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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↩

Musing on Getting Back in Shape

First Published: 22 January 2025

Draft One

I know that somewhere I’ve mused before about my fitness goals. Though they’ve changed over the years, I think that they’ve remained relatively static since college, or at least in the past few years. These days, my goals are primarily to gain flexibility and endurance.

In college, I would often joke about the fact that I had steadily gone from sprinting sport to more sprinting of a sport. Football, despite being nominally only a few seconds per play, ends up generally being a few minutes of sprinting back and forth until possession changes. As a person whose only real event in swimming was the fifty freestyle, those few minutes became twenty to thirty seconds1. Then, in college, I transitioned to diving, where each three second burst of effort in a meet was surrounded by at least five to ten minutes of rest.

Through all of this, I was relatively strong. Even today, I’m fairly sure that I can, at least once, lift more than most of the people I know. There’s something to be said for focusing on strengths, but I don’t think that applies here.

For one, I have always preferred being a jack of all trades to a master of one. For the other, given that I’m already stronger than average, the number of situations where I’ll need to lift something beyond my current limits but within my theoretical limits is relatively small. By contrast, the number of times that I’ll want to rush somewhere without losing my breath, or be able to contort my body to get somewhere2 is far higher. With that in mind, while working through the group fitness offerings, I prioritized cardio fitness and flexibility over strength.3 Today, I tried my first barre class.

In retrospect, I’m not entirely sure what I expected. If I force myself to come to a conclusion about what I thought we’d be doing, it was something like plies and other such movements on the barre4. Instead, it was, as the instructor said, a mix of plyometrics, calisthenics, and ballet. We did do a little bit on the barre, but mostly we used it for balance.5

I struggled with the workout a lot. I hadn’t realized quite how out of shape I am, but that was a great reminder. Somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, the fact that it was so painful and hard for me motivated me to go more regularly. I rely on my body for so much, so seeing that I’m letting it down in general is not something that I take lightly.

I still didn’t make it to yoga today, but I have hopes for tomorrow. Otherwise, I think that I was in general decent at following the flowchart. I’m not sure how much of it is a thing that I need to do in order and how much is just a “yes, this is a list of activities I need to ensure that I do at some point.” Still, I think that I’m doing better for having the organization, even if it is far from optimal. After all, the only way to improve is to start. Wherever I am right now is where I am. The only way to get closer to my goal is day by day.

  1. less than thirty most of my high school career, sadly never less than 20↩

  2. because, much as there are any number of benefits to my size, there are some downsides↩

  3. As it turns out, even the strength portions are relatively cardio heavy, and a few friends of mine who’ve gone said that they don’t think that I’d get much out of it. I don’t think that’s true, given my lack of cardio fitness, but there is something to be said for aiming to improve a trait by focusing on it↩

  4. is it just bar in this context? Given how pretentiously French everything in ballet is, I’ll assume not↩

  5. which, again, in retrospect, is what it’s always used for↩

An Initial Attempt to Make Macro Bread

First Published: 21 January 2025

Draft 1

As I’ve mentioned in the last few posts, I’m trying to organize my life under a few different principles. Notably, I wanted to make sure that, even though the USDA seems less than clear about their need, I get enough phytonutrients of each kind. When I looked through my diet and what I could easily add to my diet1, I was missing aliums and purple fruit. With that in mind, I decided to try to make a bread that incorporated them.

At the store, dried figs and daikon2 were the mixins that spoke to me most. Below is the recipe I vaguely followed, along with a quick back of the envelope calculation for macronutrients.

How did they turn out? Honestly pretty well. I’m happy with the taste, if only because the fig comes through, but the daikon doesn’t at all. I didn’t love how sulfurous the daikon smelled while shredding or baking, though, and so might have to take steps to prevent that in the future. Chief among these, I think that I’ll try shredding into cold water that’s been doped10 with either salt or baking soda, since those seem to work for others. Other than that, I might add more of either the daikon or fig, since they’re shockingly under noticed, for being a full 45 percent of the mass of the dough.11

What else went wrong? I don’t love the texture. I’m not sure if that’s due to the relatively low flour to other ratio, the overproofing, or something to do with using whole wheat flour. Regardless, I will probably try the next batch without rye, since I didn’t notice much by way of flavor from it, and it definitely does a lot to add that kind of texture. I’ll also try not to let the dough overproof, but that’s far more optimistic.

Nutrition Information as Eyeballed:

In total:

which, assuming I split my rolls perfectly, comes out to about:

In total, about 24 calories per gram of protein, well below the 40 threshold I need to average over the day. It is interesting how calorically empty daikon is, and how relatively dense fig is.

Daily reflection:

Didn’t do great about maintaining the schedule I set, but did do more than expected, all things considered.

  1. such as carrots, which I love to gnaw on↩

  2. which I normally see labeled as daikon radish but↩

  3. 529↩

  4. 648↩

  5. about three hours, in my case↩

  6. 267↩

  7. 254↩

  8. 103↩

  9. total of 840 grams or so↩

  10. oop my materials chemist came out↩

  11. ok not entirely, because I did squeeze about half the mass of the daikon out as water. Still, that’s like 400 grams, so still one part in three.↩

  12. that’s what my notes said, so I’m willing to believe I missed ten grams of flour somewhere. Oh I think it might have just been spillover↩

  13. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it’s almost all one of the macros by mass↩

  14. it is at this point that I opened a spreadsheet to do the math↩

  15. 5136.696↩

  16. 209.429↩

  17. 84.8475↩

  18. 900.66↩

  19. 144.44↩

On a Scheduled Life

First Published: 20 January 2025

Draft 1

As I mused about at the start of the year, I want to stop wasting time. The easiest way to do that, as I can see, is to see what I actually do with my time, and also to make sure that the things I want to do are on the list. I opened all the posts1 that even vaguely referenced schedules as I prepared to write this post.

However, before that I made my actual schedule.

“How?” you might be asking, either as someone looking for insight into my mind or as someone who wants to organize their own life. It was certainly not the most time efficient method, though I think that it may have ended up as the optimal method for me.

First, I sat and intentionally did not have audio going. I know that may be obvious to many, but your brain cannot think as well or deeply or freely if you’re listening to an audiobook. From there, I started writing down my goals for the day, and that led quickly into the things that I generally want to do, and their regularity.

I traveled to a new location2 and took that messy document3 and compiled it into two pages: goals for the day and my general musings. The goal for the day was nominally in linear order, but the musings were not in the slightest. My general musings had me breaking my life into:

Of course, I was not immediately able to annotate the importance of items without having the full list. More than that, though, I don’t love absolute measurement scales, and so I started with my first item, decided that it wasn’t very important, and assigned it a low score. The next item on the list seemed relatively more important, so I gave it a six. The next item was even more important, so I gave it a seven. Item 4 was in between items two and three for importance, so I gave it a 6.3, since I felt like it was closer in importance to item two than item one. I continued this through the entire list.

Now that I’m done with it, I do find it interesting that so many of my goals were in the 6 to 7 range and the 8 to 9 range, with nothing between 7 and 8, and only a single item below 6.7 Even if the exact values might change, it does show me that I have one goal I don’t care about8, one goal I care about a lot9, groups of goals that are very important to me10, and groups of goals that are moderately important to me.11 I do keep some absolute scaling, I guess, because nothing was a 1012, and nothing was a sub-413.

I then took my annotated pieces of14 paper home and didn’t look at it until today. Before bed, however, I made a list of tasks that I wanted to accomplish today in my bedside journal.15 Upon waking up and going through parts of my morning ritual16, I sat down with the two pieces of paper and the goals from yesterday’s journaling17 and grabbed some more blank paper.

First, I wrote in large letters and a sectioned off block the nominally immovables in my schedule. That is, the things that happen at a set time. I say nominally because in that list was also when I work18 and a few things that have rough end times. Below that I made a list of all the things that I had sorted yesterday, now ranked from most to least important. The new list looked something like:

That is:

One of my big goals was making use of the fitness class access pass I bought for the semester. They break all activities into one of four categories:

I always want more cardio fitness, generally enjoy feeling stronger, and would love to be flexible and in touch with my body. As a result, I then went to the page where they listed each activity per category, e.g. for the made up category of “Fun”

I did my normal way of deciding between options, ranking each item in relation to the rest, and started ranking them on the page:

Which means that22 I think that I would probably enjoy yoga and sleeping the same amount, though if I had to choose I’d lean towards yoga. Sleeping is significantly preferable to singing songs. Singing songs beats out testing gravity, which beats out touching grass.

After going through each of the four categories, I made my overall ranking, which unsurprisingly was almost entirely less than or equal to signs.23

From there, I went down and listed every single option on the calendar that the school provides, because I prefer being able to look through hand written pages, because I don’t like their layout24, and because there were only a few activities that I cared about. I did make this new list still broken down into category, e.g.

Etc. etc.

On a new page, I looked back at the group fitness goals I had29. Of the four activities I compiled, I wanted to make sure to do three of them at least once a week. I then went through and tried to find a way to do that. Because of prior commitments, there was only a single time each week I could do a barre class30, a single time a week I could do Zumba, and a nice yoga spot every morning before I wanted to get to work, so below the listed set of workouts with prior constraints removed, I made a list of what I wanted to do each day and when.

From there, we moved on to the actual scheduling part of my time.31 I started by listing the events that I wanted to do, starting with waking up. Using my time estimates, I was able to back track how early I would need to wake up in order to get each item I wanted to do before work done before going to yoga. Thankfully everything except for the 4 fit. It took some restructuring, because as I walked through the morning in my mind, I realized that I have a connection where some activities feels better to move into others. Like those logic puzzles where everything is given relative referents, I found a solution that worked, along with the quick time reminder of how long each would take.

Saturday and Sunday were the odd ones out, because neither has work, and so timing is weird. Since there’s another yoga slot later in the morning on Saturdays, I just moved the entire schedule so wakeup is at the same relative time to yoga. Sunday I set the wakeup time with the other five days of the week, but decided to go to it last.

Because my schedule diverges daily after yoga, I then went through my Monday through Friday schedule, noting the activities that I wanted to do before going home, with time stamps where relevant. On the next page, I started to plot out what I wanted to do each night, and what I also wanted to do differently each night. I also started plotting out ideas for Sunday. At this point, Monday through Friday is nominally scheduled from waking to sleeping32, and Saturday and Sunday are relatively empty. Looking at the ordered list of floating items, I was happy to se that most all of them were done, with only the weekly tasks yet to be assigned. I made a list of those items under the day I felt like they belonged, since floating items only need to be scheduled relative to the fixed items and each other if relevant.

I then made my weekly flowchart, which diverges and converges fairly often. Because routines are important, I tried my best to keep the divergent streams as similar to each other as possible. I also put literally everything I could think of as a necessary part of the schedule33 as an example, because cognitive load is bad.

I opened another small journal and made nine lists:

Finally, two hours after beginning, I was finished with my goal of plotting my ideal life. Most of it will be as simple as following a checklist, with the only34 cognitive load coming at the beginning and end of each day, where I go over my short term goals, and at the beginning and end of each week, where I do the same with slightly longer term goals.35 I’m hopeful that this will work and that it will make my life better.

Now to look at all the previous times I’ve tried and failed to see if there might be any common patterns:36

It’s very possible that I missed some posts there, but I don’t really care that much. I think that the important pieces for me in particular to remember about my aversion to schedules are:

All this being said, I do hope that I am able to maintain my life when the summer, with its constant interruptions to schedules, arrives.

Daily:

  1. I should really add some meta data to them so I can sort more easily. Not entirely sure how to do that, though, so would have to ask for help↩

  2. for unrelated reasons↩

  3. 5 hand written pages on top of already printed paper↩

  4. brew something again, start writing my thesis in earnest↩

  5. I feel like I’m using more itemized lists in my blog these days. Wonder what that’s about↩

  6. also these are made up examples, because I want to illustrate the system better, and while I understand it, I think that it’s generally helpful to show manufactured examples to make sure details are clear↩

  7. which, in retrospect, might be why it’s so clumped.↩

  8. the 4↩

  9. the 9↩

  10. 8-9 range↩

  11. 6-7 range↩

  12. life or death↩

  13. things I don’t care about↩

  14. white, printer↩

  15. musing to come↩

  16. i.e. putzing (I always forget that not everyone throws the occasional yiddishism into conversation) around↩

  17. transferred from the journal to another↩

  18. which is flexible↩

  19. 5m↩

  20. D↩

  21. hence question mark↩

  22. from bottom to top↩

  23. because I only picked my favorites from each category and there’s something in each category I value↩

  24. I understand that overlapping class times makes things hard, but listing two events on top of each other because one lasts ten minutes longer hurts me↩

  25. because in going through the rest I realized that what I wanted from Sleeping was equally available from other sources↩

  26. R means Thursday↩

  27. Sunday↩

  28. Saturday↩

  29. between 2 and 6 times a week↩

  30. cardio and flexibility! Perfect for someone like me with neither↩

  31. Why did I spend the last thousand or so words on fitness? Because that’s what I spent my time on, and it only seemed fair to say so↩

  32. though I will be very clear that there are two activities called “sit in silence”, and I always try to be pessimistic about how long things take because bonus time is fun↩

  33. turn on kettle for tea↩

  34. scheduled↩

  35. Long term goals go here↩

  36. in alphabetical order by URL↩

  37. except for using less social media to communicate↩

  38. oof 2022 is not one year plus away anymore↩

  39. i do feel like I’m more and more treating footnotes as asides and annotations, rather than parentheticals. I should think about whether that’s the goal or not. Certainly using hyperlinks is a good way to avoid needing to link, but. Eh a topic for another musing↩

  40. which is something that I’m hoping nested lists like I have might help↩

  41. wow I just got hit with a wave of sadness, remembering how healthy and energetic mom was then↩

  42. Reading each night is definitely one of them. The afternoon workout can be skipped at least a few times a week↩

  43. short of starting the day over, I’m realizing I don’t know of too many that work reliably for me↩

  44. I’ve generally been skimming the posts, if you’re wondering how I missed a good one↩

  45. so no pomodoro↩

  46. and probably physical↩

  47. which is my shockingly accurate gauge of my general well being↩

  48. Which is the point of nightly goals, use the remaining brain power before reset to decide. Transfer in morning in case light makes me change my mind↩

The End of a Series

First Published: 18 January 2025

Draft 2

After writing yesterday’s musing, a friend asked what the daily needs of each phytonutrient are. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem like an easy to answer question, since the textbook I’ve been relying on lists vitamins, not phytonutrients. It has, however, been updated in part, though tragically only for total energy expenditure. Time to see what Big Food1 thinks that I need.

I do also have a new favorite quote from the day: “data were insufficient to set a UL42 for arsenic. Although a UL was not determined for arsenic, there is no justification fro adding it to food or supplements” Interestingly: organic arsenic is usually fine. Inorganic arsenic (arsenite III or arsenate V), by contrast, “is an established human poison”.

So, what have we learned?

Dietary science is a lot of “people who eat like this tend to do better”, and I remember seeing a thing about how the way food is presented affects absorption of nutrients. It makes me feel better that I cannot fall into the trap of living my life by evidence based practice to the detriment of my day to day living, because there truly is not a lot of evidence.43 Well, this has been a fun journey. Tune in next time to see my recipe for bread44

Draft 1

A friend, upon reading yesterday’s musing, asked a very poignant question: how much of each phytonutrient do I actually need? Using our favorite textbook, we find that the actual chemicals are not listed, instead the vitamins are.

Instead of trusting the website that told me I need pretty colors, I’m actually just going to take this time and see what nutrients the government thinks that I need daily.48

Welp, time to go back and see what the USDA cares enough about to write a chapter on.

  1. one of the rare times I use this phrase where it’s accurate↩

  2. about 340 cals↩

  3. and women require 7 fewer↩

  4. I’ll look at all four values, knowing that the very active will likely never be relevant again, even if the top three might be↩

  5. which feels weird to put in dietary reference but↩

  6. which does explain why they updated it↩

  7. so curious what sub 1 is↩

  8. what about above that!↩

  9. I think that’s the assume you don’t move at all↩

  10. which I love as a concept, thinking about the fact that your basal needs are the entire basis for the increased costs↩

  11. this is a dangerous concept for me to be aware of, if only because I can start actually counting my movement in a variety of ways↩

  12. which makes sense, because I don’t tend to think of milk as fibrous↩

  13. which I assume is good↩

  14. wow that’s a range↩

  15. I have absolutely taken more than that↩

  16. originally had an s (a s?) instead of z↩

  17. tragically, mostly brassicas↩

  18. the latter half of the sentence is commentary↩

  19. so many b vitamins↩

  20. as is becoming a trend,↩

  21. commentary↩

  22. 1000 to 2500 mg↩

  23. 35 ug, estimated bc IR↩

  24. 900 to 10000 ug↩

  25. IR, 4-10 mg↩

  26. 150 to 1100 ug↩

  27. I knew this one! Comes from the soil which is why the Great Lakes are not healthy↩

  28. 410 mg, UL of 350, which is apparently only from pharmacological agents. Kind of funny still↩

  29. 8 to 45 mg, one of the rare cases where women have a higher one, and a significant one at that (18 mg)↩

  30. I will always be mad that this and Magnesium are both elements↩

  31. IR 2.3 to 11 mg↩

  32. 45 to 2000 ug↩

  33. upper limits cause reproductive issues in mice, not people, it comes from the soil↩

  34. mmmm matches↩

  35. 700 to 4000 mg↩

  36. IR, 4.7 g↩

  37. I never would have thought that I needed this, 55 to 400 ug↩

  38. IR, 1.5 to 2.3 g Na, 2.3 to 3.6 g Cl↩

  39. I do have to wonder why Phosphate wasn’t listed but↩

  40. 11 to 40 mg↩

  41. all UL and mg/day, B: 20, Ni: 1, V: 1.8↩

  42. upper limit↩

  43. in the sense that like if I do the generally normally accepted advice of “eat less processed food, lots of plant, and move around more”, I’ll probably be fine↩

  44. and a review!↩

  45. since I say mig I type mig, instead of mg↩

  46. read: Vitamin A↩

  47. assuming a seven to eight inch carrot↩

  48. these numbers are for males aged 19-30, but don’t really change a lot if you change that↩

  49. no weight↩

  50. the first one I’ve noticed increases as I grow older after 30. I wonder why↩

  51. typing insufficient research is hard, so I’m just abbreviating here on out↩

  52. how that differs from a gram, unsure↩

  53. Wild, I had no idea I was actually supposed to have any↩

  54. I hate typing microgram, and mu is not a latin letter, so I use its closest analog↩

  55. wow such a big number↩

  56. I wonder if there’s really any dietary source for chlorine outside of salt↩

  57. OH NO! I’ve learned that this is just normal data. I’ll have to look at each chapter for the weight based things↩

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