This project was a bit of a mess!! If this was not required for class I don’t think that I would be doing a write up for this. However, something about documenting failures and progress etc. etc.

Final project: My writing about going to 10 different churches in one year.

What matters to me?

Last week in class, we explored our priorities. This took the form of a simple “What is important to me right now?” worksheet where we marked our responses on sliders. I couldn’t find my original worksheet so I recreated it below.

priority slider

The worksheet with 8 priority sliders.

I think this shows my intention with grad school. I want to take advantage of the resources of the program and the university as much as possible, and go deep in my projects and my craft. In my non-grad school life I am very good at exploring, trying new technologies, and starting new projects. In this program I want to focus on finishing them.

One of the biggest things I wanted to finish was writings that have been swirling around my head for years. Storytelling through writing was never a strong suit for me, and not something I have done with any regular cadence or intention since high school. Some of the storys I want to tell are experiences that I’ve been meaning to document, ideas I wanted to explore, or projects I’ve finished but never written up. For my exploratory making project, I wanted to finally write one of these. I have a long Notes app note on my phone with dozens of these topics, and I picked one mostly at random - counterfeit somalian stamps of Chinese comonauts.

However, I recently started a small writing circle on Friday nights at Qawah house in Brooklyn, and this past Friday, the prompt was to write about a recent large mindset shift. For me, my relationship with religion immediately came top of mind and I started writing about my past new years resolution - visiting 10 different churches in one year. It genuinely impacted my life and is something that I find myself talking about often in casual conversation. Writing about it felt more interesting and personal then my other idea, so I decided to stick with it for this project (and will hopefully write up the other story one day!).

Where it went wrong

I went to school on the weekend to get some work done on all my various assignments - but what I saw on the floor didn’t help me. Seemingly every one of my classmates were working on projects that were way cooler than my writing. 3D printing, electronics, and sewing projects to name a few. I got extreme FOMO from everything I was seeing and had a strong desire to completely restart. However I had already committed to going to an HTML picnic, and Storm King on Saturday and Sunday, not to mention all the other readings, team meetings, and projects I needed to finish. I didn’t have enough time!

Eventually, I got so paralyzed I wasn’t even working on on my writing, I was working on an ongoing effort to migrate my blog from Jekyll to SvelteKit - another project I’ve been procrastinating for years. I spent 10+ hours on that effort, which will probably end up taking much more time. This led tome still at school at 5am on Sunday night / Monday morning, finishing a rough draft my blog post, with only the bare bones of a SvelteKit blog. Presenting the next day in class, I was embaressed by what I had to show. Even the writing was not up to the quality I wanted, and I like I could have done so much better.

Talking to one of my classmates, Queenie Wu, I think the real challenge of this project for me was not the form or funciton, but just sticking to anything. The prompt of the project - “create something” was prohibitively open-ended for me, and led me to doubt my initial idea and I ended up under-executing on that. I want to be better at sticking to what I commit to, and not get paralyzed like this again going forward in the program.