palimpsest

I deleted my old blog, caeusura, in 2019 and then at the start of 2020 I began this blog. I thought it was gone forever but when I checked the wayback machine, the whole thing was there. 

I've been working my way through the posts and adapting some of them to this blog. My overwhelming impression as I read through the old posts I wrote between 2014 and 2019 is one of 'cringe'. For that reason, a lot of the posts, I don't bother adapting them or using any of them. Sometimes I'll use and adapt a whole post, and sometimes I'll take a few lines or an idea and build a new post from that. 

It's very weird to think that this blog is now older than my old blog. 

I'm glad that I was able to retrieve my old blog because it means nothing - at least nothing that I want to keep - has been lost. 

in the mirror

Creating art of some kind is validating because it's an expression of individual humanity, an expression of character. We can't see ourselves. Just as, physically we can't see ourselves unless we look in a mirror, mentally and spiritually, it's the same. But when you create something, whether in writing, music, paint, pixels or whatever, it's like looking in a mirror because you see the expression of yourself. 

blog timeline

The first time I heard the word 'blog' was this century. It was in 2004 at UNSW in a thesis seminar. We went around the room and each person talked about their thesis, and one person said that they were doing their thesis on 'weblogs', which, they told us, is sometimes abbreviated to 'blogs'. 

Then a couple of years (I can't remember exactly) after that, I started my own blog. My blog has been through three iterations, this one being the latest. So, the timeline looks a bit like this:

2006 - 2013 version 1

2014 - 2019 'caeusura'

2020 - present, 'voracioutee' 

the folly of procedures

Something I've noticed, especially working with Units of Competency when I was a business trainer, is that, when you try to document work tasks and roles in words, in a thorough and systematic way, simple things become complicated. 

Documenting of a job becomes a job in itself, and the task of documenting is not always relevant or helpful. Take a simple task like making a cup of coffee. Writing a procedure that explains how to do that task is quite a difficult thing, because you have to assume that the reader doesn't know anything about making coffee. So, you have to tell them how much water to put in the kettle, and that the water will get very hot so be careful not to spill it on yourself, and there will be extra steps depending on how much, if any, sugar the person wants in their coffee, and then there's the question of milk and getting the milk out of the fridge and opening the milk, and putting the milk back in the fridge afterwards, and the whole procedure has to be repeated as many times as there are people you're making coffee for, etc

And does having that written procedure help at all with doing the task well? 

education system

In school, teachers always make assessments of students based on certain criteria and how those criteria apply to all the students they've known. So, it's easy for them to misjudge students' motives and character. 

stuff of novels

I read a book by James Fenimore Cooper at uni, and I thought it was so boring and slow moving, but now I look back on it and see it as very earthy and deep - a fine work of literature, and I want to read more of him. 

There have been a few classic novels that I felt that way about, which isn't surprising. Life and the world were more slow moving in the past. It's surprising that I don't feel like that more often with old novels, but I don't. Reading Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, etc...although they were written in the nineteenth century, they don't feel slow moving. 

Sometimes more modern novels seem very slow moving. Actually, they are very slow moving. I find that's the case with some of Thomas Mann's works. I started reading Joseph and his Brothers, and I just couldn't do it. It just refused to start. It begins with a kind of meditation the subject of which I can't remember. I just remember that nothing of substance happened and I kept reading - 10 pages, 20 pages - and still nothing definite. So, I gave up. 

It makes me think that maybe some literature from the past is lost to us. No one can read certain books because our minds don't work the way they did in the past. 

goals don't work the way you think

The story of how you resolved to do something and then worked towards it and persevered and eventually achieved it is always a story that you tell afterwards. Always a distortion.