actions, not words.

One of my favorite writing prompts of all time was an assignment our AP Lit teacher assigned us at the end of the class. The document begins with the following statement: Rationale: One part of maturing and growing is the ability to reflect. Often, even adults, have a hard time self-reflecting over their past, their mistakes, their successes, etc. This skill is needed in everyday life whether it consists of moments of fighting, regretful words, or learning from failure and likewise success.  It continues to ask you to think and reflect on everything which you faced in that year—whether or not it had to deal with AP Literature. “The struggles, the steps you took to overcome, the successes, the laughter…the boredom, the frustration.” It instructs the reader to “just think and reflect”—and only once that process is complete, does it present you the prompt, which it instructs you to answer in any form: What did I learn? What did I hope to learn that I didn’t learn? What was I sur...

in which sometimes you have make things messier before you can make things clean again [originally written on Thursday, May 14th, 2020] As a person, I do not tend to possess the cleanest of rooms. I am generally fairly organized—I know where things are, and I tend not to forget things—but when it comes to actually decreasing the amount of disorder in my physical spaces I have never been particularly effective. My room at home has  always  been especially messy, in particular because I keep a lot of memorabilia and just general reminders of the past scattered around me, and, based on a cursory search through old blog posts, the last time I successfully cleaned my entire room [more accurately, my floor—my bookshelves have never been cleaned, nor has my windowsill] was November 2018, with a light attempt to do so again in May 2019 which has been held in stasis for essentially a year at this point. To add to this confusion, I brought home a violin, a backpack, and a slightly-la...

this post was written on Friday, May 15th, 2020. i'm not sure if it's actually that well-written, but it has thoughts i want to share, so here goes Today was a pretty good day. I got up this morning and attended the 21W thesis presentations, which was quite an excellent use of two hours of my time, as I got to hear people read from their theses, mostly fiction, one a poetry collection. Everything I heard was pretty good, and the advisors were remarkably supportive, which really makes me look forwards to working with them in the future. I also think that, although there's a lot of distance between my writing and how well-planned-out it is with theirs, I am fairly confident that with sufficient time, effort, and classes, I can eventually make it to that level of writing. Maybe that's Dunning-Kruger effect—in fact, I suspect that it is likely Dunning-Kruger effect, given that I have scarcely finished a single creative writing project since junior fall—but I suppose tha...

The title of this blog post comes from  a really cute song  that one of my friends sent me and which I've been listening to on repeat for probably an hour now. Reminder that most daily posts are not getting published here—instead, they are on a staging blog that will be shared upon request—and that most posts will be edited down in the future to their core content. Today was a great day. In regards to how productive I was, or how today sets me up for the coming few days, a different discussion can and probably should be had. However, I think I made a resolution at some point going into MIT that I was never going to regret not doing problem sets and not sleeping because I was spending time with friends, and I think today has to fall under that exemption. Never regret the good things—they are the only things you have. This doesn't stop you from exercising some time management skills, or planning for the future, but I strongly believe that this is a valuable part of one's life...

tl;dr: this blog is going to be condensed down to only "quality" writing starting May 7th; daily minutia will continue to be published at a staging blog—contact me for details. My mood has been kind of wobbly recently, and I'm not entirely sure why. There have been days where the writing has kind of come naturally to me and my mind is full of ideas, and other days where the writing is dull and repetitive, full of echoes of things already said. This strange emotional variability can also be seen from some of the data I keep from this blog, so I'm not just imagining it—my mood has been more consistently variable over the past few weeks, if one can forgive the oxymoronic phrase of "consistently variable." In regards to writing, I plan on significantly changing the form factor of this blog in the coming few weeks—I do think that having this daily writing has benefited me by giving a space to unravel my thoughts, but I don't think this is useful as a publ...