And Whither then? I cannot say

I started writing this blog over two and a half years ago. I'd been toying with the idea of starting a blog for a long time. It was a response to a growing frustration at my lack of engagement with the world, my lack, for want of a better word, of production. I had felt that throughout my twenties I had read, watched, listened to so much. I had consumed voraciously. And I pondered and digested my consumption. Yet nothing came of it. I left no mark.
So, eventually, restless, I resolved to start writing about something, anything. It is a small outlet. I am not so presumptuous as to think any of these private thoughts are actually unique or insightful. Yet I wished to return something. And I needed an outlet for those disquisitions and diatribes I would compose in my head at two in the morning, distilling a day's worth of information overload.
In many ways, this blog surprised me. It lasted longer than I thought. It wandered more then I thought. One constant was remains that I cannot predict which posts will resonate and which won't. I guess I still don't know my audience. Some posts I considered very niche have gone far. Some of the posts of which I remain proudest linger unloved.
From the beginning, this blog has been tied to my twitter presence. And in light of what has happened with the world lately, my twitter presence has dwindled. I have had to preserve myself, control my engagement. Initially, I felt guilty, like I was abandoning the fight. But I've made my peace now. I can fight better if I can control my energy. And leaving twitter lets me do that.
I had learnt that lesson earlier with this blog. I realised reasonably soon that posts that were reactions to what was going on on twitter were not always my best. And so I started deliberately not writing blog posts in response to twitter issues. Or entwining them with thoughts I had for a long time. So my blog remained slightly esoteric, detached, the results, I hope, of my idiosyncratic observation of world. After all, I'd staked a claim in the lineage of Montaigne, and I decided to stay there.
But now that I have withdrawn from twitter, can the blog exist separately? In one sense, no. Traffic to my blog is almost entirely from twitter. Without my twitter presence, my readership will dwindle. But in another sense, yes. I am proud of this blog. I find I am attached to some of this writing. That I want to be associated with it. It has been suggested to me more than once that I should take it down as a junior academic, and I have found I cannot, no, I do not want to do it. There are things here that I feel are of value.
On the other hand, no one can deny I've been writing less here of lately. Why? In part, because when it comes to our current unpleasantness, I don't know that anything I have to say is of any value. I've become self conscious in the sea of verbiage of broadly varying quality that has accompanied the turbulence of these months. Does my writing help? Does my voice improve? Or is it yet more half baked, superficially convincing ramblings of an over educated person with an exaggerated sense of his own intellect and importance?
All this to say, I have not written much of late. But the more I think of it, the more I want to write here again. Perhaps write less, perhaps write better, but I cannot leave this place, not yet.
So, if you still know it exists, watch this space. Because here, still, my voice will be heard.

A good start

The holiday season is finally coming to a close, and as always, I have not done as much work as I hoped I would. I long ago accepted that work does not get done over the Christmas break. Now that Christmas invariably involves travelling across an ocean to engage in back to back coffee, lunch, drinks, and dinner with all my friends and family back home, this is doubly true.
I have no regrets about this. I have not been home in over a year, and so for the ten days I was away, my friends and family (and my home town, that I miss deeply) had my undivided attention. I got to see everyone I could. I spent time with my siblings, my mother, my two nephews, and my niece. I saw my oldest friend, whom I've known since I was six. It was important work.
That being said, I had set myself one objective. About two years ago, a friend and colleague of mine and I had discussed a collaboration. It was a side project, but an interesting one, and potentially a new avenue in which to use the methods I focused on in my PhD. It isn't too much work on my part, and the potential returns are large. But life got in the way, and the project has stalled since those discussions. That friend and I will be meeting at the SICB meetings in West Palm Beach later this month, and we had more or less decided that, if we had made no progress by then, the project would be shelved.
It is one of those make or break moments, when you decide how important something is. Well, it appears this was important to me, because this morning I had the workflow breakthrough I was looking for: I've figured out the key data processing steps we need to make this project work. I'm excited again. And I'm taking this as a good sign for 2015: that on the 2nd of January, despite being ill, I got up, went to the local coffee shop (I'm still not home) and worked for a solid three hours until the things I wanted to achieve got done. I still enjoy this, I still want to do this, and there are parts of it I'm actually pretty good at.
So happy new year everybody. May 2015 be filled with little moments like this one.