First Published: 2025 April 14
I’ve written more than a few posts here about writing. Having just skimmed a few of them, it is really interesting to see the way that my own writing has developed in the years that I’ve been writing this blog. But, more importantly, I’ve realized that I have internalized a lot of writing advice that I find helpful at different times and places. Since I’m being asked about advice for writing more lately, an also because I’m writing more, it feels like it would be good to get it al down in one place. After all, extended memory is far better for me.
There are a variety of ways I could structure the advice, depending on whether my goal is prose or being used as a quick reference. If I wanted it to be reference, a list of some sort is probably the ideal. However, I think that part of what’s important is also taking time, and not everything needs to be optimized for time efficiency. With that in mind, I’ll be doing it as flowing prose.
It’s hard for me to say what the most important piece of writing advice I have received or could give is. It does depend a lot on what the barrier to writing is. In general, I tend to hear that the biggest problem people have is starting, and so in general, advice on starting is the best.
More or less every book of prose advice I’ve read reminds its readers that no writing comes forth perfect from the pen or mind of a writer.1 This is similar to the advice that nearly every doctoral student needs to be told at least once, though slightly different, “the greatest enemy of goodness is perfection.” That is, the idea that what we put on the page needs to be perfect can and often does mean that we are stuck in a hell of our own creation, unable to get anything on the page. And so, the first piece of advice is to remember that you cannot revise an empty page. Closely related, any writing is better than no writing.
I hope it’s clear why these two are so essential. In more or less every situation where I find myself in need of writing, having literally anything on a page is preferable to having a blank page. I can think of a few places where it is not true, but even those situations, writing still needs to be produced eventually.
However, knowing that the writing needs to be done might not be enough to silence the voice in one’s head assuring that the words we write will never be good enough. Different authors use different metaphors, but most involve consciously acknowledging2 the inner critic we have, and then moving past it. For some, this means putting the critic in a jail cell. For others, it involves killing the editor. In all cases, though, the advice can be boiled down to an acceptance that the writing we produce will not be good.
I’ve seen the extreme version of this advice from a writer I follow on social media. Not only should you accept that the writing will be bad, they say, you should explicitly write at the top of the document that you are intentionally writing something bad. Then, if the writing that you produce ends up being terrible, you were right. If, as it turns out, the writing was fine, then you have ended up with what was ultimately the goal.
The next piece of crucial writing advice moves past the specific project, and into the advice of becoming a better writer more generally. As I talked about the other day, there’s something to be said for making sure that you want to be the kind of person who has a specific hobby. If you want to be a writer, it is important to write. And so, a great piece of advice for being able to write better is simply to write more.
I know that there’s this idea ingrained in so many of us3 that we practice like we play. That is, mediocre practice results in poor habits and therefore poor final results. To some extent, I think that is true. If you never put forth effort on a drill, you’re likely to not be able to put forth effort in the real situation. However, I think that, especially for creative tasks, it is important to remember what it means to have good practice.
There’s an XKCD4 about this very concept. Simply by writing more, you improve the parts of you that write. If you text your friend how you are feeling, you get better in touch with describing emotion. If you text your friend what you ate for dinner, you get better at conveying emotion through narrative, narrative, and descriptive writing. And so, the essential piece of writing advice is, quite simply, write more. Try some dumb writing prompt, rant about the dumbest movie you were forced to watch, pen the overly sentimental and soppy5 love note that you could never in a million years actually send to the object of your desires.
Close to this, most advice on prose will also focus on the importance of consuming media as well. Top athletes point out the same. To improve at a craft, it is often very helpful to not just practice, but to also watch those who are good at what they do. So, if there’s a genre or area you want to write in, reading in that area will help.6
Moving from the broad back to the specific, structuring longer documents, especially longer stories, is often difficult. I’ve seen a variety of advices, which are really specific to the kind of writer that someone is. However, regardless of how much or little one enjoys planning books, there are likely to be scenes which are a struggle to think about. I’ve seen the advice of planning books as though they are road trips. That is, it’s often good to simply know that you need to go from point to another without thinking about the exact path you may use. The path can be figured out later on. I’ve also seen the advice of starting from the very end of the book and working backwards. I hear that it makes the entire book much more fun, because you know exactly what you are working towards.
A piece of writing advice I think I saw from Ernest Hemmingway was to intentionally stop writing before all the words are gone. In doing so, you both avoid burn out and start to train your brain to want to write more often, because leaving desires frustrated is a great way to increase desire. It’s closely related to another piece, which is that it’s essential to also avoid burnout. While it may feel bad to write, sometimes that’s just initial activation. Different authors set different thresholds, but most will say that, if after 500 words, it still feels bad, simply give up on writing for then.
And almost finally, it’s often recommended, especially when editing and revising, to try your best to put yourself in the mind of the character. Do they react to stimuli the way that they should? If not, either change their reaction or change the character.
Finally, it can be fun to write multiple endings to a book simply to see how and where the plot would need to diverge in order for the new ending to be equally satisfying. I think that I’ve failed with that here.
Obligations:
Professional
Write the thesis
I did not, but I did spend some time talking with people about the Thesis.
Revise the thesis
Edit the thesis
Research for the thesis
I did some Gedankenexperiments, which might help me. It does feel weird to call ideas for running code Gedankenexperiments, but I think that’s how it works.
Read the books that might be useful for the thesis
Have the book, and will read after writing time.
Start citation tracking
Personal
Learn the songs for to jam
Self:
Silence
I walked to work in silence today, and it was nice. I think that I just need to stop finding enjoyable content, and then the not listening becomes easier. I do need to also make time this week for music walks, though. That’s like a form of silence.
Typing practice.
I did none yesterday, but yesterday was also just such a travel day, so I’m really ok with that fact. After writing with my partner today, I will again go back to practice before starting work for the day.
Keep the phone out of the room for bed
No, but I was finishing a podcast, so I’m somewhat ok with that.
Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning
I was so very behind this morning, and forgot that I had an actual scheduled event. Whoops! I did go to two seders this past weekend, though, which was also very prayer filled.7
Stretch in the morning
Read at night
Finished the podcast that I was advised to listen to. That was fun!
Poetry at night
I have not, but also now that I will soon have another fountain pen, this would be more doable perhaps.
Clean the home
Nope!
Stretching, standing, drinking water
I drank so little water this weekend and I can really feel it.
Posture
I’ve been doing better and better about this! I think that others are beginning to tell too, because there’s definitely a different energy I’m getting from people lately.
No wasted time
Nope! But, I generally was ok with relaxing this weekend. Now that the week has begun, we’re onto the grind season.
Eat more than 2 meals a day
... Sure! We’ll say that happened.
Goals and Growth:
Ends:
Letter writing, get into more
Not so much, though I did realize that I have a few more people’s addresses than I thought. I didn’t remember to read the books on etiquette over the weekend, but if I do so today, that might be helpful.
Handwriting, pick and make the new one
Thought about it a little last night. I realized that my signature might be a great place to start, because I don’t really need it to be a single swooping line, and figuring out how I want my letters to look there might also be great.
Means:
Typing speed, improve it.
Spent a fair amount of time the other day, and am trying to spend some effort here writing with proper finger placement. I have hopes that this will in time become faster, but I have to wonder when I’m supposed to use each different shift key.
Reading, do more of it
Read a fair amount while at home! I do really love Street Cultivation, for all that it is just such a dark series. Very much it believes in the kind of world where power concentrates and abuses.
Blogging, do it
Look at this!
Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do
Well, not everything can be a winner. I am planning to start a pen journal, and that should be fun. I’ve also been doing better about reaching out to friends which is fun!
different prose books put the act of creation at different points. The more poetic tend to say it comes from the act of writing, while the more practical tend to say it comes from the person creating.↩
can you tell that I’ve been learning a bit about zen Buddhism? Also wow the three kinds of Buddhism seem really cool and different in fun ways, and I should explore them (as with all things, once I have my Ph.D. and once again have time to exist as an individual, of course)↩
or, at least, ingrained in me from my time in high school football↩
wow the old internet joke that there’s an XKCD for everything really does feel truer the more I write↩
sappy? no cool soppy is also a word, I do have a vocabulary, wild↩
and now I am to help my undergrad with coding. Where was I?↩
and probably something to think about, the way that my different heritages celebrate and exist and etc.↩
First Published: 2025 April 12
N.B. I know this says six drafts. Really what it means is that I spent a lot of today just figuring out how I wanted to frame the advice. The advice is simple: “lift weight”. The meaning it has to me, however, applies far more broadly, and I wanted to find the framing which best expressed my thoughts, to say nothing of finding out exactly what my thoughts were. As a result, the drafts circle the same content, but often approach it from vastly different angles.
Maybe because of how I look or act, I have been asked more than once for advice on getting into lifting. Probably because I talk about music a lot, I’ve been asked about learning music a fair number of times. In both cases, I’ve imagined being asked far more than I have been asked, and yet I don’t know if I’ve ever given the correct advice.
The best way to start lifting is to find something heavy, pick it up, and then set it down. After repeating this exercise as many times as one can, record the number, and walk away. The following day, repeat.
What anyone who has never lifted before will almost certainly learn is that the number of repetitions they can do will increase steadily for a while.1 Could they potentially grow that number more quickly by hyper targeting specific muscle groups or even specific muscles?
Maybe!
I don’t really think so, though. Or, at least, the extra time that it takes to find out exactly what muscles can be targeted by what lift, learning the proper form to isolate the muscle group without harming oneself, and then setting up the specific lifts is almost certainly better spent simply lifting. When progress slows, or they notice something in particular holding them back, it’s more than sensible to start crafting a more in depth routine.
If someone asked me how to learn guitar, I’d ask if there are any classic rock songs that they can listen to all day long. Why classic rock, and why does it need to be repeatable? Most classic rock songs have a pretty simple guitar pattern, and the guitar in them tends to be a major enough part of the orchestration that practicing it alone will still give the effect.
If they have a song, I’d tell them to learn the chords for it, and then just play until their fingers hurt day after day. If they don’t, I’d tell them to do anything as long as they’re fretting2 notes until their fingers hurt. Having a metronome is only helpful when one can play notes long enough to correct themselves. Getting proper tone requires being able to hold fingers in the proper way, which requires nothing so much as practice.
Could they learn bad habits by practicing like this?
Absolutely!
However, if they play guitar daily to exhaustion, they can get sufficient calluses to play for a long time within a few weeks. Any bad habits that can be built up in that time can also be unlearned. And, a few weeks is enough time to know if one wants to become a person who plays guitar. If one is, then finding instruction becomes useful.
If you can play notes for fifteen minutes at a time, then spending five of them making sure that you seamlessly switch between chords is time well spent. Spending time with a metronome, if you are like any standard musician, will always pay great dividends. However, both require you be able to play.
That is the other part of why the advice is so good. Doing things is always harder than not doing them. Learning to lift or play guitar or anything else is easy to fantasize about. Realizing that, if you want to be able to improvise a killer metal riff, you need to know your scales on a fundamental level is far less fantastic. Before trying the grunt work of an activity, one can never know how they feel about it.3
The best piece of advice for figuring out a lifting routine I’ve ever gotten was: “put your computer away, find something heavy, and pick it up. Set it back down, then lift it again.”
If I want to improve at a skill, I must do the skill. Until I am nearing the peak of my ability in something, almost any practice will improve me. The further from the peak I am, the less difference any practice will make.
For whatever reason, music remains the skill that I can best relate to.4 If someone has never played an instrument, and they start just strumming a guitar aimlessly, they will become better at it. If they tried to follow the routine of an expert, they would almost certainly quit immediately. They lack the calluses on their fingers, the unconscious competence of doing many things at once, and the love of the instrument.
Similarly, if someone is newly embarking on a lifting journey, the most important thing is that the lifts they do will not injure them. As far as I know, almost every adult has picked something up without injuring themselves. They have likely even picked up something they consider heavy.
Our muscles grow when they are challenged. Picking up something heavy day after day will gradually make it feel lighter.
A fitness plan which hypertargets individual muscles, or even one which targets broad muscle groups, is not as useful as simply lifting. The more time we spend planning, the less time we spend doing, after all. If someone finds that after lifting something heavy for a few weeks, they’re starting to see their progress slow, then starting to atomize the workouts can become useful.
But, I think that I need to remind myself more and more, when trying to learn a skill, I should stop looking up how to do it and start doing it. As my progress wanes, I can learn from the masters, but I need to be able to love the instrument for itself first. If I need my fingers to be callused, the calluses will grow just as fast from scales as from playing twelve bar blues as from noodling about. Ok this is good but should really be a slightly different framing.
What is the optimal lifting routine?
It is not some specific set of lifts. Nor is it some specific set of focused and targeted groups of lifts. The optimal lifting routine is the routine that makes you most able to do the motions in life that you want to do. This requires three things: knowing what one wants to do, knowing how lifting can help with that, and actually lifting.5
What do I want to do?
In short, I want to be unbound. Of course, there are any number of physical, mental, social, societal6, and emotional limits that preclude many actions.7 That doesn’t change my desire to be able to do what I will.8
How does lifting help me do what I want?
Since I want to be able to effect my will onto the world, any lifting plan I pursue should help me with this goal. My will is rarely to be in the gym for its own sake9, and so a plan which has me spending less time is probably preferable to one which has me spending more time.10 If my body fails me, then, as many say, “the spirit is willing but the body is weak”. More often than not, my body being the impediment to my will comes from endurance, rather than brute force. That being said, I am sure that I would be less constrained if I were better able to move weight.
How can I do these lifts?
Eh, basically what I’ve said here is that I don’t need to lift, I need to do cardio. This isn’t the lifting advice from above, though, which is fine. Final draft should be that though, so one last chance.
What is the optimal lifting routine?
There are any number of answers to this question. Some swear by the weekly routine of “push, pull, legs”, others by some constantly evolving set of lifts, doing dozens at a time. However, there should only really be one correct answer: the optimal lifting routine is the one which most frees you.11
Since the Industrial Revolution, society has told us that we are interchangeable cogs in a greater machine. As a partial result, advice towards self betterment tends to focus on man as machine. We can and should seek to improve anything by working on atomistic parts. If I want to be stronger, that means that I need better biceps, triceps, quadriceps, abdominals, etc.
And, of course, this is not entirely incorrect advice. There are many things that we can treat atomistically. If my nose is clogged, I can blow it.
A greater consequence of the Industrial Revolution was the enshrinement of schedules. A week has no fundamental meaning to the world. Unlike the day, which, prior to artificial light’s conquering of the world, controlled when we could see, the week does not have any fixed meaning. We chose seven days, in part, because it has some relation as division to the lunar month.
It takes about a fortnight to go from new moon to full moon and from full moon to new moon. However, this desyncs very quickly. One can tell this by simply looking at a calendar which lists the full moons.
And yet, almost all workout routines I’ve seen are based on the idea that we should repeat some set of workouts weekly, or at least some general kind of lifts. Since we must live in this society, making our workouts work around the weekly schedules we must have is not the worst idea. Still, why do we break things into push, pull, legs?
Spending any time talking to physical trainers or reading up on the literature shows that these lifting routines, while often optimized to improve our ability to do the lifts at higher and higher weights, are often far from optimized in terms of getting us to be able to live a better life. And so, we get to the truly optimal lifting plan: pick up an object and set it back down.
Exercises which target a specific muscle group are fantastic for ego lifting. For functional strength, though, they are only really needed in rare circumstances. After all, I do not know a single time that I have needed to isolate a single leg’s calf muscles while lifting or moving. Training one’s body to lift heavy weights with good motor form means that the behavior becomes more innate.
And, of course, only by doing something can we learn how we feel doing it. I know now that, while running may be a healthy exercise, I don’t really like it at all. I really enjoy yoga and most meditative forms of workouts. I even prefer core workouts12 to running. Almost all benefits that any given workout has are shared amongst any workout.
Hmm might be a better framing
One of the best pieces of workout advice I ever received was about how to start a lifting program:
“Pick the weight up.
Set it down.
Repeat.
Grab a heavier weight when you stop feeling the pain”
Now, why is this great advice?
For me, at least, the primary goal of lifting is to be able to lift heavy things when I’m in my day to day life. By reframing the entire lifting plan into just getting weights moved, I can remember that, when choosing between the lift that looks cool or the lift that looks ridiculous but will help me more, I should pick the latter.
I have had lifting plans for ages, and so I know the proper form for a lot of lifts, how slight modifications to them can focus on different muscle groups, and what lifts generally target what things. However, I also have done far more lifting than most people I know, and even I fear doing the appropriate weight to train back squats to failure.13 Why do people back squat?
That’s a legitimate question.
As far as I can tell, it’s because squatting is generally a motion people do a lot, and should do in a lot of settings. It’s almost always healthier to pick up something heavy by squatting first, rather than just bending over or doing a lift which focuses on one’s back. Still, that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to do them, despite what almost every lifting plan will suggest.
In fact, almost none of the most popular lifts that people do are really the best for most people, at least as far as I’ve seen. We squat and bench and do bicep curls because they are what we have been told to do, and because, when doing an incredibly high level program, they are among the more effective for getting the last optimizations out of a lifting plan. For most of us, any lifting plan is an increase.
In general, advice since the Industrial Revolution has treated people as though they are interchangeable cogs, and as though the week is a fundamentally meaningful division of time. Oh that’s a much better framing, let’s start over with that.
I saw something really recently14 that struck me pretty deeply. I don’t remember exactly what it said15, but the general gist16 of it was that we cannot live optimally. No matter how hard we try, we will have days that we do nothing, days where we will not be the shining and perfect light to the world. For some reason, that was really helpful to me, and, despite the fact that it’s sort of opposite this post, it felt relevant to bring up here.
I forget where I initially saw the best lifting plan I’ve ever seen, but I think that it was probably a screencap of some old greentext.17 It is equally probable that I saw it with some random video.. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I consume a lot content that is at least somewhat adjacent to life optimization. In either case, the advice was “just pick up something heavy and then put it down. Repeat that, lifting heavier things when it gets too easy”.
Why is this the optimal weight lifting plan?
First,18 it’s important to remember why we are lifting. For me, the most important benefit lifting gives me is the ability to pick up heavy objects in my day to day life, ideally without showing any struggle.19 Next in importance is the fact that it’s generally allegedly healthy to lift weights. I like looking well muscled, and lifting does help with that. And finally, I like showing people up in the gym.20
I would like to think that at least the first three of these are pretty common goals for most people who want to get into lifting. So, why is it better to just pick up weights, rather than finding some optimal program? For me, any efforts that I spend towards optimization feel similar to actually working on a problem. I know that I am not alone in this sentiment, and so saying “the weight goes up and the weight goes down” means that I have nothing else to look up.
Second, focusing lifting on the idea of picking up and setting down progressively heavier weights means that one can remove some of the stigma behind what workout plan we might have. If we start with a low weight, we can make sure that we lift with proper form before raising the weight. If, instead, we were to start with bench press as the specific lift of the day, we might focus on just getting a heavy weight.
And, in general, I think that this is a good advice for much of life. If I’m wanting to learn something or do something, I should just do it.21
Obligations:
Professional
Write the thesis
I’m debating whether or not I should be working on this this weekend. On the side of yes: I should always be working, and I do actually feel some level of motivation. On the side of no, I’m visiting home, told myself that I would be taking a break, and am generally feeling low motivation while at work.
Revise the thesis
Edit the thesis
Research for the thesis
I think that I found a textbook that actually explicitly lists the matrix formation that I need. However, I’m more and more realizing that I probably do, in reality, need to solve the matrix myself, which does require understanding the basis function. That won’t be fun, even if it is important.
Boss also thinks it’s good to list out what assumptions each thing makes.
Also, there have in fact, been advances in the field since the 1960s, so I should really read the newer theory papers, if only because they might be more understandable in terms of the math they use.22
Read the books that might be useful for the thesis
See above for the book I’m to read. Also, since one of the underclassmen is preparing for a preliminary exam, I had an impromptu lecture to the group yesterday about representations and reductions. I’m not entirely sure if what I said was accurate or helpful, so wow do I need to get that in more detail. On the plus side, I noticed one major error with what I was doing in my fancy new code, so we’ll see if fixing that fixes the issue.
Start citation tracking
Continuing to load papers into the citation manager. I should start making annotated bibliography, because that’s something that many people use for some reason.23
Personal
Learn the songs for to jam
Self:
Silence
None at all, but I also don’t know how good silence is for driving. As I type that, I realize that the answer is “incredibly”, but I still don’t really love it.
I’m also realizing that GameLit audio books tend to be narrated with the assumption that you’ll listen at well above single speed, if the fact that I can listen to other content at single speed far less painfully is any indication. Also, pauses which sound stilted and unnatural at single speed feel almost correct at the maximum speed. Then again, since many consumers in the field also buy books by length24, there might also just be the motivation to read as slowly as possible.
Typing practice.
Oops! Forgot to do that yesterday. I’m sitting in a really awkward position right now25, but if I can type like this for writing, I can type like this for learning to type. I’m already able to feel how much faster and smoother my typing is, especially since I’m making far fewer mistakes. Punctuation is still awkward for me, which makes sense, since none of the drills I’ve been doing have punctuation in them. All this to say, I’ll go practice typing once i finish this reflection.26
Keep the phone out of the room for bed
Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning
Stretch in the morning
Read at night
I did! It wasn’t the book that I told myself to read, but I restarted the book series that I wanted to read. I forgot how incredibly bleak it is, wow.
Poetry at night
Clean the home
Stretching, standing, drinking water
Posture
No wasted time
I think that I did ok with this, especially because I’m doing less scrolling and more reading. Then again, I have spent probably three hours in the past day and a half looking at pens and pen inks, and I do not need more of either right now.27
Eat more than 2 meals a day
I had cake, lunch, and dinner last night! Woo, go me.
Goals and Growth:
Ends:
Means:
Typing speed, improve it.
Soon!
Wow that was fun, I didn’t realize that there was a speed chart in the settings which shows how fast each letter is. Turns out A and N are my fastest, both at over 7 characters per second, which is kind of wild to me. A I guess makes sense, since I don’t use that many z or q, but the fact that N is so fast when none of the other right index letters30 are anywhere near as fast is strange to me. I don’t know if I made much progress today, but looking at the graph of all my speeds, I do need to remind myself that only recently did I start focusing on form and making sure that each letter is pressed by the correct key with minimal errors. I’m positive that slows me down, and that’s ok for now, especially since it’s in practice time.
Does it carry over to my actual typing?
Certainly at least a little! I definitely need to look at the keyboard less right now, though wow is it hard to type with my eyes closed.31
Reading, do more of it
Why is reading a means and not an end? Oh right, because I really meant that I wanted to read the research books. Well, I brought the books on etiquette home, so I can at least start on those!
Blogging, do it
Look at this! I need to make sure that I have both low and high effort posts32
Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do
I cannot believe that I’ve written almost one thousand words in the past fifteen minutes, but wow. I did spend a few hours today going through literally every single ink seller in the country, and found my new favorite brand.33
ignoring the noise of day to day fluctuations in ability, of course↩
not mentally, but on the board↩
this isn’t the “how do you know you don’t like X”. If you have never eaten something green, then yeah you should try lettuce. If you know that you dislike kale, broccoli, and cauliflower, then cabbage probably won’t be for you.↩
ok, specifically, learning to play a specific instrument when growing up in an encultured way where they understand music but consider it something that only some do↩
In many regards, this is similar to the way algorithms work, which makes sense because my mind is one track in the regard of never truly letting go of research↩
my subgroup is far outside the societal norm↩
And, I am of course aware of the fact that failing to limit myself in one way is itself limiting. That is, committing to any particular path of action precludes doing any other act. However, failing to commit to a path closes off any other act just as much. By going for my Ph.D., I cannot travel the world and explore the unique art styles, learning how they were influenced by and influenced the peoples who made them. If I had chosen to do neither, though, I would not have done either. Basically, commitment is needed. (P.S. this was not initially a footnote, but I woudl really actually like to have a nice clean main text here)↩
and, of course, what I think that the Almighty wills. Ideally these are one and the same, practically, who can say?↩
ah gotta love considering means and ends a bunch. I get more and more why people say that philosophers should go touch grass↩
I’m not main texting this but, I am better able to get people to do what I want when I am more conventionally attractive. Lifting can make my body more toned and my muscles larger.↩
ok so that’s a framing I should really interrogate myself about. I wanted to have some answer, but then remembered that all things should lead to sanctification, then had makes you strongest, but even that is a vague term↩
especially when I can actually do them↩
I just fear failing that lift orders of magnitude more than any other lift↩
well after planning this post↩
and no, there is no real correlation within myself between what I remember and how important it is to me, and yes, I do really wish that there was.↩
why do I feel like jist should also be acceptable? probably because jel and gel are both words that I’ve used in the NYtimes crossword↩
if you don’t know what greentext is, your life is better for it↩
oof I love lists apparently↩
yes, I do have an issue where I hate showing any forms of weakness how did you know↩
absolutely my least healthy trait, I know↩
obviously with exceptions↩
it remains a bother to me that the brits say maths↩
why? Eh could be a fun appendix “here’s the list of things that someone learning rotational spectroscopy should actually read and what they should get from it”, since like each textbook cites at least 500 different articles (and a shocking number of other textbooks, gotta love that the research in the field actually happens and is published in textbooks (or at least did, back in the good old days when the field was being actively advanced)). I’ve definitely found that each of them has complementary information, and I would save myself a headache by noting down what each one has at different points.↩
and I am beginning to be one of them, much to my own (only now realized) dismay↩
read, functionally laying down with my head propped up↩
and therefore before I start on the blog of the day↩
especially since I have an order coming in soon↩
script? Is that what people say?↩
I know that isn’t the same order that I listed before↩
also, how did I just now notice that I type p with my pinkie? Also, am I supposed to use both shifts, because I only use left shift. Probably something to ask someone at some point↩
shockingly, that entire sentence had only a single error in it, even though I know that I did mispress a few keys. Oh well. Might be good practice for me to write with my eyes closed more, so that I have to really focus on making sure that each letter is being typed by the correct finger.↩
that might not be the right framing. Deep and shallow? Basically things that I can really dig into and things that I can quickly get my thoughts on the page. First is good for revising and structuring thesis and writing as a whole. Second is good because I want to be able to craft something compelling without having to revise and revise and revise. It does mean that the shallow posts might have to be written slightly less stream of consciousness, but that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make↩
I am a simple, simple man. Also, I’m nearly positive that at some point in the not far off future, I am going to end up making my own inks from scratch↩
First Published: 2025 April 11
One of the weirdest things to think about in physics, for me at least, is how important a frame of reference is. In general, we tend to treat the earth as our fixed reference. Of course, the earth, as we generally know from science, effectively moves around the sun.1
A part of me wants to go off here about the way that I have lost my own fixed reference. However, the words are failing me, which is always a shame. The point of this framing was initially about how the earth is opposite the sun halfway through the year. In that respect, I’m as far away from my mom as I can ever be.
Anyways, I’d rather not focus on that, if only because I don’t want to start crying. Why is that relevant to this musing in particular, though?
While my mother was suffering from cancer, she told me that she really found relief while reading my web serial. On days when I struggled to start writing the day’s chapter, I would start by typing the title out. Getting the words on the page was almost always enough to get started with the chapter, and the reminder that what I was doing something not just for myself, but for someone I cared about helped me to finish it. As time has progressed, I’ve grown to use the phrase more and more, and the meaning it has for me has deepened and grown.
I have seen the first half of this expression at least somewhat often, and I feel like I’ve seen the second half as well. I don’t know if I see them together, though. It’s very important to me that the two are linked, at least in terms of motivating myself.
I often know that I want out of whatever place I am. Usually that’s in a metaphorical or emotional sense, in which case it’s far truer that I have to get through whatever I’m in. In a physical sense, I can usually simply run away, rather than going through whatever experience I have.
Why, then, is it important to remember that the only way through is forward?
To start, I cannot go backwards in time. Even though time doesn’t feel particularly linear, the arrow does always face the same direction. More, though, I also find it important to remember that I cannot passively move through whatever I experience. If I want my situation to change, I must make efforts.
And, right now, I find myself realizing I should start explicitly saying this more often. It could be a fun way to practice or play with my penmanship.
Before the most recent total solar eclipse in the continental United States, I found myself giving a number of talks about how eclipses worked.2 In the standard version of these talks, I explained how a day is relatively easy to describe based on the motion of the earth relative to the sun.3 A year, likewise, is relatively simple.4 A month, by contrast, is far harder.
The standard Western calendar these days is almost completely decoupled from any historically informed meaning of a month. In general, months have historically5 been defined by the moon. There are generally two ways of describing a month with the moon, one based on the time to return to a certain phase and one based on when the moon realigns with the far off stars.6
Why am I talking about months and how arbitrary they are?
Yesterday, I was reminded that it had been six months since I lost my mother.
Six months, in my mind, should be exactly half a year, always and forever. In this case, it just about is.
When the earth was in the opposite point of its orbit, my mother passed from this life into the arms of the Lord.
In a very real sense, I am just about as far away from her as ever I can be. Space and time come together into a four dimensional reality, but what is time to man? As my memories fade, what will it mean to have lost my mother? Already, I find it harder and harder to remember the sound of her voice or the feeling of hugging her.
Even though she breathed her last half an orbit ago, I do really feel like I lost her slightly earlier. She had been growing steadily less lucid and wakeful in the weeks leading up to her death. I do not remember the last words we said to each other, but I am nearly positive the last words she would remember saying to me are that she loves me. I would hope that the last words she would remember me saying to her were that I love her. Even the morning that I woke up to my father’s call, informing me that our vigil was over, I could not remember the exact time of our last words.
How, though, does this relate to the title of the post?
As my mother’s cancer progressed, and she began dealing with the symptoms of both the disease and its treatment, I found myself in the same position that so many others have. I watched someone who had cared so deeply for me suffering, and could not find a way to take the suffering onto myself. However, she told me that she enjoyed reading the web novel that I had been writing. In retrospect, I think that she mostly just enjoyed being able to support me in my creative acts, but at the time I took her at face value.
Opening the blank document which would become the next chapter,7 I would find myself staring at it. Like staring at a perfect marble block, knowing that anything can come from it, but that anything I made would preclude making something else, I found myself frozen with indecision. And, feeling generally down about things, I found it hard to write the fundamentally upbeat story that I had started. I knew that my mother enjoyed having something lighthearted, and so felt that I needed to keep the book positive.
And so, knowing that writing was a way that I could deal with my feelings and ameliorate suffering, the first words I would type would be “the only way out is through. The only way through is forward.”
As I think about the phrase and its usage, I realize that I cannot separate it from my mother.
How did8 this set of phrases or sentences or clauses or whatever else you want to call them9 help me, and what did it mean?
I cannot separate the meaning I have with them now from the meaning I once had. However, I don’t think that they’re significantly different, and most of the difference is probably me better recognizing what it meant.10
I have mentioned somewhere before11 that I have a phrase I use fairly often to motivate myself. Like so many others, a blank page terrifies some primal part of me. As a result,12 I found it really helpful to simply remind myself that “the only way out is through and the only way through is forward.” At first, I only used the beginning half, but I found that it did not do enough for me. So, what does it mean?
Honestly, I feel like the meaning is fairly self-evident. If I want to exit any situation I’m in, be it not having a draft finished or feeling a certain way, I have to work through whatever is keeping me from it. And, since I have yet to learn how to experience the arrow of time in more than one direction, that means that the only way to get through the issue is resolving it. That is, while it might have been better for me to not find myself falling from a plane, once in the air, that is not a useful thought.
How does it help me?
Truthfully, I find that it helps me most because it reminds me that, like all things, whatever issue I face is transient.13 Also, since I tend to use the phrase mostly when facing something that I apparently feel conflicted about doing14 something, it reminds me that I am the agent in control. One way forward is giving up a project, after all.
However, it is obviously not my preferred way forward.
The phrase is also a good reminder that, much as I might wish otherwise, I must deal with anything holding me back before I can be free. If there are chains of doubt weighing me down, I have to unlatch them.
Obligations:
Professional
Write the thesis
Doing so badly here. I have an idea for what happened to my motivation.15
Revise the thesis
Edit the thesis
Research for the thesis
Gave up on my new and cool and novel search algorithm for one who16 works. It hurts but I suppose that it’s probably for the best.17
Read the books that might be useful for the thesis
Start citation tracking
Personal
Learn the songs for to jam
Remembered to bring the book home, but did not do much else.
Self:
Silence
None at all.
Typing practice.
Unlocked another letter or two, which is great. Also sent it to a friend18
Keep the phone out of the room for bed
I did not, but I also did not scroll. I did, however, start catching up on videos, because, as mentioned before, I lack comfortable seating in my home.
Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning
...
Stretch in the morning
Read at night
Poetry at night
Clean the home
Did minimal yesterday, but minimal is not none!
Stretching, standing, drinking water
Ehhh. I did ok on drinking water, if not good. That’s about it though.
Posture
Decent! Still weird to me how uncomfortable it is to have flat feet on the ground. Also like wow my legs only want to exist crossed when I lie down.
No wasted time
I did not have this, which is a bit of a shame.
Eat more than 2 meals a day
Made curry last night! And I had it over rice for dinner. It was really good, and wow I need to use cumin more.19
Goals and Growth:
Ends:
Letter writing, get into more
Eh I got new ink, which will hopefully help to motivate me
Handwriting, pick and make the new one
No real progress, but see above
Means:
Typing speed, improve it.
My mind is empty today for some reason, and so I have spent much of the past hour working on my typing. Upon rereading the site, I saw that they recommend starting at a very low speed and only increasing the character per second goal when all letters reach the barrier. I decided that half character per second increments would be ideal, and then only after breaking three and a half characters per second on all letters did I realize that I should really be focusing on accuracy of both letter choice and finger use over speed right now. After all, when I practice my scales, what is important is getting the best possible tone, fingering, and note. After that, the goal is to get rhythm right, and I am not entirely sure how that connects here.
I guess that ideally, each letter would be typed at exactly the same pace, and I would sound perfect.
Reading, do more of it
I finished the book yesterday, and am making my way through the audiobook. Unfortunately, I also need to find time tonight to walk for an hour as I listen to the All Night Vigil again.
Blogging, do it
I didn’t post yesterday’s and I think there are two reasons. First, I want to make the post better before I release it. Second, I was out of energy.
Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do
Practicing touch typing is like writing!
Obligations:
Professional
Write the thesis: Making progress!
Revise the thesis
Edit the thesis
Research for the thesis.
Oh boy is it fun to deal with Government agencies. Also, wild that some people pick their phones up before a single ring. I didn’t even know data sent that fast.
Read the books that might be useful for the thesis
I got another one today! Woo.
Start citation tracking
Slowly making a gigantic Zotero folder, which is close.
Personal
Learn the songs for to jam
Self:
Silence
Absolutely none. I want to finish this book.
Typing practice.
I didn’t do it yesterday, but I would like to do it today.
Keep the phone out of the room for bed
Nope! Hopefully after this weekend.
Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning
Stretch in the morning
Read at night
Poetry at night
Clean the home
Stretching, standing, drinking water
Posture
Decently! Not stretching enough, which isn’t great.
No wasted time
Yesterday was a blur, and I should not have gone on the field trip to the book sale.
Eat more than 2 meals a day
I think so! In that I ate a giant bowl of oats, a heart of lettuce,20 and some rice with curry. Was the curry rice a full meal? Great question, moving on.
Goals and Growth:
Ends:
Letter writing, get into more.
I just picked up all the etiquette books that I was considering reading, so now I can read them. Also! The pen set I’m ordering with a friend is being shipped, so soon I will be able to play with more inks. I do find it interesting how much nicer the pens that are more finicky seem like they’re writing. I don’t know if that is just a function of the ink that I’m using or what, but I do love how it looks.
The pen I’m using right now is a little high flowing, which is maybe not the best. I do love the way that the wet ink looks on the page.
Handwriting, pick and make the new one
I tried something to the extreme of print, with incredibly sharp lines. I realized how much I hate it, and have been doing some cursive now as I take notes. I remembered or was reminded21 that cursive comes from running, and it is so nice just sliding my pen. Might just give up on the part of me that prefers print and commit to making more people learn cursive.
Means:
Typing speed, improve it.
Whoop! Will do at some point, hopefully.
Reading, do more of it
Still listening to the book!
Blogging, do it
Oof, I haven’t posted in a few days, which is not something I love. Time just completely escaped me, and last night I somehow lost the hours between 5 and 8 working on derivations.22
Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do
yes, yes, all orbiting objects orbit each other↩
found myself is such a fun way to describe anything I’ve done, because it does so much to decenter my own agency↩
earth spins↩
earth goes all the way around the sun↩
and in most non-Julian or Gregorian systems, still are↩
because moon lighting is based on position of earth to sun, and so when moon gets back to same spot relative to earth as viewed from above, the earth has moved, and so it isn’t the same phase↩
Yes, I do use a separate file for each chapter of the book, and yes, I tended to write each chapter without any real consideration for an overall plot↩
and to some extent does↩
that is probably really meant to be a footnote↩
n.b. at this point I had to leave for an appointment, and planned to have continued the draft after returning home↩
potentially only in the list of musings to write and the post about why I stopped with my web novel↩
and when generally life feels hard,↩
I have an idea for a reflection about how “remember you are dust and to dust you will return” can be, rather than simply humbling, also words of encouragement.↩
else I either would just do it or wouldn’t want to do it at all↩
I write this before the text of the day, which is sort of opposite of how I assume it’s consumed.↩
which??↩
honestly, I have no idea if that’s true. Ran two samples last night, one with new and one with old↩
idk how to describe some of the people in my life. Friend is clearly the wrong word because we’ve only interacted in professional environments but like we both smile at each other when we run into each other (in a way that is more happy/genuine than the standard greeting a known↩
if only because I bought a large bottle of it↩
why does lettuce only have a head and a heart? Where’s the leg?↩
memory is strange↩
see, as always “derivations are dangerous for me”↩
First Published: 2025 April 7
I think a lot about the way that my life is and will be, especially these past few months. In part, I am absolutely sure that this is because dealing with a death, even one which is far from sudden, makes anyone think about the way that they’re spending their own time on the earth. In part, I think it has something to do with the fact that I’m closing a chapter of my life. Before I turn to the next section, I would like to think that it will be a better one.1
I remember watching a video a few years ago that really changed the way that I view a lot of the goals I set. I am well aware of the SMART2 method, but I find that a lot of the things I want to do are fundamentally not either of the first, and as a result, hard to know the achievability or timeline for. When life doesn’t work with a plan, one can either change the plan or the life. Since goal setting is to help me live, I want the goals to reflect my life, and not the other way around.
I think that the video was initially set about new year’s resolutions, and it talked about how, at the end of the day3, most of these goals, even when framed as SMART ones, are not really the actual goal. A goal to stop eating sweets, for instance, is more likely the method to meet some real goal, such as improving health or managing blood sugar. As someone pointed out once4, a measure stops being effective when it becomes a goal. We see this all the time, such as how standardized tests effectively became the curriculum taught in public schools. The goal of a standardized test was to see children’s general knowledge. Instead, it becomes about how well a student has been prepared for the specific exam.
Also, especially with New Year’s Resolutions5, life circumstances change rapidly in a way that makes SMART goals bad. If I twist my ankle on the fifteenth with a goal of running daily, then I’ll have to stop. If, instead, the goal was something broader, like improving my physical fitness, I can instead start rowing or swimming or anything else. In general, the author stated confidently, themes can be the answer to your life.
As I’ve grown, I find myself trusting common wisdom about change less and less.6 While I have not had much luck with themes, something he said was very impactful.
Butchering the metaphor, as is my right as an author, think of your life as a road. We cannot change the path we have taken. And, in general, any choice we make does not truly diverge us that much.7 However, each choice we make turns us slightly more into the kind of person who makes those kinds of choices. Every time we eat a salad, our brains are a little more tuned to eating salads. Every time that we do a kindness for no reason save itself, we become slightly kinder.
Is that a particularly deep or profound metaphor? Maybe not to the average reader. However, I find it far more helpful to me than thinking about goals. I do not really want to be a runner, so practicing running doesn’t make a lot of sense. I do, however, want to be an older person who is described as “shockingly, almost horrifyingly spry”, and so want to practice the exercises that will both lead me to being spry today as well as lay a good foundation for me to age.
A habit is, by most definitions, something we do without conscious thought. That is, it is when we follow the twists in the road without consideration. A metaphor I used in my web novel was the river of fate.8 We are all riding rafts down a stream which never ends. Following the path set for you is not just easy, it is effortless.
Like any other source of flowing water, though, the more you wish to diverge from the main flow, the more effort it takes. Rerouting the river itself is nearly impossible, especially the wider and stronger the river is. The metaphor gets a bit strained here, because each action we take is making the riverbed ahead of us, so I suppose that a better analogy might be a river shrouded in mist. We get to decide what comes next, but rivers tend to flow a specific way.
All this to say, not making choices is the default way people go through the world. Better habits lead to better lives because choosing the good is difficult, not because of the word good, but because of the word choose. All choices take effort, and so the goal for me is less any individual good habit or virtuous thing and much more about shifting who I am to become the sort of person who does not have to think about doing good. Everything yearns to rest, and so making the good easier is the best thing that I can do.
Hmm, I’m not super happy with this, because I don’t really think that I said anything that meaningful, and what shreds of meaning may have made their way in are obscured by the filler of my stream of consciousness. Still, it is also important to accept what is, rather than what I wish would be.
The astute reader might note that this has changed. I don’t think that spending twenty minutes a day on the daily goals is necessarily serving me well right now, so I tried to pare it down. I will likely pare down even further before the time is through
Obligations:
Professional
Write the thesis
I tried to spend some time on this yesterday, but got far too into the musing.
Revise the thesis
See above.
Edit the thesis
Research for the thesis
See above
Read the books that might be useful for the thesis
Start citation tracking
Personal
Learn the songs for to jam
Self:
Typing practice.
Did my time today!
Averaged just under 6.2 characters a second, unlocked letters through “u”, and generally felt like I was doing ok. Interestingly, my average speed decreased through the lessons on almost every letter. Wonder what that’s about. I don’t get new letters until I’m at 5 characters per second on the previous letters, which I really like as a system, because 5 is just about where it stops feeling like something that I need to think about at all. There’s something to be said for more incremental changes to be sure, especially since the default goal is less than three characters per second. Still, once I’m at 5 per second in all letters, I think that I’ll start working on punctuation and capitalization. If I can get all of that together up to 5 per second, then it’s on to six, and so on until I either give up, die, or max out the program.
Keep the phone out of the room for bed
Did not do this, and started a new audio book, which I am enjoying. I’m listening to it at single speed, and I’m more and more thinking that this publisher9 records books with the assumption that they’ll be listened to at greater than single times speed. Still, there’s nothing that I really gain from listening faster, especially since there are no other books that I’m trying to consume right now. Learning to go slower is almost never a bad thing.
Pray St. Michael Chaplet in the morning
I did not do this today or yesterday, which isn’t great.
Stretch in the morning
I did that today, though certainly not for an hour. I think that I should have time tonight to do so, though, which will hopefully help me. I found that I was incredibly tight in the front of my chest today, so I have confidence that stretching is doing something.10 My back also seized when I bent over suddenly, which I don’t like. Might be good to start some lower back stretches.11
Read at night
Nope.
Poetry at night
Nope.
Clean the home
Spent time this morning! Realized, as I tend to, that one of the big issues in my life is storage. I’ve been keeping spices above the stove, but12 that area gets fairly hot, which is not good for spice storage. It’s really not good for most storage, but I think that I have enough things that are non-consumable that I can make it work.13
Stretching, standing, drinking water
I did kind of ok with this yesterday, other than the time period where I left my water at primary location and moved to secondary. Stretching, generally not as much as I’d like.
Posture
So I have realized that I instinctively cross my legs, which is weird, and a habit I think that I would like to break. I catch myself doing it so often, though. Even lying in bed, my right foot goes over the left.
No wasted time
Generally decently, although I did spend a while yesterday looking for pen ink, I enjoy writing enough that I’m willing to call that time decently, if not well, spent.
Eat more than 2 meals a day14
I ate two and a bit yesterday!15
Goals and Growth:
Ends:
Letter writing, get into more
Did Not write yesterday, will not write today or likely tomorrow or the rest of the week. I need to lower the barrier to going to my jail cell in the library, or else I should just be honest with myself and take the letters elsewhere. Hard to decide either way.
Handwriting, pick and make the new one
In reading the book about gentlemanly etiquette, I was reminded that the primary goal of any hand16 should be legibility. A secondary consideration is normally speed, but I think that my personal priority list puts that at the end of the list. For my new hand, I’m prioritizing legibility first, as anything I write I want to be read, and read easily. Next I have uniqueness.
I know that it’s ridiculous to want my handwriting to be different just for the sake of being different, but I have a few justifications. First, it makes it slightly harder for someone to falsify something as having been written by me, even if that is unlikely. Second, it makes life more fun to look at something fun. It doesn’t have to be unique in the sense of never seen, just in the sense of not commonly seen today.
The next priority is beauty. Beauty is not necessarily quantifiable, but for anything practical, it does have elements of both form and function. Anything which passes the first criterion17 will satisfy the functional element. If it is also unique, I find it unlikely that I will not find the writing beautiful. However, if I have to choose any specific character’s beauty or originality, it is good to remember the priorities I have set.
Finally, I want to consider speed. Although I do not ever really need to write quickly by hand, I am not hoping for calligraphy. My writing needs to be done at a writing pace, which means that, by and large, extraneous strokes and flourishes don’t get to exist. Finding a hand that satisfies all of these criteria is difficult, to be sure, but most of the fun in getting a script is playing with options. I think I might go letter by letter, if only because that way I can really focus to make sure I’m able to reproduce the exact thing I want.
Also, cursive script is sadly out, because so many people these days cannot read it. Even though I can and think that more people should be able to, I want my writing to be able to be read by anyone.
Oh, I guess it’s an unstated thing before this, but I want the handwriting to scale. That is, I want to be able to draw the same shapes on a small note, a notebook, and a whiteboard or blackboard and have it look fine, if not good. Why? Because why go through the effort of making beauty if I do not commit to it?
Means:
Typing speed, improve it.
As mentioned above, I have been working on that.
Reading, do more of it
Yesterday, while spending time with the friend, we had a fair amount of downtime where conversation did not need to occur. I kept reading the book I started a few months ago when I was reading more, and I forgot how much I enjoy it. I do also want to reread one series, which I’m not letting myself do at least until I finish this book.18
Blogging, do it
Look at this! Of the seven days of the month, I think that I have done at least 5!
Writing things that are not the blog and thesis, do
I wrote some reflections about the reading before blogging yesterday, which somewhat counts, and I’ve done a bit of scheduling for things. I also spent most of the late morning and early afternoon helping my undergrad to write a script to do some data analysis.19
not that this stage (other than the obvious) was bad, just that I always want better for those I care about, and I care about myself.↩
specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound↩
end of the year?↩
I don’t remember where↩
note the capitalization! Fancy.↩
partially because survivorship bias, partially because I am not the average person, partially because I find myself trusting other’s knowledge less and less (wow I really need to do reason and revelation already↩
obviously like jumping out of a plane will impact the shape much more than like red tie versus blue tie for a day↩
I think fate is not real, but the normative Catholic stance is that only humanity (and some non-corporeal beings) have free will. It’s not a large leap to say that this means the universe is predictable for any system without human connection, and I think that I’ve seen talks with that exact thesis. I don’t know where I stand on the issue, generally thinking that we should err on the side of treating animals with compassion, as they too are G-d’s creations, but↩
is it a publisher for audio? I think so↩
even if it’s making other parts of me tighter rather than the parts I think I’m stretching lighter.↩
lifts?↩
obviously↩
oh duh, if I move dishes into there, at worst I end up with nice warm plates to serve my meals. Nice how thinking through things by typing helps me come to answers↩
meaning a snack and 2 meals is good or three meals, etc.↩
rice and bratwurst and gravy for dinner, which was shockingly good. Gravy entirely because Japanese curry starts from a roux and I forgot how much I love both making and consuming roux based sauces. Lunch was a pot pie from the local gas station chain. Breakfast was a rice krispie treat and a protein bar.↩
which I think isn’t used as a term any longer. Maybe script↩
right? because it’s the singular one there?↩
it’s a really dystopian progression fantasy series, where the main character is poor and wants to cultivate, and ends up joining a horribly abusive fighting ring just to be able to pay off his debts. Not that I want to write more dystopic fiction (if anything, I want the reverse. I want writing to return to an era where we have hope. Society influences art and art influences society. I want to do my part to make both better), but it was enjoyable, and I’m curious if I’ll still enjoy the themes on a second read through.↩
would it have been faster by a lot and also easier for everyone if I had just written it? yes. Did the undergrad necessarily want to write the script? no. Does the undergrad need to know python? no, but I think that the more tools one has, generally the better.↩
First Published: 2025 April 6
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that I have only one other reflection on a Lenten gospel, since I’ve never been good at this blog in the springtime.
Note 7 April 2025: By mistake I uploaded the monthly reflection again. Whoops!
N.B. Oof this one got rambly and also weirdly aggressive and uses second person more than usual. To any and all of my readers, I promise that the you in the writing is the generic you, not you specifically.
“Has no one condemned you?”
She replied, “No one, sir.”
Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
Of the lines in the Bible, I don’t really know why this one doesn’t get the same sort of, if you’ll pardon the pun, religious fanatacism that others like John 3:16 gets. What better encapsulates Church teaching than Christ’s final line there?
We are a faith of hope, of belief, of love. G-d does not condemn anyone to hell, nor does he condemn anyone generally. We choose hell.
However, this is not free license to act how we please. We are also commanded to sin no further.
Who has the authority to make such statements?
The Lord, the G-d of Abraham and Isaac, the voice of the burning bush, the soft call on the wind.
I cannot understand why the beauty of this line is not commented on more often.
I do, however, understand why so many non-and non-practicing1 Christians use this as a cudgel. I have primarily seen it used in reference to homosexuality and abortion, the two hot button topics of the era for believers.
When the crowd is gone, and the woman is standing alone in front of her Creator, as we all will do, He asks if anyone condemns her. If she had been wracked with guilt over her actions, she could still have condemned herself. She does not, however. Looking around, and seeing the space empty of herself and Love Himself, she responds that no one does.
While the crowd arrives and ultimately leaves, Christ is writing in the sand. Folk legend says that he was writing the sins of everyone in the crowd, which, even if I do not agree with on principle, points so something we too often forget. In the parables that find themselves recreated in our lives, we are not Him. We are not the father from last week, gladly welcoming his son back. Most often, we are not even the prodigal son. We are the other son, the one feeling jilted because his father is celebrating the return of his wayward son.
I think that we should all take part in a thought exercise. Imagine the worst person who has ever lived. Pray for them.
That’s not the exercise, but it is a good reminder. The exercise works just as well with a fictional person, assuming that you can still bring yourself to feel the same level of disgust and horror at the actions of the person. Imagine that when you die, and the Heavenly Father receives you into his warm embrace, you find yourself face to face with this person. I am not asking how the you of then would feel, I am asking how the you of right now would feel.
Or, take it a few steps closer to home. Think of everyone in your life, repentant sinner trying their best, person flaunting their sin, the annoying person who always takes forever to order their coffee. Would you be happy spending an eternity in heaven with all of them? Would you be happy spending an eternity in heaven if the two of you alone were saved? If the answer to any of these questions is no, then you do not have the heart that Christ demands.
Too often, people who claim to be Christian will speak of justice when they mean retribution. We need to remember, all sin is public sin, because we are all one body. You cannot harm one part of yourself without harming the whole. If, in the gym, one arm gave out before the other, you2 would not shame the arm. You would give it the extra attention that it needs in order to be as strong as the other.
The Church does not teach equality, but equity. “To whom much has been given, much is expected”, reminds us that those who have been blessed with more or seemingly greater3 gifts are expected to give more to the world around them. In direct opposition to Calvinism, the Church teaches that those who have received more from the Lord are actively sinful if they notice someone suffering. St. Basil, one of the early Church Fathers4 put it so strikingly. We would condemn someone stealing the coat from a homeless man’s back. What then, is the coat that we do not wear?
As with every Gospel passage, it can return to love of neighbor. However, this passage is specifically about justice.
One argument people use for retributive “justice” is that it works as a deterrent. If you cut of thieves’ hands, then you will have less theft. If you kill the murderer, others will not lash out in anger. This is not, however, a matter of faith and morals. This is a matter of fact and evidence.
The research is resoundingly clear that retributive justice does not work for anything except causing suffering.5 All punishment should be oriented towards the salvation of a person’s soul and the souls of all in the world.
An argument for life in prison or capital punishment is that a country may be unable to keep someone effectively detained. If a murderer escapes and kills a dozen people, wouldn’t it have been better to have killed him to prevent that? The Church is incredibly clear on that point.
No.
The Church rejects any way of quantifying the value of human life, as to put a price on something of infinite glory is to inherently devalue it. We are crafted, lovingly and individually, in the image and likeness of the source of all good. By saying that twenty lives is worth more than a life, or a thousand, or any number, you are inherently saying that there is a worth to human life. One life is worth one life.
Something mathematics has right is the idea of infinity. What is infinity plus one? Or, getting to the direct thrust, what is infinity times twenty, or a million?
Infinity remains infinity.
There is more to be said. One could speak about how jury nullification, at its best, deals with the fact that laws are black and white but circumstances rarely are. One could speak about how we can never know the state of another’s soul. One could speak about how kings had, or at least claimed, a divine right to rule, which gave them the power of choosing death. One could speak about how, if the goal is to cow a populace into not murdering, it is truly less relevant who is hung, as long as a body swings from the rope.
This Lenten season, I invite you and myself to truly think on the meaning of Christ’s passion. He willingly died for each and every one of us and our sins. My sin and my sin alone condemns Christ to the Cross.
But, as Lent becomes Easter, so too does Christ rise from the dead, showing the path forward. We should not condemn those around us, but in all things should strive to love everyone as Christ loves us. After all, just as two infinities is the same as one, half an infinity is as much too. Loving any fraction of the amount that Christ does means having an infinite well of love.
Wow, sing of an age past but not forgotten Sunday!6 It has been ages since the Gospel really spoke to me like it did today. With that in mind, I’m going to reflect on it.
Today’s Gospel is probably one of the more commonly7 cited passages of the Bible, especially by non believers. In it, a woman is caught in the act of adultery. The crowd,8 seeing an opportunity to entrap The Lord, ask Him what they should do. Obviously Mosaic Law says that she is to be stoned, but something something, Roman government said that Jews can’t do their own capital punishment or something.
Christ does not respond at first, instead writing9 on the ground. They repeat he question, and he says that the one without sin should cast the first stone.
In the Catholic joke version of this parable, a stone flies through the air and Christ exclaims “Mom! I told you not to come today!”
In the Biblical10 account, the crowd leaves one by one, until it is only the woman and Christ standing there. He asks if any condemn her, and she says no. Christ says that he, then, will also not, and tells her to go forth and sin no further.
Now, there’s a lot that I want to unpack here.
First, something I don’t know if I have ever seen is that Christ implicitly is asking the woman if she condemns herself or her actions. I feel like there’s something really important there, especially in the context of how people use the passage. However, I’m not sure what it is yet, so I’ll try to figure out by the end of this reflection.11
Second, there is a popular Catholic belief that Christ was writing the sins of the crowd on the ground, and that is what caused them to leave. I think that this is a bad faith reading. I do not know a single person who would be able to confidently state that they were perfect and without blame, especially in the context of explicit entrapment. Too, there is the point to remember that they asked Him this to cause trouble. I do not think that they would have stoned her even if He had said that all must follow the Mosaic Law.
In this reading, it is simply a waiting game. At some point, the provocateurs get bored or have other obligations, and are so forced to leave. Christ, waiting patiently12, does not address the woman until the entirety of the crowd leaves. I also don’t know what to make of this, except that we should never make choices about judgement and punishment rashly.
If I had been attempting to goad someone I thought of as a false prophet into choosing between two terrible choices and he just didn’t give a real answer, I think that I would be relatively patient. I surely would believe that he would become uncomfortable with a crowd looming over him, anxiously awaiting an answer, far before I would have reason to leave. I don’t know if that’s true, but, if the leaders had that belief, they would have been proven entirely wrong.
Third,13 there is something really interesting to me about the way that the Law is fundamentally changed in that instance. Nothing in the Mosaic Law, so far as I am aware, requires the dispensers of judgement to themselves be pure.
In Catholic teaching, sacraments are effective “ex opere operandi”; the holiness of the one providing the sacrament has no effect on the efficacy of the sacrament. There’s something really interesting to me about the fact that we have decided that expecting perfection from those who have been called and chosen to lead the people of G-d14, and yet Christ seems to be demanding that we be perfect in order to enact justice. Regardless of whether we feel it is merited, the crowd was correct that the explicit punishment laid out in the Law was death by stoning. Again, I don’t know what to do with this thought, so I will leave it for a little as well.
Moving to the more immediately applicable interpreting, this passage is often thrown by non-believers15 when Christians attempt to enact policy or seek punishment for violations, especially moral violations. The common response is that Christ said that she was to sin no more, and so telling people to stop bad actions is still ok or something. My most charitable reading of the Christian response is that the Christian legitimately believed that the other person was unaware that they were violating moral law, and out of perfect love and charity were simply informing them of a new Truth.16
Of course, we know that is not the case. Especially in the context of homosexuality, where I feel like the verse was most popularly used, no one is unaware that the standard belief in Christian society has been that homosexuality is inherently sinful.17 I think that, truly, this is an example of just how much Christian morality on justice is nonexistent among nominal believers.18
What is the goal of a punishment? To me, the answer is simple: as with literally everything that we do, the end goal of a punishment should be to bring the entire world to G-d and Christ. What does that mean in this context, though?
Generally, it means that reform based punishments should be seen as objectively better than retribution based punishment.19 The Church, in “Fides et Ratio”, was very clear that religious and scientific truth do not disagree. The idea that anyone has the right to end another’s life, whether explicitly by capital punishment or implicitly by life sentences, comes from the belief that Church Fathers had that deterrence was an effective way to reduce crime.
That is not a question of faith and morals.
Deterrence’s effect on crime rates lies exactly in the camp of a question that rational20 thought can answer. Even the federal government, whose recent administration is explicitly in favor of retribution based punishment, still acknowledges that harsh punishments do not reduce crime. So, then, how can a Catholic support retribution based punishment?
This is not a rhetorical question, for all that its presence in my writing makes it inherently rhetorical.21 I legitimately do not know of an argument for retribution based punishment that does not rely on the argument of “the Church Fathers said it was ok.” The Church Fathers are often wrong. Aquinas, the argumentative Catholic’s favorite cudgel, famously did not believe in the immaculate conception. We don’t question the validity of this.
We don’t22 question that daytime is bright because of the sun, as Augustine did. So then why is it that we question the Holy Father, who, seeing this, recently reminded all Catholics that we cannot support the death penalty. I have seen that some say that we still should allow it because we may not be able to keep someone imprisoned. Why is someone being imprisoned?
In the Christian ethical framework, we are punished only in so far as it is beneficial towards leading us to the Gospel. If we believe that crime is bad for getting all souls to heaven23, then we should work to stop crime in whatever way is most effective. The data show that means catching people, and giving them ways to rehabilitate.
If a murderer escapes custody and kills again, this is not somehow worse than killing them. If a murderer escapes and kills a thousand people, it is still no worse than killing them. All lives are infinitely precious.
Despite what we may have thought as children, infinity times one thousand is still infinity.
Of course, this line of thought quickly leads to pure pacifism.
Unfortunately, I now have a meeting with a friend, and so cannot finish the thought. That’s probably fine, since I am on a huge tangent right now.
I’m realizing that the way that these goals is structured is not entirely what I want right now. It kind of came up in yesterday’s musing, but, while I don’t think that today is going to be the day that I work to fix it24, I think that it’s still probably worth thinking about. Right now I’m kind of leaning towards obligations25, growth, both autotelic26 and means27, and how to improve in some other regard.28
Anyways
Intentionality:
At least hourly, stand up, drink water, take two deep breaths, and do a stretch of some sort
Absolutely did not do this yesterday. I was writing for a solid four hours and stood maybe three times, with absolutely no stretching. That being said, though, I do think that I was much better about drinking water yesterday, which is really good! Unfortunately, my bottle is just barely too low to drink from with good posture with my current desk layout.29
Be proactive about avoiding overwhelm and when feeling overwhelmed, stop and figure out why.
Generally doing ok! I do find that I’m getting migraines more often, so it might be worthwhile to just start taking caffeine in the morning with the rest of my pills.
Light a candle and read by candlelight each night. Along with this, leave all electronics outside of the bedroom and/or move them away at least an hour before bed time.
I lit the candle but did not do candlelight or electronics free.
Candle time in the morning before electronics. Use the time for prayer
See above.
Focus on good posture, especially straight back and making sure that neck isn’t awkwardly positioned.
Did decently during choir retreat, realized why so many doctors hate laptops while working yesterday.
Don’t waste time, and in particular, be mindful about making sure to take breaks and rest. Especially make sure to do rest which revitalizes the me of tomorrow, rather than rest which simply keeps me in stasis.
Eh. I think that I was generally ok with the revitalizing aspect, because I feel well rested. Then again, I also slept in effectively two more hours today. I have to decide between feeling rested and feeling tired at night’s end, I think. If I just force my way through this week, hopefully I can reset the schedule?
Interpersonal Relationships:
Figure out what belongs in a normal letter to a friend.
Darn libraries being closed on the weekend.
Get back into writing letters.
I woke up to a message from a friend today asking if I was still willing and able to help with a project today. Since my general rule of thumb is that in person events almost always trump unexpected things to a friend,30 I agreed. That does mean I don’t have a super free day, though.
Work to message friends at desired intervals.
Professional:
Do the Thesis and other research requirements. Upcoming deadlines:
Brain dump about science communication (Overdue)
Brain dump a publicly accessible chapter (Overdue)
Have final convergences for the results I’m trying to reproduce (due 4/4)
Draft of the first paper (due end of month, but I want to make sure that I’ve reupdated it sooner than later)
Finish revising and editing the overview of a program chapter (due 4/7) and send it to the boss
Revise the Science communication and publicly readable chapters (due 4/7)
Send the science communication chapter to the boss (4/14)
Brain Dump the background to the program (4/14)
Only do the work I feel called to when I’ve finished the tasks set to me for the day or outside of normal working hours (post 1725)
Start making the giant citation document so that I don’t have to search for citations later.
Work towards future career:
Figure out the difference between my public-facing and field-facing presentation affects. As I focus on becoming a better presenter, I need to become aware of the difference and how to switch them.
Need to look for jobs
Health:
Spiritual:
Get back into the Lenten goals (pray chaplet of St. Michael, give money equal to amount I’m spending on myself, stop scrolling social media, stop playing video games)
Be intentional about prayer. That means both making time for prayer and actually doing it.
Physical:
Start focusing on posture again, especially while sitting.
Go to group fitness classes more regularly and more often. If not, do workout at home
Feed myself simply and healthily. Healthy here means trying to generally avoid processing.
Mental:
Clean Life:
Remove dirt and clutter from physical spaces (standard definition of clean):
At least once a week, each room has nothing on the floor
At least once a week, all surfaces which are not inherently storage are cleared off
At least once every two weeks, each room is vacuumed
At least once every month, all non-storage surfaces are explicitly washed/cleaned
At least once a week, I get rid of at least one item that I notice (meaning throw away or in rare circumstances gift or donate)
Clean sight lines. Is my space set up in a way that orients me towards my goals for the space? If not, how can I make it so?
Spend time each day thinking about the goals for the day, and getting them out of my head and onto the page.
Continue to explicitly confront the voice in my head that says that people hate me.
Hobbies:
Reading
Start reading and returning the library books I have.
Finish the book on mindfulness I started. (also make a list of the exercises in the book and try them out)
Read more poetry
Music:
Work on guitar
Learn the songs that jam partner suggested and/or requested I learn
Get back into the album.
Writing:
Write poetry more often, ideally nightly.
Find a way to add meta data to my blog posts and then add the meta data
Not only write blogs, but also post them.
Get back into writing the web novel
I talked about this yesterday, but typing practice. Right now my goal is 5 characters per second, and sadly all my data just got lost between trying to log in through a few sources. That’s ok, data are data
Other hobbies, do them.
Because once baptized always baptized, etc↩
hopefully↩
remembering that the only greatness in heaven is He Who Is. All that we do on earth is just in attempt to model ourselves after Him↩
since for some reason there are people who think that those born centuries ago have wisdom that we lack by virtue of coming later↩
which, I will admit, is some people’s stated goal↩
unlike wayback wednesday or throwback thursday or flashback friday (I’m going to start playing with capitalization, I think. I’m thinking about how to change my handwriting again, and capitalization is a thing that I play with a lot there so may as well do here), I don’t know of any pithy ways to say that for satur or sundays. If you know of one, please let me know↩
intentionally. I know that we all have tons of Biblical allusions in everyday speech that go completely unnoted↩
wow I realize what Jewish authors mean by the New Testament being really Jew Hatey (I’m no longer using antisemitism, because we should call it what it is) more and more lately↩
I swear I’ve seen versions that say drawing↩
read, more likely to be what happened↩
something something, if I had more time I would have written less↩
and who among us hasn’t whittled a day away writing on the nearest available form?↩
both the first and third points here are things that I didn’t think about until I started writing here. Wild how consciously taking time to consider something makes it easier to consider↩
who, remember, are told it would be better that they have a millstone tied around their neck and be cast into the sea than to mislead↩
or believers in something else. I’m not totally sure that it’s a fair way to characterize someone. Non-Christians? Hmm↩
see my future musing on truth, reason, and revelation↩
Though I did recently encounter an interesting argument that says more or less that the anti-homosexual stance the Church has taken is relatively modern. The Bible is more than okay with slavery, but we banned it when society said that we must. Even in America, the Jesuits (ugh I need to muse about my issues feeling called to Ignatian spirituality) owned, bought, and sold enslaved people as chattel. Something something, cultural norms aren’t always right, especially arguments which are entirely “well we kind of always felt like this”. Like yes there are a few Biblical passages which explicitly decry homosexual actions, but those are also generally surrounded by any number of admonitions that we no longer follow. I should think on this longer↩
nominal here because there’s the whole Catholic thing of “faith without works is dead”, so if you don’t change how you act based on information, do you really believe it?↩
I say punishment not justice here, because starting here I mean Justice as a fundamental and independent of human belief thing, not simply what we have agreed as a society↩
since it’s faith and reason, I’m using reason and rationality↩
because there’s no way for another to respond in the moment.↩
or, at least, I hope that we don’t. Given how much people hate the ratio part of fides et ratio lately, I’m not confident↩
which I don’t think anyone explicitly states, but it is frequently assumed↩
because I have far more obligations than I thought that I did↩
things that some external source expects from me. E.g. my thesis, the guitar with a friend↩
things that I want to get better at for their own sake. (I say this having yet to write the post about intrinsic motivation), but like composing, I want to be better at for its own sake, and I guess singing or guitar, etc↩
things that I want to get better at to help with something else. E.g. I want to be faster at typing mostly so that I can get back to having my brain be the rate limiting step in my writing, rather than my keys, as it is right now. The site I’m training on helpfully lets you express speed in characters per second or minute, which makes far more sense to me than words per minute for a specific letter, even though I intellectually know that they’re just linear conversions↩
e.g. eat better, write letters, etc. I guess those go in self improvement, but... (you see why I have this issue)↩
wait that’s such an easy fix since I have some 3 inch binders now. Woo gerbil hour is slightly more back. Issue is now that in order to have water bottle in good place, I also have to have hands in bad place. I really need a split keyboard, and then water can just go in the middle.↩
I realize now, and am very comfortable with↩
First Published 5 April 2025
A potentially concerning percentage of the posts1 I’ve been writing are about food. I want to be feeding myself, and I want that feeding to go quickly and healthily.
I did realize today, though, that I want this post to encompass more than simply feeding my stomach. I want to make sure that all parts of me, body, mind, and soul, are being fed. Still, I’m going to start with feeding the body.
Breakfast and lunch, at least during the work week, are getting better and better. Breakfast of oats with berries is a great breakfast,2 and I’ve generally been eating a decent lunch. Dinner remains a mixed bag, though, which isn’t great.
I think that there are a few interwoven parts to that. For one, I still have some part of me that really thinks that dinner should be a production, or at least something effortful. I don’t really know what that means, and interrogating the idea isn’t really giving me anything either. However, I guess it is good for me to know that I have that gut instinct, so that I can start confronting it. I think that the other main issue with dinner is that I do not have a schedule, which makes scheduling exactly when I will be eating what in my home more difficult.
Still, I’ve done any number of hard things, and this isn’t as hard as that.
Third issue is that I don’t have a microwave, so anything I want for dinner kind of has to be stove or oven meal, which also adds some time to the prep.
Potential solutions:
Plan to eat dinner at work. In this way I feed myself, don’t crash as much when I stay late, have motivation to stay and keep working, and have access to a microwave. Downsides: I then am eating all three of my daily meals at work, it does nothing to help my weekend self, and I only have access to a microwave.3 I guess I really mean that I cannot do food prep at the office the same way that I can at home. It would require me constructing meals and bringing them to the office.
Keep as I am doing. Works for lunch and breakfast, but adds stress to my day and means I’m very tired by the time that I go home for the night. Probably not the winner, for all that it does have the advantage of being exactly what I currently do.
Do to dinner what I do to lunch: premake a bunch of meals and then heat one up each night. This can work with the first idea, but it means that if I do so at home, I have to deal with the slow pace of oven or stove.
Make dinner the night before, when I would have been making the dinner for night of. In this way, I can still get the cooking itch scratched, and if I don’t prep something, then I will know that I am responsible for feeding myself.
I guess there’s also the tertiary consideration, which is that I can also just keep more easily consumed food at home. If I do that, then I can just grab like a handful of peanuts when I feel hungry, rather than needing to either just suffer or make something effortful.
Ok with my thoughts laid out like this, I think that I have my answer for now. Night before, I will cook dinner for the following day. If, for whatever reason, I am not able to get the meal done, then I’ll just grab two lunches to work, and eat one for dinner.4
I’ll also get some peanuts the next time I go shopping and then have a snack that I can consume at home. Goal part two of feeding my body is explicitly getting some, if not recipes, then at least food things that I can do, knowing that a past me has found their macro profiles to at least resemble something decent.
(N.B. I wrote everything from here until the start of the list after the second entry, because I realized that I want to do the back of the envelope protein content for what I’m getting from breakfast and lunch).
Assuming that I eat my oats and box lunch like a good child, I should be getting about5 my entire daily need for protein in the first two meals I eat, so I can go entirely based on vibes!
Pot of beans has been doing me well. If I thought ahead, I could do from dry6, and I know that I prefer them with a little kick.7 Beans are great in terms of the macros. I’ve taken to starting with frying up a handful of frozen onion and celery, which adds at least something to the dish, and I also tend to pour in some frozen peas at the end, which helps the dish overall. It’s also relatively low effort, which means that if I make a batch8 I will need to actually eat the whole batch before the beans ferment.9 I don’t really need rice with that, though rice is nice. Probably worth thinking about making up some rice at start of week and doing some portioning? Ooh! If I get japanese curry blocks, I can have curry beans and rice.10.
“But!” you might cry out here, “is a curry block not incredibly processed?”
Great question.
if I thinly slice meat, rather than boldly chunk it as I have been, I can take small bits of that and it’ll reheat quickly.11
Since I don’t really need to hit any macro goals, plain curry rice12 is an easy and tasty option. If I add vegetables to the curry, becomes even healthier! I can also apparently make my own curry block at home!13 My friend recommended carrot, potato, and onion as a trio of vegetables for the curry. I guess one issue is that I then have to cook them and make the roux, which kind of means that it shouldn’t be a daily event. Honestly, though, that’s not a huge issue. I don’t think I actually have the cooking urge so much as have tied it in my mind to being able to eat dinner14
Ok cool, I do love japanese curry, and I have been wanting an excuse to buy potatoes.15 So, the to do list is:
Clean out fridge16
Figure out food cooking timings (next part of blog)
Figure out how often I need to go grocery shopping to get the things that I want to have
Get the things for next week
Make food
Keep a schedule
One thing that I know about myself is that I cannot rely on weekends for cooking. I can rely on it for shopping, which is maybe strange, but. I guess there’s also the fact that I will have an incredibly different schedule in a little over a month17, and will be visiting friends18 over the summer, so I guess I know that it won’t be a forever thing. Still, probably good to give myself the bare bones of how I would feed myself going forward.
So:
I eat a small loaf of bread each day M T R.19 If I make the buns as I have been, I can make 24 at once. Let’s say that’s three or four loaves a week, which means I need to make bread every six to eight weeks. That feels about true to what I’ve had, and of course does not include the fact that I do tend to eat more than a loaf on some days or eat them on off days. Cool, once I figure out how many I have left, I can schedule when to make the next batch.
Oh! I did also just buy a lighter whole wheat flour, because I don’t necessarily have to eat the aggressive winter wheat, spring wheat is also still whole. That’ll be fun. I do also want to start using the entire container of yogurt, because I have kind of stopped eating it at home lately. That might change with my schedule, but I doubt it.
I currently don’t eat meat on Fridays because it’s Lent20. I should consider whether it’s worth continuing that past lent. Pros: day without meat is better for the environment and myself, if the data are to be trusted. The American Church is laxer than most of the world when it comes to the Friday meat restriction. Technically we are still supposed to give it up. I’m on a high meat diet21 right now entirely because I want to make sure that I’m not harming my body. If I keep not eating meat on Fridays, I will in theory start to get more meals that are meatless and can find ways to increase protein.22 I don’t know what I started this note with, but that’s just a thing to consider.
I eat about 100 grams of cheese every day I have a bun, so approximately 3-4 times a week. I must be buying huge blocks of cheese, because wow I get a lot of days’ cheese from them. Still, next time I’m at the store, note how many it will make.
Around 200 grams of pork a day of cheese, which means a little more than two weeks a kilo. Since I think that the porks I’ve bought are all in the 8-10 pound range, that means I’m good for probably a month per pork.23
Fruit: one to three a lunch, on all days ideally. That means that I need at least fifteen a week. I also find that they’re only really good for a week or two. With that in mind, I guess that I should probably be buying a weekly supply. I don’t know if driving an hour a week is necessarily worth it to go to Costco, but maybe it is, especially when I’m going somewhere nearby already.
Vegetable: I have been loving crunching down on a romaine heart, but I think that literally anything which has that same general vibe24 would be good enough. Also probably an every 1-2 week thing.25
Ok cool, that’s everything I eat I think? Oats and frozen fruit I of course need to buy as I run low, but they last forever, and so don’t need to be considered in terms of perishables.
So, I’m going to be making Japanese inspired curry on Tuesday.26 Oh wait, I do also want to get through my beans.
Um.
Ok so for now let’s try curry beans and rice, as much as that’s not really a thing. I’m still going to be doing potato, carrot, and onion, since those are all delicious and my heritage yearns for me to eat more potato. This means my shopping list is carrot27, onion28, potato, curry block, fruit29, and crunchy green30.
I’ll also inventory my fridge and freezer and toss the expired and rotten food.31 What food is not expired, I will also attempt to eat quickly, in such a way as to get rid of it.
Great!
Now, about feeding the rest of me.
I want to get back into typing practice I think. Two of the rate limiting factors for me right now are legitimately my typing speed and accuracy. That feeds three things: the part of me that loves quantifying growth, the part of me that is writing a bunch, and the part of me that likes being good at things.32 On weekdays, I think that this will mean that I spend the five minutes immediately after daily reflection doing typing practice. Goal in that space is of course accuracy and correct finger placement.33 Actually, if I start with the practice, then I will be primed to get the finger choices and placements correct, so five minutes before doing the reflection are to be spent on the practice.
What else am I trying to feed?
I absolutely need to do guitar every day and work out every day. A forty minute workout in the morning is a lot, but forty minutes is forty minutes, and I’m no longer finding that I am only productive in the morning. If anything, it kind of feels like I’m having the waking version of the previous me’s experience with alarms.34
Five minutes of stretching at night and five minutes of guitar in morning and evening means that in total I’m scheduling less than an hour of my life right now. I’m debating whether or not I should let myself catch up on content during the morning stretch, but am leaning towards no. I’ll absolutely get more workouts in if I only let myself catch up on content when being stretching or cleaning, especially because I do want to keep up with content.
I want to read more. If I just say that I’ll read each night, will I? One issue is that I very much cannot read or write by candlelight, at least with it as flickery as it is. Apparently trimming the wick can help with that.35 I think that I will! But, I also don’t want my nights to be filled with a number of activities, even if they are nominally restful. I think that reading analog nonfiction will help me to bed, as will writing poetry.
As the end to the previous sentence implies, I also want to write more poetry. Doing so after reading might actually be the best, because it gives me a space to process what I read and get my final thoughts for the day onto the page.
Woo! Look at this, I have plans for how I will feed myself. Now I just have to actually go to the store, get the food, clean the fridge, make the food, and keep to the schedule. Basically nothing!
I’ve mused more than a few times about how I would like to improve my mental and physical health, especially in context of food. In the past, I’ve focused more on the higher level concerns, like the overall macro and micronutrient profiles that I should aim for. The other posts have generally been focused on individual recipes that I made a single time, mostly so that I would have a point of reference in the future when I forgot what I did. However, the most important part of keeping myself eating healithily is actually having a sustainable way of feeding myself. With that in mind, this post is focused on how I’m getting nutrients now, how I’d like to be, how I think that I should be, and what the differences are.
So, let’s start with what I’m doing right now.
My breakfast for weekdays is a bowl of oatmeal with frozen36 berries, usually blueberries but sometimes mixed berries. These days, my lunch on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday are a block of pork37 and cheese38, along with a romaine heart and one or two apples or pears, depending on what I got at the store that week. Dinner, on the other hand, has no regularity
Intentionality:
At least hourly, stand up, drink water, take two deep breaths, and do a stretch of some sort
I know that I did a bad job of this, but I also realized that I had 20 minutes of break between 11am and 8:15pm yesterday, and that’s not including the fact that I was actively working before 11. Still, the idea of self work and externalized schedules are different.
Be proactive about avoiding overwhelm and when feeling overwhelmed, stop and figure out why.
Despite that, I somehow did not feel too overwhelmed yesterday. That was great.
Light a candle and read by candlelight each night. Along with this, leave all electronics outside of the bedroom and/or move them away at least an hour before bed time.
Candle time is really nice. It remains a pain to write by flickering candle light, but it might be good if I were to get some sort of lid like in a lantern. No electronics was great too.
Candle time in the morning before electronics. Use the time for prayer
Did not have candle time, but I did force myself to make time to stretch and pray before getting onto electronics. That was probably good.
Focus on good posture, especially straight back and making sure that neck isn’t awkwardly positioned.
Good posture is getting easier, and I can now bring my shoulders too far back for even posture.
Don’t waste time, and in particular, be mindful about making sure to take breaks and rest. Especially make sure to do rest which revitalizes the me of tomorrow, rather than rest which simply keeps me in stasis.
I think that I did ok with this, though prioritizing remains incredibly difficult. I don’t know what’s more important between the writing I know I need to do for work, the writing I know I need to do for my personal well being, the derivations I need to be doing for my code, the code I need to work on, the things I must do in order to be healthy in all the senses of the word, the things that people expect of me, and the things that no one is asking me to do that I don’t want to do but absolutely need to do.39
Interpersonal Relationships:
Figure out what belongs in a normal letter to a friend.
The books arrived at the library, so now it’s time for me to pick them up. That’s going to be fun
Get back into writing letters.
I think that this is always meant to be a weekend thing.
Work to message friends at desired intervals.
Shoot. One of these days I will compile the information.
Professional:
Do the Thesis and other research requirements. Upcoming deadlines:
Brain dump about science communication (Overdue)
Brain dump a publicly accessible chapter (Overdue)
Have final convergences for the results I’m trying to reproduce (due 4/4)
Draft of the first paper (due end of month, but I want to make sure that I’ve reupdated it sooner than later)
Finish revising and editing the overview of a program chapter (due 4/7) and send it to the boss
Revise the Science communication and publicly readable chapters (due 4/7)
Send the science communication chapter to the boss (4/14)
Brain Dump the background to the program (4/14)
Only do the work I feel called to when I’ve finished the tasks set to me for the day or outside of normal working hours (post 1725)
It’s unclear to me what’s work I want to do and what is work that I need to be doing.
Start making the giant citation document so that I don’t have to search for citations later.
Nothing new, but I’ve at least reorganized the books I have which are at least nominally related to the research.
Work towards future career:
Figure out the difference between my public-facing and field-facing presentation affects. As I focus on becoming a better presenter, I need to become aware of the difference and how to switch them.
Need to look for jobs
Health:
Spiritual:
Get back into the Lenten goals (pray chaplet of St. Michael, give money equal to amount I’m spending on myself, stop scrolling social media, stop playing video games)
Be intentional about prayer. That means both making time for prayer and actually doing it.
I prayed the chaplet this morning! I haven’t been scrolling or gaming, which is good. I have yet to get into the almsgiving, which is a shame.
Physical:
Start focusing on posture again, especially while sitting.
Did that yesterday, today I am in pain and not sure why. I will still work on posture, but it is a lower priority.
Go to group fitness classes more regularly and more often. If not, do workout at home.
Did a workout yesterday night, despite getting home late. Stretched this morning because I have the full knowledge that I am not getting home until very very late.
Feed myself simply and healthily. Healthy here means trying to generally avoid processing.
I don’t generally think of canned food as unprocessed, but realistically it’s a pretty low level processing.
Mental:
Clean Life:
Remove dirt and clutter from physical spaces (standard definition of clean):
Did some work on! Almost certainly need to make a list before we get to it.
At least once a week, each room has nothing on the floor
At least once a week, all surfaces which are not inherently storage are cleared off
At least once every two weeks, each room is vacuumed
At least once every month, all non-storage surfaces are explicitly washed/cleaned
At least once a week, I get rid of at least one item that I notice (meaning throw away or in rare circumstances gift or donate)
Clean sight lines. Is my space set up in a way that orients me towards my goals for the space? If not, how can I make it so?
Spend time each day thinking about the goals for the day, and getting them out of my head and onto the page.
Wow look at this.
Continue to explicitly confront the voice in my head that says that people hate me.
Woo.
Hobbies:
Reading
Start reading and returning the library books I have.
I just reorganized the shelf, and there are far fewer books than I thought that there were. That’s pretty great, which means that I have more hope about my abilities to rewrite.
Finish the book on mindfulness I started. (also make a list of the exercises in the book and try them out)
Did no reading yesterday, which I don’t love, but I was also very tired.40
Read more poetry.
I wrote some! That’s better than nothing.
Music:
Work on guitar
Learn the songs that jam partner suggested and/or requested I learn
Get back into the album.
Writing:
Write poetry more often, ideally nightly.
Wrote some last night, and even tried to work with meter and rhyme, at least a little bit.
Find a way to add meta data to my blog posts and then add the meta data
Is metadata all one word? I think that it might actually be. Asked my sysadmin about it.
Not only write blogs, but also post them.
Another one down!
Get back into writing the web novel
Other hobbies, do them.
Intentionality:
At least hourly, stand up, drink water, take two deep breaths, and do a stretch of some sort.
If the fact that that I didn’t end up posting last night isn’t enough of an indication, I did not, in fact, manage to do this. Additionally, I don’t think that I drank water or had good posture for most hours. From 1300 to 1900 I was completely locked in.41
Be proactive about avoiding overwhelm and when feeling overwhelmed, stop and figure out why.
I think I did ok with this. Didn’t feel very overwhelmed for most of the day yesterday, and so that was good. Today, because I was double booked, I ended up feeling overwhelmed when I got to the second activity, which was fine. I took literally 30 seconds, wrote down what I was thinking, and then felt better.
Light a candle and read by candlelight each night. Along with this, leave all electronics outside of the bedroom and/or move them away at least an hour before bed time. I didn’t get home until very late last night, and so I did not do this.
Candle time in the morning before electronics. Use the time for prayer I also did not do this. Oof
Focus on good posture, especially straight back and making sure that neck isn’t awkwardly positioned.
Forgot about this for most of the day, and then was reminded by looking at others, and so I am once again reminding myself that posture is important.
Don’t waste time, and in particular, be mindful about making sure to take breaks and rest. Especially make sure to do rest which revitalizes the me of tomorrow, rather than rest which simply keeps me in stasis.
I think that I generally did ok with this. I spent last night hanging out with some friends, and it was great to see them, even if it did mean that I was out far later than I would otherwise normally choose.
Interpersonal Relationships:
Figure out what belongs in a normal letter to a friend.
Shoot, in the fugue/flow42 of yesterday afternoon I did not end up picking up the books.
Get back into writing letters.
Tomorrow is Sunday, and so tomorrow a letter is to be written.43
Work to message friends at desired intervals.
I still need to make the list, but I do feel like I’m doing an ok job of contacting some friends. List really needs to start moving up the priority list. It’s just hard because, while I adore and feel close and want to remain close with a number of people, I also feel like I am already so far behind on my thesis writing.44 I have some objective standards for that, since I do, in fact, have a draft due nominally on Monday that I haven’t even finished writing, let alone leaving for a week before revising and another week before editing to send it in. However, I will always be behind, and I need to start to come to terms with that.
Professional:
Do the Thesis and other research requirements. Upcoming deadlines:
Brain dump about science communication (Overdue)
On the bright side, I had the event today, so I can at least write about how it went in the form of a laboratory report. It’s almost certainly not worth publishing, but that’s why it gets to go in the thesis. If I start reading the books on teaching astronomy and chemistry that I have in my shelf, I can write something about that, if only as a “this could be a cool experiment for someone to use”
Brain dump a publicly accessible chapter (Overdue)
I’ve been trying to explain my research to people more and more, and it’s hard because one answer is “I’m writing AI to replace the work of assigning molecular spectra”, which is in the broadest terms true, but that’s really the only terms where it’s true. Anything else, though, requires me to explain what rotational spectroscopy is.
Have final convergences for the results I’m trying to reproduce (Overdue)
I figured out45 why the code wasn’t converging correctly, and spent some time yesterday with the derivations trying to make the speed up I had plausible. However, I should instead just finish updating the code to run with both ideas that I have.46 I started before the activity this morning, so that was good, but I also need to clean the code and delete the extraneous code47
Draft of the first paper (due end of month, but I want to make sure that I’ve reupdated it sooner than later)
I looked at it today, because I deleted the actual file which had my compiled comparisons between theory and experiment at some point. I knew that it was in the file, then realized that one benefit of cookies is that the site I haven’t been to in at least 8 months still had the entire spreadsheet in the different forms I might want it to be expressed. That is literally all that I did, though.
Finish revising and editing the overview of a program chapter (due 4/7) and send it to the boss
This really means finish writing. However, since I can’t really distinguish between the background and the overview, I think that it might have to get broken into different sections. I don’t know how, but what’s most important is getting all the content on the page, both for the words and so that I don’t have to remember to add more content. I can’t revise an empty page and all
Revise the Science communication and publicly readable chapters (due 4/7)
Send the science communication chapter to the boss (4/14)
Brain Dump the background to the program (4/14)
Only do the work I feel called to when I’ve finished the tasks set to me for the day or outside of normal working hours (post 1725)
So, yesterday was not a good example of that. I did have it in the to do list, but that isn’t really so much a reason as an excuse.
Start making the giant citation document so that I don’t have to search for citations later.
I reorganized my bookshelf, so the books that I am most likely to put in my thesis are all in the same place now.
Work towards future career:
Figure out the difference between my public-facing and field-facing presentation affects. As I focus on becoming a better presenter, I need to become aware of the difference and how to switch them.
Need to look for jobs
Health:
Spiritual:
Get back into the Lenten goals (pray chaplet of St. Michael, give money equal to amount I’m spending on myself, stop scrolling social media, stop playing video games)
Be intentional about prayer. That means both making time for prayer and actually doing it.
Physical:
Start focusing on posture again, especially while sitting.
I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong but wow is sitting up straight kinking my shoulder something fierce.
Go to group fitness classes more regularly and more often. If not, do workout at home
Haven’t worked out yet today, but am planning to when I get home.48
Feed myself simply and healthily. Healthy here means trying to generally avoid processing.
Ehhhh, most of my food since the last reflection was potluck style. I don’t believe in mandating someone else’s diet, especially when they are helping to feed me.
Mental:
Clean Life:
Remove dirt and clutter from physical spaces (standard definition of clean):
It took me all morning yesterday, but the area above my desk is again ordered, and significantly moreso49 than it was before. My home,50 however, is in a static or slightly worsened state. At some point I’ll have to take the time and commit to actually just giving a day to a deep clean, but that day is not today.
At least once a week, each room has nothing on the floor
At least once a week, all surfaces which are not inherently storage are cleared off
At least once every two weeks, each room is vacuumed
At least once every month, all non-storage surfaces are explicitly washed/cleaned
At least once a week, I get rid of at least one item that I notice (meaning throw away or in rare circumstances gift or donate)
Clean sight lines. Is my space set up in a way that orients me towards my goals for the space? If not, how can I make it so?
Spend time each day thinking about the goals for the day, and getting them out of my head and onto the page.
I really need to start the day with this more explicitly. I don’t know what medium to use, though, because I don’t want to be on the computer early, but I do also primarily look at the computer, these days.51
Continue to explicitly confront the voice in my head that says that people hate me.
Spent time with friends last night, and I didn’t even think that they hated me once before leaving!
Hobbies:
Reading
Start reading and returning the library books I have.
They’re organized now, into the four relevant kinds.52
Finish the book on mindfulness I started. (also make a list of the exercises in the book and try them out)
Have made no progress. I will do so tonight, though.
Read more poetry
Music:
Work on guitar
Oof. I haven’t touched it in days.53
Learn the songs that jam partner suggested and/or requested I learn
Get back into the album.
Writing:
Write poetry more often, ideally nightly.
Find a way to add meta data to my blog posts and then add the meta data
Not only write blogs, but also post them.
I didn’t do either tomorrow, which isn’t great.
Get back into writing the web novel
Other hobbies, do them.
interesting that I’m more and more using post instead of blog or musing or anything that others I know use. Worth thinking about, so onto the pile (list of things to write) I have↩
accusations of it being horse food aside↩
ok that isn’t true, I do also literally have the small countertop oven that I brought into the office a few years ago.↩
I should really get through the bag of rice that I brought in at some point↩
ok so one ounce of oats dry is apparently 120 calories, which is about 5 grams. Another site has it as cups of prepared, which is weird to me, because that’s entirely based on the amount of water I add, and (unfortunately for my diet and fortunately for basically everything else) the water I consume is not appreciably protein filled. Still, I think I probably eat 2-4 ounces of oats a day, so 10 to 20 grams of protein. Probably about 50 grams from the 200 grams of pork I’m now eating a day (I was still hungy after eating the 100 gram bits, so). I’ll assume the cheese that I’m eating right now is fairly representative, and so I’m getting like 25 grams from that. Oh Wild, I don’t actually need protein at dinner! Cool↩
because wow I should be cycling through them↩
read: measure cayenne with your heart↩
as I kind of have to do, especially if I’m going to be using dry. I guess there’s nothing actively making me cook the entire bag at once, but let’s be real. I will not cook a half bag when it is no extra work to cook a full one.↩
don’t ask me how I know that the stages of a bean dish left in the fridge tend to stall out at the fermentation step, rather than ever molding.↩
double checking that this isn’t offensive↩
yet another option over rice↩
Japanese curry block over rice↩
I won’t because I don’t really care that much about palm oil, but it is still good to know. Then again, if I do something resembling a block, I can instead keep roux blocks and spice mix ready to go in my freezer, which is also fun! Let’s plan on that when I get an afternoon, since I like being able to completely choose my flavor profile. Does mean I would have to splurge for dry mushrooms, but.↩
which is true↩
they spoil at nearly normal vegetable pace, but I treat them like onions (indefinitely good) or apples (also good forever if u do it right). Maybe I just need to treat them better?↩
read: get rid of the food which is clearly bad and or that I know I will not eat. Food waste is bad, but it’s a smaller sin than self harm, which not feeding myself is at least a passive version of↩
read, no longer have most of the demands on my time that I have right now↩
hopefully. I do need to schedule that!↩
on Wednesdays I often treat myself to a bagel and on Fridays I don’t eat meat, which means that I do kind of need to feed myself differently because of the missing seventy five grams from the two pieces. Then again, it’s ok if one day a week is protein deficient↩
and, despite my reservations about food restriction, I think that it’s still probably better for me to follow the guidance of abstinence on Fridays↩
ok I do realize that 200 grams of meat a day is not, by almost any American definition, a high meat diet. It feels high, though, because I’m eating meat daily, and usually as a block of its own. If I put it in curry, I suppose that would make it more spread out. Off topic though, return↩
there’s the ever available and expensive option of simply adding gelatin↩
oof that back of the envelope math feels like XKCD’s joke, but it also is probably true in the end. Back of envelopes here, not precision↩
holdable in my hand, fittable in my mouth, crunchy, generally dense↩
am I currently literally googling (using it for brand dilution) “things like lettuce”? yes. Yay! I can eat chard still, but it’s a little bitter. Collard greens are also very bitter when raw. And tragically, they like so many of the remaining leafy greens are related to mustard, which I have an allergy (allegedly) to. Ugh.
Endive!! Not super bitter! Not a mustard! Escarole is like endive, and also an option.
Iceberg lettuce is always a popular choice for a reason, though I tend to find that it’s too flavorless (no I will not consider dressing)↩
I honestly think that Tuesdays could be a good food prep day of the week for me, though it does mean that Mondays are the old day. Also depends on shopping day. If I shop on the weekend, waiting a few days to cook is fine↩
assuming (likely accurately) that the ones I have aren’t great. They’re also a decent choice for the munching sensation of romaine, but different enough that I don’t think interchangeable↩
assuming (with who knows what level of accuracy) that they aren’t good↩
read: apple or pear unless something calls to me↩
lettuce or endive probably, though chard is an option. Leek? That’s almost certainly wayyy too oniony↩
please don’t judge my life. If it helps, the rotten food is often like homemade pickles that I was curious the lifespan of (and forgot to eat)↩
two of those are the same, so how can we break it into something else? I don’t really know, honestly. Uhhhh what was the third thing initially?↩
how useful is working for a few minutes a day when I spend the rest of the day teaching myself bad habits? Great question.↩
roughly speaking, for every minute earlier I wanted to leave the house, the alarm had to go two minutes earlier. So, getting up and being ready an hour before normal meant the alarm was two hours. These days that is not super true, but I do find that my productivity crashes when I feel like I’ve done a task and spent a decent amount of time. If I do it right, that break happens at lunch which restores me to work again.↩
which can’t hurt to try?↩
read: they are frozen initially, they thaw out as I mix them with the oats↩
approximately 200 grams↩
approximately 150 grams of a semi hard. I apparently don’t like Jarlsberg, which makes sense because I have more and more found that I dislike swiss cheeses as I grow older.↩
oof the agonizing pain of grief hurts so very very much↩
as evidenced by my sleeping all the way until the overly generous alarm I set.↩
note to self, you are not allowed to work on derivations until you’re finished with the day’s work and completely caught up.↩
honestly, that’s got promise for a musing. What is the difference between a fugue and a flow state?↩
Is to have been written is I think the construction I need for agenda’s construction in Latin, but I may be wrong, since it has been the better part of a decade (oof I’m old) since I took the class and learned that content↩
to get to anything resembling the goal I have for the length of my thesis, I need to be writing thousands of words a day every single day. While I have absolutely had periods of doing that, I don’t know if they’re the pace I have right now. Also, like I guess the thesis is a higher priority than almost any other research I would be doing, so that should leave me more space for writing, especially once the term ends↩
at least one more reason↩
this is not me being data shy or coy, I just don’t entirely have in my working memory right now what the two ideas are.↩
I think that about half the functions I wrote in the code aren’t actually called anymore.↩
because I have the goal of getting work done, and I still don’t let myself work at home.↩
I really feel like that’s a word, but my editor assures me that it is not. Weird↩
oof, I wrote the rest of my home at first. I promise that I do not live in my office nor mentally think of the office as my home↩
see: me constantly kvetching about the amount of writing that I am to do↩
things I think or hope will be in my thesis, popscience, actual philosophy, and books I thought might be popsci but look to be much lower reading level than I thought↩
I keep wanting to animize or anthropomorphize my guitar. Is it better to say she? he? they? xi? Great question. I think it is still good for now, because i still know it is not↩
First Published: 2025 April 3
Anything in the future is worth less than having it now. For all that the previous sentence feels like the rantings of a child, they really underpin a lot of modern economic thought.1 In economic terms, most everything either appreciates or depreciates, and most do so in some sort of exponential fashion.
In retirement advice, this is usually used as a way to encourage 20 and 30 somethings to enjoy their lives a little less.2 In this post, however, I’m going to use it as the way of encouraging me to become slightly better.
I think that I can improve as a person. Even though I do agree that the exponential growth implied by most basic theories of compounding are unrealistic or unsustainable3, there is still something to be said for compounding generally. Every day that I go forth with a skill is a day that I can improve the lives of those around me through that skill. Since I live in a society with capital requirements, I also have a chance to use any skill for a profit.
It’s far more than that, though.
There’s an old interview my grandmother once had, where she debated someone about whether or not everyone should get a liberal arts degree. As you might expect from everything about me, she argued very much in favor of universal liberal arts education. In her mind, and as a partial consequence, my mind, education is an inherently positive thing.4 We are changed by everything we experience, and education helps any such change to be positive. When we learn facts, we are able to connect events and realities. When we learn theories and heuristics, we are better able to make sense of the world. And, more than anything, I think that learning is about finding joy in the world.
The Almighty created the heavens and the earth for humanity.5 We are called to seek the Divine, and are given the wonder of the universe to better understand Divinity. We are given talents and seeds for growth and asked to plant and nurture them in ourselves and others.
Through all of this, there’s something to be said for laying groundwork today for a better tomorrow.
The nearer term the future and the greater the expectation of gains, the more I should be willing to give now. That feels reasonable. If spending two hours on a project makes me feel marginally better for the following hour, I’m not sure if it’s worth it. If spending two hours is supposed to me feel marginally better for an hour in three weeks, I know that it’s not.
There’s also the cost to be considered. Something that takes minimal effort is worth doing, even if the expected gain is low. I know that after stretching I feel better in the moments to follow, the rest of the day, and the following days. I even tend to feel better during it.
The initial premise of this post was self improvement. What can I do to make myself better, and how much is bettering myself worth?
I’m reading a book right now called Radical Acceptance, and one of its key points is that only after accepting the realities of ourselves can we change any of them. The author is pretty clear that the goal is not attempting to change things, but I can take from books what I want. Still, there’s a large difference between accepting reality and settling for reality.
How do I want to improve? Let’s spend a minute and think.
I want to be more productive. I want to be more in shape. I want to be more kind to myself and others. I want to learn how to be vulnerable. I want to write, just so very very many words for my thesis. I want to experience the world around me, highs and lows.
Wow that went all over the place.
Ok so, writing and being productive obviously go hand in hand, since the productivity I’m searching for is generally writing right now.6 Being in shape is probably not a great goal as an end in itself, and wanting to be in shape for how I look is also not a good goal, since bodies change and I should never strive for a bodily ideal that absolutely is not sustainable for the rest of my life. I do, however, want to be able to experience the world around me.
When a friend asks if I want to go for a run, I’d like to be able to keep up. I don’t want to be winded when I’m walking somewhere or going up stairs. I want to be able to move my body into different poses. I want to be able to pick stuff up.
When I am more centered and grounded, I am more able to experience the world. When I am more centered and grounded, I am more able to be kind. When I am more centered and grounded, I am more able to accept weakness, and therefore show vulnerability.
So, what can I change to be more productive, in shape, centered, and grounded? Luckily, the answers are all the same: be more mindful and work out more.
A common idea in economics, especially modern economics, is that a dollar tomorrow is worth less than one today. There are plenty of arguments for this7, but most boil down to the obvious that it’s always better to have than to not have. When you combine this with general ideas of compounding interest8, you get some ideas about saving like “any dollar you spend today is the same as spending two dollars in ten years or four dollars in twenty or etc etc.”9 I don’t really love that argument, because like a guitar that costs five hundred dollars today, even if it wouldn’t be worth 2000 to me in twenty years if I was to buy it then, could very well emotionally be worth that amount then. Also, as I talked about in the previous draft, I can only ever experience the present.
I’m now realizing that previous sentence is really the issue underlying a lot of my failure to self care. Any time that I spend doing something unpleasurable now with hopes of it paying dividends in the future is fundamentally happening to an alien me. I have no idea what I will be like even tomorrow, at least on an emotional level. However, much as I can think through choices in ways like “doing this will likely harm someone in another country”, or “this will have bad effects in fifty years”, I think that I can trust that I will always want to be supporting the future me. A future me who turns to a life of crime is likely having a harder time than I am now, and deserves all the help I can give.
So, then, what is the right way to do self care knowing that money spent now is money gone forever, anything gained now will either depreciate10 or compound11, and any action I do is ultimately laying another brick in the road of my life.12
I’m just now rereading the initial prompting, and it was not about self care at all!.
In economics, there’s an idea of time discount. In short, it’s the idea that money today is worth more than money tomorrow. For whatever reason, I’ve taken at least a few surveys that ask questions on the nature of “would you rather one hundred dollars at X point in the future or fifty dollars today?” And, in general, I think that I generally have a fairly low time discount, if only because I have a decent understanding of general inflation rates and a pretty low acute need for 50 dollars.
Like most economic theories, this can be immediately applied to absolutely everything, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to treat taking care of myself as a time discount problem. The me of the future will reap a large number of gains for any number of small inconveniences now. Getting a degree, especially an advanced degree, is very often posited in the language of a time discount. “It’s worthwhile to get paid peanuts now,” they say, “because in the future you will make far more!”
Still, my goal here is not to think about how things are worth less to me in the future generally, but to specifically try to reframe the things that I do to take care of myself in this way. At the easiest, let’s take eating.
I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I feel better on the day after I ate well than the day after I ate minimally or generally poorly.13 I have faith in the medical science that tells me that setting up habits now will make the me of the future healthier. I have no difficulties in putting into practice ideas of saving for the future, and yet I do not put the effort to make sure that the future I fund will be enjoyable by the me of then.
I do know that I have more faith in money, being external to me, than my own health, which is dependent on so much. Still, even in the short term, I know that I am happier, better able to handle life’s struggles, look better, and feel more energized for less sleep when I spend more time working out. I even find that I am more productive, I think even when taking into account the hours spent not working or doing other hobby. However, on any given day, I am almost always more productive when I do not work out.
I don’t really know what else I’m actually trying to say here, other that like when I think about actions that I want to do or want to want to do14, I should really stop framing the present me as much.
There is, of course, the counter argument to a lot of saving. After all, the age of your life when you are most able to take life by the horns15 is the age when you’re most encouraged to be planning for the future. In some regards, this is obviously a holdover from when society was more Christian, though I’m not sure if it’s initially a Catholic or Calvinist way of doing the world. However, there is also research saying bad events are more meaningful than good. All that this paragraph is to say: I don’t want to let my aspirations for the future prevent me from experiencing the present.
That’s applicable in finance and self care, even if I think that they take up different spheres.
Wow, look at me, writing parts of drafts before the day I post. Anyways
There’s a concept in economics called time discount. I know that on at least a few occasions I’ve been asked a series of questions that starts with something like “would you rather have 100 dollars today or 50 dollars today?”. This has an obvious and correct answer. After choosing 100, I am then prompted between 50 today or 100 tomorrow.
Intentionality:
At least hourly, stand up, drink water, take two deep breaths, and do a stretch of some sort
I think that I did actually do a pretty good job of this yesterday. I at least paid attention to my body and tried to be standing daily.
Be proactive about avoiding overwhelm and when feeling overwhelmed, stop and figure out why.
It’s wild how quickly asking myself what, exactly I’m feeling and why stops me from feeling bad.
Light a candle and read by candlelight each night. Along with this, leave all electronics outside of the bedroom and/or move them away at least an hour before bed time.
Didn’t do great on this one, found a video I really wanted to watch right before bed.
Candle time in the morning before electronics. Use the time for prayer
Didn’t do this. Found a video I wanted to watch this morning.
Focus on good posture, especially straight back and making sure that neck isn’t awkwardly positioned.
Did shockingly well at this one, for all that wow it really feels like my upper back is seizing up
Don’t waste time, and in particular, be mindful about making sure to take breaks and rest. Especially make sure to do rest which revitalizes the me of tomorrow, rather than rest which simply keeps me in stasis.
Did generally ok with this, though while teaching16 I did definitely find myself twiddling my thumbs, and as mentioned, watched videos this morning instead of the mindfulness. I did, however, stretch for a full half hour last night. It’s wild how much more fun stretching is when you feel flexible.
Interpersonal Relationships:
Figure out what belongs in a normal letter to a friend.
Read a book from 1860 yesterday about gentlemanly etiquette. It had a section on letters, which did give the advice of only writing letters when I have a reason to. Outside of that, it was very clear that one needs to write in a clean hand and with good spelling and grammar and etc. The clean hand is probably something I can work on. I have a hand which is beautiful and legible and should work on using it more.
In general, the advice was to simply write in a letter what you would say to a person in person, which was pretty helpful.
Get back into writing letters.
Work to message friends at desired intervals. I know that I said today was going to be the day that I made the list, but I don’t know if it is.
Professional:
Do the Thesis and other research requirements. Upcoming deadlines:
Brain dump about science communication (Overdue)
Brain dump a publicly accessible chapter (Overdue)
Have final convergences for the results I’m trying to reproduce (due 4/4)
Draft of the first paper (due end of month, but I want to make sure that I’ve reupdated it sooner than later)
Finish revising and editing the overview of a program chapter (due 4/7) and send it to the boss
Revise the Science communication and publicly readable chapters (due 4/7)
Send the science communication chapter to the boss (4/14)
Brain Dump the background to the program (4/14)
Only do the work I feel called to when I’ve finished the tasks set to me for the day or outside of normal working hours (post 1725)
Turns out that reminding myself that falling into obsession is bad means that I don’t!
Start making the giant citation document so that I don’t have to search for citations later.
The old17 articles are in Zotero now.
Work towards future career:
Figure out the difference between my public-facing and field-facing presentation affects. As I focus on becoming a better presenter, I need to become aware of the difference and how to switch them.
Need to look for jobs
Health:
Spiritual:
Get back into the Lenten goals (pray chaplet of St. Michael, give money equal to amount I’m spending on myself, stop scrolling social media, stop playing video games)
I printed the chaplet out and brought it to my bedside, did not read it though.
Be intentional about prayer. That means both making time for prayer and actually doing it.
While teaching the children’s Sunday school analogue18, I made them do some silent prayer, and prayed during that.
Physical:
Start focusing on posture again, especially while sitting.
Really did that yesterday, and I’m beginning to wonder if I might end up pushing my shoulders too far down and back. I have to imagine I’ll be able to figure out what that’s like, but given how tight my chest is when I try to sit like that, it’s probably a ways off.
Go to group fitness classes more regularly and more often. If not, do workout at home
Since the First Wednesday of the Month is always a long day for me, only ended up with a half hour19 stretch/yoga time
Feed myself simply and healthily. Healthy here means trying to generally avoid processing.
On Wednesdays I get suspiciously cheap burgers, and I accept that those are almost certainly hyperprocessed. Otherwise did ok! Forgot berries at home which meant I had oatmeal with jam yesterday, which felt wrong somehow.
Mental:
Clean Life:
Remove dirt and clutter from physical spaces (standard definition of clean): I am still actively behind on this, but I have hope that I will claw my way back to a comfortable place.
At least once a week, each room has nothing on the floor
At least once a week, all surfaces which are not inherently storage are cleared off
At least once every two weeks, each room is vacuumed
At least once every month, all non-storage surfaces are explicitly washed/cleaned
At least once a week, I get rid of at least one item that I notice (meaning throw away or in rare circumstances gift or donate)
Clean sight lines. Is my space set up in a way that orients me towards my goals for the space? If not, how can I make it so?
Spend time each day thinking about the goals for the day, and getting them out of my head and onto the page.
This has been really helpful for that, as has making sure that, while my tea brews in the morning, I start by thinking about the goals for the day.
Continue to explicitly confront the voice in my head that says that people hate me.
Haven’t really needed to do!
Hobbies:
Reading
Start reading and returning the library books I have.
Finish the book on mindfulness I started. (also make a list of the exercises in the book and try them out)
Read more poetry
Music:
Work on guitar
Learn the songs that jam partner suggested and/or requested I learn
Get back into the album.
Writing:
Write poetry more often, ideally nightly.
Shoot! Forgot this one
Find a way to add meta data to my blog posts and then add the meta data
Not only write blogs, but also post them.
Yesterday I even managed to do this without my writing buddy!!20
Get back into writing the web novel
Other hobbies, do them.
though, given the state of the economic world, maybe it’s entirely appropriate that it sounds like a child having a tantrum↩
wow I’ve gotten steadily more cynical over the drafts↩
see: planet↩
ugh having all the posts I want to write keep coming up in the posts I do write is getting frustrated. Curse of knowledge rises a few more slots↩
oof this may be a heresy↩
gotta love homonyms↩
inflation, uhhhh not being able to do stuff with it?↩
generally assume that the stock market returns 8 percent per year on average↩
there’s the fun “if you divide 72 by whatever percentage per time you have compounding interest, you get about the doubling time” fact that I always enjoy↩
e.g. you lose some huge percentage of the worth of a new car just by driving it off the lot↩
my degree, for instance, will do many things for me, not least is potentially shield me if I need to flee a country↩
see the post overmorrow↩
of course, what poorly means is entirely context dependent, but really this is just saying present me affects future me↩
I think that I have mused about this in the past. seems like the closest, though even this is less of that.↩
I think that life is a bull right?↩
which, I know, does not need to be a multitasked event↩
read: mid 1900s↩
it’s on a Wednesday, so not totally sure what to call it↩
or was it twenty minutes?↩
miss you↩
First Published: 2025 April 2
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.
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.
Intentionality:
At least hourly, stand up, drink water, take two deep breaths, and do a stretch of some sort
This went pretty well yesterday! I think I forgot about it a little while TAing, but not too terribly much
Be proactive about avoiding overwhelm and when feeling overwhelmed, stop and figure out why.
I think I did ok about this. Yesterday I did feel horrible more than a few times, and simply realizing that wow I’m fundamentally just really sad about my mom is something that helped the overwhelm pass.
Light a candle and read by candlelight each night. Along with this, leave all electronics outside of the bedroom and/or move them away at least an hour before bed time.
For some reason the flame in my candle really wildly swings every few seconds, which made reading a bit of a pain. I did, however, remove all the electronics from my room and read before bed, which was really peaceful.
Candle time in the morning before electronics. Use the time for prayer Did not have candle time this morning, but I did also realize that there’s no real point to my morning alarm, because I would rather be well rested than up early, so I’ve now set the alarm such that it is only for the absolute latest that I can get up and not miss anything.10 I did try to pray the chaplet to St. Michael, then remembered that I don’t have it memorized. Will print it out to solve that issue
Focus on good posture, especially straight back and making sure that neck isn’t awkwardly positioned.
In general I’ve been trying, but it does really feel like it puts a lot of pressure on the part of my back just below my ribcage, which I’m not sure about the reason for or health of. I should look that up tomorrow
Don’t waste time, and in particular, be mindful about making sure to take breaks and rest. Especially make sure to do rest which revitalizes the me of tomorrow, rather than rest which simply keeps me in stasis.
I did 45 minutes of stretching yesterday when I got home from grocery shopping, and it did do a lot to revitalize me before bed. That feels a little strange, but I mean that it took me from feeling exhausted and run down to just like sleepy, if that makes sense.
Interpersonal Relationships:
Figure out what belongs in a normal letter to a friend.
I have requested a number of books on etiquette from the 20th century, and we will see if any of them end up being useful for what I need.
Get back into writing letters.
Going to my cell in the library is a bit of a journey, but it’s also something that I know beyond the shadow of a doubt is good for me, so that’s a difficult tradeoff. It might help me to start actively working to spend time doing the reading I need to do in there.
Work to message friends at desired intervals.
I still need to make the list of friends. That might be a tomorrow task, though.
Professional:
Do the Thesis and other research requirements. Upcoming deadlines:
Brain dump about science communication (Overdue)
Brain dump a publicly accessible chapter (Overdue)
Have final convergences for the results I’m trying to reproduce (due 4/4)
Draft of the first paper (due end of month, but I want to make sure that I’ve reupdated it sooner than later)
Only do the work I feel called to when I’ve finished the tasks set to me for the day or outside of normal working hours (post 1725)
Start making the giant citation document so that I don’t have to search for citations later.
Work towards future career:
Do the reflections that were recommended to me (mostly focused around why I care about science communication. See above
Figure out the difference between my public-facing and field-facing presentation affects. As I focus on becoming a better presenter, I need to become aware of the difference and how to switch them.
Need to look for jobs
Health:
Spiritual:
Get back into the Lenten goals (pray chaplet of St. Michael, give money equal to amount I’m spending on myself, stop scrolling social media, stop playing video games)
I did try to pray it the chaplet this morning, but I forgot most of the parts.11
Be intentional about prayer. That means both making time for prayer and actually doing it.
I prayed a little before bed and a little this morning, which is progress. I’m also being better about praying before meals again, which is good for me.
Physical:
Start focusing on posture again, especially while sitting.
As mentioned above, I do feel like this makes it harder for me to breathe. Will have to look up why that is and figure out if it’s that those muscles are too weak or what.
Go to group fitness classes more regularly and more often.
Yesterday I instead, as mentioned above, did a self guided workout for about 45 minutes while catching up on some content creators whose content I enjoy. It was pretty nice, but I did not push my core or other parts as much as in a normal class. Then again, I let myself spend more time in many of the poses, which was also good. I did find that my mat is stretchy, especially on movements12 like downward dog. It’s wild to me that I can touch my toes for the first time maybe ever, but certainly since college started. It feels nice
Feed myself simply and healthily. Healthy here means trying to generally avoid processing.
I’ve been eating oatmeal for breakfast on work mornings, and it’s been generally good for keeping me going through the day. I have even been generally good about remembering to bring in some frozen blueberries or mixed berries, which add health, taste, and color!
Mental:
Clean Life:
Remove dirt and clutter from physical spaces (standard definition of clean):
I’m still working to play catch up on this, but I have been trying. This morning I cleaned up some clutter, and if I have energy tonight, I will do so again. The hard part is absolutely that I have too much stuff, and I need to be more intentional about getting rid of things.13
At least once a week, each room has nothing on the floor
At least once a week, all surfaces which are not inherently storage are cleared off
At least once every two weeks, each room is vacuumed
At least once every month, all non-storage surfaces are explicitly washed/cleaned
At least once a week, I get rid of at least one item that I notice (meaning throw away or in rare circumstances gift or donate)
Clean sight lines. Is my space set up in a way that orients me towards my goals for the space? If not, how can I make it so?
Spend time each day thinking about the goals for the day, and getting them out of my head and onto the page.
I’ve spend about 15 minutes on this so far today, and that doesn’t count the three or four minutes that I spent planning the work I’m going to do today. Still, I think that it was time well spent.
Continue to explicitly confront the voice in my head that says that people hate me.
Actively did so yesterday! Left an encounter with a friend feeling really angry, asked myself why, and realized that the feelings were misplaced.14
Hobbies:
Reading
Start reading and returning the library books I have.
Not so much yesterday, but that’s ok. It remains a lower priority than the other activities I have been doing.
Finish the book on mindfulness I started. (also make a list of the exercises in the book and try them out)
Read some yesterday! It was nice, and shockingly emotionally connective for me, which is always strange.
Read more poetry
This is more aspirational than anything else. Still, it would behoove me to sign up for a poem of a day somewhere.15
Music:
Work on guitar
Practiced a little bit by candlelight last night! I need to bring home the exercises for guitar that are on my desk.
Learn the songs that jam partner suggested and/or requested I learn
Get back into the album.
Writing:
Write poetry more often, ideally nightly.
Wrote some last night! Or, at least, wrote some words that I intended as poetry. Without strict meter and rhyming, I find that I can’t really distinguish between prose and poetry at a fundamental level. Probably good to talk to someone about this.
Find a way to add meta data to my blog posts and then add the meta data
Not only write blogs, but also post them.
Did so yesterday, will do again today
Get back into writing the web novel
Other hobbies, do them.
e.g. molecules in space↩
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.↩
writing professor emeritus takes a while and I’m never sure about capitalization. By initializing, I solve both issues↩
here being used in the prescriptive sense of trying to dictate my future hypothetical actions↩
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↩
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↩
which I don’t know if the data would support↩
year’s?↩
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.↩
8am, because I have an 830 appointment on Saturday↩
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.↩
poses?↩
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.↩
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↩
and then to actually read them↩
First Published: 2025 April 1
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:
Tentative approval for my defense timeline
Received an award for outstanding service to the university
Got a massage
Had friends respond positively when I asked them about contact rates
Started writing choral music
This coming April, five things I’m looking forward to are:
Leading the science experiment this coming Saturday.
Going to a friend’s thesis defense
Finishing and submitting my first first author paper
Writing more with a close friend
Becoming more of the person that I would like to be, both by changing and by changing my goals.
Particular areas I want to focus on this month:1
Prayer. This has been at the bottom of my priorities for months now, and I am finally starting to notice the consequences. I want to reconnect with the Almighty, and that requires prayer.
Physical health. I know that I have more energy and feel better when I work out more often, and so I really need to make that an emphasis
Avoiding obsession. I know that I can let myself get stuck on a problem until I solve it, and I also know that doing so means that I fall behind on everything else that I want to be doing. When I catch myself obsessing, stop.
Intentionality in general. I want to make sure that what I do and plan to do is what I want to be doing. In particular, I want to make the choices I want to do the path of least resistance, which I think means making more schedules and forcing myself to follow them.2
Working on hobbies. I know that I feel more complete as a human when I do things other than research. More than that, the time I spend on research is improved by taking time off.
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.
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
Met with my committee and set a tentative thesis defense date! It’s so wild to me that they all think that I can be done in just a few more months.
Got an award for dedication to giving talks to the broader state-wide community
Got positive responses from my friends when I asked them all about the rate that they wanted me to message them.
Got a massage!
Started writing choral music again.
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?
Leading a science exploration day this Saturday!
Going to a friend’s thesis defense
Finishing and submitting my first first author paper
Going to a farmer’s6 market
Writing more with a close friend!
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:
Do the things I know prevent me from feeling overwhelmed. (e.g. fill my water pitcher in the morning when entering work, check my list of tasks and make sure they’re still accurate)
When I feel overwhelmed, take the time to reflect and figure out why, and then write down what’s making me feel so.
Take at least a little time every hour, at the very least, to stand, stretch, drink water, and take two deep breaths.8
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.
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.
Intentionality:
At least hourly, stand up, drink water, take two deep breaths, and do a stretch of some sort
Be proactive about avoiding overwhelm and when feeling overwhelmed, stop and figure out why
Light a candle and read by candlelight each night. Along with this, leave all electronics outside of the bedroom and/or move them away at least an hour before bed time.
Candle time in the morning before electronics. Use the time for prayer
Focus on good posture, especially straight back and making sure that neck isn’t awkwardly positioned.12
Don’t waste time, and in particular, be mindful about making sure to take breaks and rest. Especially make sure to do rest which revitalizes the me of tomorrow, rather than rest which simply keeps me in stasis.
This weekend wasn’t great for non-stasis activities, but I’ve got ideas for how to do so moving forward.
Interpersonal Relationships:
Figure out what belongs in a normal letter to a friend.
Get back into writing letters.
Wrote one on Sunday!
Work to message friends at desired intervals.
I need to make a list of the friends who responded and their preferred intervals.
Professional:
Do the Thesis and other research requirements. Upcoming deadlines:
Brain dump about science communication (Overdue)13
Brain dump a publicly accessible chapter (Overdue)
Revise the overview of my program, which also means finishing writing it up14 (Overdue)
Have final convergences for the results I’m trying to reproduce (due 4/4)15
Draft of the first paper (due end of month, but I want to make sure that I’ve reupdated it sooner than later)
Only do the work I feel called to when I’ve finished the tasks set to me for the day or outside of normal working hours (post 1725)
Start making the giant citation document so that I don’t have to search for citations later.
Work towards future career:
Read the recommended readings about science communication. Just did.
Do the reflections that were recommended to me (mostly focused around why I care about science communication)
Tomorrow.
Figure out the difference between my public-facing and field-facing presentation affects. As I focus on becoming a better presenter, I need to become aware of the difference and how to switch them.
Need to look for jobs
Have started! Now I need to start actually filling out applications, etc.
Health:
Spiritual:
Get back into the Lenten goals (pray chaplet of St. Michael, give money equal to amount I’m spending on myself, stop scrolling social media, stop playing video games)
Be intentional about prayer. That means both making time for prayer and actually doing it.
Physical:
Start focusing on posture again, especially while sitting.
Go to group fitness classes more regularly and more often.
I think that a secondary goal could be that if I don’t go in the morning and there’s not a class I can make it to in the evening that I’ll just do one myself at home. I have a yoga mat and a family subscription to some yoga classes.
Feed myself simply and healthily. Healthy here means trying to generally avoid processing.
Honestly, I didn’t realize how much I actively crave artificial dyes. I still have some candy that was gifted to me, so I’m also going to keep eating it.
Mental:
Clean Life:
Remove dirt and clutter from physical spaces (standard definition of clean):
At least once a week, each room has nothing on the floor
At least once a week, all surfaces which are not inherently storage are cleared off
At least once every two weeks, each room is vacuumed
At least once every month, all non-storage surfaces are explicitly washed/cleaned
At least once a week, I get rid of at least one item that I notice (meaning throw away or in rare circumstances gift or donate)
Clean sight lines. Is my space set up in a way that orients me towards my goals for the space? If not, how can I make it so?
So far I’m behind, but the goal right now is really getting to a baseline where that’s possible
Spend time each day thinking about the goals for the day, and getting them out of my head and onto the page.
Yesterday I started by just working and wow I felt horribly overwhelmed right away. Today I spent like 10 minutes looking over the schedule I had previously set for myself, and I feel much more ready for the month
Continue to explicitly confront the voice in my head that says that people hate me.
Have been, and will continue to do so.
Hobbies:
Reading
Start reading and returning the library books I have.
I want to set the goal of at least one book a week, but that may not be possible, given so much stuff.
Finish the book on mindfulness I started. (also make a list of the exercises in the book and try them out)
Read more poetry
Music:
Work on guitar
Learn the songs that jam partner suggested and/or requested I learn
Get back into the album.
Writing:
Write poetry more often, ideally nightly.
I should really start doing this again, and also on Sunday I lit a candle and it made my night better. If I do those together I think that it will be better for me.
Find a way to add meta data to my blog posts and then add the meta data16
Not only write blogs, but also post them.
Get back into writing the web novel
Write other fiction. Ideas include:
The book I made a document about in late January
A story told through bullet points
Embroidery:
Make pattern
Make embroidery from pattern
Explore stitches other than the single stitch I’ve used exclusively for all of the projects I’ve finished.
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↩
see: avoid obsession↩
I always forget which way of writing the number is supposed to be in parentheses↩
this is a thing that I’ve always done as a list, so I’m going to keep it as one!↩
as defined by “got”↩
farmers’? farmers? great question↩
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)↩
I’m not entirely sure how this is going to happen while I TA, but it’s something to try↩
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↩
i.e. when I’ll cook how much so that I have meals for so long↩
which I’m going to do in a different document↩
I can’t remember the word right now↩
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↩
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↩
I know this is more than a week away, leave me alone↩
at least moving forwards and hopefully also working backwards through the many posts that I have↩
First Published: 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
Learned to live with a single living parent.3
Saw Hozier live in concert4
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.
Officially gave up on my web novel.5
Seasoned a wok!6
Sharpened my own knives at home7
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.
Did a large embroidery pattern9
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
Joined a book club with some church friends10
Joined a community choir! It’s TTBB which is also really cool
Went to adult night at the local conservatory (nature not music)
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
Did an unassisted downward dog!11
Tried a bunch of different fitness classes!12
Started teaching children’s religious education
Designed a novel search pattern13
Was explicitly acknowledged in a Ph.D. defense not as a formality14
Started using the university-wide high throughput computing center
Got an award for service: I apparently gave talks in the greatest number of counties through the university’s talk program
Learned how to crochet flowers
Realized that my life is better when I wear good noise cancelling headphones, bought a pair, and became comfortable wearing them in public
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:
Learned to live with a single living parent.
Saw Hozier live in concert
Seasoned a wok!
Sharpened my own knives at home
Sat shiva16
Did a large embroidery pattern17
Did the entire stage managing and crewing for a small cabaret production
Joined a community choir! It’s TTBB which is also really cool
Went to adult night at the local conservatory (nature not music)
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
Did an unassisted downward dog!18
Started teaching children’s religious education
Got an award for service: I apparently gave talks in the greatest number of counties through the university’s talk program
Learned how to crochet flowers
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.
Professional:
Continue to work at work
Work towards future career:
Read the recommended readings about science communication.
Do the reflections that were recommended to me (mostly focused around why I care about science communication)
Figure out the difference between my public-facing and field-facing presentation affects. As I focus on becoming a better presenter, I need to become aware of the difference and how to switch them
Need to look for jobs
Health:
Spiritual:
Get back into the Lenten goals (pray chaplet of St. Michael, give money equal to amount I’m spending on myself, stop scrolling social media, stop playing video games)
Be intentional about prayer. That means both making time for prayer and actually doing it.
Mental:
Clean my Life:
Remove dirt and clutter from physical spaces (standard definition of clean). I’m going to change this goal to:
At least once a week, each room has nothing on the floor
At least once a week, all surfaces which are not inherently storage are cleared off
At least once every two weeks, each room is vacuumed
At least once every month, all non-storage surfaces are explicitly washed/cleaned
At least once a week, I get rid of at least one item that I notice (meaning throw away or in rare circumstances gift or donate)
Spend time each day thinking about the goals for the day, and getting them out of my head and onto the page. I still don’t know how to do this, but I also feel like I have less explicit goals these days.
Start reading and returning the library books I have. I’m going to try to do better at this, but I don’t know how
Don’t waste time, and in particular, be mindful about making sure to take breaks and rest. Especially make sure to do rest which revitalizes the me of tomorrow, rather than rest which simply keeps me in stasis
Clean sight lines. Is my space set up in a way that orients me towards my goals for the space? If not, how can I make it so? Darn curse of entropy.
Interpersonal Relationships:
Figure out what belongs in a normal letter to a friend.
Get back into writing letters.
Continue to explicitly confront the voice in my head that says that people hate me
Work to message friends at desired intervals.
Potentially start giving small gifts, though many people also dislike clutter, so think carefully about that one. Have started giving friends things as I have them, and they’re well received. Thoughtfulness is the key.
Physical:
Go to group fitness classes more regularly and more often. Gym is closed this week, I learned yesterday. I really need to start going to yoga in the mornings, especially since my afternoons and evenings are about to get really full.
Feed myself simply and healthily. Healthy here means trying to generally avoid processing.
Other:
Music:
Work on guitar
Learn the songs that jam partner suggested and/or requested I learn
Get back into the album. I was jamming with the friend on Saturday and they talked me up to their partner about having written music. I couldn’t remember the chords for one of the songs, and that’s kind of sad to me.
Writing:
Write poetry more often, ideally nightly. Wrote some free prose yesterday!
Find a way to add meta data to my blog posts and then add the meta data20
Not only write blogs, but also post them. Ideas include:21
26 for 26 Wow! Lookie here
Listening to an album and writing about my experience with it. Unsure if this is best done with one I have prior knowledge of or a new one, but regardless, sit and listen without other stimuli. One of my lab mates and I have been exchanging albums, so this could be fun
The arts I’ve been doing lately
Why I care about science and communicating it22
My general disposition to authority. I’m not entirely sure what that meant, but it was a note I wrote to myself while half asleep, so I’ll leave it here.
How to feed myself. How I am, how I would like to, and what the difference is
Motivation, autotelic motivation, etc. etc.
The idea I have that knowledge (music, writing, science, etc.) is revealed, not acquired
Understanding the human experience, esp. in/re. writing
Doing the work to improve myself and time discount
My writing style(s) and what they show
The four levels of mastery
“the only way out is through, and the only way through is forward”
Internal and External Arguments within and without23
Curse of knowledge, esp re. Music Theory
What does it mean to succeed at a creation? (reception, viewership, etc.)
Inertia (re: my mind sticking to the thought patterns I have at a moment)
Why I feel the way that I do about the art I create and work on.24
I know that I have a musing somewhere about flavors of truth. Revisit it
Generally revisit the old blog posts
Get back into writing the web novel
Write other fiction. Ideas include:
The book I made a document about in late January
A story told through bullet points
Other creation ideas (that I’m going to keep here so I don’t lose them and so that maybe someone will steal them and I can consume without having to create)25:
A short film: watching the screen as a breakup letter is written
Embroidery pattern
Embroidery physical relic
Upcoming self imposed deadlines (within the ten days):26
Brain dump about science communication (due 3/24)27
Brain dump a publicly accessible chapter (due 3/31)
Revise the overview of my program, which also means finishing writing it up28 (due 3/31)
Have final convergences for the results I’m trying to reproduce (due 4/4)29
Write next week’s plans (due today)
Apparently I never updated the twenty five for twenty five, so it’s anyone’s guess whether or not I made it!↩
I generally want to do less lists in my blogging and writing generally, but this feels like an ok place to do so↩
we all knew that I was going to start here, since it’s obviously the point that is the biggest change↩
which was a great time↩
the day that I have in my notes is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the day I made the post on the site↩
or, at least, attempted to↩
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↩
do I capitalize it???↩
which I’m actually really proud of↩
and unfortunately had to stop the book club because I then joined a community choir↩
there’s a chance that I did this before, but I cannot remember a time when I did↩
barre, rhythm cycle, zumba, HIIT↩
I think, at least, and we’ll see whether or not it ends up working↩
i.e. not a member of my research group, who is obligated to do so↩
in about a week↩
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↩
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↩
there’s a chance that I did this before, but I cannot remember a time when I did↩
in about a week↩
at least moving forwards and hopefully also working backwards through the many posts that I have↩
as a living list!↩
ties into the professional goal↩
what’s the term for not just within?↩
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↩
hint hint↩
OOf this is a lot↩
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↩
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↩
I know this is more than a week away, leave me alone↩