Let Me Stop There

Yes, I’m still alive. It’s just that there has been nothing interesting to write about in the last couple of months.

Work continues as usual, and I have reached the stage of having zero motivation to do my job. I think that’s understandable – four years is about how much I can take before it’s time for a change, which was why the last few years of graduate school were such a struggle.

But I am a professional and it turns out, even with zero motivation, I am still more productive (in terms of research output) than most of my colleagues. I assume they are busy doing other useful things related to work, since the alternative is that they’re just not doing any work at all. Let me stop there, having learned a life lesson twenty years ago that talking about work on this blog is not a helpful exercise.

Things are opening up as the government has begun relaxing some Covid protocols (there is even talk it will drop the mask mandate, which I strongly disagree with) but I’m still very cautious and minimizing how much time I spend indoors in crowded areas, meaning I’m not doing very much socializing, and thus there are no stories or reflections to share either.

I should be reading more – I have a stack of books on my desk, including an autographed copy of All In that has done more traveling in the past year than I have – but I’m really struggling with motivation.

Instead, I spend most of my free time playing Royal Match. I know, I know. It all started when I was doing some research on video games and I was looking for some games to try besides Scrabble and Wordle. I’m absolutely not investing in a console, and though I tried some PC games like Epistory, it turns out I am not into long-term complex games, so Elden Ring is totally out of the question.

I did jump on the Severance bandwagon, and there may be a review of that coming up in a couple of weeks, when we have three consecutive public holidays in celebration of Labour Day and Eid Al-Fitr.

That’s it for now; hopefully there will be more things to talk about in the second half of the year.