know that the stages of a bean dish left in the fridge tend to stall out at the fermentation step, rather than ever molding.↩

  10. double checking that this isn’t offensive↩

  11. yet another option over rice↩

  12. Japanese curry block over rice↩

  13. I won’t because I don’t really care that much about palm oil, but it is still good to know. Then again, if I do something resembling a block, I can instead keep roux blocks and spice mix ready to go in my freezer, which is also fun! Let’s plan on that when I get an afternoon, since I like being able to completely choose my flavor profile. Does mean I would have to splurge for dry mushrooms, but.↩

  14. which is true↩

  15. they spoil at nearly normal vegetable pace, but I treat them like onions (indefinitely good) or apples (also good forever if u do it right). Maybe I just need to treat them better?↩

  16. read: get rid of the food which is clearly bad and or that I know I will not eat. Food waste is bad, but it’s a smaller sin than self harm, which not feeding myself is at least a passive version of↩

  17. read, no longer have most of the demands on my time that I have right now↩

  18. hopefully. I do need to schedule that!↩

  19. on Wednesdays I often treat myself to a bagel and on Fridays I don’t eat meat, which means that I do kind of need to feed myself differently because of the missing seventy five grams from the two pieces. Then again, it’s ok if one day a week is protein deficient↩

  20. and, despite my reservations about food restriction, I think that it’s still probably better for me to follow the guidance of abstinence on Fridays↩

  21. ok I do realize that 200 grams of meat a day is not, by almost any American definition, a high meat diet. It feels high, though, because I’m eating meat daily, and usually as a block of its own. If I put it in curry, I suppose that would make it more spread out. Off topic though, return↩

  22. there’s the ever available and expensive option of simply adding gelatin↩

  23. oof that back of the envelope math feels like XKCD’s joke, but it also is probably true in the end. Back of envelopes here, not precision↩

  24. holdable in my hand, fittable in my mouth, crunchy, generally dense↩

  25. am I currently literally googling (using it for brand dilution) “things like lettuce”? yes. Yay! I can eat chard still, but it’s a little bitter. Collard greens are also very bitter when raw. And tragically, they like so many of the remaining leafy greens are related to mustard, which I have an allergy (allegedly) to. Ugh.

    Endive!! Not super bitter! Not a mustard!  Escarole is like endive, and also an option.

    Iceberg lettuce is always a popular choice for a reason, though I tend to find that it’s too flavorless (no I will not consider dressing)↩

  26. I honestly think that Tuesdays could be a good food prep day of the week for me, though it does mean that Mondays are the old day. Also depends on shopping day. If I shop on the weekend, waiting a few days to cook is fine↩

  27. assuming (likely accurately) that the ones I have aren’t great. They’re also a decent choice for the munching sensation of romaine, but different enough that I don’t think interchangeable↩

  28. assuming (with who knows what level of accuracy) that they aren’t good↩

  29. read: apple or pear unless something calls to me↩

  30. lettuce or endive probably, though chard is an option. Leek? That’s almost certainly wayyy too oniony↩

  31. please don’t judge my life. If it helps, the rotten food is often like homemade pickles that I was curious the lifespan of (and forgot to eat)↩

  32. two of those are the same, so how can we break it into something else? I don’t really know, honestly. Uhhhh what was the third thing initially?↩

  33. how useful is working for a few minutes a day when I spend the rest of the day teaching myself bad habits? Great question.↩

  34. roughly speaking, for every minute earlier I wanted to leave the house, the alarm had to go two minutes earlier. So, getting up and being ready an hour before normal meant the alarm was two hours. These days that is not super true, but I do find that my productivity crashes when I feel like I’ve done a task and spent a decent amount of time. If I do it right, that break happens at lunch which restores me to work again.↩

  35. which can’t hurt to try?↩

  36. read: they are frozen initially, they thaw out as I mix them with the oats↩

  37. approximately 200 grams↩

  38. approximately 150 grams of a semi hard. I apparently don’t like Jarlsberg, which makes sense because I have more and more found that I dislike swiss cheeses as I grow older.↩

  39. oof the agonizing pain of grief hurts so very very much↩

  40. as evidenced by my sleeping all the way until the overly generous alarm I set.↩

  41. note to self, you are not allowed to work on derivations until you’re finished with the day’s work and completely caught up.↩

  42. honestly, that’s got promise for a musing. What is the difference between a fugue and a flow state?↩

  43. Is to have been written is I think the construction I need for agenda’s construction in Latin, but I may be wrong, since it has been the better part of a decade (oof I’m old) since I took the class and learned that content↩

  44. to get to anything resembling the goal I have for the length of my thesis, I need to be writing thousands of words a day every single day. While I have absolutely had periods of doing that, I don’t know if they’re the pace I have right now. Also, like I guess the thesis is a higher priority than almost any other research I would be doing, so that should leave me more space for writing, especially once the term ends↩

  45. at least one more reason↩

  46. this is not me being data shy or coy, I just don’t entirely have in my working memory right now what the two ideas are.↩

  47. I think that about half the functions I wrote in the code aren’t actually called anymore.↩

  48. because I have the goal of getting work done, and I still don’t let myself work at home.↩

  49. I really feel like that’s a word, but my editor assures me that it is not. Weird↩

  50. oof, I wrote the rest of my home at first. I promise that I do not live in my office nor mentally think of the office as my home↩

  51. see: me constantly kvetching about the amount of writing that I am to do↩

  52. things I think or hope will be in my thesis, popscience, actual philosophy, and books I thought might be popsci but look to be much lower reading level than I thought↩

  53. I keep wanting to animize or anthropomorphize my guitar. Is it better to say she? he? they? xi? Great question. I think it is still good for now, because i still know it is not↩

Time Discounts and a Better Me

First Published: 2025 April 3

Draft 3: 3 April 2025

Anything in the future is worth less than having it now. For all that the previous sentence feels like the rantings of a child, they really underpin a lot of modern economic thought.1 In economic terms, most everything either appreciates or depreciates, and most do so in some sort of exponential fashion.

In retirement advice, this is usually used as a way to encourage 20 and 30 somethings to enjoy their lives a little less.2 In this post, however, I’m going to use it as the way of encouraging me to become slightly better.

I think that I can improve as a person. Even though I do agree that the exponential growth implied by most basic theories of compounding are unrealistic or unsustainable3, there is still something to be said for compounding generally. Every day that I go forth with a skill is a day that I can improve the lives of those around me through that skill. Since I live in a society with capital requirements, I also have a chance to use any skill for a profit.

It’s far more than that, though.

There’s an old interview my grandmother once had, where she debated someone about whether or not everyone should get a liberal arts degree. As you might expect from everything about me, she argued very much in favor of universal liberal arts education. In her mind, and as a partial consequence, my mind, education is an inherently positive thing.4 We are changed by everything we experience, and education helps any such change to be positive. When we learn facts, we are able to connect events and realities. When we learn theories and heuristics, we are better able to make sense of the world. And, more than anything, I think that learning is about finding joy in the world.

The Almighty created the heavens and the earth for humanity.5 We are called to seek the Divine, and are given the wonder of the universe to better understand Divinity. We are given talents and seeds for growth and asked to plant and nurture them in ourselves and others.

Through all of this, there’s something to be said for laying groundwork today for a better tomorrow.

The nearer term the future and the greater the expectation of gains, the more I should be willing to give now. That feels reasonable. If spending two hours on a project makes me feel marginally better for the following hour, I’m not sure if it’s worth it. If spending two hours is supposed to me feel marginally better for an hour in three weeks, I know that it’s not.

There’s also the cost to be considered. Something that takes minimal effort is worth doing, even if the expected gain is low. I know that after stretching I feel better in the moments to follow, the rest of the day, and the following days. I even tend to feel better during it.

The initial premise of this post was self improvement. What can I do to make myself better, and how much is bettering myself worth?

I’m reading a book right now called Radical Acceptance, and one of its key points is that only after accepting the realities of ourselves can we change any of them. The author is pretty clear that the goal is not attempting to change things, but I can take from books what I want. Still, there’s a large difference between accepting reality and settling for reality.

How do I want to improve? Let’s spend a minute and think.

I want to be more productive. I want to be more in shape. I want to be more kind to myself and others. I want to learn how to be vulnerable. I want to write, just so very very many words for my thesis. I want to experience the world around me, highs and lows.

Wow that went all over the place.

Ok so, writing and being productive obviously go hand in hand, since the productivity I’m searching for is generally writing right now.6 Being in shape is probably not a great goal as an end in itself, and wanting to be in shape for how I look is also not a good goal, since bodies change and I should never strive for a bodily ideal that absolutely is not sustainable for the rest of my life. I do, however, want to be able to experience the world around me.

When a friend asks if I want to go for a run, I’d like to be able to keep up. I don’t want to be winded when I’m walking somewhere or going up stairs. I want to be able to move my body into different poses. I want to be able to pick stuff up.

When I am more centered and grounded, I am more able to experience the world. When I am more centered and grounded, I am more able to be kind. When I am more centered and grounded, I am more able to accept weakness, and therefore show vulnerability.

So, what can I change to be more productive, in shape, centered, and grounded? Luckily, the answers are all the same: be more mindful and work out more.

Draft 2: 3 April 2025

A common idea in economics, especially modern economics, is that a dollar tomorrow is worth less than one today. There are plenty of arguments for this7, but most boil down to the obvious that it’s always better to have than to not have. When you combine this with general ideas of compounding interest8, you get some ideas about saving like “any dollar you spend today is the same as spending two dollars in ten years or four dollars in twenty or etc etc.”9 I don’t really love that argument, because like a guitar that costs five hundred dollars today, even if it wouldn’t be worth 2000 to me in twenty years if I was to buy it then, could very well emotionally be worth that amount then. Also, as I talked about in the previous draft, I can only ever experience the present.

I’m now realizing that previous sentence is really the issue underlying a lot of my failure to self care. Any time that I spend doing something unpleasurable now with hopes of it paying dividends in the future is fundamentally happening to an alien me. I have no idea what I will be like even tomorrow, at least on an emotional level. However, much as I can think through choices in ways like “doing this will likely harm someone in another country”, or “this will have bad effects in fifty years”, I think that I can trust that I will always want to be supporting the future me. A future me who turns to a life of crime is likely having a harder time than I am now, and deserves all the help I can give.

So, then, what is the right way to do self care knowing that money spent now is money gone forever, anything gained now will either depreciate10 or compound11, and any action I do is ultimately laying another brick in the road of my life.12

I’m just now rereading the initial prompting, and it was not about self care at all!.

Draft 1: 3 April 2025

In economics, there’s an idea of time discount. In short, it’s the idea that money today is worth more than money tomorrow. For whatever reason, I’ve taken at least a few surveys that ask questions on the nature of “would you rather one hundred dollars at X point in the future or fifty dollars today?” And, in general, I think that I generally have a fairly low time discount, if only because I have a decent understanding of general inflation rates and a pretty low acute need for 50 dollars.

Like most economic theories, this can be immediately applied to absolutely everything, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to treat taking care of myself as a time discount problem. The me of the future will reap a large number of gains for any number of small inconveniences now. Getting a degree, especially an advanced degree, is very often posited in the language of a time discount. “It’s worthwhile to get paid peanuts now,” they say, “because in the future you will make far more!”

Still, my goal here is not to think about how things are worth less to me in the future generally, but to specifically try to reframe the things that I do to take care of myself in this way. At the easiest, let’s take eating.

I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I feel better on the day after I ate well than the day after I ate minimally or generally poorly.13 I have faith in the medical science that tells me that setting up habits now will make the me of the future healthier. I have no difficulties in putting into practice ideas of saving for the future, and yet I do not put the effort to make sure that the future I fund will be enjoyable by the me of then.

I do know that I have more faith in money, being external to me, than my own health, which is dependent on so much. Still, even in the short term, I know that I am happier, better able to handle life’s struggles, look better, and feel more energized for less sleep when I spend more time working out. I even find that I am more productive, I think even when taking into account the hours spent not working or doing other hobby. However, on any given day, I am almost always more productive when I do not work out.

I don’t really know what else I’m actually trying to say here, other that like when I think about actions that I want to do or want to want to do14, I should really stop framing the present me as much.

There is, of course, the counter argument to a lot of saving. After all, the age of your life when you are most able to take life by the horns15 is the age when you’re most encouraged to be planning for the future. In some regards, this is obviously a holdover from when society was more Christian, though I’m not sure if it’s initially a Catholic or Calvinist way of doing the world. However, there is also research saying bad events are more meaningful than good. All that this paragraph is to say: I don’t want to let my aspirations for the future prevent me from experiencing the present.

That’s applicable in finance and self care, even if I think that they take up different spheres.

Draft 0: 2 April 2025

Wow, look at me, writing parts of drafts before the day I post. Anyways

There’s a concept in economics called time discount. I know that on at least a few occasions I’ve been asked a series of questions that starts with something like “would you rather have 100 dollars today or 50 dollars today?”. This has an obvious and correct answer. After choosing 100, I am then prompted between 50 today or 100 tomorrow.

Daily Reflection: 3 April 2025)

  1. though, given the state of the economic world, maybe it’s entirely appropriate that it sounds like a child having a tantrum↩

  2. wow I’ve gotten steadily more cynical over the drafts↩

  3. see: planet↩

  4. ugh having all the posts I want to write keep coming up in the posts I do write is getting frustrated. Curse of knowledge rises a few more slots↩

  5. oof this may be a heresy↩

  6. gotta love homonyms↩

  7. inflation, uhhhh not being able to do stuff with it?↩

  8. generally assume that the stock market returns 8 percent per year on average↩

  9. there’s the fun “if you divide 72 by whatever percentage per time you have compounding interest, you get about the doubling time” fact that I always enjoy↩

  10. e.g. you lose some huge percentage of the worth of a new car just by driving it off the lot↩

  11. my degree, for instance, will do many things for me, not least is potentially shield me if I need to flee a country↩

  12. see the post overmorrow↩

  13. of course, what poorly means is entirely context dependent, but really this is just saying present me affects future me↩

  14. I think that I have mused about this in the past. seems like the closest, though even this is less of that.↩

  15. I think that life is a bull right?↩

  16. which, I know, does not need to be a multitasked event↩

  17. read: mid 1900s↩

  18. it’s on a Wednesday, so not totally sure what to call it↩

  19. or was it twenty minutes?↩

  20. miss you↩

On Science Communication

First Published: 2025 April 2

Draft 1: 2 April 2025

I’m wondering if the daily reflection I have might be too long. It’s great and all, but spending twenty minutes every day on them feels like a lot. Then again, it isn’t as though I really need the twenty minutes for anything. Time I choose to spend is time well spent. That’s probably a good thing for me to keep reminding myself.

Onto the actual meat of this post. As I have mentioned here before, my current career plans have me going into science communication in some form or another. One of the leading voices in the field, at least as far as I know, is a Professor Emeritus at my school. I met with him a few weeks ago to get his advice on finding a career in the space. He gave me a lot of good advice, and in particular gave me a few questions that are important for me to answer.

This is a space for me to try to think of some initial answers to the questions.

His first thing to remember, though not a general question, was what the purpose of any given demonstration is. That is, what am I trying to communicate, and is what I have prepared effective for that task?

The two biggest questions were really, “why should I care about science?” and “why should my tax dollars go to funding (insert research that does not seem to improve someone’s life)?”1 I’m going to treat them as the same question, at least to start, but will keep in mind that they are not intrinsically the same question.

So, why should a random person care about science?

At a visceral level, I cannot think of an answer to this question. There’s a meme that goes around sometimes that says something along the lines of “if you don’t care about other people, I don’t know how I can convince you to.” It feels similar to my feelings about science. Why should someone care about science feels like as ridiculous a question as why someone should care about others. Still, that’s not a good way to win any hearts or minds, so let’s fight past our own reactions.

My general life view says that we are all born interested. Before we know how to divide the world into science and art and language and sport, we simply absorb what’s around us. I don’t think that I have ever met a child who was not at least nominally interested in anything, when framed correctly.

Life, or to be more precise, the systems that we all live in, beat the joy out of learning and exploration for so many people. When I was in college, a frequent question I would ask my teammates and prospective students looking to join the team what hobbies they had outside of the sport. A number of them had no answer. This used to surprise me, until I learned more about the difference between going to school in rural versus urban America.

In rural America, it is not only acceptable, it is almost expected to be somewhat of a dilettante, at least in my experience. There simply are not enough people in the entire school to be able to segregate groups into a single activity. There were of course general trends and class divides, even if I did not see them at the time. After all, if you need to work every night to put food on the table, you aren’t going to be able to do every extracurricular.

Almost every athlete did multiple sports, especially the top ones. The only exceptions to this that I can think of are some swimmers and soccer players, who joined club teams during the off season. In part, I have to assume that’s because the programs were all no cut. If you showed up and put in work, you were guaranteed a spot in the team, and as far as I can tell, everyone generally had a chance to even compete. You might not end up on the varsity squad, but playing JV is still doing a sport.

I compare this to my friends’ experiences going to schools in larger cities. Starting from early middle school, school sponsored activities begin actively cutting students. If you didn’t know that you wanted to be a swimmer before entering high school, it is suddenly too late to do so. Even once you’re on the team, though, you aren’t safe. The fact that cuts exist at all means that there is a constant existential need to focus on the single activity.

I can relate to that now. The looming deadline of my thesis does make it harder for me to do other activities, because I am constantly asking myself if the time would be better spent doing something else. I feel beyond blessed to have ended up going to a small college, which gave me the chance to continue being an amateur.2

Returning to the point of the question, and hoping that I don’t go on the rant again, my initial answer to why someone should care about science is that they once did, and life is better when we care about more things. As the PE3 stressed, the first and primary goal of science communication should always be to have a conversation with someone else. Too, the primary goal of a conversation should always be setting the stage for the next conversation. In a conversation about science, the most important thing is to share feelings, not facts.

There’s a recent Pope that made a similar point about conversion. People are convinced by experience and emotion, not by raw facts. Even within the sciences, we know this to be true. The scientists that everyone points to as the best lecturers and teachers are the ones whose presentation styles are animated and draw the listener in.

So, if someone asks me why they should care about science, my first question to them should4 be what they care about right now. It is important that the question doesn’t feel like an attack or a deflection, so framing it as something like “I don’t really know you well enough to know why you should or shouldn’t care about science. What do you care about right now?” Then, and importantly, I need to actively listen to what they say, not to find the way that I can tie their interest to science, but simply because they’re a full human, and deserve to be listened to.

Somewhere I need to do a reflection on how cults work, in part, by making people feel seen, and how I can weaponize5 that knowledge towards good.6

However, despite the fact that the first goal of my science communication is a conversation and the second goal is therefore to have another conversation, the third goal is to make them leave the conversation at least a little more pro-science. As a result, it does still become important to figure out why they don’t care about science. I have the internal idea7 that people will generally tell you why they dislike or don’t care about something better if you ask them tangentially related questions. Deep in my heart of hearts, I do legitimately believe that most people want the world to be a better place. At the end of the day, if I cannot agree with someone on that basic premise, I might just have to accept that I cannot communicate with them about science.

However, wanting the world to be a better place still leaves a lot of room for disagreement. In general, I think that the quest for knowledge is a good in and of itself, not simply as a means to something else. Many people, however, want knowledge to have a use, especially knowledge that their tax dollars support, and that is also reasonable.

I can’t ever imagine “you pay far less to fund science than you do to (insert other thing)” will ever be a useful line of questioning. So, what else can I say that researching prebiotic astrochemistry is good for? An answer I probably shouldn’t and won’t give but is true is that it keeps the sort of people who would do that kind of work from doing something else. We all know enough horror stories of mad science to not take the idea of keeping scientists placated at least a little bit seriously.

Many medical students do research as undergraduates before entering medical school. Giving them the chance to do research of their own equips them with the tools to better understand new advances in medicine. In general, there are plenty of versions of “funding any research is good because research helps people.”

A fair counterpoint is that we could get all those benefits by studying something useful. This is where we get to the real issue with communicating the need for science funding: there is very rarely a way to know what discovery will be important in a hundred years’8 time. Newton’s experiments with light were nothing more than a fun diversion until quantum mechanics became relevant. Gauss’s understanding of electricity and magnetism only became important to the average person when we began using electricity.

On the other hand, all the research we did into vacuum tubes for computing was, in retrospect, not really needed. We now know how to make semiconductors without these tubes, and so computing can be done with far smaller pieces. Without knowing what a semiconductor is, there would have been no way for people to research them. Without a need for semiconductors in computing, the fact that silicon can easily be made to take on different semiconducting properties is mostly irrelevant.

All that to say, the biggest reason to fund any given research that sounds silly is that we never know where important facts will be discovered.

There is also the secondary point, which is that almost9 any research can be made to sound ridiculous when framed by a bad actor. I do not know if all research can be framed to sound as though it has merit, but I think any research worth doing can be. Then again, I think that “we didn’t know this and now we do” is a totally valid answer.

Of course, there’s the final set of arguments, which is that a lot of seemingly frivolous hard science is in fact just basic science. Exactly one person needs to measure most things in chemistry and physics, and then everyone else can use that information forever. I do not need to take the gas phase rotational spectrum of water to know if it’s in my sample. The more tools we have, the better we can build.

So, I guess that one of my answers does really boil down to the fact that having more tools available is always better, even if using more of them isn’t better for any specific case. Without looking into the future, there is no way to know what problems tomorrow will bring, and so there is no way of knowing what information will be needed then. Even moreso, without knowing what question to ask, we cannot hope to find an answer.

Daily Reflection: 2 April 2025)

N.B. Since I’ve realized that I will often give up halfway through a post, I’ve decided that I’m going to start each post now with the daily set of reflections.

  1. e.g. molecules in space↩

  2. Ok so in retrospect this is just my whole society needs to let us be amateurs rant, which I am nearly positive that I have posted before.↩

  3. writing professor emeritus takes a while and I’m never sure about capitalization. By initializing, I solve both issues↩

  4. here being used in the prescriptive sense of trying to dictate my future hypothetical actions↩

  5. weaponizing gets a bad rap, apparently because people use it to mean attacking someone. I don’t know what the non-aggressing way to describe taking a fact and turning it towards effecting the changes I want to see on the world would be. Arguably, any time I try to change someone’s mind on anything I am, in fact, attacking them↩

  6. oh, right, leverage is the word people use. It’s got such a different meaning to me though. Meanings to me and others is another post to do↩

  7. which I don’t know if the data would support↩

  8. year’s?↩

  9. only putting this here because I like to hedge my bets. “they’re breeding mice to have cancer” is an example for like how ending childhood cancer could be portrayed.↩

  10. 8am, because I have an 830 appointment on Saturday↩

  11. including, funnily enough, the number of choirs of angels. I assumed it was 7, because seven shows up so very often. Turns out it’s nine. I do still also have the critique (unposted) about Archangel Uriel, but that’s something to think about on another day.↩

  12. poses?↩

  13. for example, there’s no reason that I need to have dozens of empty wine bottles. If I brew again, I am enough of an adult to buy my own bottles, and the empty space will make my life better.↩

  14. I’m trying to stop calling my emotions dumb or wrong because emotions have no intellectual merit to them at all. Positive or negative, they are my body reacting to the stimuli around me. When I notice my emotions are negative, though, it is good for me to make sure that I intellectually agree with the gut reaction I had. When I don’t, it’s also good to try to reframe the experience, which helps shift the emotional reaction↩

  15. and then to actually read them↩

Monthly Reflection

First Published: 2025 April 1

Draft 2: 1 April 2025

N.B. the two drafts are markedly different, and they cover somewhat very different things

Time has continued its ceaseless march ever forward, and marching, passed March by. My experience has been detaching from time again, which isn’t great, but is true. With that in mind, I will really reaffirm here my goal to write on this site more often. I do not know what happened this past month, or really this year so far, and I do not like that.

Still, in the interest of giving myself grace, it’s good to remember why I wasn’t blogging. The past few days in particular, I was really focused on the derivation for some equations that I just realized might be helpful for me. Looking with a little more intention, I realize that I let myself be consumed by that project, and the consumption is not particularly healthy. Moving forward, I want to be better at keeping myself outside of obsession.

Five great things from March:

This coming April, five things I’m looking forward to are:

Particular areas I want to focus on this month:1

While that is five items, many of them intersect in a variety of ways. All in all, I know that I am better when I don’t rely on my internal memory, but instead have it extended into a readily available source. I need that source, however, to not be as messy as my own mind, which is its own problem. Still, the better I become at setting and enforcing boundaries, the better all of this will become as well.

I look forward to seeing the person I become, and I look forward to seeing the person I was and am as I continue to reflect.

Draft 1: 1 April 2025

It’s been somehow another month. Time continues its aggressive march forward, and it has left March behind. Despite the fact that I had exactly three (3)3 blog posts for the month, it seems good for me to do my usual monthly reflection.

I really haven’t been doing much blogging at all this year, which is a bit of a shame, though tracks with the fact that I have no real sense of how time has moved this year. Still, it’s always good for me to have some highlights from the previous month:4

It’s interesting to me that a full majority of these are things that happened to me5, but that’s probably fine.

What are five things that I’m looking forward to in the coming month?

Normally I would now go through the goals that I had last month and see how I did, and then create the goals for the coming month. However, my goals list is currently a living document, so that’s kind of taken care of. Still, probably good to at least reflect on them as a macro level.

I still like the division between Professional, Health, and Other, and I think that the upcoming deadlines will be nice as well. It might make more sense for me to move upcoming deadlines into the Professional, especially since effectively all of the deadlines that I have are in relation to the thesis I’m writing. Professional otherwise just reminds me that wow I am not doing a good job of actually working towards a future career.

Health being broken into mental, physical, and spiritual still seems good, and the order seems reasonable to me still. I think that the cleaning goals will become reasonable once I’ve achieved them a single time. Still, that does mean that I need to start prioritizing them more. Today, much as I want to work on the idea for my research that I had as I was getting ready to leave work on Friday, I should7 probably instead go home and clean, especially since I’ll be busy tomorrow night.

Cleaning my life belonging in mental health remains kind of odd to me, but I can’t really say that I disagree with it, since I do feel like it’s my mental health that suffers the most from not having a clean life. I’ve added the goal of candlelight time each night, and I’m realizing that part of my problem is not feeling like I have a comfortable place to sit in my apartment outside of my bed. I don’t know if that means that I should get a new couch, a new chair, make a bundle of blankets and call it a sitting location, or what, but it is certainly something to consider. Goals for the day remains a good thing for me to do. Doing it this morning certainly helped me feel far less stressed and frantic than yesterday, where I did not take the time. In general, I think that I should probably just make more of an effort to be intentional, in the senses of:

I don’t really know where intention should go, but I think that I might like it to be its own category. This month, I think that physical health is more important to me than mental health9 Hmm, only having three physical health goals is a little lacking, for all that they do really make space for how I want to improve. I suppose that making an actual diet plan could be good10, and that might be a worthwhile activity for tonight while cleaning. Honestly, posture probably belongs in intentionality, so I’ll have it double listed.

Spiritual health remains the highest priority, so it remains at the top of the list, and I’m trying to figure out where to add the time. Candles in the morning for the chaplet could be a good starting spot. I’m realizing that the candle is better placed in intentionality, so have moved it there.

Interpersonal relationships I think should be moved into intentionality, since the goal of the interpersonal relationships is to be more intentional. I also think the bit about rest can be there as well! Wow this is getting revamped a ton.

I’d like to have a schedule of blog posts, which probably deserves to live somewhere outside of the daily posts. Then again, it could be a fun way for readers to see what they’re going to get. Eh, I think that it’s better to let me decide what needs to come on each day, for all that there are a number of posts that I do really feel like I need to have on certain days. I should make a list of the lists I’m trying to make right now11, because I know that otherwise I’ll forget it all.

Other is a category that’s grown just so much since the start of the document, and it’s probably worthwhile to consider breaking it apart. Right now I basically have the reading goal of getting through the library books, which is arguably an intentionality thing, doing music, writing things that could be fun, and other artistic endeavors I’d like to do. I have forgotten what embroidery physical relic means, and that’s a bit of a shame. Oh, duh, I literally just meant that I should embroider something.

What can I call these things? Hobbies? That’s probably a better term, and then I can move the other creative ideas that I generally have into their own, again separate, living document, since they’re not going to happen on the blog. I don’t really think that I need to be actively working on all of the hobbies at once, and so it could be good to treat them instead as potential options, which I put in my schedule as items for restorative rest.

Great, that’s really the whole new set of daily goals (which I’ve put in the modified Daily Reflection section, which I did not leave as a record of the changes I made, because that goal of the blog has been abandoned. Let’s clean up these thoughts in the next draft and then call it good to post.

Daily Reflection: 1 April 2025)

N.B. Since I’ve realized that I will often give up halfway through a post, I’ve decided that I’m going to start each post now with the daily set of reflections.

  1. since this is a reflection document, I feel much more ok with using lists, for some reason. I don’t think that’s an impulse I need to delve too deeply on, though↩

  2. see: avoid obsession↩

  3. I always forget which way of writing the number is supposed to be in parentheses↩

  4. this is a thing that I’ve always done as a list, so I’m going to keep it as one!↩

  5. as defined by “got”↩

  6. farmers’? farmers? great question↩

  7. here being used in the sense of I’m realizing this might be better for me, not in a judgemental way (if you’re reading this and confused why I’ve started explicitly tone tagging certain words, it’s because I was implicitly advised that doing so might be good for me)↩

  8. I’m not entirely sure how this is going to happen while I TA, but it’s something to try↩

  9. That came out wrong, but like I think that I need to focus more on my physical well being than my mental well being, since the latter is in what feels like a better space than the former↩

  10. i.e. when I’ll cook how much so that I have meals for so long↩

  11. which I’m going to do in a different document↩

  12. I can’t remember the word right now↩

  13. brain dump meaning I sit down at my computer and start typing until the well runs dry in regards to the idea. Avoid significant editing or revising wherever possible↩

  14. something I just realized is that I never added time to make graphics, or a stage where I would explicitly put them in. I think that I plan to do so after the first time my advisor looks at the drafts, because no point making something she thinks is pointless↩

  15. I know this is more than a week away, leave me alone↩

  16. at least moving forwards and hopefully also working backwards through the many posts that I have↩

26 for Twenty Six

First Published: 27 March 2025

Draft 1: 27 March 2025

This will officially be my third year attempting to do a number of new tasks over the course of the year.1 I more and more realize that this has become less of a way for me to start doing more new things and much more a way of making sure that I recognize the many ways that I’m continuing to grow as a person.

Even though I’m well into this year of my life, I still want to have finished with this by the time I turn twenty seven! Let’s see what things I’ve already done, and then start to consider what else I want to do:2

  1. Learned to live with a single living parent.3

  2. Saw Hozier live in concert4

  3. Checked in with most of my friends to make sure that I was communicating appropriately. That’s really mostly me accepting that I like to have expectations explicitly stated and trusting my friends enough to do so.

  4. Officially gave up on my web novel.5

  5. Seasoned a wok!6

  6. Sharpened my own knives at home7

  7. Sat Shiva! It was a really fantastic experience, in as much as anything about grieving can be good. Watching someone else near to me deal with the loss of a parent without Shiva8 really highlighted just how beneficial it was in terms of my ability to process my grief and accept the way that life is forever going to be different for me.

  8. Did a large embroidery pattern9

  9. Was the entirety of the stage crew for a cabaret. I don’t quite know how to phrase this one, but it’s mostly that I was the sole person for staging all the props and scenes for a number of small acts. It was kind of weird having such responsibility

  10. Joined a book club with some church friends10

  11. Joined a community choir! It’s TTBB which is also really cool

  12. Went to adult night at the local conservatory (nature not music)

  13. Started going to a weekly watch party for a television show. I really don’t think that I’ve ever really kept up with a show as it aired each week

  14. Did an unassisted downward dog!11

  15. Tried a bunch of different fitness classes!12

  16. Started teaching children’s religious education

  17. Designed a novel search pattern13

  18. Was explicitly acknowledged in a Ph.D. defense not as a formality14

  19. Started using the university-wide high throughput computing center

  20. Got an award for service: I apparently gave talks in the greatest number of counties through the university’s talk program

  21. Learned how to crochet flowers

  22. Realized that my life is better when I wear good noise cancelling headphones, bought a pair, and became comfortable wearing them in public

  23. Will15 lead an interactive science demo with children.

Wildly, that’s already twenty three items. Many of them are things that I don’t really think that I would count if given the option, and so let’s pare the list down to things that I actually consider novel:

  1. Learned to live with a single living parent.

  2. Saw Hozier live in concert

  3. Seasoned a wok!

  4. Sharpened my own knives at home

  5. Sat shiva16

  6. Did a large embroidery pattern17

  7. Did the entire stage managing and crewing for a small cabaret production

  8. Joined a community choir! It’s TTBB which is also really cool

  9. Went to adult night at the local conservatory (nature not music)

  10. Started going to a weekly watch party for a television show. I really don’t think that I’ve ever really kept up with a show as it aired each week

  11. Did an unassisted downward dog!18

  12. Started teaching children’s religious education

  13. Got an award for service: I apparently gave talks in the greatest number of counties through the university’s talk program

  14. Learned how to crochet flowers

  15. Will19 lead an interactive science demo with children.

That’s still 15! That means I need to do eleven in the next four months, which is more than doable, hopefully! That’s a relief, honestly, and really points out just how much my mind lies to me. I did really believe that I had not done anything novel this year, entirely because I thought that my mom’s death had been all consuming. It’s nice to know that that isn’t true! Only two and a half of the items are explicitly related to that, and the rest I don’t think were impacted at all! Wild how life continues to go on even when I want it to stop, and wild that I continued to actively live even when I felt like I was behind a curtain watching life pass me by.

N.B. This is the living list of ways that I want to take care of myself and/or goals that I have and/or things that I want to do. I’m planning to start adding the shorter term goals that I have to this as well.

  1. Apparently I never updated the twenty five for twenty five, so it’s anyone’s guess whether or not I made it!↩

  2. I generally want to do less lists in my blogging and writing generally, but this feels like an ok place to do so↩

  3. we all knew that I was going to start here, since it’s obviously the point that is the biggest change↩

  4. which was a great time↩

  5. the day that I have in my notes is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the day I made the post on the site↩

  6. or, at least, attempted to↩

  7. or, at least, ran my knife over a sharpening stone. In doing so, I realized that my standard for sharpness is actually relatively dull, which is kind of nice↩

  8. do I capitalize it???↩

  9. which I’m actually really proud of↩

  10. and unfortunately had to stop the book club because I then joined a community choir↩

  11. there’s a chance that I did this before, but I cannot remember a time when I did↩

  12. barre, rhythm cycle, zumba, HIIT↩

  13. I think, at least, and we’ll see whether or not it ends up working↩

  14. i.e. not a member of my research group, who is obligated to do so↩

  15. in about a week↩

  16. turns out it is not supposed to be capitalized! Who’d’ve thunk? Thunk is a weird word, now that I think about it even a little bit↩

  17. I feel like I should justify this one more, also maybe I should blog about the fact that I actively hate the idea of anyone caring about it? apparently at least↩

  18. there’s a chance that I did this before, but I cannot remember a time when I did↩

  19. in about a week↩

  20. at least moving forwards and hopefully also working backwards through the many posts that I have↩

  21. as a living list!↩

  22. ties into the professional goal↩

  23. what’s the term for not just within?↩

  24. e.g. why am I so opposed to framing the embroidery or giving it to someone who would cherish it? Why is it that I told a friend yesterday that I don’t like using extant embroidery/cross stitch patterns because I think that most art should be created a single time, and what does that mean? Where is the line between art and functional things (e.g. I love crocheting the same flower a hundred times or the same hat a million (exaggeration for literary effect) times↩

  25. hint hint↩

  26. OOf this is a lot↩

  27. brain dump meaning I sit down at my computer and start typing until the well runs dry in regards to the idea. Avoid significant editing or revising wherever possible↩

  28. something I just realized is that I never added time to make graphics, or a stage where I would explicitly put them in. I think that I plan to do so after the first time my advisor looks at the drafts, because no point making something she thinks is pointless↩

  29. I know this is more than a week away, leave me alone↩

Exploring Hesitation to Restart Web Novel

First Published: 2025 March 26

Draft 2: 26 March 2025

I do really love a good metanarrative, and this blog post might be a good example of one. I was1 wondering why I have not been writing my web novel. I thought that I would2 have the time, energy, and motivation to write another draft yesterday. Instead, 13 hours after leaving home for work, I returned. Everything that I planned to do at home last night took longer than I had assumed it would, and as a result I did not end up writing my chapter.

I forget who initially told me this, but someone once told me that there’s no such thing as free time. That is, anything that I do has to come at the expense of something else that I am otherwise doing.

Somewhere else, I’ve seen that I need to have some amount of my time as rest. For a while, I think that the novel was a form of rest for me, but it absolutely stopped being one by the time that I stopped writing it.

With both of these in mind, it’s obvious to me that I have been less able to do things lately than I was before.3 If I want to be better about extending grace to myself, I need to make this a question stemming from curiosity, not judgement.4

So, let’s go through the reasons that I might write a web novel, and see how motivating they are to me right now.5

In general, I would love if more of the things that I did were autotelic.6 Actually, I don’t know if that’s true. Some use autotelic to mean that a task is undertaken without external goals, and is therefore motivated by the thing itself. It gets to intrinsic and instrumental motivations.

Do I have intrinsic motivation to write?

Broader, do I have intrinsic motivations?

Even broader, is it better for me to have intrinsic motivations?

I guess things which are good in themselves are considered intrinsic motivations. I more and more realize that I think that I subscribe to a version of Divine Command Theory, which means that good is itself an extrinsically defined thing. However, since I also think that goodness is a moral constant, I suppose that practically speaking I can treat things that I do because I believe that they are Divinely ordained as good, and therefore intrinsically valuable. I’ll even go the step further and say that I’m going to use intrinsically motivating as good in itself, where good means I think that it, on the whole, helps to bring the world towards G-d.

Ok, diversion aside, let’s say that an autotelic action is an action I undertake without the explicit or implied belief that I will have an extrinsic benefit from doing it. For me, working out is not an autotelic action, because I exercise to stay in shape. Practicing my guitar is not autotelic, because I do so to be better at guitar. Jamming with a friend is an autotelic action, because the jamming is the goal.7

This helps me think about the book. What would it mean for me to be writing the book as its own end? I think that it would mean that I’m writing it to figure out where the story leads me.8 That is certainly a motivation I have. The initial premise for the book had the main character becoming a terrorist in the final book.9 I’m less and less sure how that will happen given the way that the story is playing out right now. In short, I think that there is at least a small part of me that wrote the book and would continue writing the book for its own sake.

Is writing the book a way for me to hone my writing skills? If so, then the motivation to write the book becomes10 my motivation for improving my writing skills and my belief that writing the book improves my writing skills. Writing skills are not a monolith, however, and so I should really clarify what it means to improve at writing, at least insomuch as it relates to the book.

I believe that the primary ways the book helps me improve as a writer are that it teaches me to work on a deadline,11 it teaches me to write faster,12, it helps me with considering a long narrative and pacing therein13, and it helps me to understand the general human experience.14

How motivated I am to improve in each of those regards is, as far as I can think of it, a function of how motivated I am to be good at the skill, how good at the skill I currently am, and the rate of progress that I think I will have in improving in the skill.15 This means that my overall motivation for writing the book to improve myself is the sum of the motivations to improve each skill multiplied16 with the likelihood that I will improve that skill by writing It can be better broken down into the sum of how quickly I think that writing the book will help me with a given skill multiplied by how motivated I am to be good at the skill, divided17 by the skill I think that I have, or:

M(Write) = ∏ M(Be good at skill) P(Writing will improve the Skill) E(Speed of improvement by writing)

Where M is the motivation overall, P is the probability, and E is the expectation value, which is itself a function of how easily I train the skill, how good the skill already is, how hard it is to train, and what it means to improve. In general, right now I do think that I am, at least consciously18 very motivated to improve at writing. I think that writing the book will absolutely help me with keeping to deadlines, writing quickly, and understanding the human experience. I think that it will be neutral to slightly negative towards my ability to write in the scientific tone, but it might be positive at helping me to develop a specific register for writing, in such a way that I can then change it.

Ok, so the overall motivation appears positive in both regards, and I assume that if I have two positive motivations that they will add. Let’s hope that this will continue to be true, and all reasons I once wrote the book are positive motivators.

The next reason I had to consider was that I was motivated by the idea of making money. That’s really a few motivations hiding in a trench coat and pretending to be the same: the amount that money itself is a motivator, the amount that money is a decent stand-in for how much the external world values something, and the fact that one of the initial reasons I began to publish the book was my belief that I could write something better than the authors who make a lot on the platform. Money itself is not really a motivator for me, I more and more realize. Money as a stand-in for value is something that motivates me decently well, though not much better than anything that money can be exchanged for (pizza, ice cream, a medal).19 Given that the majority of my readers are faceless entities leaving comments on a faceless book, money is really the only way for them to show value. I don’t think that I’m really motivated by the idea that other20 authors are making more, because I’ve seen a number of what I consider really well written books also not have a significant monetary value associated on the website, and I’ve seen how much work the authors who turn major profits put into the business side of the writing.

A part of me also worries that being paid to write will make me want to write it less and/or value the book less. Given that I’ve made absolutely no steps towards monetizing the book, I don’t think that’s a motivation I should take into account. Comments are about as meaningful to me as I think that money would be, though there is the secondary point that something people spend money on is something that they’re more likely to recommend to a friend, which would increase my number of comments. All in all, though, I guess that I have to say possibility of monetization is probably just about zero as far as motivations go.

The next motivation I wanted to explore was the fact that I do things in order to prove21 that I can. I think that I have effectively proven that I can write a web novel while doing a Ph.D., and I’ve proven that I can write something that others want to read. However, I haven’t proven that I can finish a story or tell a narrative that ends in a way that people like.22 There is also the above portion of my motivation to prove that I can write something that others would pay for, but, as discussed, that’s relatively minor, especially since I’ve had comments saying that people are actively looking for a way to pay me. All in all, I’ll say the part of me that refuses to accept limits is a minor motivation at best.

My motivation to write something that my sibling enjoys is not something I’ve considered for a bit. Given the group chat I had with other friends who enjoyed commenting on the book as each new chapter released, I should probably extend it a little further. They all have other things to read which they enjoy, so I don’t really feel like I’m depriving them of much. Then again, I do also love when people like things that I made.23

And finally, a friend asked me how motivated I was to write the thing because I enjoyed it. That feels like a tough question, and was part of my question for an autotelic action. Does doing something because I think that I’ll enjoy it make it not autotelic? Great question, and one I’ve just reached out to a philosopher friend of mine about.

Ok, so all in all, I do have a fair amount of motivation to start writing the book. I do really believe that on some level the thing that was keeping me from writing was the fact that I didn’t have an explicit reason to point to for why I would. I have that now!

Now comes the hard question: how do I start writing it? I have been and plan to continue to be very busy at work. However, breaks are important, or so I’m told. I do often find that I stick myself into a rut while working, and forcing myself to take breaks is at least one way of confronting that part of me.

How often do I want to publish, how much do I want to be able to revise, how much will I revise, how long will each chapter be, how much of a backlog do I want to start with are all other questions. Let’s answer them now. I want to publish at least once a week, and ideally three times a week again, because I love a MWF release schedule. I would ideally like to be at least 10 chapters ahead so that I can hopefully avoid writing myself into a corner re: making a choice that has bad consequences in three more chapters. I don’t really think that I’ll revise much, in part because I don’t care that much about eking out every possible shred of skill into the book, and in part because a goal is to get better at quickly writing decent text. I want each chapter to be in the 2000 to 2500 word range, but will accept if they are again in the 1800 to 2200 range. I want to start with a ten chapter backlog, because that gives me the revision ability that I had hoped for.

How do I get the next twenty five thousand24 words written? I set up time and space to do so. In general, I think that I can and probably should start setting time aside on Sundays again for personal growth related activities. They, like swimming or most things in my life, make every day slightly harder but in return make every day markedly easier.25

I’m a few weeks behind on keeping up with the living goals, but here it is!

N.B. I’ve decided to have the whole list of goals that I have for the month at the bottom of each posting, and I’ll delete entries as is relevant. That way I can track everything each day!

Draft 1: 25 March 2025

I keep musing within my musings about why it is that I’m not doing my web serial right now. I have a few reasons that have seemed plausible, and so I’m going to explore them as well as anything else that comes up as I muse today. I’ve been very into structuring documents lately28, but I want this to be less structured, if only to force myself out of the happy little boxes that I’m putting myself into.29

The first and most obvious reason an external observer might have for me no longer keeping up with the book30 is the same reason that most people have expressed shock that I was writing a web serial at all: a graduate degree is intense and31 all consuming. Especially now that I’m in the thesis writing stage, I really should32 be spending a lot of my mental and physical writing space33, if not all of iton the thesis. However, I stopped writing the serial well before I started writing the thesis in earnest, and I was, in fact, able to write it while in a doctoral program, so that can’t be all of it. Whether it’s an actual reason or a convenient excuse I’m using is definitely up for debate, and I’m sure we’ll come back to this in time.

The second reason34 that an external observer might use is the death of my mother this past October. Technically speaking, I stopped writing before October35, so that’s not explicitly timeline accurate. Of course, my mother was actively dying in late August, and had been in the hospital for a while before that, when it wasn’t clear if she was going to recover.

The death of my mother does tie neatly into the comment from the first reason: time. Not only was I grieving the loss of one of the pillars of my life, I am36 playing catch up, or at least feel like I’m playing catch up for the time that I was less than productive while actively dealing with her dying. Even outside of time, grief is absolutely something that has taken up a lot of my mental space and time. Something that countless authors have spoken37 about is the way that grief is almost all consuming at first.

The death of my mother also directly affects the novel for a really key reason that I’m not sure the average external reader would know: she was one of the main reasons that I wrote it. There was a solid month or so that I had to force myself to write each chapter, beginning with typing “the only way out is through, and the only way through is forward. This is something you can do to notably improve your mother’s experience as she deals with her cancer”, deleting it, and then writing the words to the book. When it became clear that she was not, in fact, reading it or likely to be able to read it again, that baseline reason disappeared from the logic. Given that it was, at least allegedly, the sole thing that got me writing for at least a month, the loss of the reason is definitely a big part of the loss of motivation. I think that I had forgotten or blocked out the fact that I used her cancer as an explicit reason to write the book.

Obviously, this ties to another barrier to writing: I associate the book with her and it’s painful to do things that I associate with her, knowing both that I am no longer able to connect with her about them and, maybe more importantly38, that the more I do them without her, the less I’ll associate the actions with her. That’s not just me fearmongering, it’s, as best as I understand it, the state of the field in psychology and neurology. Part of me was, and probably still is,39 grasping tightly onto anything that I have that still reminds me of her. Looking at the blank text file where the book once was, or seeing the drafts that are still unwritten, though painful, also makes me immediately think about her. Grasping tightly is never healthy, though, and I think that I’m finally starting to loosen up my grip.40

I also have the general wall of starting anything.41 I’ve taken enough time off of writing that restarting the book is just that, starting again.

Part of me is worried that fans will suddenly hate the way that the book is written.

Part of me knows that so much of the book was written with the general love for life and optimism that I have had for most of my life. I’m beyond terrified at the idea that this optimism, which I have internally as such a key part of my identity, might no longer exist. I also worry that the writing will become darker, and therefore ruin the style that I’ve worked towards.

Part of me knows that the book is, to put it mildly, unique in the writing style. I’ve continued to read about writing style and how to structure prose, and I think that there’s the internal argument within me42 between adapting my writing style, and therefore the book, into something more mainstream, the part of me that wants to lean into the uniqueness, and the part of me that wants to not think about the style as I write. Writing that sentence, I know that it’s the exact same issue I have always had with poetry and music.

More than that, though, it’s the same argument that so many pop-adjacent43 musicians use for not learning theory. They have a unique sound and don’t want to force themselves into the box that learning theory will do. I always decry this argument as nonsense, because learning new tools is never a bad thing.

However, there is absolutely something to be said about the rubik’s cube dilemma.44 That is, once you know how to solve a rubik’s cube, there’s no way to go back and try to derive how to solve it yourself. Or, rather, knowledge changes the way that we see the world.

I know this is true, and have commented on it a lot. There is even a name for this, the curse of knowledge.45 In music, I feel like I’ve never thought of it as a curse.

Because music is such a universal human behavior, there are countless thinkers46 who have put forth their reasons for why the curse of knowledge doesn’t apply to songwriting. In short, the idea tends to be that we all listen to so much music, and our brains are so hard wired to find patterns, that we have internalized most musical rules. Education simply lets us make the choices conscious, rather than unconscious.47 There’s also the secondary point that I don’t see a lot of people talk about, which is that most people, especially today, learned their instruments from some sort of system that derives on some level from the academy.48 I guess that I’m growing a little less sure of the position that knowledge is not a curse when it comes to finding a voice.

There’s the related but completely independent argument that much creative expression is not solely about using our own voice, but also about sharing it with someone else. If the consumer does not take in what you are trying to convey, were you successful in expression? Even deeper, if the consumer doesn’t consume the product because it’s so off putting to them, were you successful at expressing yourself? In some regards, this ties to the question of why I am writing the web novel.

Is it something autotelic49? Is it, as I’ve mentioned before, a way for me to practice and hone my writing skills? Is it, as I’ve thought about before, something I do with hopes of one day turning a profit? Is it about demonstrating that I can do whatever I set myself to, believing that I am unlimited?50 Is it, as the initial drafts were, about writing something for my older sibling to read? From a friend, is it something that I do because it’s pleasurable?

This feels like a good place to stop the reflection for now, return to work51, and come back to this later.

  1. and am, I suppose↩

  2. wow three I statements in a row↩

  3. see: grief is a huge obligation↩

  4. which, eh we’ll see if I’m ever able to do↩

  5. I was about to make a list but then I realized that I said I wouldn’t last version↩

  6. hmm, is that true? I suppose that I want everything that I do to be for the greater glory of G-d, and I want that to be my main motivation. If I assume that I have that motivation and that the actions I take are doing so, then an action is as though autotelic↩

  7. or, making music is an end in itself to me.↩

  8. I also more and more realize that I believe in some weird potentially inherently heretical metaphysics where knowledge, song, and story all exist external to humanity and we receive revelation which lets us see them, if only for a moment. I should really expound on that sometime↩

  9. or at least a revolutionary↩

  10. I’m working with probabilities right now, so that’s where my mind is at with separating things out↩

  11. relevant for the thesis drafts↩

  12. always something that I want↩

  13. wow, really relevant to the thesis↩

  14. which is not, in fact, a writing skill, but is a motivation that I should explore on its own↩

  15. Wow I really think entirely in the mode that I last used my brain. Yesterday I tried to learn probabilities, and now all I can do is think about probabilities↩

  16. for some really arbitrary definition of multiply. Convolved? Functioned? Idk↩

  17. again, for some arbitrary meaning thereof↩

  18. there’s such a ripe series of musings for me to do about what it means to fight your subconscious. I.e. if there’s something you aren’t doing, there’s clearly some part of you that doesn’t want to do it. There’s a saying I see that people can lie with everything but their habits, which might be relevant here↩

  19. I have commented a number of times that, much as I love receiving awards and medals, I hate having them (hate might be a strong word, dislike? do not like? hmm) after the fact. My motivation to win is entirely on getting a thing, not having a thing↩

  20. potentially worse↩

  21. side note: to who??↩

  22. the one thing I published on the site has a fair number of angry comments on the last chapter because I spent the entirety of the book on a few days and then sped through the next two decades.↩

  23. There’s a meme that goes around where someone says something like “when looking at your art, think of it as a cake at a party. People don’t go ‘wow this cake isn’t as good as this other cake’, they go ‘wow! two cakes!’” which feels somewhat relevant here↩

  24. wow what a big number↩

  25. which is such a horrible thing to realize, because it really shows me how quickly my discount function takes effect when I’m in the day to day. Framing it as a time discount might help me going forward, though (another idea!)↩

  26. as a living list!↩

  27. what’s the term for not just within?↩

  28. unsurprisingly, given that I’m setting up and writing my dissertation right now↩

  29. read: no lists or subsections today↩

  30. I don’t know why I am so opposed to listing the title or even the shortened version I tend to use↩

  31. in theory at least↩

  32. should is a word that is apparently problematic for a lot of people↩

  33. the best part about being in physics is that now I can use space and time interchangeably and justify it with spacetime being a thing↩

  34. I know I said destructuring, but I also need the reader to understand that writing paragraphs that are text numbered feels completely free form to me at this point. The more I’m doing with planning, the more I feel like a bunch of nested bulleted lists tends to be the ideal way to write (side note: maybe explore that as a fiction idea?)↩

  35. the 28th of August is when I posted that I was going on hiatus. Oof↩

  36. I don’t know why I’m using past tense, and much as I hate intra-sentence tense disagreement, I think that it stylistically works here. Readers are of course free to disagree↩

  37. written?↩

  38. for all that I’m just now coming to the realization↩

  39. deciding what belongs in text and what belongs in footnotes is really hard when the entire thing is me reflecting and musing on emotions and what’s in my mind explicitly↩

  40. I listened to the audiobooks for the first series we ever read together (rather than like as a mother reading to a child). It was really hard, and I think that I actively like the books less now for having done so. Then again, I did do that in November, so the grief was without a doubt far rawer then↩

  41. how’s that for a smooth transition↩

  42. that’s redundant, but I do also feel like I have internal arguments outside of me and external arguments within me, maybe↩

  43. I don’t know what else to call it. I’m using popular here in the musicological sense, which is non-academy and (these days generally) non sacred. That isn’t to say pop the genre as labels define it, just music that people do independent of the academy↩

  44. I know it has an actual name, but my little sibling is or was trying to solve a rubik’s cube without any help↩

  45. see this comic for a humorous example↩

  46. from the academy, of course↩

  47. then we get to that whole “four levels of mastery” thing that I find so intuitive and that no one else seems to use↩

  48. of course, music being so intertwined with culture means that like the blues, which was famously initially something completely independent from the academy, is now a staple of the knowledge the academy can give you (why the blues progression is what it is and how to quickly vary it)↩

  49. new word I learned meaning something done for its own sake↩

  50. something that an expert tells me is that I have an internal worldview that believes that I am unlimited, and so therefore am hard on myself when, as it turns out, I am not↩

  51. ah the first point returns↩

Planning For Lent

First Published: 2025 March 1


ectionDraft 1: 1 March 2025 As far as I can tell, I don’t have any musings on Lent.1 Lent comes from the Old English word for spring, which I really appreciate, since so few liturgical words seem to come from English’s roots. Every year I do something different for Lent, based on what I’ve done previous years and where I feel the most spiritual need for growth.

The Church’s default three things to focus on in Lent are: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I’ve often seen this expressed as giving something up, taking something on, and doing charity. These two triads are not identical, but they share some similarities.

A quick google search has any number of ideas for how to make Lent more meaningful. One of the sites has the very crucial piece of advice: the thing we give up for Lent shouldn’t be inherently sinful, because we shouldn’t be doing that in the first place. It’s totally fine and good to give something up for Lent with the expressed purpose of returning to it after Lent. That’s something I should keep in mind. Normally I tend to treat Lent as a test run for things which might be healthier for me long term. I’m going to give myself the freedom to also consider giving up or taking on things that I am pretty sure aren’t going to serve me as a new practice.

In the past, I have tended to give up meat and alcohol, both because those are traditional Lenten things2 and because they’re parts of my diet that are nice but not necessarily essential. This year, however, I’m really trying to find a way to keep my body nourished, and so I think that anything that puts a block between me and food is probably not a healthy idea3.

In the past I’ve also added on large prayer plans, but that doesn’t feel as good right now, probably because of how little prayer I have right now. Still, I should add more prayer, both because it’s a thing explicitly recommended in Lent, and also because it’s a goal I’ve had external to that. I think that a decade of a rosary is absolutely a low bar, and something that is at least somewhat meditative, if I do it right. Chaplet of4 St. Michael is another good one, and I do find the intercessory prayers more powerful in that one, so I might say that as the thing.

Ok so then we have almsgiving. There are just so many places in the world right now that need help, and there are so many ways that I can give time, talent, and treasure5. What causes are the nearest and dearest to me?

Honestly, I think that because so much of the focus of catholics around me is entirely on abortion, I find myself more and more looking at the ways that life is hard for mothers. There’s the cheap answer of trying to campaign for maternity leave or better protections for mothers, but that’s basically the same as doing nothing. There’s a charity in town that gives away diapers and other supplies families might need, and that’s probably a safe and good plan. It’s controversial for having formerly6 been a crisis pregnancy center, and I understand some of the objections that many have to them. However, they are the major provider of aid for new mothers in the area, as far as I can tell.

I have a friend who volunteers at a house for young7 single mothers. It is also an organization that could always use more resources. For reasons which seem fair, they’re less keen on having men volunteer, but I don’t have to put all my eggs in a single basket. It is important to both give low level aid to many and high level aid to a few. Which is better is ultimately a meaningless question, because we are constantly reminded that anyone we see struggling is Christ.

There’s also the more classic version of almsgiving, and the area certainly doesn’t lack homeless people. One thing that I’ve seen suggested in the past is giving away as much money to others as I spend on myself. Since part of Lent is about giving up pleasures, the fact that it might lead me to spend less on myself is a benefit, as is the reminder of just how many blessings my life is filled with.8

It’s hard for me to feel like giving someone money is not an effective form of charity, even if I understand economies of scale are sometimes helpful, especially for food banks and the like. However, charity is a virtue like all others, and it needs to grow from somewhere. I think that it makes most sense for me to send money to one of the two organizations for mothers and infants, in part because that was something dear to my own mother’s heart. I’ll also think more about volunteering, though I do truthfully feel like I don’t have the time for it right now9 between everything else that I do.

So we’ve taken on prayer: the chaplet of St. Michael and alms giving: donating at least as much as I spend on myself per week to one of the above organizations as well as giving to the homeless on the street. What am I giving up?

First: games. I spend a lot of time passively wasting on playing logic puzzles, and I don’t think that’s particularly healthy for me. I’ll still play with friends or any non-digital game as it comes up, but solo games are out for the season. Should I give something else up?

I want to stop scrolling social media, so will try once again to stop scrolling. My friends value memes, it’s true, but they value me more than the memes I give them.10

I think that limited social media and no more games are probably two good things to give up. As I said, giving up meat doesn’t seem like my best bet right now. All said, this seems reasonable to me!

N.B. I’ve decided to have the whole list of goals that I have for the month at the bottom of each posting, and I’ll delete entries as is relevant. That way I can track everything each day!

  1. At least, not by name↩

  2. the meat for sure, alcohol is less clear, given the fact that, you know, alcohol used to be an essential part of diets↩

  3. fasting and avoiding meat on required days being the obvious exception↩

  4. to?↩

  5. which is a common thing I see, I don’t know if that’s a Catholic only thing though?↩

  6. still?↩

  7. I think↩

  8. which is a sentence that still feels weird to say when I think about my mom↩

  9. which I know, is sort of the point. The woman who gave her single coin was worth far more than those who gave from their excess. However, I know that I need to give myself grace as well↩

  10. hopefully↩

  11. as a living list!↩

Reflection on the Start to the Year

First Published: 2025 February 28

Draft 2: 28 February

As the second month of the year comes to a close, I was reminded by a dear friend that it has been a while since last I updated my blog. The first draft of this post contains more ramblings and ideas, but my ideal blog post1 is much tighter and cleaner.2 Where my writing, like my mind, is meant to ramble, I prefer to have asides in the footnotes. With that in mind3, let’s reflect and, like all interactions, plot towards the future.4

Since the year began, I’ve managed to make progress on a fair number of my goals for the year, and possibly more importantly, I’ve also revised my goals for the year, incorporating both more time to think and the lived experiences that I have from attempting them. The only major difference is that I no longer have a goal relating to drawing or art of that kind. More than that, I now know that when I feel as though I should learn to draw, I simply have a short lull in my life, and some activity is soon to require my attention.

As we look towards the next month and period of the year5, it seems worthwhile to explicitly state some goals, so that I can reflect on them. Given my inability to write those reflections without finding any number of sidebars6, and given that they didn’t appear until at least a few thousand words in, let’s rewrite them. My goals can broadly be grouped into: Professional, Health, Other.7 Other is wrong, but I can’t find the word right now to describe the connecting thread for them that doesn’t also mean professional or health related goals.8

Well, when spelled out, that’s both a lot and not many goals at all!

I think that it’s also probably smart for me to break the goals into one-offs and continuing goals:

Despite how long this list appears, it’s really a very discrete number of things. More importantly, most all of the continuous goals are me attempting to orient myself. That is, rather than trying to get to writing daily poetry, I just want daily poetry to be on my mind going forward. Well, more than 6000 words later, I think that I should call this reflection here.

Draft 1: 28 February

It’s officially the end of the second month of the year. It has been a little over a month since the last time I posted here, and that’s not great, especially given the goals that I’ve had. Let’s use this space18 and look through what our goals were for the year19 and see how resonant they still are, along with how much I have made progress on them.

Let’s start with the things that I’m excited for this year.

Moving on to my January goals, which I’m also going to treat as February goals:

Finally, with my yearly goals:

So, two thousand words in33, what is the summary of my reflection?

I’m generally doing better than I thought I was on my goals, even if I’m doing far worse than the me of early January had hoped.

Before I answer “What do I want to work on in the month of March?”, let’s get some highlights of the past two months out of the way, because focusing on the good is better when framing my future.

Wow, that’s way more than I thought, and I had to go back multiple times to add more and more to the list. Honestly, I feel way better about a lot now that I have that all down there. It is wild to me how much just sitting and reflecting does to make me feel centered, and I do absolutely need to make more of a point of doing so.

Looking into March, what’s on the docket?

This set of goals is markedly different than the one at year beginning, and I feel comfortable with the changes. Mostly, they come from me realizing that my priorities are starting to focus on excelling in the areas I care about, rather than trying to become competent at even more areas that I have no true need for.50

In a slightly more coherent manner, the goals I have for March:

Woo! We did it! Only 4500 words to vaguely get my point across. Let’s revise this so that i can make it a little easier to follow

  1. truthfully, I’d like all my writing to be so, but as someone (I think Twain) said, something something if I had more time I’d have written less↩

  2. hmm the choice of adjectives I made comes with a lot of connotations. Why is a more concise (the word I forgot) writing cleaner?↩

  3. wow a lot of w sentences↩

  4. that metaphor failed, but that’s fine. In general I was thinking how like ripples from a pond you can trace time in both directions. Idk↩

  5. since Lent is about to begin↩

  6. which I think is a boating reference? should look that up↩

  7. wild how all categorizations work when you add an other↩

  8. personal, for instance, doesn’t work, because health is an incredibly personal goal↩

  9. I do love nested lists, and nested things generally, as a group member pointed out (about my code)↩

  10. I break into physical, mental, and spiritual, not because I think that I am these three discrete things, but because I think most of my goals primarily target one of the three aspects of me, and the effects that they have on the rest of me are harder to quantify (not that all goals need to be quantifiable)↩

  11. be it physical or digital↩

  12. elements of this hit professional, because it is potentially part of the thesis work↩

  13. are essential to my mental health, and I know this↩

  14. even ignoring that not everyone and I had a deep connection over my mom dying, that’s only good for a single letter I think. Also, I want them to be potentially light, rather than always heavy. “Hi Friend, I love you and hope you’re doing well” is not a heavy statement, but feels lacking to me for a letter. Whether that’s a personal issue or actually advisable, who knows? not me yet!↩

  15. other than letters and daily notes, as in health or the professional ones in professional↩

  16. meaning, not planning to finish in March, even if they can be explicitly finished↩

  17. Hmm I don’t have a good mental distinction between the two. Should I?↩

  18. digital, and also the time that I have right now (spacetime is a thing! That means space is interchangeable with time)↩

  19. and also January↩

  20. conveniently hitting the second point↩

  21. not eating well probably doesn’t help that fact, but↩

  22. read: the youtubers I enjoy or whatever audiobook I’m listening to↩

  23. not in a good way↩

  24. the space I have reserved in the library is very cage-like↩

  25. as I’ve been writing this, I’ve also been catching up on text with friends, and remembering the correct usage of full stops is always a fun journey when swapping between the two back and forth↩

  26. at least the way I do them↩

  27. wow this reflection is getting rambly faster than I would have expected (rambley? spell checker dislikes both and googling (I had a moment of “I don’t use google or to support it”., then remembered brand dilution is a thing) doesn’t seem to immediately treat either as a word↩

  28. TTBB! My first ever I realize↩

  29. not the stem or calyx (which is a term crochet embroidery pattern makers feel wayyy too loose in using, imo)↩

  30. me, if I bothered to pay attention↩

  31. whoops↩

  32. which is a blog post I should do↩

  33. hey cool, my writing pace is still around 2k an hour, which is right around 30 a minute. Given that I have to think about what I’m going to write, along with the fact that I’ve been multitasking and correcting all my errors, I’m really happy with that↩

  34. they were, unsurprisingly, fantastic↩

  35. which I did, in fact finish after the recital but before I left↩

  36. no, that was not connected to the theology in any way, shape, or form↩

  37. and, wildly, it was really great. One review put it nicely “it shouldn’t have been as enjoyable as it was”, since it did really have a pretty predictable and generic plot, caricatures of characters (ooh that’s a great line, I need to do something with that in the future), and the outdated sexual morals of the 1970s (consent is much different now)↩

  38. not so much we got scooped as the field came to the knowledge as a whole↩

  39. thankfully metaphorical↩

  40. he’d say public engagement, and I agree with his points↩

  41. i.e. probably today in between reviewing documents with the group↩

  42. Deep down, this feels like something related to spirituality, but for the life of me, I cannot find the words to describe how↩

  43. ah yeah simple is probably what I meant↩

  44. in the sense of video games to pass the time, not in the sense of any shared experience with people↩

  45. I think that’s a new phrase but↩

  46. wow I had no idea where the t’s in that word went↩

  47. that feels wrong to say, but I am in general struggling to find the words to express myself. That’s part of why I want to get back into journaling and poetry↩

  48. once again the wrong word, but like I feel better when I have a journal with me, regardless of my intention to write↩

  49. mentally and emotionally↩

  50. Drawing is really the big one here. I don’t care about it when I don’t have time, and when I do have time, I do. That’s interesting enough, and is probably something I can keep in mind as I move forward in life. The more space I have, the more I care about learning to draw↩

  51. retroactively placed above artistic after first point there because I was (am as of right now) unsure whether I should put writing there. Why I don’t think of writing as artistic is a question for another time↩

  52. yes, I realize that I am not a mind, body, and soul as three distinct parts, but it does help me to think of the driving reason behind each. Secondary effects are not primary↩

  53. there’s a post that I’ve seen that means a lot to me talking about how there’s no bad calories, and also that potatoes are not great in spite of caloric density, but in part because of it↩

  54. acids??↩

  55. oof this is getting rambly↩

  56. in that like I want to be able to mindfully take breaks↩

  57. this is kinda new buttttt↩

  58. if we redraft, move them down here↩

  59. if alone↩

  60. probably, though that’s something I shouldn’t say there. Hmm what is something that I can say that feels true and is helpful (this was initially going to be followed by wronged, but the new one is better)↩

  61. like not necessarily meaning to the same degree, because that’s not important↩

  62. obviously make sure they agree with the goals, but for now make it aspirational↩

  63. ooof helping one of the fellow students in my group with a coding issue really took me out of this. The next like 600 words I spent describing the difference between how I feel also did↩

  64. taking a break here for work with the group. Returning: let’s keep going↩

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