You Need to Be Proactive
One of the things that has been repeatedly drilled into me over the past year or so is the fact that if you want people to do things for you, you’re most likely going to have to harass them. (I don’t mean literal harassment, by the way – please don’t commit a criminal offense and say I encouraged you.) This is true especially when working with highly busy people like managers and professors. If you want something, you can’t just assume they’ll intuit that and give it to you – you have to ask (and assume they’ll forget, then ask them again). If you need them to do something for you, you’ll need to remind them, and inform them of the deadline, likely multiple times. Everyone has their own problems to worry about and the thing you need might not be top of mind. The burden of remembering is on you.
Some Interesting Things I’ve Read/Watched: Link Dump #1
I keep coming across articles (and occasionally videos, and occasionally fiction or poetry) online that I want to share and comment on, but I recently realized that I will never have time to fully comment on everything I read that I find interesting. So I’m pulling another page out of Cory Doctorow’s book: here is a dump of links to cool stuff, along with some (hopefully very) brief descriptions of why I found these articles interesting. (Also, here is a link to a link dump where Doctorow 1 talks about link blogging. It might be interesting for you to look at.)
I’m Still Not Entirely Sure What a “Poem” Is
I think there might be people out there who think I’m a poet, and I think it’s terrifying. I haven’t been a poet since my middle school days of writing rhyming couplets about hating school and my early high school days of writing terrible prose with line breaks. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure the main reason I wrote so many poems in grade nine was because my teacher seemed to have no idea how to grade poems but very strong opinions about fiction, and I felt like I was terrible at writing fiction and wanted a shot at a decent grade. Man, high school was such a great time.