Happy new year!

I haven’t published on this blog for quite a while… there obviously are many reasons for that, a few of which I can mention. As I already wrote in the very first entry of this blog, I am terrible at keeping up with a self-imposed schedule, and I am actually very sorry about that! I also spent a lot of time preparing my teachings, in particular planning my first lectures and writing the teaching material accordingly; and while I thought I had taken a very generous estimate of how much time I would need for that, I eventually had to give it three of four times the estimated amount, which was a lesson in humility regarding my planning talents.

As I enjoy overthinking and banging my head at impossible questions as much as everyone else (i.e. quite a disproportionate amount), I also spent a lot of time considering what teaching means to me, and how I can make my lectures engaging for students while making the skills and knowledge taught worth their time. In fact, I spent so much time on it that I decided to write about it and I started writing a blog entry reflecting on my first lectures. As the ingenious reader can obviously notice, the non-existence of said entry online means that things did not go as planned: I restarted the whole undertaking three or four times, but each time it becomes a behemoth that both starts and goes nowhere, and I get either dissatisfied or bored with it (or both) and don’t publish it. Maybe someday I will write something I will be happy with and it will appear here? It’s on my (very long and very rarely completed) to-do list, among with a lot of other ideas of posts for this blog (like a very on-the-nose relevant entry about “Why does writing a blog entry in English is so damn much harder than chatting up the topic with friends?”²).

Anyway! I am back here and it is time for celebrations once again: happy new year everyone! I still have a few days of holidays at home, after the (not much resting but definitely very socializing) holidays with family and friends. Then I’ll once more turn to working on my infuriating slightly difficult math problem at the lab, but let’s not talk about that now, shall we? 😄

As the custom dictates, it is the time of the year at which people obey the unforgiving tradition of writing down a list of resolutions. I am not one to usually do so, since not taking these resolutions helps me avoid the unpleasant contrition of not upholding my end of the self-imposed bargain. Yet, this year I’m changing that³: let me announce, here and now, that I will attempt to write more constantly on this blog in the future.

Why break my non-pledging habits⁴? I see two reasons for that. First, I really take pleasure in writing here (even though I’ve been somewhat suboptimal at keeping up with it). The writing process is particularly effective as a way to think things through, lay thoughts down and organize them properly; and it is quite convenient to have a place where I can consult these thoughts later on. Also, for anyone interested, it hints at how I like to think, and I always find observing somebody’s thought process quite fascinating. Writing a blog in English is also efficient training for my English skills, taking the proper time to look for grammar rules and specific vocabulary⁵. Second, I already have two drafts of posts that I started weeks ago but that are still far from being complete: I am still unhappy with their current states, so I keep coming back at them, adding whole sections and removing others, changing the whole outline… and I still don’t know how to get them done. As January should be a calmer month than the two previous ones, I will hopefully get them out of the door in the weeks to come. At this point, I completely fall in the sunk cost fallacy: too much time has been spent on these drafts for me not to complete them! Finally, the third and most important reason (who said I knew how to count?): because I feel like it!

There wasn’t much direction for this entry, except babbling for a little while, so I’ll end it there. Incidentally, it was the first entry for a very long while; hopefully, the first of many more! Happy new year!