a little braindump

COVID

January plus two days, officially.

100,000 deaths in a month +2 days.

I’m so tired. Safe healthy and mostly sane. Chinese/Lunar New Year’s coming up, so guess we’ll have to go in person for that. (No apps for shopping at the Asian stores. And, it feels so weird to say, hey, here’s $100 that you need way more than me, so that you can go in and risk being sick instead of me). That’s changed – I don’t really hesitate to order even trivial things online anymore.

This pandemic really brings out the judgmental side of me.

Academics

COVID and STEM persistence – I made my choices. Should be grateful, and probably shouldn’t feel miserably like a failure. Hard to do so when working for free and living with my parents.

Cats, Birds, and Books

Bought some sunflower seeds today, refilled the bird feeder. Sat outside for a while just listening to bird calls and looking at the sonograms on BirdNet app. Red shouldered hawks, American Robin, Eastern Towhee, Canada goose. Red bellied woodpeckers (!), tufted titmouse, carolina wren from earlier this week.

Sun sets an hour later here than in Boston. Much warmer. Spring is in the air. Spotted a few leaves peaking out of the rose bushes.

I went through another 4 Discworld books. Going to miss this series. Definitely a comfort food.

Side projects

Need to get back into making cards – postcard stamps have arrived from USPS. Am excited.

Locale

Keep eying an Airbnb. But it is so easy to stay home (but maybe that’s a problem? too comfortable). Live somewhere a little more rural, a few more stars in the sky, with some chickens.

Impeachment

Some disorganized thoughts (un-apologetically, I write this blog for myself)

• being grateful is hard – it’s so easy to see inequities instead of being grateful for the opportunities i *do* have
• it’s easy to look down on people and harder to reach out a hand – so what if people haven’t done the work or put in the time – as a community with a shared goal, just get people up to speed and running
• academia really poisoned my mind into thinking everything is a competition,
• or maybe it’s just my crappy path in academia made it feel like a fight to “survive” / persist in academia
• i tend to project my self-doubt into the neutral actions of others – i should probably stop chewing off my lifelines lol
• so, just have to believe in myself (perhaps). it’s hard to not depend on others when lost, but after startup-ing, I do hold confidence in
• one of the things I’m bitter about is not feeling in a position to really mentor as much as I’d like
• life is unfair! it’s a struggle for me to not let the anger over this impeded my progress in my career. so what if I joined grad school looking for stability and found so little? the key is to look forward to where to go from here
  • things i didn’t find in phd:
  • not having to think about gender / pay differentials
  • having stability of income and health insurance
  • i guess that’s it… but those are huge things, i mean to some extent like startups you could say i put myself in this position – i chose to pursue this phd, i am choosing to finish it even without being paid, i am choosing to not teach to get an income because i can’t juggle that and research… that i have the privilege to do so. i could just apply to a job
  • so, should i be mad or not? i guess we always have a right to our feelings u___u

i guess i have fewer ties so i have to spend less time worrying about family (have no grandparents, no cousins aunts uncles etc. in the US) falling sick to the virus.

being home, i’ve found it difficult to be frank on this blog; and now that i’ve been in a position of authority over others (have had students and mentees within the field) it’s even weirder…

just keep putting one foot forward in front of the other ! i need to stop feeling incompetent and just

get

work

done

todo: apply to internships, dissertation fellowships, complete workshop paper draft, finish contract work, make a puzzle, find… a research direction??? maybe i should start thinking of what i consider hackathon projects… and just complete those and publish them on this blog. i think that would motivate me more to finish things, than to find some abstract ideas. and it would at least force me to move things forward, instead of wait hopelessly for NDA access to come through.

Waiting for an NDA to make research progress… I believe there’s a great Chinese idiom for that

守株待兔

Definition: https://www.purpleculture.net/dictionary-details?word=%E5%AE%88%E6%A0%AA%E5%BE%85%E5%85%94

My side project of the weekend was adding examples to flashcards of the top 3000 characters in Chinese. After working through this deck I agree with the assessment that I probably only know about 1500 characters in Chinese. Documented on github: https://github.com/nouyang/ChineseScraper/ (privately for now but basically combine http://www.zein.se/patrick/3000char.html & https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/39888802)