Originally published in February 2023, access restored April 2024.
Musings behind a new year’s theme.
0. Introduction
As I recall, it has been proposed by YouTuber CGP Grey, and his sources, that instead of new year’s resolutions, a new year / season / month’s “theme” might be more effective and enduring in changing one’s behaviour.
In short, a theme is a much broader — insofar forgiving — target than a fixed goal. Rather than painting glowing orange on a finish line banner that our ape brains have trouble navigating to (or spotting at first glance), a theme is a series of signposts, wherever there are branching paths in life — nudging our behaviour towards the goal whenever options arise.
And for this year, to partially fulfil my degree of course, but also to better pursue my dream of one day becoming a competent scientist, my theme is to write.
Write, not professionally, not commercially, and surprisingly not only within physics, not even science fiction. I am not limiting this theme artificially. Just write.
1. What Writing Means to Me
I wish to avoid tossing around hefty concepts here, but a theoretical motivation chapter is always nice for me. A habit I carry from work, really.
I sometimes refer to my music composition (mis)endeavours, Iridium Point, as “scratching on the surface of time”. I guess this spirit carries over to my writing efforts in general.
Philosophically, to me, writing is a way to directly interface with time, on the human scales anyway. To write is to access memories in a self-directed manner, and to either condense, or acquire condensed, wisdom.
Culturally, writing is an elevated way of humanity’s favourite past-time, story telling — a reproducible one, and one that allows far more complex structures than spoken words alone can carry. As such, within and outside a written story, one enjoys the liberty to hop across the confines of space and time.
Physically, writing is a way to speak louder than any single vocal cord and signal amplifier system can allow, while keeping your mouth shut most of the time. Some of my earlier works (and this website itself) carry an optimistic notion that writing may survive longer than my physical existence, and reach out to people and circumstances I have no idea about. This is a high hope, but a worthy picture to have in mind. Still, because it is solo and quiet, writing also should (return to) fit right in my daily lifestyle.
Lastly of course, financially, writing is how I justified my purchase of a mechanical keyboard, and I should probably start using it properly. Writing widely might help me type physics faster as well in the long run.
2. Writing for WHom?
As someone who’s done more than half of all his writing in an exam room, and now forever barred from re-entering one, I realise I am occasionally left with a fundamental confusion when I create a new blank Pages document: who am I writing for?
To rebel against automated content generators?
Naturally yes, but that’s not the point.
To impress markers and score points?
No.
I guess it’s fair to say I was good at scoring essay points. Still, the 600-character limit of school is far behind me, and I am only gradually realising that the implicit final goal of my (every?) education system was for people to transfer the acquired skills and tricks into the real world, and not packaging all education into a duffle bag called “cringe” and never opening it again. To re-open it, in my case, requires a critical self-examination.
Writing for exams, as friendly and personal as the tone may be, is a transactional and alienating activity. Observations and experiences give way to standard-issue parts, and sometimes embellished or fabricated ideas. I wrote an award-winning essay in middle school about “Entering Nature” more than a decade before I had my first multi-day tramping experience. As genuine as I felt I was when writing that, and as calm as I convinced myself I was in my story, riding in a tour bus in Yosemite and only “Entering Nature” for toilet break and photos, the vision contained in my essay was no match for a real experience.
Of course, this realisation does not influence the normal utilitarian form of writing I have been doing anyway, namely the various cover letters and of course my thesis. For those, I do still have examiners or equivalent.
To attract friends and romantic interests?
No.
Well, RRFP (a collection of short poems you can find around here) was cut out for that purpose, but I’ve not really explored what writing personally with passion and emotion is like anyway, sans a few attempts at love letters and letters of apology that would usually follow.
To be remembered?
No?
If anything, I hope I get remembered by my physics and secondary effects that come with my technical training — my childhood dream was to design and build cars after all, and nowadays I am worryingly interested in civil aviation — that kinds of stuff.
Sure I have an autobiography project grilling over the back-burner, but I don’t really live life thinking about what it does to my legacy — yet, and perhaps used to — which brings us to …
3. Some Nebulous End Matter
How my current self forms any narrative of personal experiences is interesting, at least as far as I am concerned.
Trapped in my own head, I answer to my conscience and have little to no ways of calibrating that. This is why I think I should write. To leave a mark, maybe yes, but ultimately to see myself from more angles than first-person experience allows.
I rather dearly remember a scene from the Matrix Animated Series (one of the weird shows they put on county-level TV stations) quite dearly. It perhaps depicted the first-person experience of an incubated child when the matrix glitched, and he was trapped in a frozen state of the world, ending up at the same place no matter where he ran.
Well I watched it during my childhood so it’s equally likely it gave me a biased prior with which I experienced my own. But I have been at the same place for quite a while too.
At the back of my mind has always been an ordinary family lunch at our second apartment, maybe the first, memory blends. I would be seated at the table, we haven’t gotten rid of our wooden one yet — I would do so much math on it during middle school.
The kitchen window would be open, I would detect whiffs from the lunch of our neighbours of varying cooking ability, and hear various exhaust fans in the building turn on and off, and then my father’s cooking. Potatoes and eggplants should have been involved, and he would always plate the stir-fry precisely just as my mother returns from morning teaching.
We would talk, and eventually they’d ask me “how was school?”
And that would be where I started to tell my stories.
Yourong Frank Wang 