Humble Beginnings

I was never good at writing. Some say it takes a lot of reading, but I have little faith in that reasoning. If reading meant you could write, I'd be a movie director by now. To others, it is simply a matter of habit. If that is the case, then perhaps this text will serve as a testament to how bad I once was, one day. Regardless, one has to begin from somewhere.

I am currently finishing the second year of my PhD. This, too, is a matter of taking things one step at a time, as my parents used to say. My 6 year old self was most likely annoyed that he had to go to school, dreading the 9 months of imprisonment ahead of him. Surely, I would have thrown a tantrum had anyone told me I'd be in and out of classrooms for the next 20-some years.

Surely, everyone must have read and heard of this hundreds of times: Take things one step at a time. Don't lose track of your goals. Carpe diem. An entire book's worth of motivational quotes, many times contradicting one another, stemming from millenia of human experience, mostly made as blanket statements on the daily. There is naturally truth to all of them; after all they survived a lengthy process of linguistic darwinism.

There is allegedly a Churchill quote about how inspirational quotes kept him motivated, but naturally searching for it bombards you with inspirational quotes by Churchill himself. If that quote did indeed exist, I wonder if it was a matter of populism, or his sincere thinking. History fascinates me, and I'd love to write about it more one day.

Writing is, for me, also a hobby, albeit a very new one. I don't find it "meditative" or anything like that, if anything I find it rather stressful. Not necessarily because of what you might think about my (mostly amateur) essays to follow, but because I myself might not like them. I have decided to not change things that I have already written (a practice that ironically ties in with my research), so what I write here will be here to stay, regardless of what I myself think about it ten or twenty years down the line.

There's all sorts of subjects I want to write about, from technology (of course) to linguistics, to history, to film. I am very torn about the idea of using current events as a jump-off point to dive into larger topics. Their temporal nature might work to my detriment, but then again this blog is a product of its time. Actually, the word blog itself is already antiquated, as far as I know. Regardless, I hope you enjoy these posts and join me in this journey.