Hi friends - welcome back to the BLOGGING REDUX!

I never meant to fall off so hard on blogging, but honestly, Admissions paying me was a good incentive structure. However, I do actually enjoy writing even if nobody is paying me to do it, so we’re going to try this again.

I have been inspired heavily by Avi’s and Evan’s buttondown blogs, which I have enjoyed receiving in my inbox over the past few years. It is generally nice to receive long form communication from friends, including but not limited to: platonic love letters, interesting posts, and Christmas cards from Andrea specifically. I’m hoping that you all might feel the same way.

There are a few other reasons that I think this might be good for me personally:

• AI is rotting my brain. And yet, AI still cannot produce off-the-domepiece nonsense in the exact same way that I can. Among the many Sam Kriss passages that I viscerally enjoy is this one: “What we have and [AI] doesn’t is dumb lust and jealousy, the rage of a rapidly obsolescing ape. The forms that will remain inviolably human are the racist tirade, the queasily specific pornographic fantasy, and the death threat.” I probably won’t be making racist tirades or death threats on the internet, nor will I be publishing my queasily specific pornographic fantasies on Buttondown (although, if you ask really nicely, I’d be happy to share). But in the broader slop-ification of the world, it’s imperative to produce 100% cage free, organic, grass-fed writing once in a while.

• One subpoint here is that coding agents do actually save me a lot of time, and I’d like to use some of that time to do things I like (which is the platonic ideal of what AI is actually supposed to be doing for us). I can manifest this in my personal life even if society is not manifesting this for itself.

• I’m going to be living in Japan this summer and I think there’s a good chance that I’ll be lonely across the ocean from most of the people I see every day. Being in touch with my thoughts seems like it might help.

• I’m currently at a lower emotional baseline than usual - if you’ve had a conversation with me in the past few months, you have probably heard me complain about the reasons why, potentially over several cups of late night chai. All therapeutic advice points to writing and journaling in times like these.

• Relatedly, and unfortunately, performing a level of vulnerability online was somehow easier for me than actually, for real for real, being vulnerable in my personal writing. I have tried and failed numerous times to start a journaling habit, and I think it’s because the further away I’ve gotten from the blogging times, the more cringe I’ve found it to be vulnerable, even with myself.

And finally:

• A few months ago, Lily (a fellow MIT undergrad to UW PhD) made this post about dropping out of grad school. I was touched at Lily’s vulnerability in sharing all of this with me as a reader. I messaged her that I was very moved by her words, and she said that me and the other MIT bloggers served as inspiration for being vulnerable with strangers online. It reminded me, five years after I had stopped blogging, why I had enjoyed it in the first place. People had found my words valuable! And sometimes, my words inspired them to think or act in ways which they might not have otherwise. That, and mostly that, makes the whole venture of writing personally worthwhile.

Booting the blog back up has been, if nothing else, an exercise in nostalgia as I port all my old posts from Admissions over. I have to reformat and add pictures back to a lot of them, which will probably take me a few weeks. But it has been nice to track the journey of my own hopes and dreams starting from almost a decade (oof) ago. In particular, I find the posts from late junior to early senior year - where I was waffling about going to grad school and raving about how much I loved Seattle - particularly heartwarming. Grad school is equivalent to death by a thousand rejections, and on the day to day, I lament all the fellowships and conferences that I don’t get into. But on the whole, I have managed to have a pretty firm hand over the trajectory of my life and steer it almost exactly in the direction that I manifested all those years ago. That’s pretty cool and fun.

One thing that I still need to think about a little is what kind of blog I want this blog to be. I’ve been infernally plagued by Big Thoughts for sure, but I think constantly Posting about Big Thoughts would be insane (derogatory) for my mental health. Zawad suggested a “Comprehensive Guide to Crying on Campus” [UW edition], which I think is in the right spirit. Suggestions and prompts are very welcome; most of you know exactly where to find me.

I’m grateful to those of you who have been following since the Admissions days. A select few of you may have even read my AoPS blog, which, if you did, no you didn’t. But I hope that these incoherent blasts from my brain straight into your inboxes will be a net positive experience for you, and I’m sure it will be good for me too.