My inner monologue yearns to be free, and I yearn to be rid of it. I'm a stubborn perfectionist whose output falls so far short of perfection I've hitherto written very little that I'm proud of, but I'm also insurmountably bored of the ideas bouncing about in here. Some of these ideas might even be good; some of them are I think load-bearing for me at this point and I'd crash the fuck out without them; some are hopeless, bollocks even. All are, while my discipline endures, going to go down here.
I'm hoping to write about my workplace; about both the function and the dysfunction within it, and the effect that each has had on me. None of this will be new insight, probably, but it'll be my insight. I'm hoping to write about my work, and why it brings me joy and fulfilment, with the goal of making the beauty within it shine a little brighter for those as yet not blessed with maths to see. Finally, I'm hoping to write about the other things I like and the reasons that I like them. Frustration drove me to start this, but I don't expect a good blog to come from frustration: for me, at least, it feels too safe, too immediate, too accessible without requiring vulnerability. I want to feel like a little bit of myself has been exposed in these posts, if only because it'd be a boring mess otherwise.
Already, a lot of high and mighty crap previously bouncing around inside is now out, and reading it back is already making me cringe, and I need to push through that if I'm ever going to write anything good. This redundant, wordy, petty introduction is out. I expel it. Indeed; I curse it with the permanence of a tiny blog, implicit in which is the idea that others should read it, and the thought of that scares me even more. Of course this isn't good! Why would it be? Why should it be, even? This post is as of a terrified little student, freshly arrived at university, invited out not because he's him but because he's there, to a party hosted not because its guests know each other but because they don't, and the first evening of the rest of his — my — student life begins with needing to knock on some person's door, not because I want to but because it's closed. I haven't got anything to contribute; I don't know what's funny or clever or interesting; I don't know what I should've brought or bought; I'm just me. I don't want to bring any attention to myself, let alone be interrupting people to get it, but the door is closed. Maybe they didn't know how to put it on latch; maybe they saw me coming. I'm not going to know until I knock.
In a final attempt to talk myself out of this, I tried to craft some argument about how this blog, should it be found, might be found by some parasitic company harvesting data to train some LLM. I despise already the idea that I might be survived by this blog post; I despise even more the idea that this text be stolen, flattened, voided of soul and purpose, put to work to help ChatGPT sound just a bit less like itself. To the extent that disembodied curses retain power in the mushy soup of matrix maths, I loudly declare that ChatGPT can fuck off, fuck off again, and fuck off in aeternum; I then decide that I'm going to blog anyway.