Tag: blogging

A Mini Vacation

When family visits, time flies, especially when cross-country travel and a wedding are at hand.

After a long time, here was a chance for me to unwind, regroup, and realign for the rest of the year.

Once the festivities were over, my creative pipeline was all set for the big return. Unfortunately, a yet-to-be-unpacked suitcase came in the way. Literally.

Yes, yours truly is now all wrapped up in bed with a fractured toe.

After my encounter with said static pulverizer, I endured a few trips to the hospital. Realigning my toe was a novel experience; then came the buddy tape and a possible loss of circulation, and, lastly, a run-in with a podiatrist discussing my options moving forward.

The final verdict: I’m stuck with a medical walking boot for the next month.

I’m now enjoying my life at a relatively slower pace: one boot’s width at a time.

So while my toe bone gradually pulls itself together, I’m finally able to pull my weight in sitting down to write again and get back on the proverbial “creative writing horse”.

The crappy part of all this is that, as nature goes, my body’s energy is mostly being siphoned off towards fixing my bone.

That leaves me acting the better part of The Summer Carol, Mr. Ajay Peter Scrooge, stuck in solitary confinement, and contending with the ghosts of the nostalgic pre-injury past, grumpy injury-present, and exciting post-injury future.

But, as always, I like to look on the brighter side. Now, with this injury, I don’t have an excuse to run away from my writing, and there is a lot to do on that front.

Over the course of the past year, I have been gradually building up my efforts toward my goals in creative writing. In the past six months, I have made some progress, submitting my stories to publishers and magazines.

The waiting period for a response continues, but in the meantime, I’m ramping up efforts to pull together an author site that will serve as a connective hub for The Pensive Reverie and my revamped (currently under construction) science writing blog, The Procrastinating Scientist.

It also helps that I finally get to have more time on my plate. With my daughter starting primary school very soon and my wife jumping into her practicums as a medical tech, I get to tweak my daily schedule to focus a bit more on my creative pursuits.

The encroaching silence of my home is a little unnerving. There is also the melancholy that accompanies seeing your kid grow up so fast. But writing about it helps, and so do all the other exciting projects awaiting completion.

With that said, you can expect to see me as a regular again, albeit dealing with the frustrations of a broken toe, and with another entry to share very soon!

To be Continued…

“Saying is one thing; doing is another.”

I spent the last few months in what amounted to a roller-coaster ride “parallel processing” all the variables that regulate my present life, and those I must now consider for my future.

I’m a guy who likes to live in the moment and not have to think too far ahead so, obviously, this was a problem. The floodgates opened with a series of conversations at work after I had successfully completed my candidacy examination.

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I was perfectly poised at the halfway point of my PhD degree, and on a near-constant basis, caught up in various conversations revolving around a necessity to plan ahead and begin setting the foundations for my career aspirations.

While much of the advice I received was in good spirit, it was quite overwhelming to take in all at once. It also served as a bitter pill that I hadn’t fully pushed myself to ask the important questions and seek the necessary answers for my future.

Thankfully, with this post, I can confidently say that I’m now on the road to getting my shit together and fully committing to my career aspirations.

Passions vs. Priorities

The world revolves around money, and I would be stupid to fool myself otherwise. I needed a good plan, and a backup to that plan, on top of another backup to my backup.

With that said, I spent the last few months heavily researching, not so much in science, but in life. I identified my passions as well as the priorities that come naturally as you grow older. As usual, it will ultimately be a balancing act, and one that I’m eager to dive into.

The goal: find a secure day-time job that fits my academic and scientific interests (ideally, a science writer), and serve as somewhat of a financial coverage, while simultaneously moonlight as a writer/artist….

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Who will take over the world!

Teaching at the university… 

My outlook on such a future was further strengthened in a recent opportunity as a guest lecturer for a higher-level undergraduate course at the university. As a teenager, I was a huge fan of the works of Carl Sagan. I was captivated by his ability to communicate complicated concepts in such concise and measured language.

Preparing for the lecture, I would try to emulate Sagan in my own way.  Unlike the usual recipe of wrestling with the concepts in my own privacy, I would wrestle with ideas on how to communicate my research to these undergraduate students.

The lecture itself would go “smoothly,”

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From what I gathered talking to a few of the students, they seemed to have understood the points I had tried to get across. It was also clear I had a long way to go until I could reach the level of Dr. Sagan. Set against the backdrop of inner monologues on my career aspirations, the guest lecture experience was beneficial and altogether, a lot of fun.  

Looking ahead

With that being said, I am now in full-time pursuit of setting the foundations of my career in writing and art. Moving forward, there are two major changes I wished to share with my readers:

(1) A science blog, established independently from The Pensive Reverie, that I will publish this coming week on WordPress. It will serve as my primary platform towards my efforts to becoming a science writer.

(2) The continuation and refocusing of The Pensive Reverie as more of a personal outlet (along the lines of this post’s content) to share my daily adventures and thoughts in my efforts to moonlight as an author/artist.

That covers most of the fun surprises I have in store for all of you. I will see you all again very soon with a new post, and a new blog to boot on top of it!