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Monthly Reflection

First Written: 2023 October 1 First Published: 2023 October 311

Draft 1

Well, another month as flown by, carried away on the wings of time.2 As you3 can tell from the lack of posts lately,4 there are many updates since the last time I talked.

In short, I:

Let’s see once again how that compares to the list that I tried to make about things I was excited for this month.9

Oof ok. So, I did do the first three of those, but I had already done them by the last reflection. I did not record a song, which is a bit of a shame. As you might guess from the lack of postings lately, last month was not a good month for me in many regards.14

I’m mostly ready for my upcoming talks, though that’s a brand new development. Yesterday I gave a practice version of the talks to my groupmates, who resoundingly hated the talk. In their defense, I agree with absolutely all of their comments. They mostly boiled down to the fact that a public presentation should be a story that’s somewhat educational. Instead, all that I had was a list of facts.

As a result, I more or less restarted, this time much more focused on collecting pretty images than anything like having a coherent set of facts. After all, it’s far easier to make a coherent set of facts when you have a story than it is to make a story from a set of facts. I don’t think that I have quite enough content yet, though, so I’ll need to think about other ways that I can pad the content. One option is obviously just to add in some more specific facts about what the different kinds of months are?15

I started hashing out the planning for the talk I’m giving at a real school. It’s for sure happening, which is really nice. I even have a date16 nailed down, which is great. Other than that, I vaguely know what I’m going to talk about.

So, what am I excited for this month?

All in all, it’s looking like it’ll be a pretty calm month, which will be nice, especially with how hectic my summer was.20 I’m sure that I did a bad job with my goals last month, but let’s see just how bad.

Goals for this month:

  1. Whoops↩︎

  2. Someday I’ll learn how to write poetry. Until then, we all get to deal with this↩︎

  3. hmm who is the you in this situation? Is it potentially future me?↩︎

  4. this phrasing implies that I expect to have active readers, which I don’t think I do↩︎

  5. which should go in my yearly goal post↩︎

  6. well, office, but close enough↩︎

  7. for a very, very generous definition of learn↩︎

  8. I think? The point of the session was a little muddy to me↩︎

  9. I wrote everything before this on the first, and nothing has really happened since then, so that still works, I guess.↩︎

  10. I did it on the first! I think I pr’d↩︎

  11. did that this morning/early afternoon. (it was a long swim time↩︎

  12. I am ninety percent sure I’ve used the program name in this blog before, but if I haven’t, this will not be the first time. I did it, in fact, last night! It went really well. Without (many) spoilers, there were like seventy people again!↩︎

  13. depending on Bureaucracy↩︎

  14. it’s much better now, though↩︎

  15. idk, I’m really lost and not feeling particularly inspired by anything right now↩︎

  16. i think↩︎

  17. real in the sense of a talk that was explicitly asked for and that I have legitimate plans for↩︎

  18. I should probably prepare something for that↩︎

  19. kind of? it’s a like “this is what science research is like for graduate students” event at a local high school↩︎

  20. it says something that giving two talks and two school visits is a boring month to me↩︎

  21. starting now↩︎

St. Jude's Relic Monthly Reflection