Metapost

There are two (2) things that make it a little bit harder for me to blog these days. The first is that I am sleeping tons better than I'm used to. I don't want to jinx it -- and given how much sleep is affected by some deep level of the subconscious that seems like a real possibility -- but at the moment I keep doing this weird thing where I turn off my reading light, shut my eyes, and am asleep within about twenty minutes. No more mulling over deep thoughts in the middle of the night. The other thing is that I spend most of my working hours thinking quite hard. My post-doc academic jobs have involved large amounts of what is essentially just data entry. Once you know how to take book X and summarise its position on charter/manuscript Y into database Z (hint: start at the index) you find that it's not quite taking up all your brain, not to mention that there's all the time you spend physically tracking down a copy of book X, backing up database Z, etc etc. Whereas mundane activities are rare in my current employment. Most days I do something which I had no idea how to do the previous day. I have to do a lot of thinking abstractly about organisation and patterns, and I also do a lot of learning to use new tools.

It's not that I don't have things to blog about. I've been doing quite a bit of thinking about gender in particular, because I find myself in a very male-dominated though thankfully not macho environment. I've been doing some STEM ambassador work (to encourage the youth in its regard for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths, though I really only care about computer programming) because I want there to be more visible female computer programmers and the only one whose visibility I get to control is me. I really want to blog about these things. I fear that maybe not blogging about them is a sign that I haven't been getting the chance to think about them to semi-finishedness.

And if I haven't been thinking about those things fully, there may be more important but less to-be-blogged-about things that I haven't been considering. I'm off next week on the Corpus Christi College annual trip to the monastery of Bec, which will give me some time to think about God and truth. But as for blog things I think maybe I should try to do what I would do with a complicated task at work, e.g. break it down into several different small parts and write short clear things for each one.