Musings

I'm just copying my father

Home

Dietary Needs Mostly Concluded

First Published: 17 January 2025

Draft 2: 17 January 2025. Realized that I want to make sure I’m getting the proper micronutrients from fruits and vegetables, and wanted to start listing that

I just finished meeting with a nutritionist. In general, the advice was good, practical, and not particularly enlightening.1 That being said, I was advised to generally eat more often, which is absolutely a good idea. I’d like to plan to start eating lunch and dinner daily, along with two snacks of peanuts and maybe a fruit. The macro breakdown in draft one shows me that’s probably doable, and so now it’s time to make sure I get my recommended plants.

Of course, frozen fruit is an equally viable option. The site claims I should shoot for about 4.5 cups a day of fruits and veggies9 The book I was using for macros does not provide specific guidance, so that seems like a reasonable enough goal. Writing my shopping list for next week, then:10

My lunch each day will shoot for 30 grams of protein, and I’m hoping for it to include:

The snack container, having just been measured, is about 3.5 oz, so my snack(s) will be:

Here we go!

Daily Notes:

I only drew once, on Sunday, but I did manage to write and send out a letter22.

Draft 1: 17 January 2025

23

I just finished meeting with a nutritionist!24 In general, there was nothing particularly life altering about the advice she gave. I feel mixed about that, as I tend to when no easy solutions present themselves.

On the one hand, it’s nice to know that I wasn’t just failing to do the proper research or draw the correct conclusions. On the other, it’s kind of frustrating to go into a situation with a  problem and leave the situation with the same problem.

That being said, though, there were three pieces of advice that she gave which I think may become helpful for me in the coming weeks.25

Other pieces of advice that I found useful, though less so:

Let’s see what peanuts29 are like in terms of their protein efficiency. Looks like it’s around 17030 calories per ounce, and about 7 grams of protein in that same space. Converting to grams, that means I’d need about 364 grams of peanuts a day, or about 13 oz.31 That’s really not bad!

So, assuming that I eat two meals32, if I’m awake for 16 hours a day, I should be eating at least two snacks. I’m going to start shooting for 3-5 ounces33 of peanuts at each of these snacks. That means I’ll be getting between 21 and 35 grams per snack, for a total of 42 to 70 grams per day. Oh, yeah ok if I can eat 10 ounces of peanuts a day, I should have no trouble finding the other 20 grams from somewhere. Looking at the price per gram of protein, it’s about 2 cents an ounce.34

Since I will generally be in my office from 8:30 to 535, I can do two snacks and a lunch36, which is great. Assuming that I can manage 25 grams of protein in the lunch37, I only need that much again for dinner! That’s so much easier, and if I make my lunch:

  1. not in a bad way, just in a “oh good I’m not horribly off base with my estimations”↩

  2. that I enjoy enough to consider having as part of a daily lunch or snack↩

  3. though other sources disagree with that↩

  4. which is not beta carotene, containing a hydroxyl group on one end.↩

  5. cancer stoppers I guess.↩

  6. make me life forever↩

  7. I wonder why those in particular↩

  8. onions, mmmm, keeps me from tumors↩

  9. nine servings, I imagine, though Harvard seems to disagree Green, vitamin C, and beta carotene seem to be the important things for that. Ah, one cup of each is considered a serving, other than fruit juice and dried fruit, which are both halved.↩

  10. this is more a journal entry than blog post, but↩

  11. maybe↩

  12. because I’m going for a snack board kind of vibe↩

  13. I forget the specific term↩

  14. I do also own green tea, which I should remember to consume during lunch↩

  15. about 20 grams of protein↩

  16. 10 grams protein↩

  17. probably prune↩

  18. stuffed? I never know what it means when people say a loaf is studded↩

  19. dietary info to come, might mean I need less of the chicken or cheese?↩

  20. about 24.5g, 600 calories (wow that’s a lot of calories↩

  21. and staying out too late↩

  22. also on Sunday↩

  23. did absolutely write 2024 at first, did have to correct myself↩

  24. there are a number of unseen benefits to continuing education. This was absolutely one of them↩

  25. no, “don’t worry too much” was not one of them↩

  26. When awake, though I didn’t ask about what happens when I wake up in the middle of the night↩

  27. I should also be eating breakfast, but that’s its own issue↩

  28. nuts and seeds were examples of high protein snacks↩

  29. the cheapest nut, by far↩

  30. plus minus ten↩

  31. I did not convert back, but I did redo the math without the conversion because I still consume my food in ounces, in general. Or, at least, I feel like I can estimate an ounce better than 30 grams, even though they’re the same amount↩

  32. because shooting for two a day is a good starting goal↩

  33. which is .75 to 1.25 cups, which might be FAR too much, but who knows↩

  34. which I only now realize I calculated in the second posting↩

  35. I feel like these hours are generally decent, and somewhat reflective of reality↩

  36. starting next week, since I’ll be able to do my pseudo meal prep↩

  37. I’m thinking part of rotissiere chicken, fruit, and probably bread (it took me far too long to remember that bread exists), which is a fun thing that is full of tactile sensation and also requires effectively no prep. Since I do also want to hit the other two kinds of vegetable (I don’t care about starchy, and peanuts are legumes)↩

Dietary Needs

First Published: 17 January 2025 (because I forgot to hit post)

Draft 1: 10 January 2025

Yesterday I went through some of the different ways that I could get sufficient protein.1 Since I’m2 not going to just consume all of my protein from a single source, I do technically have an NP problem, which is a variant of the knapsack problem. However, I’m looking for solutions that do not fit neatly into the normal computational framework, if only because more or less everything I could consume is functionally continuous, and the knapsack problem is meant for discrete entries.

Chicken, fish, and cheese are all similar in that I need to be eating about a pound a day of them in order to get my nutritional needs met. That’s a fair amount of volume, if nothing else. I can’t really imagine sitting down and eating a pound of any of them in a single sitting3

However, one piece of advice a friend gave me was to speak to a dietician at my school, which is apparently free. Rather than continue to worry about all of this, I’m going to try to do that instead.

Daily:

  1. as also kind of pointed out, though mostly implicitly, fat and carbohydrates are so minimal as to be trivially consumed.↩

  2. after much counseling from friends↩

  3. which is probably something that I would be told is bad.↩

Dietary Needs

First Published: 9 January 2025

Draft 2: 9 January 2024

My last draft really went off the rails, because I got too far into the biohacking mindset. At the base minimum, I should be consuming:

Below, we see that,1 at the absolute minimum, I can meet this in a smoothie that does this relatively easily. Since the fat and carbohydrates are incredibly simple to achieve, it’s worth considering what 90 grams of protein otherwise looks like. Common ways I get protein are:

To get 90 grams of protein from each of these sources, I would need to consume2:

In the future, I’ll hopefully figure out a way to take these numbers and construct a meal plan out of them.

Daily:

Draft 1: 9 January 2024

First, it appears that I was wrong in yesterday’s musing. The oil requirements are just straight up grams per day, which makes my life significantly easier. In order to hit my nutrition goals, I should be consuming at a minimum:

That is very little, and in total seems to add up12 to around 2300 calories. If I choose better oils for alpha linoleic acid13, that number drops to 1222 calories per day. If I price out my costs,14 to hit the minimum I need for nutrition:

Total cost for the base need smoothie comes out to around 7 dollars and 10 cents.

If we swap the gelatin out for egg whites, we get a little bit of carbs, but, assuming the cost is only in protein15, we can start pricing out the price per gram of protein for different foods:

Gelatin and egg whites are both about 1.6 grams per gram of protein, whey protein is about 1.1, and pinto beans are about 5, so it does require significantly more bean consumption. It also takes me well over the minimum carb load for the day, which also saves me 30 cents in sugar. It would, however, require consuming a full pound of beans18 each day. Egg whites probably strike a good balance of volume and cost.

Now that we have gone through this, we also need to remember the whole “there is a limit of calories I can, or at least should, consume in a day.” At the 3500 calorie mark, that means everything needs to be under 40 calories per gram of protein in order to be a valid source of all protein I consume.

Also, if I do the insane thing of bulk buying gelatin, I can get it for as cheap as 40 percent the cost, bringing it down to 3 cents per gram, which is honestly kind of tempting. It does, however, require purchasing 50 pounds of gelatin, which would serve me for around half a year. It would take us down to under three dollars a day.

According to the USDA, as long as I’m spending under 10 dollars and nine cents a day, I’m doing well.

This has absolutely degraded from the initial goal of figuring out how to feed myself well, for all that it would, without a doubt, be a very easy and effective way to get myself all of the nutrients I need in a day. I do wonder if I would be able to eat enough fruit and vegetable in a day to feel satiated.

  1. ooh an unconsidered benefit of drafts↩

  2. going off of USDA’s food search↩

  3. I assume the usual 2:1 water:rice ratio many use, and that the entirety of the water is into the rice, so I divide the USDA’s protein by 3↩

  4. assuming white long grain, which is my usual↩

  5. assuming the same water absorption↩

  6. assuming cooking doesn’t change the size much↩

  7. which, I do note, means that it’s almost all protein, since each gram of protein is 4↩

  8. same assumption as fish, which will go forward as needed, and assume that the grains expand the same tripling↩

  9. which weirdly gain a gram of protein when fried↩

  10. which according to Wikipedia at time of looking, is about half of corn oil, so 34 grams of that↩

  11. which wikipedia claims means about 160 grams of corn oil, or 4 grams of flaxseed or linseed oil↩

  12. assuming corn oil is my only oil choice↩

  13. better here meaning optimal↩

  14. assuming gelatin, sugar, corn oil and linseed oil all priced from my local grocery store that lists prices online↩

  15. true to a first order↩

  16. I’m remembering something about bioavailability, but that’s probably not too relevant, skimming an abstract, I see that all animal sources basically fine. Soy also approx 100, as is potato, interestingly. Oh wait, this is percent of amino acid intake, which have requirements in the mg/kg/day, which is so much less as to seem irrelevant to me; I’ll just trust protein labels.↩

  17. this article claims it misses lysine, threonine, and methionine.↩

  18. raw, then cooked↩

Initial Reflection on Dietary Needs

First Published: 8 January 2025

Draft 2: 8 January 2025

As I’ve mentioned in a fair number of musings, I want to be better at fueling my body. That means that I’m going to aim for a few goals:

both lets me get some estimates and gives me the actual links to the book where the USDA lays out their explicit recommendations. Unfortunately, those PDFs do not give citations, but I will trust that the data are at least generally good. With that in mind, the goals I should be hitting:

Ok, so that’s interesting and good enough. It’s always nice to confirm that there’s a large range of completely acceptable values for every macronutrient. The micros I will assume I can hit if I get a diverse diet in, at least for now. Now comes the much harder part: generating an actual diet.

I think that having the list of colors is a thing I need to do when plotting literally any meal, and especially while shopping. I think that it’s also probably best to have as much of what I’m cooking as things that I can generally do in batches that requires minimal in person effort. The absolute ideal, is of course, something like the classic crock pot meal, which is a turn on whenever and come back to whenever, with no real time considerations other than a floor.

I know myself well enough to know that I do, legitimately, enjoy cooking when I can, and that I hate following recipes. Those two conditions make a lot of meal planning hard, as does my tendency to forget things when they’re out of sight and to fall into chaos at the slightest provocation. However!

Hope is not lost. I do know myself well enough to know that when I have a list, even if it’s vague, I can often follow along with them, especially when I have a reason to do so.4

I think that this may be more than a single blog post is able to have, but I will definetly try to start making vague measurements in my recipes, so that I can both recreate them and see what the health information in them is. Additionally, that can let me start experimenting with different changes to each recipe. For instance, yesterday I baked a loaf of sandwich bread where I substituted yogurt for milk and added some almond flour.

Draft 1: 8 January 2025

As I’ve mentioned a fair amount in the recent musings, I want to be better about feeding myself. There are any number of reasons for this, but if I’m being honest, it’s mostly due to the loss of my mother.5 With that in mind, there are some general guidelines that I’m going to try to keep in mind going forward.6

Alrighty, that’s a pretty doable set of items. With that in mind, let’s start being explicit with some numbers9. Thankfully, Uncle Sam has us covered with that. These days, I do unfortunately think that I am Inactive to Low Active based on their terms, though that is something I’d like to change:10

I’m realizing that I’m losing the thread, so let’s restart.

  1. though, I could easily believe that my brain is in the top 2 to 3 percent of calorie usage, in which case would need to be higher.↩

  2. all in mg/kg, all RDA↩

  3. more solid↩

  4. like, for instance, this whole blog post and my general desire to eat better↩

  5. as so much of what I do is these days↩

  6. will be looking things up really quickly to make sure that I don’t miss anything super important.↩

  7. Yes, I’m well aware that the average American gets far more than enough protein in their diet, but I’m not average↩

  8. says that trans fats are banned, interestingly. Looking at the abstract of this meta analysis, seems like that’s not necessarily true.↩

  9. for the macros, in particular↩

  10. N.B. I am rounding everything, because I don’t like unnecessary precision, and don’t really believe that my body is a bomb calorimeter (unfortunately).↩

  11. which I kind of am↩

  12. which, wildly enough, is on the low end. The USDA recommends 10-25 percent from protein↩

  13. USDA wants 20 to 35 percent↩

Planning 2025

First Published:

Draft Two: 7 January 2025

N.B. In the interest of having single day drafts, this is the first draft up until reflection of July 2023.

I generally title posts like this a reflection, for a few reasons. Mostly, I want to use it as a way of seeing what goals I’ve had, kept, lost, and picked up. However, this musing is meant to serve a different role.

Up to this point, I’ve mostly been treating what’s changed in my life as though it’s no more a change than any other sudden shift, like studying abroad or graduating. I don’t know if even now I’ve come to terms with all of the ways that my life is forever fundamentally altered for having lost my mother. Goals that relied, in any way, shape, or form, on her direct motivation1 need new reasons. So, even as I look back at my past to see what my goals once were, my focus today is almost entirely on the future. I am willing to discard any goal I once had that no longer serves me.2

Time to go through every reflection I’ve had.3

Back in January of 2019, I had the goal of writing a sonnet every day. I do think that forcing myself to do something creative, in both senses of the word, and analog before bed time is ultimately good for me. Much as I think this, however, I don’t love sonnet form. I’m tempted to try common verse, because I do really enjoy alternating tetrameter and triameter. However, unlike a sonnet, common verse does not have a set number of stanzas or lines. Worth considering, at least.

Three years later4, I wanted to blog daily5. I was working through the Bible in a Year that year, and had the goal of keeping up on it. I also wanted to work on working out and writing music.

Apparently that February was the only February I reflected on. Interesting that I lose focus in the springtime. More or less, the same as January, though with working on my book6 added in.

March has also only been reflected on once, and I misdid the naming of the url. As before, with practicing guitar added in.

In April, I wanted to finish a draft of a paper I needed to write.

June7 brought the idea of listing the exciting things that had happened to me in the past month. That’s probably something that’s worth bringing back? It also added the goals of accordion practice and writing short stories.

In July I wanted to be able to run a little over five miles continuously, stretch, work on an exam, and revise my book.8

Poems, journaling,9 and curricular development were my August goals of note.

September had me hoping to work on my 24 for 24 list.10

I wanted to do NaNoWriMo and fill out 24 for 24 in October.

NOTE: At this point in the musing, I realized that I’ve been looking at the goals moving forward, so generally transpose all the goals forward one time unit.

I had the insane goal in November or December of that year of writing another 50K word book.

On the start of 2023, I wanted to add daily rosaries to my list, along with working through the Catechism in a Year.

February brought no new goals.

In May of that year, I split my goals into professional, personal, and growth. In general, they were single things that I needed to accomplish, and I should not forget the value of static goals. I also wanted to get back into bagpiping, which is also a thing I miss. Wildly, I hadn’t written any public outreach talks at that point. I know that it’s something I really started in graduate school, but it’s so weird to me that I only really started to do it about 20 months ago.

June had me counting my monthly words, and split goals into finite11 and growth. I wanted to get up at 6am daily, get ahead on my book, and write letters to friends. I also wanted to invite friends over to my home, because I was happy with its state.12

That same month, I also reflected on the reflections themselves. In that post, I introduced my concept of actually tracking my goals.13

In July, I wanted to be able to have friends over, which necessitated a clean home. That’s really it for changes.

August brought the goal of finishing a talk and nothing else.

September had me reflecting forwards14 on what excited me about the coming month, which seems like a good goal. I also started work on my album, which I have yet to finish.

In October I gave small snippets of explanation for why each goal was set.15

November had me commenting that the month had passed me by for reasons I should have remembered. I don’t know if I recall them right now. It’s distinctly possible that October of 2023 was when I found out about my mother’s illness. I was apparently doing well enough at prayer then that I wanted to do better than a rushed rosary.

At the dawn of last year, I kept up my tradition of five things that I was excited for in the coming year. Let’s see how I did:

I may as well also list five good things that happened to me last year that I did not list:

I did also want to swim a mile, learn a polka, read through all my books. I did none of those, though I was generally ok at finishing the rest of my goals.

Nothing really new in July, though that came with my acknowledgment that I more or less had given up on blogging.

At the end of last year, I made a list of more or less every goal I had at the time. I then spent some time sorting them into different categories, like finite and infinite, goals for the near and far future, etc.

So, what have I learned from going through all my reflections?

In general, I always want to blog more, stretch more, and exercise more. Most of the time I want to pray more. I have also gone through different phases for how I reflect.

Going forwards, I think that I would like to continue monthly reflections, and I would like to do a few forward looking and backwards looking experiences. Looking through the goals from my last reflection, there are some changes and some similarities from there. So, what does this mean for me?

In 2025, I am excited to:

Goals for this year20:

Looking more short term, what are my goals for the rest of the month?

That’s a fair number of goals. How can we make this a daily and weekly check?

Daily:

Weekly:

Ok, that doesn’t actually seem so bad. Saturdays seem like they’ll start to be filled with activities which lead me to growth, which is always really nice. In general I do tend to find that I spend too much time wasting away on Saturdays, since I tend not to have anything in particular scheduled to do.

Draft One: 6 January 2025

I generally title posts like this a reflection, for a few reasons. Mostly, I want to use it as a way of seeing what goals I’ve had, kept, lost, and picked up. However, this musing is meant to serve a different role.

Up to this point, I’ve mostly been treating what’s changed in my life as though it’s no more a change than any other sudden shift, like studying abroad or graduating. I don’t know if even now I’ve come to terms with all of the ways that my life is forever fundamentally altered for having lost my mother. Goals that relied, in any way, shape, or form, on her direct motivation24 need new reasons. So, even as I look back at my past to see what my goals once were, my focus today is almost entirely on the future. I am willing to discard any goal I once had that no longer serves me.25

Time to go through every reflection I’ve had.26

Back in January of 2019, I had the goal of writing a sonnet every day. I do think that forcing myself to do something creative, in both senses of the word, and analog before bed time is ultimately good for me. Much as I think this, however, I don’t love sonnet form. I’m tempted to try common verse, because I do really enjoy alternating tetrameter and triameter. However, unlike a sonnet, common verse does not have a set number of stanzas or lines. Worth considering, at least.

Three years later27, I wanted to blog daily28. I was working through the Bible in a Year that year, and had the goal of keeping up on it. I also wanted to work on working out and writing music.

Apparently that February was the only February I reflected on. Interesting that I lose focus in the springtime. More or less, the same as January, though with working on my book29 added in.

March has also only been reflected on once, and I misdid the naming of the url. As before, with practicing guitar added in.

In April, I wanted to finish a draft of a paper I needed to write.

June30 brought the idea of listing the exciting things that had happened to me in the past month. That’s probably something that’s worth bringing back? It also added the goals of accordion practice and writing short stories.

In July I wanted to be able to run a little over five miles continuously, stretch, work on an exam, and revise my book.31

Poems, journaling,32 and curricular development were my August goals of note.

September had me hoping to work on my 24 for 24 list.33

I wanted to do NaNoWriMo and fill out 24 for 24 in October.

NOTE: At this point in the musing, I realized that I’ve been looking at the goals moving forward, so generally transpose all the goals forward one time unit.

I had the insane goal in November or December of that year of writing another 50K word book.

On the start of 2023, I wanted to add daily rosaries to my list, along with working through the Catechism in a Year.

February brought no new goals.

In May of that year, I split my goals into professional, personal, and growth. In general, they were single things that I needed to accomplish, and I should not forget the value of static goals. I also wanted to get back into bagpiping, which is also a thing I miss. Wildly, I hadn’t written any public outreach talks at that point. I know that it’s something I really started in graduate school, but it’s so weird to me that I only really started to do it about 20 months ago.

June had me counting my monthly words, and split goals into finite34 and growth. I wanted to get up at 6am daily, get ahead on my book, and write letters to friends. I also wanted to invite friends over to my home, because I was happy with its state.35

That same month, I also reflected on the reflections themselves. In that post, I introduced my concept of actually tracking my goals.36

In July, I wanted to be able to have friends over, which necessitated a clean home. That’s really it for changes.

August brought the goal of finishing a talk and nothing else.

  1. or even indirect↩

  2. this is an aspirational statement, not necessarily indicative of any real fact.↩

  3. at least those which I was smart enough to title “reflection-”↩

  4. and horrifyingly, almost three years ago↩

  5. which was true in the prior reflection, and is likely going to be true in every future one, so I’m just going to stop mentioning it↩

  6. now my web serial↩

  7. nope I did not miss a month, no clue what you’re talking about↩

  8. assume that goals are generally transferred between each month unless otherwise noted↩

  9. ah, right, the spell checker I use doesn’t like journal to be a gerund↩

  10. Which, realistically, is probably a good thing for me to bring back this year↩

  11. static from above↩

  12. what a wild concept, honestly↩

  13. For those reading, yes, it took me more than five years from starting a blog to realize that I could (and realistically, should) track the goals I have↩

  14. projecting??↩

  15. Ok so that’s something that’s been extant before, but↩

  16. initially: Finish my album. Realizing that I’ve been nominally working on this for 18 months really just goes to show me how much I need to finish it.↩

  17. initially: Restart my web serial and find a way to make it a healthy and growth-inspiring habit, but I realize that it was a goal, not an experience↩

  18. or so I hear that’s what the wedding is↩

  19. meager just feels like such a British word that I cannot help but spell it meagre↩

  20. taken liberally from my 2024B reflection↩

  21. I don’t really know how to describe it, maybe ensemble?↩

  22. why non-musical? see the other musical goals and also below.↩

  23. I know that I’m starting very late, but there’s every chance that I’ve done novel things since my last birthday that I have noted somewhere. If not, well, that might be a sign that this summer will have to be filled with growth.↩

  24. or even indirect↩

  25. this is an aspirational statement, not necessarily indicative of any real fact.↩

  26. at least those which I was smart enough to title “reflection-”↩

  27. and horrifyingly, almost three years ago↩

  28. which was true in the prior reflection, and is likely going to be true in every future one, so I’m just going to stop mentioning it↩

  29. now my web serial↩

  30. nope I did not miss a month, no clue what you’re talking about↩

  31. assume that goals are generally transferred between each month unless otherwise noted↩

  32. ah, right, the spell checker I use doesn’t like journal to be a gerund↩

  33. Which, realistically, is probably a good thing for me to bring back this year↩

  34. static from above↩

  35. what a wild concept, honestly↩

  36. For those reading, yes, it took me more than five years from starting a blog to realize that I could (and realistically, should) track the goals I have↩

Christmas 2024

First Published: 2025 January 6

Draft 1: 6 January 2025

I started to write this musing on Christmas morning. It was a Christmas unlike I’ve ever had before, though for almost no positive reasons. I woke up alone in my empty home, with neither tree nor any decorations.

Last Christmas1 I mused about the different Christmas traditions my family had.2 This Christmas, we abandoned most of the traditions, for a few different reasons.

We kept the pajama exchange, though it felt far less homey, given that I had to walk a few blocks in them in order to sit with my father and brothers. We kept the photo with Santa and the family selfie, though I no longer had to angle the camera far down. We kept the generally low energy vibes, though with a flavor of sorrow rather than joy underpinning it.

Having spent a year without the traditions, my family and I all agree that we do, in fact, like all the traditions we have and want to bring them back next year. Of course, there will be a gigantic hole in the midst of that3 celebration, but that is something that we’re going to have to work around. I don’t know what metaphor will end up being the most true here, whether the hole will grow smaller in time, be covered over by new threads of life experiences, or simply avoided, as a scar in the ground. Regardless, I am grateful for the past year, the coming year, and whatever time I have left on this world.

Draft 0: 25 December 2024

As much as I’m glad that last year’s musing about Christmas contained our traditions, because I have already forgotten them, reading them was very difficult. So much has changed from last year, and some of it was even my fault. We are not at home

  1. I gave you my heart (song reference)↩

  2. has? It’s hard to use tenses when discussing anything with my family any longer↩

  3. and every↩

Reflections on Today’s Gospel

First Published: 2024 December 15

Draft 1

It may have taken 6 years, but I’m finally reflecting on the same Sunday Gospel more than once. While reading today, the two things that most struck me were the fact that the first paragraph of the gospel was almost entirely secular advice, and the second half was almost entirely spiritual. I know that the distinction is not necessarily true, but an atheist should take no issue with anything in the first paragraph.

My other major takeaway was the wheat and the chaff. Since fire was used in reference both to baptism and the burning of the chaff, I read it as saying that we are the wheat whose chaff is being burned off. Chaff, as we all know, is not something independent of wheat. It is the outer covering, which we remove because we don’t want it. Likewise, the sin in us is the chaff that we need to not just separate from, but burn away entirely through the healing power of Christ.

I’m really fatigued today, so that’s all I have, other than a quick look to see what has changed in the past six years.

Ooh! I focused on the fact that it was Advent, and mentioned that we should focus more on the joy aspect of the faith. That’s still true, but it’s interesting how my takeaways have changed through the years.

Goals:

  1. Ave Maria and Salve Regina↩

Learning to Draw

First Published: 2024 December 14

Draft Two

Visual art and music have always felt completely separate to me, in a way that I don’t really think is true of most people. Given the fact that both are what people will point to as “the arts”, or “fine arts”, there’s at least some level of correlation. I can understand part of it. After all, both are endeavors which fundamentally require conveying something within ourselves to the world outside, in a way that isn’t as true for other activities. Both are seen as fundamental to humanity.

As I think about why I consider the two forms so different, I think that the artifacts of practice are incredibly important. When practicing music, there is no direct evidence once you have finished. The notes fade, sound waves dampened by everything around you. When finishing a practice of visual media, by contrast, the page is full of every mistake you’ve made.

The fear at the idea seeing my own mistakes, and the pain of actually witnessing the work I was proud of a day ago has certainly been a discouragement from my continuing the practice. I also don’t know that I’ve ever really figured out a good way to practice the skill. With writing, for instance, I know that everything I write will, on some level, improve all of my writing. I also have relatively clear demarcations for what practice will most impact what part of my craft.1 The same is true of music.

In drawing, by contrast,2 I know that line and shape and form are important, but I still don’t see how studying one thing inherently leads to improved ability to draw something else. On the same thread, I also do not have anything that has ever been a huge motivation as a relatively large project. Even to this day, a motivation for at least some of my music practice is upcoming public performances, which weigh heavily on me. I write as a part of my job. Drawing is not something I’ve done.

And yet, this musing is not about my historical struggles with drawing, it’s about my current goals to learn how to draw. I’ve been working on the skill since about the day that my mother died. I think that it was the next day that I got a sketchbook and started to draw. Primarily I’ve been focusing on figure drawing.

I don’t really know why that is. Certainly I like figures in art, and at least some of the art that I want to create has the human body as a part of it, but I think that a larger reason might just be that the media about learning to draw I’ve consumed lately has been focused on people’s own goals to learn to draw form.

As I continue to draw the human form, though, I am more and more finding the ways that small gestures really do mean the difference between something completely discordant and something pleasant to look at. Simply thickening a line where there is shadow in a reference image adds a surprising amount of depth to the drawing. All this to say, I feel like I’m making progress, even though I don’t really want to go back and see if it’s true. I’m hoping to dedicate some time as I continue to move forward in my life to actively studying how to do it better.

Draft One

Interestingly, it seems that I’ve only ever mused about drawing a single time, almost three years ago now.3 As my goals right now hopefully indicate, I’ve decided that right now I want to learn to draw. I don’t think that this is a new goal, but it’s never been something that I have put for a sustained effort on.

I’m really not sure why I never really learned how to draw. For reference, when I say draw here, I’m using it in the sense of still life or figure, or generally of something vaguely resembling realism. I’ve done plenty of nonrepresentative art4, and I have run up against the borders of insanity more than a few times constructing a knot. Despite this, I still don’t really think that I can draw a guitar, even though there is one sitting in front of me at this exact moment and I can perfectly picture one in my mind.

When reading about learning to draw, a lot of the stories end up similar to those that I see in music spaces from those who enter later in life. Someone, either an authority figure or the general air of authority, convinced people that they were not musical at some fundamental level. Probably because I am a relatively competent musician5, I do not think that was ever the case for me. I also do not lack inspiration for things I would draw. My mind is filled with countless fantastical images that I wish I could convey to the world.

Especially since I have spent the past six6 or so years working on my penmanship, it seems more than a little strange that I haven’t really spent a lot of time with drawing. Of course, paging through my old notebooks does show a good number of pages with different amounts of pedagogically sound drawing practice. Unlike the music that runs through the books, however, there is no through line.

Goals:

  1. at least in theory. Whether or not those are borne out by reality is another matter entirely↩

  2. i keep wanting to just say art, which I know is wrong, and also I’m only really interested in pencil or pen drawing or digital drawing, so might as well just use that↩

  3. I hate that 2022 is three years ago in just a few short weeks↩

  4. representative was the word I was looking for↩

  5. it’s wild what things I do and don’t feel comfortable claiming. I have never felt good about saying that I’m good at music, except when interfacing with someone who I think is wrong about their opinion↩

  6. Oh gosh this blog is old↩

Brain Training

First Published: 2024 December 13

Draft 2

Because I am actively trying to return my library books right now1, I’ve started to actually try to read them. A past version of me was incredibly optimistic, and thought that I would be able to read through tomes upon tomes of information about historical science and synthesiz it into my public facing talks. Of course, life happened, and I did not end up doing so.2 In attempting to read some books which are little more than collections of essays, I have come to realize that I’ve somewhat lost the ability to read essays, especially social science essays. Thinking about my brain as a muscle may have problems from a psychological standpoint3, but it’s been something useful for me in the past. Just like how swimming is harder after taking a break, so too is it harder not just to think, but to think in any particular thought pattern after taking an extended break from it. I recently noticed where my mental strength had waned on Sunday as I tried to write a hymn harmonization. For whatever reasons, I most often find myself writing polyphonic music, or at least homorhythmic music.45 Hymns, by contrast, are almost always homophonic.

That is, there is one single line that can be clearly pointed to as the melody, and the rest act to support it. At a more fundamental level, though, I do not work in the realm of tonal harmony that often.6 Sure, many of the folk songs that I write take the standard I IV V approach, but the music I listen to, cover, and especially write for choirs do not rely on that very limited harmony. Hymns, as a genre, however, operate completely within that sphere. Because I have minimal interest in writing tonal homophony, I was very comfortable with the fact that I have lost those skills.7 By contrast, I’ve realized that I cannot read essays, especially in the way that I used to, and that is something which concerns me, at least a little. I don’t know where the mental fortitude to slog through dense words that are written from an expert in a field to another expert in the same field has gone, but I do know at least a few reasons why I’ve lost it. First, scientific papers are rarely written as essay. These days, most of the time the abstract and conclusion are all that need to be read. If attempting to copy an experiment, than a brief skim of the experimental section is usually sufficient. I am also rarely attempting to do pure literature reviews, where I synthesize a number of papers into a single document without adding new information of my own.8 Now I guess I have to ask myself whether that’s a skill I want back, and if so, how much effort I’m willing to put into it.

Goals:

Draft One

I found myself struggling to think of a topic for today’s musing.9 Potentially relatedly, I’ve been trying to get through the long list of library books that I checked out from the library at my school. Among them are books that have come recommended to me and a number of books I’ve found by simply wandering the stacks. I often forget that History of Science is its own field, and that tends to be to my own detriment. Because of the fact that it is History of, the field’s output more closely resembles that of history than that of science. That does make sense, given that it is tools and techniques from history which enable the research. However, it does mean that I’m being confronted with a fact that I haven’t had reason to realize: I’ve lost my ability to read essays. Hmmm, this is a little too off the topic.

  1. there are a variety of reasons for this, but most of them boil down to me realizing that I’ll never finish if I don’t start and my research being a lot of start a test, wait for hours, check results↩

  2. Ok so to be fair, I don’t know if I can really entirely blame life, especially given what will follow↩

  3. that is a statement that is just obviously true, but↩

  4. I know that there’s a term for music that shares rhythm but is multiple melodies↩

  5. Oh cool the term was homorhythmic↩

  6. I use the definition of tonal meaning something approximating “a single diatonic scale at a time, usually through the entire piece, with emphasis on the I chord, the IV chord acting as sub dominant, V as dominant, and resolutions at I. Usually this means that the seventh resolves to the first and the fourth resolves to the third.”↩

  7. For those then asking why I’m practicing it now, the answer boils down to the fact that the conductor I’m hoping to write music for generally likes homophony and relatively tonal music↩

  8. that feels like it might have come off somewhat aggressively towards the social sciences. That wasn’t the goal, and I absolutely think that synthesis is value, even if it is not explicitly novel in the same way as measuring something for the first time.↩

  9. No, I don’t have any good answer for how I pick between calling it a musing and a blog↩

Donut Recipe

First Published: 2024 December 12

Draft One

Wildly enough, I don’t think that I’ve ever written a blog post with the word “recipe” in the url. I’m almost positive that I’ve given at least a few recipes, so that might be a bit of an issue. However, that is not the purpose of today’s musing. As the title1 probably indicated, I’m going to talk about my donut recipe.

As with most of the things that I cook these days, there was minimal measuring involved. In general, this tends to work out, because I generally work with continuous ingredients.2 That is, if the dough is ever so slightly too dry, I can add functionally any amount of water to the dough to hydrate it slightly more. In the specific case of the donut3 dough, though, I do somewhat regret not measuring anything, because I used one of the only discrete ingredients in the average baker’s toolkit4: the egg.5

As a result, rather than simply describing a texture, I feel somewhat as though I need to at least approximate the recipe I used. My best guess is as follows:

  1. Pour flour, sugar, liqueur, salt, vanilla, and first tablespoon of yeast into a large bowl.

  2. Crack in two large eggs

  3. Pour the milk on top and stir with a wooden spoon10. Texture should be about the same as slime, or slightly thicker. That is, it should be very sticky, but when you stir, you should easily watch it pull away from the edges of the bowl.

  4. Cover and let sit for two hours.11

  5. After two hours, remember that for some reason you can never get yeast to rise when poured directly in milk, so add final tsp of yeast into water in a small container. Wait until frothy and stir into the dough.

  6. Cover and wait 68 hours.12

  7. Dough should be approximately doubled in volume. Punch it down by using spoon to lever the dough off the rim of the bowl.13 Because it is a very wet dough, might take some effort to deflate.

  8. Cover again and wait until clearly risen once again

Now, I am always a fan of doing things a little extra. The previous time I made an iteration of this recipe14, I think that I wrapped the dough around oreos. This time, at request of the people I am feeding them to, I had three fillings: oreo, biscoff, and whole strawberries. With this in mind, recipe will continue:

  1. If filling donut with a solid, take enough dough15 to cover the object and wrap it. Because we used high protein flour, you can stretch the dough a fair amount. Don’t16 worry about that, the donuts will puff in the oven. The older cookbook I found recommends rolling to 3/8 inch thick and cutting from there, so if afraid, use that as a baseline

  2. As each donut is made, place it on a greased sheet pan17. It is ideal to wait at least five minutes after forming the donuts before frying them, though if you wait to heat your oil until you’ve finished shaping the donuts, you’ll likely be fine

  3. When filling, dough, or shaper is exhausted, heat a pot full of a good frying oil to 35018 Follow normal frying safety when frying.

  4. When oil reaches 350F19, add as many donuts as you see fit. I found that in my wok, 1214 was about as many as I could reasonably fit, though I did manage 20 at once.

  5. Using a wooden spoon20, gently stir the donuts as they fry, flipping them if one side appears to be blonder than the other.

  6. Pull from oil when golden brown21, drain, and let cool on paper towels.22

  7. When cool enough to handle23, dip in icing of choice.

  8. Allow to cool fully! This is an important one, because the inside will likely retain heat better than the outside.24

By mentioning the icing, some might wonder about the recipe. The oreo donuts were topped with vanilla icing, and the strawberry were topped with a lemon icing.

I think that about sums it up!

Goals:

  1. and likely URL↩

  2. can you tell that I’ve been thinking a lot about quantum chemistry lately?↩

  3. my spellchecker and the cookbook I used last night insist it’s doughnut. Hmm wonder what gardner says. Tragic, he’s on team dough because of ingredient. However, given that it’s a 15  to one ratio, I think that I’m going to feel justified with moving the lexicon forward↩

  4. I did absolutely sit and think for a long little bit about what ingredients might be in a baker’s kit that are functionally discrete. Chocolate chips are, but almost never will they be treated as such, since they normally are done by volume. (I also roped a friend into this) An entire whole spice, such as cinnamon bark or a vanilla bean, is similar. Fruits and vegetables maybe, especially if used whole (I never know what to do with onion)↩

  5. more accurately, two eggs, but↩

  6. because it’s what I had. Given the way I use it, probably not a bad idea to use bread flour or other high protein↩

  7. I think↩

  8. I feel a familial obligation to use Gran Marnier, but A: the grocery store did not have it, and B: the store brand was much cheaper↩

  9. entirely because I buy yeast by the pound, and I hate to measure↩

  10. you probably don’t have to use wood, but it’s what I did↩

  11. since everything I used came from the fridge, I put in a slightly warmed oven↩

  12. could probably wait less time, but like bed, you know?↩

  13. I generally assume you use a bowl that will be completely filled and doming when the dough finishes rising↩

  14. 24 May 2022↩

  15. I usually need to sprinkle a little bit of flour on the dough constantly, don’t be afraid of that fact↩

  16. a pun you can’t make with the “approved” spelling↩

  17. or something else↩

  18. There are so many schools of thought to this. If you have money to spare, I have heard great things about avocado oil. If you have slightly less, peanut oil is often recommended. I personally “splurge” (in the grad student sense) by buying canola oil rather than vegetable oil, because I like at least nominally knowing where the hydrocarbons are from. In general, high smoke point, minimal flavor is the goal↩

  19. I really hope no one reading this (lol) assumed 350 C and didn’t keep reading ahead. Oh well, not changing it↩

  20. again, probably optional, though I like to think that the wood is less likely to damage the donuts↩

  21. if in doubt, another 30 seconds probably won’t hurt↩

  22. J. Kenji Lopez Alt did find that they work better than cookie trays for draining oil↩

  23. so for me: immediately to 30 seconds later. To a saner person, a few minutes later↩

  24. why yes, I did have a mouthful of hot strawberry this morning, why do you ask↩

Newer Older