Here are some things I’ve learned so far this summer:

1. Reading is slow.
2. Understanding things is slow and there are no shortcuts.
3. If you keep revisiting the same concepts they might make sense eventually, things aren’t impossible.
4. Academics are opinionated people who find it hard to agree on things, so faculty meetings are messy.
5. Most people are bad at writing.
6. Blackboards are a pain to work with.
7. Don’t self-select out of asking for things, initiative is good.
8. Talking to people can be hard.
9. File management is useful.
10. You can always break down problems further.
11. Someone projecting confidence may or may not actually know what they’re talking about.

Writing poems feels like abstracting the train of thought itself, and it feels a little weird, like I’m leaving gaps for the reader to fill in within the context of whatever “structure” or “internal logic” I’m trying to create.

I feel like the difference between trying to write prose and writing poems is that writing prose feels like creating chains of causality between things, whereas writing poems sometimes feels like constructing a world where two (or more) things are related, and then placing both things in that world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of “academic lineage” recently and I don’t have anything concrete to say yet but it is very interesting.

So I’ve been rereading this book called Range (by David Epstein), and I’ve come across some interesting ideas that didn’t really stick with me on my first reading. For example, one concept I’m finding intriguing is the idea of “match quality”, which is basically a measure of fit between a person and their job/occupation.

The idea presented in the book is essentially that improving match quality only comes through exploration – you don’t figure out who you are by locking yourself in a room and thinking about it, but by trying out different things.

One of the things I’ve always worked towards is expressing my thoughts in the clearest way possible. I feel like I’m decent at it in text form, because text doesn’t happen in real time. But verbal communication is a whole other story. Trying to explain an abstract thought during a conversation is like looking at some delicate cobweb you can barely see and trying to lift up the edges, only for them to disintegrate under your fingers.