Something that just occurred to me is that one reason why someone might aim to be promoted is because if you keep getting promoted, then eventually your “above-my-pay-grade” questions won’t be above your pay grade anymore.

The difference I’ve found between reading textbooks and reading academic papers is that on my first pass through reading a textbook page, I read most sentences 1-3 times, whereas if it’s a paper, I’ll probably end up reading each sentence 3-5 times before turning the page.

I am currently doing what I am going to call “spring cleaning” on my blog. What this means is that I want to get rid of a huge backlog of articles and things I started writing about in the past because I have lots of ideas for new things I want to do here (how shocking), and I’m honestly not super happy with the direction this blog has been taking. I don’t think I write enough about my own ideas, or about the things I spend hours learning about. In fact, I don’t think I write enough at all.

I think the way we teach kids to think about and categorize questions is completely wrong. If I think back to any time I’ve been taught about questions formally, I’ve always been taught to think about the 5 W’s: Who, What, Where, When, Why – and the H: How? These are perfectly good questions to focus on if you’re a journalist writing a news story, but most of us are not journalists, and I’ve found a broader range of questions to be useful or relevant in my day-to-day life.

Alright, time to look back at another year of writing. I’m not quite sure what to think of this year. Last January feels like it was ages ago – I barely remember any of what happened, and it feels super removed from now. That being said, I probably did the most variety of writing this year that I’ve done in years, because I took an experimental fiction course, which forced me to write fiction.