Musings you’ll never read

Topics/tags: Meta musings, rambly

As you may recall from some recent end-of-month musings, one of my current goals is to read through the list of forthcoming musings and categorize each musing. But every time I step back and review the list of forthcoming musings, I realize that there are musings I’ve planned that I’ll never write as well as musings that I’ve started to write but will never finish. I thought it would be useful to reflect on a few of them.

I saw Hamilton last week. I watched the kickoff performance of the 2018 Iowa Ambassadors of Music early this week. I couldn’t find the energy to reflect on either performance on the night of the performance. It’s really hard to muse about a performance more than a few days later. So, while I may eventually muse about the Iowa Ambassadors of Music, it won’t be about that performance. I’m not sure I’ll ever muse about Hamilton. If I do, it will be about the cultural concept rather than about the performance.

You may recall that I was on a cruise a few weeks ago. The overpriced Internet connection on the cruise was awful. I spent some time on the last day of the cruise writing one musing about the awful connection and another about the experience of musing with an awful connection. I thought those would be the first musings I posted when I returned. Then my computer crashed. At this point, it’s not worth finishing those musings.

Then there are the musings that were supposed to be drafts of things that I was planning to write. At the end of spring semester, I added two new CSC 151 assignments [1], one on text generation and one on a very simple neural network. I thought that having them as prospective musings would encourage me to write early drafts. But I ended up writing them when I needed to post them and they never ended up as musings. It seems too late to post them. The same is true of a report on the code camps that I needed to provide to my funders. Maybe the next report on the code camps will appear as a musing [2].

It’s a bit sad to realize that these musings will never appear [3]. Nonetheless, I’ve learned to accept that I’ll never write everything I plan. After all, the number of potential topics seems to grow each month. As topics age, they may become less relevant. There are also a number of cases in which I no longer remember what I meant when I listed a topic; what did I mean when I just wrote hyphenation as a topic or application for Google thingy? In the former case, I’ve already written about the stupid joke, so I’m not sure what else I was thinking. In the latter, I’m not even sure what I was thinking of applying for.

Oh well. At least I got to muse indirectly about these topics.

[1] More precisely, I added two parts to one assignment. Students could choose which of the assignments to do.

[2] Certainly, some of the musings about the code camps will provide fodder for that report.

[3] It’s also sad to realize that I spent effort on musings that I’ll never finish. That’s okay, though. I got the pleasure of drafting them and I won’t get utility from completing them.

Version 1.0 of 2018-07-08.