TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHTEEN: The Current Year
Obligatory update post.
Weirdly, the time between this post and the last feels roughly like the same amount of time between the last post and the one before that (which is to say, the first post). And yet the first update took a mere month and a half, while it was nearly another 3 months (a quarter of a year! yikes) before I finally got around to writing this.
This is further evidence of the temporal acceleration that occurs throughout the course of each semester. What’s more, this temporal acceleration itself accelerates over the course of the semester, which has the practical effect of causing me to perceive the semester like this:
- Early September: hey wow, school’s starting, everyone’s back, wow there are frosh, also holy cow there’s so much time. Every week, perhaps even every day, feels important and distinct.
- Early October: oh hey, the semester’s starting to warm up a little. though days are no longer individually distinct, weeks are easily distinguished.
And then something happens around mid-October. Probably some derivative of temporal position is constant (maybe the jerk, maybe the jounce), but acceleration is not, and right around mid-late October, things suddenly get a lot faster, resulting in:
- Mid October: Wow, there sure is a lot of stuff going on. But I’m still on top of things, are generally cognizant of what’s going on.
- Late October: Pretty busy, but still fi-
- Mid December (weekend before finals): -what just happened and why do i smell like peanut butter and sorrow
Seriously, my recollection of the entire month of November is hazy at best. Like, I continued existing, and my work got done, but I must’ve been on some kind of scholarly autopilot. Well, no, that’s not quite right. Anyway, it’s a weird effect, and it’s also my shoddy excuse for taking so long to update this blog. Speaking of which, my writing this post was (as with the first post) prompted by waiting at an airport. Maybe I should do it more often; it seems fruitful.
So now it’s 2 0 1 8. Wowowow.
What have I been up to over my luxurious winter break? I’m glad you asked!
- Reading! I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which was interesting and more contentful than I had expected (from the somewhat click-baity way the 10,000-hour rule is often referenced). I also read a book about composing game music, which was quite insightful. And I devoured another Stephen King novel (Cell), and picked up a couple of others for the road.
- Movies! I watched a bunch of them. I also saw It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time, and have feelings about it.
- Music! I didn’t have access to a guitar, so I worked on my (near-nonexistent) keyboard skills. Actually, I didn’t have access to a keyboard, either, but I was able to borrow one while I was in town. I was also able to borrow the time and materials of a local saint, who gave my several lessons and helped motivate my progress. The crowning achievement of my break is undoubtedly my hard-won ability to play The Entertainer half-decently. I’ve also been doing some ear training stuff. Unrelatedly, I continue to discover new things I like by Dan Auerbach (example).
There were some weird tense changes there, but I’m not going to bother fixing them because I want to finish this post before I eat.
I have various things planned for this site. One is updating ‘Projects’, and another is perhaps making a ‘Consumption’ page along the lines of a reading list, but more broad (e.g. including movies, games, etc.). I just got around to making a change I’ve been meaning to for a while: enabling comments via Disqus. So now I can get flamed by random Internet people on my site; hooray! The comment section is that-a-way ↴
I’ve also been kicking around the idea of a more essay-like post, tentatively named ‘On Maximizing’. We’ll see.
Yours in the current year,
ijc