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first blog thoughts

if you’re reading this, thank you for coming to check out my empty space. I promise it’ll get filled pretty quickly with things I find pretty entertaining. mainly, I wanted to make a website where I could journal publicly in a relatively simple way while posting about things I’m doing. no, it won’t be written with chatgpt / claude.

so, to kick it off, as almost everyone else, I have some new year ambitions:

  • make my blog (done)
  • shoot and post more (first post of year - done)
  • read more books (more on that below)
  • catch-up on my creative backlog (see parenthesis above)

something I’ve been thinking about after completing my masters last year was something that discernibly frees up my time, but when you have things that you’re constantly doing with deadlines and relatively high stress, it isn’t just about the time in my opinion… it’s the actual filling of space in my consciousness about a constant worry of something that I have to do.

  • on the morning subway commute: let’s watch half a lecture during lunch
  • at lunch (watching a youtube video & procrastinating): let’s watch the lecture later tonight… notification pings about the boys wanting to game tonight
  • home, mentally tired from all the analysis at work today: have to do a homework problem relating to some computational analysis
  • turning off the lights: mental list about work and then about school

definitely realized how much mental capacity was being taken up by just constant progression of things… but that’s over, finally!

anyways, onto more fun things:

read more books

after my headspace talk, I’ll cut to the chase - I’m reading two books right now: Leonardo da Vinci’s biography by Walter Isaacson and The Odyssey (the Fagles translation).

a bit of background for why these things:

back when I was in embry-riddle, something I always thought about was that you don’t really get a chance to learn about the “high culture” of literature as much as other schools; we definitely learned about physics and how spacecraft attitude works, but not much about the history of the world. I’ve read Anna Karenina and that was an experience to jump right into. Anyways; Pao has more of a background in the western canon and thus I wanted to learn more about that and be a bit more like the disciple of experience. Only on chapter 2 so far for Leonardo, but it’s been amazing. dude was actually surreal.

The Odyssey is a bit of a different story. Pao for my birthday a couple of years ago gave me three theban plays, and I’ve always had an interest in mythology, so it made sense to choose the Odyssey as well. Nolan’s new movie is the Odyssey and what better way to learn about the classics?

please send me unsolicited text messages about western canon if you want to give me any heads up / recommendations / discuss anything / if you’ve read either Leo’s bio or what translation is best for The Odyssey

creative backlog

fvckchev hasn’t been as active recently, and I’ll be hoping to change that. My medium term goal is to make my images have a physical form, so more on that later if you’re interested. I have some footage to edit from trips to Hong Kong, Egypt, and Jordan, so it’ll be fun to check all that out. Hopefully the video isn’t too shitty. I’ll start posting pictures on my blog posts soon instead of just posting sporadic pics to ig, so you’ll get to see more stuff here hopefully if you really feel inclined to indulge my hopes & dreams of being a photographer.

what I’m excited about the next couple of weeks

I’ve noticed emotions and curiousity drive a lot of my life, so whether that’s good or bad, we’ll see, but I’m excited to have some cool artistic experiences to look forward to. After watching The Brutalist, I’ve become obsessed with Brutalist architecture, and I saw that there’s actually an amazing exhibit to check out right now regarding exactly what I’ve been visualizing. nyc friends, lmk if you want to come.

thanks for reading, let me know if you want a notification when a new blog post drops.