200 Posts

I wasn't sure which of a few things I was going to write about here, but most of them got put by the wayside when I noticed that this will be the 200th post to this blog. An arbitrary round number for sure, but it still represents a fair amount of time and thought. A fair bit has changed since I started this blog, but many things are still the same.

When I started I was about halfway through a PhD, and trying to decide if I wanted to keep going. The blog was an outlet for me to try and get my thoughts out in a somewhat coherent way. The posts were a lot more introspective, philosophical and emotional. Part of this was because I didn't really expect anyone to read it. It was a journal that just happened to be available to anyone who randomly came across it. It probably says something about me that I felt more comfortable opening up to random strangers than to friends and family, but given how unlikely it was that anyone actually read it at that stage, it was more a theoretical point than a practical one.

Since then I dropped out of my PhD and left academia, worked in a call center for about a year, spent about 6 months unemployed, done a little IT contracting of various levels of respectability, tutored and am now working in another country. I've visited Thailand, and just now Laos. I've gone from relative affluence to living paycheck to paycheck, and am on the way back to relative affluence (once my advance is paid off this month).

There has been one death in my immediate family, and two more in the second degree of separation. I went to two of the funerals, but due to distance and timing I didn't attend the third. These deaths have all been in the one family which has made them so much more devastating for those involved that just three randomly distributed deaths would have been.

Internally, not that much has changed. I'm still uncommunicative with a lot of people, take a long time to open up to new people, etc, etc. I get along well with the people I work with, but don't do much outside of work with them. I spend a bit of time with my housemates, but not a lot. All of the touristy stuff I've done around the place has been on my own. Sometimes I look at the people who came here around the same time or later and how much more involved with other people they are and wonder how the hell they do it.

Well, I'm going to finish this one here, as I seem to have quite distracted myself (I started to check if I was the first or zeroth degree of separation from me and have ended up about to read a maths paper by the actress who played Winnie Cooper in the Wonder Years. The chain goes something like this Six degrees of separation -> Bacon number -> Erdos-Bacon number -> Danica McKellar. Four degrees, how easy is that.).

End Post
Writing time: 1 hour 23 minutes (less distractions previously mentioned)
Time since last post: 10 days
Current media: iTunes shuffle of all the track 3s - currently Synaesthetic by the Blue Man Group