I don’t have much positive to say about the PhD experience, and so I will refrain from generating a list of things that feel like they went awry. Some legitimately did, such as a year of the professors striking in my second year. I suspect after this is over I will have more positive feelings, or I will simply box the whole thing up and ignore it. I find many of my friends with humanities PhDs feel this way. Perhaps, vs the science PhDs, the ‘answer’ is less clear as we suffer with less math in our work?

On the path to completion, I started picking up books about getting a PhD, what is the student responsibility, the supervisor, what to expect year by year. When I began the program, I was unsure how things would unfold. I was aware that I was shifting to foreign school system, that the language would or could be different, and that my academic background was not in the same field of study. And that I would be living in a city that I had previously not enjoyed living in. Retrospectively, I wonder, ‘What was I thinking?” However, the PhD is my fourth degree, and I always think this, so perhaps a different problem we do not need to discuss. But the books themselves were very interesting. What are the responsibilities of the players, what is the expectation of the work itself, how to expect things to play out. A map, which, as I understand it, part of the purpose of the PhD is to find the map yourself, and do the entire thing on one’s own, whilst making a unique contribution to knowledge.

Prior to the PhD I was running a research program at the National Institutes of Health. The focus of this is on how people relate to health, well-being, their knowledge on genomics and health topics, and their ability to engage both digitally and in person with a focus on positive outcomes. I know the difference between academic research (we worked with Vanderbilt a lot, and they spent a lot of time escalating), and research done to inform design and information decisions. It is an advantage to come to a PhD with broad and deep knowledge on how to run a research program, how to set up a study, and how to evaluate outcomes. Also a bonus, being able to write.

The truth of my situation is, I love knowledge, studying, deep diving, engaging with others on discussions of topics of curiousity, and, of course, books. Though, I will note, there are fewer books in libraries these days, so often they are digital, but at least university libraries, so far in my experience, have open stacks, so I can wander about and see the books I didn’t know I needed to read. I do think the way knowledge transfers into my brain via analogue tools is more sticky, but I cannot afford to be $180 Routledge books, just to see if I want what is inside them. A different topic on the inaccessibility of knowledge, but very notable in doing this work.

In the course of writing my PhD, I kept a project journal. This is a Scrivener document with a new page for each date. It is currently 170,000 words long. For comparison, my PhD can be a max of 100,000 words, and is more likely to be shorter, closer to 75,000, because I like to be concise, when I can.

My Magnet book was 30,000 words and it was an agony to write. I don’t know why, retrospectively, as it was a topic I had been steeped in for years, and when I sat to write, I had enough research to write a much longer book. I believe the first problem was lack of solitude. I had rented a friend’s place who was going to be away, but then he was not. I function best in a flow state that doesn’t break for sleep or anything else. I live inside my head, and things continue on a calm churn level. I don’t sleep a lot in this state, but it is highly productive. This is how I managed to read nearly 300 books in the first year of the Adelphi Project. I almost never broke flow state, and if I did, it was easy to return to it, in the solitude of my East Village Apartment, and no linear time that required me.

What is amazing to me with the thesis, much like the magnet book, it is all in my head, been researching for years, now just to the writing up stage, feeling late, and thus highly focused. I have another Scrivener document that has every book or article I read through out the course of this, and notes on when I read it, what was interesting, things to follow up, and any quotes I think might be of use. There are over 1000 entries, which I learned, is a little unusual. But then, I read.

Come to the now, and I am writing 17,000 words a week. Which means a complete draft in four weeks. The outcome is rougher than I usually like a draft, and the editing phase and the weaving phase will need more time, but the writing process, well, it fascinates me. Part is the, ‘get this thing away from me’ state that I think all PhD students must hit, if they want to finish. Part is that I am alone and in flow, and I have removed all ‘noise’ from my ilfe. It isn’t healthy, but it is efficient. I work, and I sleep. I walk, occasionally, and I eat, and I pull weeds from the largely abandoned flower beds in the yard outside. Murder as method?

A standard non-fiction book runs 50,000 to 75,000 words. To the left of where I am sitting there are boxes of research I have done on several topics of great interest to me. I tend to research, and box things, and think about them for a decade, and not write them. I think it is time to reset my head for what an expected output of my time could be.

The Magnet book was also agonizing because I was assigned a series of pregnant editors who each went on maternity leave whilst I was in the process, then a gap, then a new one, with new ideas, and considerations. I disliked the process so much, fact-checking was done via Wikipedia and errors sent to me were wrong in Wikipedia, not in the scientific journal articles I had pulled the data from, disagreements on the use of pronouns for non-human beings, disagreements on translations I did myself — though I think this was missing by the commenters, even though it was noted. Suffice to say, every book I considered writing after that one, I simply refused. I had no interest in selling a proposal, and no focus to simply write the books and be done with them. It turned me off dealing with publishing full stop. I have published chapters in collections since then, but little else. I wasn’t proud of the output, and I don’t want to repeat that. A good lesson, and hopefully one that dies in obscurity (so obviously I should not be writing about it here!)

Recently in reading the Paris Review interview with Elliot Weinberger, I paraphrase, he said something along the lines that when he is done with a book it is done. He is not asking for feedback or editing, he has written the book he wants to publish. Et voila! I admire this, not only because of his writing, but also the knowledge that the book is the book. This would require me to apply more time and focus to my work. Which, in return, requires more solitude. But I am not averse to this.

At the end of it all, I find that I really enjoy writing my thesis (British PhD speak, US is dissertation). And I do in fact still like the topic, though of course it is narrower than where I began, and there is a lot more I would have liked to have done. If I’d thought about it earlier, and how it is I could have done it.

And now, I must go finish this week’s 17,000 words. Friday is editing day, though I am about 2,000 words short, so I shall do both. I look forward to the end of this process, and am also thankful for it, as I suspect I may do more writing when I am done, on topics meant to be more public, and that are really rather fascinating. Eventually, you can be the judge. of that.

I learned to read around three or four. A neighbour child had a small schoolhouse in the hard and would gather up all the littler ones to teach us. I grew up in a house full of books, so playing school, in which all I did was sit around and read things, well, let’s just say I showed up.

It was surprising to my parents to realize I could read. I was mimicking my father and sitting at the table reading the paper, perusing sections, pausing, and a comment was made about how cute it was that I was turning the pages, so I started reading aloud. My mother was a library, and my older brother was learning to read in kindergarten, so there were always books.

I cannot remember a time without books. We had abridged editions of the classics as kids, The Count of Monte Cristo was my favorite, and second, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I read all the books in our house, and quite a few in the neighbours as well, as they owned an Encylcopedia Britannica, and I’d go over on Saturday mornings after I wasn’t needed for anything else, and slowly read it from start to finish. By mid-highschool I had read all the books in the library. For those who do not recall small town libraries full of paper books, there was a particular section on criticism that fascinated me. It also bored me. Who thought so much and like this, that they wrote these things?

In my third year of highschool I took a part time job at a used bookstore. Small wages, but I was allowed to borrow and read any book I wanted, I just had to return them. A new lending library that had a lot more trash in it than the town library, mysteries, murders, policiers, romances. I read them all, though I was more embarrassed by these and reading of things such as Harlequin Romances was done as surreptitiously as possible.

As an undergrad, surprising, I am sure, I took on work a few days a week in the library. I worked in interlibrary loan and special collections. I read everything I could get my hands on. Start at this time, I began tracking what I read in old chemistry notebooks. Grey blue covers, yellow lined and numbered pages, hard covered. Every book, my thoughts, other things to read, words I had learned, I kept these for perhaps 20 years, until the manufacturer discontinued them. I tried several new formats, similar structures, but none really ever did the trick. The same company makes them again but the texture of the cover is different and they are purple. I have quite a few that are blank, bought in hopes that I would restart, but the new format never caught on. Reading back on the old ones, there is a lot I had forgotten, but it is also interesting to see who I was, what I was thinking, what I was reading.

When I graduated from undergrad and moved to SF I was too poor to buy books. I always had been, but I had always had libraries. Now I was without and needed to be careful about spending. I lived around the corner from a bookstore, and allocated a purchase a book a week.

I was, for some reason, very curious about the meaning of the world, my role in it, if there was some way of knowing anything. I read classics, philosophy, history, mysticism, religious studies, and physics and maths books. I borrowed from those who would lend, bought what I could, and spent, according to these notebooks, two years trying to answer questions. One day, I stopped. I decided I would never be able to answer questions and truly know, so reading these was not necessary. I didn’t stop pondering and considering, I just stopped pour dense and complicated things into my soul.

My upstairs neighbours read Chandler and noir, so I borrowed from them. The man around the corner gave me my first Calasso book, opening that thread that continues til this day. San Francisco in the early 90s was full of so many curious people, that my book borrowing habits covered anything and everything. Those days, if you remember, not only did we read, we sat around and talked about them til all hours. My friend Dino and I, in particular, skinny 20 somethings on motorcycles, would meet up at bars in the afternoons to talk about philosophy or theory or design or art.

This pattern continued, but also, modified. I started reading in ‘chunks’, books that felt related to each other in some way so I was getting many points of view at the same time, synthesized down into what I hoped was a more rounded experience of whatever topic obsessed me. I started to buy books, and for most of my early adult life they were shelved geographically. I had an enormous India section, and for a long time, Albania, South Africa, and others. Pull a thread on the sections the the questions tumbled out, what drove me in that direction.

These days my books are not really shelved, and they are certainly in no order, except the occasional shelf here and there. There are selves on south asian religions, and a chunk of buddhism. The Adelphi books, of which I have over a thousand, core and related, are generally close together. But sometimes they are order publication number, and sometimes by author’s last name. There are troubles though, the Blixen Dinesen and similar issues where different names appear in different countries.

Today there are at least a hundred books around me in stacks, the shelves are a disaster, the books are spread across five rooms and, at last count, there are 28 book cases in this house — not all books are mine.

For most of my life I have preferred to read a book in a single sitting. This is good and bad. The single sitting experience is immersive and obsessive, I get so far deep into the thing, that I can’t stop. Literally, no matter how insane it might be, I stay up til two or three in the morning. I was indeed that child with a flashlight hiding away to not stop reading, but I don’t remember my parents caring much. As long as I was out the door in the morning on time, and didn’t sleep during the day, there was a big of a shrugging sensation. I am a gen x kid though, so it could just have been the time.

Digital books make obsessive reading worse. It is easier to pass out with a paper book on my face than break me away from a device. I try not to read on devices, but this past year I made that harder, by deciding that I would buy no books for a year — in any format. I had a library card, but I found Libby, so now I can read too late, and in general it is bad.

At the end stages of my PhD — I can’t help but want to create a terminal capitalism like phrase for what this is, the closest I get is to describing it as a state of thesis psychosis, I read papers and books, or re-read bits of them when I am looking for things, or I read sorbet. Sorbet, the books I can forget as soon as I read them, because the reason I read them is to not be present in my life, or in my thesis, to give pause. It reminds me of the limoncello granita one finds in Amalfi, which might be a better choice for some reasons, but worse for many others.

My thesis is due in 159 days now, draft sooner, books don’t really need to be read for that, but sometimes I use them to forget. Not buying books is a lot easier than I expected. Even though there are books I would have bought, earlier me, unbridled version, I feel a bit thankful that I don’t need to buy them and read them now, as it is disallowed. Oh, and for the record, I read the books I buy. Because I can’t help myself.

A few years ago W. tried to calculate how many books he had left to read in his life, based on his pace and his life expectancy. It was very low, I think he decided at the high end it would be 2000. This might not seem low, but there were years, especially Adelphi years, where I read over 300 books a year. Mortality and Morbidity report suggests I have far more than six years to live, though given the state of the US today, those numbers may start trending down faster than they have been.

But where was I? Oh yes, the ease with which I do not buy books, even though I still go in bookstores and read the covers and sometimes some of the books. I take their pictures, too, as though I will take the book from the library or remember to buy it when the year is up.

But here’s the thing. Not reading is…pleasant. And not in the way I didn’t read for a year when undergoing cancer treatment. That time, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t think either, and frankly, moving about was hard as well. So I know I can go a year without reading, but I am thinking of doing it again, this time by choice.

I think it will let me slow down, spend more time having other people telling me what they read and what they learned from it — please keep reading, friends. I hope it will get me to spend more time in nature and looking at the sky and the sea. I would have to spend my time differently. I don’t want to replace reading with some mindless act, watching Netflix or baking, or the like.

I don’t what what the rules would be. Could I re-read my book journals from those twenty years? Rethink all the things previously thought? And what about other forms? I can read journal articles? For several years in the mid 2010s I read every journal article on language translation and AI, and wrote about them. That seems ok, more engaged. Can stopping reading books make me more engaged with the world? I think it will.

There are other things I want to make, as well. With my hands, as well as with my mind. I look forward to this, this idea, anyway. But perhaps what I need to be is more discerning and thoughtful about what I read and why. But no, I think it is not that. I feel like I have gotten out of touch with what is within me, my mind and beyond, whatever that is, and the only way to get back to this is to stop adding to it, shuffle back through, unload some things. I get an image, suddenly, of storage wars, and the clean out phase. Perhaps there are too many words me my head, in so many languages, and mathematical equations, and the sounds of squealing pigs (where did that come from?), and I just need it all to find ease in silence again, and then spin back into meaningful shapes, not these fracture unrecognizable monsters.

What would I find in there? Compelled to find out. But first, I must find the escape velocity, decide the laws of physics of my engine, and pack what is necessary. It amuses me to consider blogging the books I did not read, but would consider, if I were reading, with entirely fabricated reviews on non-intervention.

Now I must go reshelve these books, and consider throwing out every piece of paper I have printed in the past two years. Remove, replace, resign, reform. Dance. Yes, let us dance.

I do like numbers. Some of my favorite telephone conversations from my 20s and 30s were discussing graph theory and Riemann space with my father. I have two different collections of books on the history of math, one that belonged to a mathematics and physics majoring ex-boyfriend from undergrad, and the second a series of five books on the history of maths by century and millennia. From 19 til 25 almost every person I was involved with was a physicist or a virgo, and quite a few, both. Patterns.

I find numbers soothing at time but do not actually like to do math. I aced it through out academia, following in my father’s footsteps of scoring more than 100 on most tests. He graduated with a degree in math, I went the route of linguistics. Languages, however, are math, in my estimation. Most of them, anyway. But not all. Brasilian Portuguese is all imaginary numbers and swing states, for example.

162 is not math. It is a number, normal, not even complex. It does nothing for us, but mark, and in this case, it marks the number of days until my PhD thesis is due. As a number with that meaning, it feels really very large. As a number it does not imply distance but that is what this number is. It is not the scope of time in which I have to shove a certain amount of anything. It is stones on a path. 162 stones until I am required to fall off the edge, or more realistically, until I fling somewhere between 65,000 and 85,000 (not not more than 100,000) words off an edge, then wait a few months to argue their validity. I count only to the date of the fling.

My days revolve around collecting numbers. This morning I noted that I had 25027 words in the document that contains words for Part I. They are disordered, occasionally incorrect, and probably too self-discursive to please an overlord. But words they are.

I calculate and recalculate because there is something pleasing about the concrete structure. 51 days until my supervisor would like a complete draft. 82 days which feels more reasonable on the front side, but perhaps less on the back side. She would like me to have 90 days to edit before submission, and wants 14 days to review the 65,000-85,000 words that I give her and recommend things that need doing to enable the successful flinging.

Even though I have written 37,000 words I find most of them unlikable for one reason or another. I discount the count. I discount the discursion. I have channeled the sheer joy of a David Foster Wallace text which is 40% footnotes, though mine is currently 17% footnotes as I am unsure the patience of the interrogators who will exam the flung document. I do not make this easy for them nor for myself, but the tangential, circular, recirculating conceptual model with lyricality became a necessity. It was never the thesis itself that caused pain, but the academic-ese causes tics and twitching and I have no medication for this except for the footnote, indented fieldnote block, and an insistence that we are playing in a non-dualist reality in which what happens in the invisible not only does not stay there, but it is not a metaphor.

162 days. 75,000 words, let’s take the mean and also the median. I made that easy for us, now didn’t I? If I were to begin today (I am not, trust me, I am not telling you stories), for each of the 51 days I would need to produce 1471 words. Of reasonable quality. Quality, there is the 611st word of this entry and while they may be of reasonable quality they are topically incorrect and thus my word count for the day will require an increase of the orthogonal. Statistically speaking. Yet irrelevant. Do androids dream of R?

Today I shall send my supervisor 1158+866+747+1223+some subset of 25027. None shall be the words she wants. That is: Table of contents, not on current process, abstract, introduction, and the chaotic neutral Part I document.

I shall take on 161 and not make words towards the goal. Probably. This makes it harder to evenly calculate the words. When I began, I calculated by month and by week, then would subtract the words as they were written. This thesis is not about the number of words. The only number that matters, truly, is 100,000 which I am not allowed to go over. And 21 June 2026, the date of the flinging.

That does not mean that I do not daily peer at the number of words written, words per section, sections per part, parts per thesis, and decide if I am or I am not on a track that I approve of. At the end of any day, the numbers tick over, I awaken and do it again.

I cannot make my brain not calculate. When I was in business school, in a class of 75 students, when the teacher would step out for some time I would calculate the value lost of my tuition on his lack of attending to my education. I would calculate the cost per minute, assuming our tuition only went towards our teachers, which in the case of Columbia was certainly not the case, and how much each minute was worth.

It also calculates language. Languages are a bit like music and dance in my mind. Depending on which languages I am messing about with, different things happen. I used to dream in symphony, which was quite beautiful and it did not include visible math, but it was always there, underlying.

I took up meditating several decades ago, it makes the math controllable, so no, when we are chatting over a coffee, there is unlikely to be math or music or languages dancing in the background of my mind. Just me and you.

Thankfully the words don’t get used up, so even though I have taken a break from today and the cleaning up of the 25,000 words to a tidier 15,000 or 16,000, by creating 1066 (!) they are still there for the taking. I’d best go attend to them. They don’t clean themselves up. 162 isn’t so big, nor is 75,000 — not when it comes to words — so soon enough I’ll find some new numbers to let float about in the background. I already have a few in mind. 730, 60, 57, 7.2. Meaningful, purposeful. Looking forward to getting to those, actually. Zoom zoom.

Here is my favorite mathematical poem. Stanislaw Lem. Love and Tensor Algebra.

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane

Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,

Their indices bedecked from one to n

Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone

And every vector dreams of matrices.

Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:

It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space

Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.

Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,

We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,

Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;

And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,

And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,

Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,

Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,

Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?

Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,

A root or two, a torus and a node:

The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!

The product of our scalars is defined!

Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind

Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,

I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.

Bernoulli would have been content to die,

Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 ?!

We can come back to Schrodinger equations another day, I must get to the words.

I am not as obsessive about watching movies as I am about books and other performance types. However, I needed to take some down time late this year, after somehow breaking two teeth on a Friday evening and needing to wait until Monday for repairs. So I pulled up the BFI movie list for 2025 and watched movies.

In the last month of the year, including that weekend, I saw:

• Hamnet
• Cover-up
• Cruella
• (half of) Afternoons of Solitude (the blood got to be too much for me)
• The Mastermind
• The History of Sound
• If I Had Leg’s I’d Kick You
• Muppet’s Christmas Carol
• The Shrouds
• Black Bag
• A House of Dynamite
• Resurrection
• Orwell 2+2 = 5
• G.I. Jane
• Little Women
• Summertime
• Sabrina
• Charade
• Wake Up Dead Man
• Tick, Tick…Boom!

They were all good, in different ways. I had read and really enjoyed Hamnet so was leery of a film version, and though while different, I thought the movie was very well done. I my very short list of adaptations I like enough to recommend.

I probably saw more movies in December than in the rest of the year combined. I have been pondering a year of no reading books, to see what it does to my mind, though I don’t think that replacing books with movies is the expected outcome. I was hoping to spend more time in consideration and contemplation, more conversations, and possibly more writing. (Though after this PhD thesis, it may be a while before I want to write again. We shall see.)

I accidentally took up tennis earlier this year. I played for the first time last year, with family, people far better than me. It was a lot of fun, but I knew I’d never be the fastest or the strongest, so I decided skill was the path forward. This year I started taking clinics at the local public club, a mere five minute drive away if I time the freight train properly. otherwise, it can be 20 minutes, or forever, if the massive freight trains stop on the track and go back and forth doing who knows what.

I’d probably held a racket once or twice as a kid, and when I went to my first clinic I discovered that no one had held rackets that way since I was a kid. The first thing I had to learn how to do was hold the thing. Nothing like new beginnings, but honestly, it felt good to learn something new.

As it turns out, tennis really suits me. It is both mental and physical, has strategy and attentiveness, and if I do not give it my full attention I either get hit in the face with a ball — even at my low level, as I have discovered, those things are hard, or I play really badly and get annoyed with myself.

After a few months of playing I started reading about tennis. I read Andre Agassi’s memoir, which is strangely boring, all about him except really all he wants to talk about is how much he hates tennis, and also Brooke Shields, whom he spends a significant amount of space saying unkind things about, such that one wonders what is the point? The book is well liked by the coaches and I think in part it is because it describes game after game and if they are older enough, they have watched these games. I probably watched him some as a kid, my parents played tennis. I do remember watching tennis. Jimmy Connor and Bjorn Borg and the meltdowns of John McEnroe.

This year I also read John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, about Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner’s match at Forest Hills in 1968, which is also about everything else, their backgrounds, the way they were raised, how they came to embody certain types of tennis. As an aside, I lived in San Francisco in the late 80s and early 90s. Ashe died in 1993 of aids, and it was not until this book that I learned that he was straight. I had always assumed he was gay, and always assumed he had the double struggle of black and gay in early tennis. But no, not gay, he was one of the many who died from inflected blood in transfusions, before testing blood became the norm.

Tennis suits my mind. I can tell you what I do wrong, even if I can’t do it right. I am incredibly aware of when I am not doing what I am being taught, of how my body works, and what I need to do. Learning new complicated skills with the mind is only a first step, yes, I understand what I should do, but now I need my body to do it by rote, and I need my body to do it by rote when under pressure. Currently, my mind understands a lot of it, but my body doesn’t always follow. And if I think too much on the court it all goes wrong. There is a perfect zone where body and mind know what they are doing, and I let them take over and do it. The desired flow state that can be as hard to reach in tennis as it is in writing.

I could list the things my coaches tell me I do wrong — I don’t take up enough space, I don’t put my hips into it, these are the most common. When I first began to realize the kind of space I need to take up on a court to hit well, I also realized that having spent my entire life being told to take up less space, its really hard to do. After so many years of being alive as a woman, of living in cities, of navigating streets and darkness and people who don’t want me to be smarter than them, or more capable, I habitually avoid potential dangers through being smaller.

Yet here I am, on a court, when I need to spread my arms to full wingspan, to hit the ball in front of me, which means I need not only to be open like a starfish, in two dimensions, I need to also do it in three. “Hit the ball in front of you,” coaches say. Imagine you taking up all the space you possibly can in every single direction, then add a fourth dimension, MOVE, through space and time and keep all that extension. And also hit the ball, and then be ready in three seconds when it comes slamming back at you.

Naturally, I do not want to seem to do this, take up space. Naturally not as in, but of course, but by decades of habit the idea that I should take up all the space, flow through a stroke and then take up all the space on the other side…right. In my mind, though, I think this is a very excellent idea. I just need to take body memory and habit and replace with a new reality. No small task.

When I do it, it is glorious. It is strange to feel freed in space. I really never feel freed in space. When my head is so far into the game that I can take up all the space and play hard I also fail to notice anything around the game. That constant peripheral vision that I have been trained to attend to, to be so cautious about it, it all recedes, and the game is the game, and my body is my body, and my body was built for sport.

David Foster Wallace also wrote a book on tennis, String Theory. It is one of his books of extraordinary footnoting, the de-linearizing of his work. The story is not linear, tennis is not, in fact, linear, because you have to think in multi-pathways to make it work well. Wallace always touches on obsession and genius, but also on human limitations. I want to fight both for and against at least half of what he says, and I want my life to be different in way that I would have more footnotes, and more greatness. More obsession, for sure.

I started watching tennis after I started playing. All the things we are taught in baby tennis, which I find hard to do because one starts to learn tennis stationary, so a split step feels like an odd hop dislocated from time or purpose. Watching incredible tennis players though, is inspiring, and of course they do all the things the coaches teach, just faster, and with more elegance. Learning tennis, sticking one’s hand in the air while standing sideways on a court waiting for a ball to fall feels..awkward. Without the speed, I feel too seen, and not in a way that I am ashamed, but in a way in which my physical body feels dislocated from my tennis body. .

My tennis body is the interior version of me that is lean and muscled and plays very well. After a few months of clinics I started to dream in tennis, playing night after night, often working on a particular move or stroke. Sometimes what I learn in my sleep plays over into my awake state, but not enough, not yet enough. It’s time on the court that matters, ball machines and thousands of serves, and everything else I can do to optimize my body for success on the court.

Last week a coach joked with me that I should get a beach ball, or an inner tube for floating and swimming, and tape it to my body so that my arms and my racquet are always forced to be at least arms distance from my body. He said I should do this at home, and just learn to have space. I don’t think he understands why I don’t have space. This amuses me, perhaps, in general, I should do this, and let my arms expand out and shit the space in which I propriocept (is that even a word?) to get larger, to expand so that I am large, that I take up space.

I did not expect tennis to require me to reconsider how I take up space in the world. And it is, as one who has done this for most of their life realizes, very hard. I probably need hours and hours and months more than weeks on a court in which I simply take up as much space as possible. One day a coach yelled at me to take up more space and I yelled back, I am fighting decades of programming not to, give me a moment. And he stopped and looked at me, and the other women on the court with me all nodded their heads in unison. We know.

On those days in which all things align and I am fluid and take up all the space, of course I play better, but also there is a strange and deep joy of being in my body and not holding back and taking the space and racing from end to end and laughing with my compatriots, at the good points and at the bad. It is also very hard. But I do refuse to give up. And one day, perhaps I shall careen down city streets taking up all the space too, not quickly mincing out of the way of others, I shall hold ground, because it is not my responsibility to be smaller, it is my responsibility to be me.

Several years ago my friend Nicky Twilley sent me a short piece of a book, Feasting Wild, by Gina Rae La Cerva, in which the author states that the constitution of the Congo equated the Iyaelima people with wildlife, demoting them to animals so they were allowed to live in the forest. This struck me as odd, and unlikely. So I decided to fact check it. As it turns out, there was a single (specious) source of the ‘fact’, a piece for National Geographic Adventure by John Falk, a piece itself a horror show of racism, colonialism and misogyny, for which he cited no sources.

I was so appalled by the positive press the book was getting, and this bit in it, I read the entirety of the current Congolese constitution (in French), and the forest code of law. I read all of the law that Kabila instituted when he became president, still nothing. Then I reached out to a friend who runs an NGO on that forest and asked if he had heard of it, and shared the sources I had read in hopes to find any comment. He was deeply horrified, profoundly so, and said it was unlikely but that he would check with his local sources. While awaiting his response, I went and read all the Belgian Geographic Society’s notes on the forest, forest research, and legal creation, and still came up with nothing.

I commented on this back in the day when Twitter was useful and the book publisher reached out to me. I explained my research, and the horror, and she got in touch with the author and the book’s editor. The editor confirmed that Rae had used Falk as the source (horrifying to not reflect on the lack of citations and all the other concerns with what he wrote), and also then the fact checkers and the publisher utterly failed to check their data, and printed a book that dehumanized an entire tribe of people and inaccurately portrayed the country. They did tell me that they were going to correct the error in future printings of the book — I never did check, and attempt to address with readers of the first printing themselves, also something I never checked.

I also eventually got an email from the author, who also asked me about all the legal documents I read, and the ways in which Mobutu passed laws to expand the Salonga park boundaries. She asked if I wanted to be cited as the discovered of the false information, which I declined. Though I did respond with further detail on the tribal structure and the park laws and ancestral lands. I will note that some materials were hard to find remotely, so it is possible there was some document somewhere, but not one I found. She felt that it ‘sounded like something a colonial power might have done’ as why she didn’t dig further. I never did hear back further on this.

They were very nice, though I am generally disappointed at the quality of fact checking. (As an aside, when my Magnet book was fact checked, I was returned an ‘error’ on my behalf which they corrected. Their source was wikipedia and mine was academic journal papers. When I was teaching at Pratt and SVA, wikipedia was entirely disallowed as a valid source. Now, it seems to be canon (even though so often wrong) and it is the AIs that are disallowed. The needle may have moved, but it is still more false than I would like.)

All of the above took place in 2020, in the early days of the covid lockdown. Perhaps why I had time to read the constitution and forest law, but also, I was so annoyed by the casual dehumanization without citation, I probably would have done it anyway. Poor Nicky, after pointing this out to me, then had to suffer through my rage-emails at the horror, though I did of course share the resolution and the emails from editors and authors.

Poor Nicky, however, just got to suffer through my rage texting about a book that is so infuriating to me, that I also engaged in fact checking and validation of assorted conlcusions. This book enraged me far more than Feasting Wild, and deserves its own post, which I shall attend to next. (Manvir Singh’s Shamanism, is that book.) In general I have a rule against writing negative book reviews, as author’s spend a lot of time working hard on their topics and just because I don’t like it doesn’t mean that I need to tear it down. However, stay tuned for Part II of this, because here I feel very strongly.

For some reason, this refuses the embed, so the link to the full thing is here.

I laughed when I read this, particularly the estimated odds of survival and optimistic assumptions about hobbies panel. I don’t have any particularly dangerous hobbies at the moment, other than the phd-induced-psychosis, which ought to be in the DSM-5, but I am pretty sure isn’t, and which I shall shortly recover from. I do, however, desire to have more dangerous hobbies. I could use more arctic kayaking expeditions, and definitely a return to scuba diving all over the world. I miss working with bronze sculpting, but I don’t think that really shortens my life span.

I know quite a few people who have made it to the fifteen year mark. I know that five is the one where the doctors look away, but I find fifteen, which I am not far off from, to be more significant. Perhaps because there is more time to look back on what happened AFTER.

After reading this two days ago, I found myself thinking about what I would do differently if I went back to that time period. Not to change the diagnosis, or even the treatment choices (though I might), but how I attempted to put my life back together afterword, what that entailed, and how I did. If I gave myself a grade, it wouldn’t be very high. I’d have failed out and probably in that mode where the teacher takes you aside and says, ‘maybe this subject isn’t for you,’ except of course in this case that subject is life.

Despite being in two of the best cancer hospitals in NYC, and having reasonable health care coverage for America, the aftermath was a shit show. I suspect the process was as well, but as I liked to joke at the time, I was busy with the survival bit, all the rest could wait. Undergoing cancer treatment and living in NYC without paid sick leave decimated my savings and put me into debt. I was in my mid-30s at the time, and had a very nice savings account with which I intended to buy me a flat of my own. Post-cancer, not only was that gone, but I had acquired debt on credit cards. Some was medical debt, some was my radiation survival technique of buy a new dress a week, for six weeks (retrospectively, weird, but ok, that happened).

I was diagnosed with cancer two weeks after I graduated from Columbia Business School. Three weeks before the end of school I had quit my high paying job running CX for AOL Products. The politics were hellacious, the constant end of year reorgs frustrating, and I had been transferred out of working with the product people I loved onto a New York City-based media and content focused team, and the culture shift was agonizing.

There is a lot I’d like to say about the family process of navigating cancer but I’d really prefer everyone I wish to talk about were dead before I do so. Let’s just say that with the exception of spending a lot more time with my uncle, much of that time period felt like being regularly slammed in the head with something painful and then needing to turn around to make sure the person who just smashed me was OK.

To be frank, most of having cancer seemed to be about the care of others. People who were so distressed when I told them, I had to hold their hands and tell them it would be ok. People whose response was to tell me of a friend that had a similar diagnosis, often ending with, “… oh and then they didn’t make it,” and me asking, “and why did you think telling me this was a good idea?” I suspect that everyone who has ever had cancer experiences the really weird things people tell you. Part of my memory of that time is of me, peeled slightly away from reality with the colours a bit dimmed and the lighting off, listening to people interacting with me, but really not with me. It was a dissociative stance, I suppose, but I can feel myself making the same expression now, and I am leaning away from the keyboard, puzzling out the oddities of it all.

A lot of shit happened. Some friends disappeared — also normal, my husband whom I had been wanting to divorce lost his mind and tried to steal all my money and demand that I go through all kinds of hoops to get through this. At the time, NYC was NOT a no fault divorce state. In my opinion, he was entirely at fault through dint of being a grasping asshole, but that wasn’t one of the options and would have required going to court. He held me entirely responsible for his not getting the green card he wanted, even to the degree of accusing me of going behind his back to the USCIS to somehow block this. Can you feel the crazy? I can, but I can’t lean any further away from this machine and have my fingers reach the keys. I can, however, also feel that anxiety pooling up in my chest, that feeling of being trapped and having no way out.

After I finished treatment the doctors waved their congratulations and disappeared. Years later I learned I should have had mental health assistance — cancer along with heart attacks cause significant post-treatment depression cycles. I was already probably deeply in one during treatment and my doctors should have noticed, based on what I was telling them, but nothing came of it. I also learned, years later, that at the time they did NOT prescribe mental health support lest us women (specifically) convince ourselves we are depressed and demand treatment from an overburdened system. Apparently as well I should have begun physical therapy, because the extensive internal scarring from three surgeries limited my motion. I have no idea why this never came up nor was it suggested. When I finally started dealing with it, eight or nine years later, every PT and otherwise person I saw was a mix of horrified and astonished, and also sorrowful because having waited that long, it would be nearly impossible to return me to something near my original form.

Unlike the XKCD comic, however, I never really managed to find my way back to believing I was going to live, for at least the first decade. I had decided full stop I would never undergo treatment again, so after the first few years of check-ups every three to six months, I simply stopped going. I could not settle back into work or do things I disliked, but I also could not choose to do something hard that I love that could take years, because I didn’t expect to live that long. Not on the surface, but deep inside, in the way that behaviors seem to just happen, and it took me a long time to think them through.

Thinking about the last fifteen years, if I could pop back, to cancer treatment, not to the before, there are so many changes I’d make in how I chose to live my life. It’s irrational to think if I popped back I’d suddenly have the energy and agency to make them — I was exhausted for a good five or six years post treatment, but I like to consider.

I find me now wondering if I went back and did things differently, where would that trajectory have taken me, would I still want to end up at that place in my life, and what is the fastest way to traverse the glacier and the massive cracks to get myself back to a place like that. If this is what I want.

Foolishness, of course. It doesn’t work like that, and the better question would be, where do I want to go now, what do I understand from all that crap that happened, and what I would have wanted to be different, to move into the place I want to be now. I think, weirdly, cancer treatment and the aftermath broke my ability to dream. I recognize this, but I am not sure I have fully recovered it. I find I am still able to easily pop into the post-C crisis mode I used to refer to as dragon-state: I wish to hoard, money, people, books, shoes, dresses, and sit alone on them in a cavern where no one can get to me. Pretty unhealthy. But also funny. I think it would be better to be a sociable dragon. I could use the claws and teeth and fire. And the sense of safety I imagine I would have if I were a dragon instead of what I sometimes feel like, just a girl, in a world that is hostile to girls.

I finished treatment near my birthday and invited the women who had supported me through it, 14 absolutely wonderful people, to dinner in NYC. It was incredible and I could see that one deep and internal thing in me had changed through the process, I was more willing to ask for help, to be present with people, to not always insist on being the edge-girl observer. My friend Sara created a book for me, each person put in a photo of us together, and wrote a note, and Sara, crafty designer that she is, made it beautiful. I pulled it out today, I still love all these women, though I’ve not been great about being in touch. A little too much lonely dragon in the dark but without her hoard. (Except the shoes, there are so many shoes, still.)

There were amazing men as well, Seth and James in particular, but for that dinner, it was all the ladies.

Everything crooked can be straightened. Every path can be regained. I have always felt, even when not acting, that the future can be anything I want, if I dream and if I reach for it. I have this image in my mind that I wish to draw on my chalkboard wall. The path I took, the path I’d have preferred, and the path of now, with all the dreamed of outcomes sparkling at the end, with all my friends and full of love and interesting things and creativity and tasty things to eat and drink. Not sure I’d buy more shoes though.

I’d like to write the real stories, the terrible things. They are funny and horrible and awe inspiring (and not in a good way), yet something in me feels they should be spoken. I had a blog at the time, called TIBY (the yellow blight), full of rage and frustration, which would make good interludes, but the stories of how people manage the frailties and weaknesses of others, at least in my worlds, can be very dark. Or more precisely, how people handle their own frailties and weakness in light of things that scare them, that they cannot control, is not always grand.

I am happy for Randall and his girlfriend that their fifteen years has found them in a place of love and happiness, alive, together, and hopefully still taking photos of crocodiles and falling into the holes that sometimes open in the post-cancer world, but fishing each other out.

I shall fish me out, of this thesis, of the past, into the boats, and across the water.

It has been 7 weeks since my rash decision to not only not buy textiles for a year, but to also buy no books. My friends have been doubtful that I can do this. Reasonable. I buy books. I own books. I also, thankfully, read books. 45 more weeks to go.

Strangely, it hasn’t been hard. At least not yet.

I’ve acquired the Libby app, which I must say, I love. I’ve been reading NYRBs that I don’t own, and listening to books as well. I feel a bit bad it took this long. I’m afraid to calculate my usual annual spend on books, mostly paper. I suspect that while I have bought fewer in the past four years of PhD, I have bought significantly more expensive ones, (thank you, springer and routledge, for ensuring that tasty knowledge only falls into the hands of the wealthy).

Speaking of rage for the insanely expensive academic book, I needed to access a springer book on an anthropological study of spirits ($179.95), which resulted in me acquiring a UT Austin Courtesy Borrower card, which cost me $55 (because I was in a rush and didn’t have weeks to wait for the city of Austin to give me something that will make it free. ok maybe I wasn’t in that much of a rush, but I was. If you know me, you get it.)

So now I have the Libby app, and another local library card. UT Austin has a lot of libraries, I could drown. But I am trying to refrain from walking the stacks for the glorious serendipity because I have only a few more months to finish writing up the PhD, or my head will explode like old sci fi tv when I hit the perimeter.

As an offset to the PhD, I read a lot of mystery novels, mostly bought at the local Half Price Books. I refer to them as the ‘sorbet course’ and I forget them as soon as I have read them, but I have also spent two hours not thinking PhD, and it’s a bit like sleeping, but no stress dreams.

Strangely, I’ve been craving books about/by artists and their practices. I have a few shelves on this, so I am slowly starting to read some I had not, and re-read some I had. In the absence of creativity — at the point the phd is purely instrumental — reading about it, whether craft, art, creation, ways of thinking, or simply looking at images, seems to be doing something for me. It makes me hungry, and it helps me dream of a future when this thing is done.

I’ve been reading Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects, which has a quality of moving between images and words that I resonate with. For most of my life I was more attuned to words and movement (dance), than visual art, but then something changed in the past years and I am also far more interested in visual arts than I used to be, I hunger to understand more. First, the scaffolding, but then, the specifics.

I’ve also been reading Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men, which is…odd. It has a lot of ‘my favorite painting or work by this artist is X’ and I really do wonder why, when describing the art made by women over the centuries, she needed to go into Artemisia Gentileschi’s rape or Camille Claudel’s guy problems. Even though she wants to put the history of female artists back into our minds, she still centers men, in many instances. Also, she does not much mention where all this information comes from, and so I wonder who the art historians are that kept all of this knowledge alive. That aside, I am still enjoying the short histories and images.

I think I have actually read more books since the ban, and I have been in several bookstores without needing to buy books. (Though I did ask Wayne to buy me a $5 used kids book in a record shop in Wimberley last week. Did that break the rules? Maybe.)

Frankly, I hope this becomes a way of life rather than a blip. In concert with this, I have been trying to downsize the books. Today I took about 60 books to HPB, and they gave me $22.00. This exchange so annoys me I would rather give the books away. I know they will sell them for a lot more, and that this is how they make money, but it feels so unequal. Why not a dollar a book? Why pennies? Don’t they know pennies are over?

My Austin neighbourhood has a lot of little libraries, so today I snagged a book from there. I would say that I as of yet feel no pressure or sense of loss about not buying books. And even those that I am saving in my phone (by taking photos of their covers) do feel like they could wait til later. I may be a bit late to some of the books, rather than reading what is just out, but what’s a year in the grand scheme of things?

I took my $22 and bought two months worth of coffee filters and three lottery tickets. I figure if the books bring me a million dollars, that is a fair exchange! Never happens though, I am never a windfall girl, I always get offered the work to generate the money. But as my Russian friends say, hope dies last. I hope Santa brings me some books.

So here we are, I’ve bought no books, I’ve wasted your time with this ramble, I am reading about art and dreaming of making things again, things beyond words, but I am still trapped in the spin cycle of thesis words with a few months to go before I am ejected into the sky. I’ll use my saved book dollars to glue together some wings, and hope to get neither too close to the sun nor to close to the sea when I make my break into mid-2026 and the light-loaded futures I desire.

There really is no such field, but sometimes there are small toe taps towards it. It’s actually a terrible title, but trying to find a name that fits what I am trying to say inevitably ends up with too many words, all of which someone or many someones would argue the meaning of.

Linguistics is most commonly understood to refer to structural linguistics. This is de Saussure in the beginning, and to grotesquely oversimplify, it is syntax and phonetics and morphology and semantics. More about the form than the meaning. To me, this is the mathematics of language. Or the desire for one. We are in the land of signs and signifiers and the signified. There is much comparison between systems and languages, and the evolution of languages. Computation linguistics rolled out of this bed.

Originally, this looked at language as separate from context or culture. Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, in addition to including new methods of study, looked these two Cs. My undergrad was in structural linguistics, but I dual majored in ‘Language and Culture’ with emphases on French and Japanese. (At the time I spoke both very well, the Japanese is somewhere stuffed in my head now, appears in occasional bursts of oddity, but mostly I haven’t relocated the door to that fluency. Maybe one day.) My masters degree was a mix of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. Georgetown at the time was most renowned for Deborah Tannen and discourse analysis, however I was more interested in hybrid languages and authority in the internet (late 90s), and focused more on pidgin and creole studies as well as basic methods and analysis. I studied the language and culture of internet communities, how authority was marked online, and in particular how it was marked in second language speakers. I didn’t end up writing my thesis on this however, just a series of papers. My thesis was on the prescriptive language qualities of software tools — spellcheck and grammar check. At the time they were newish tools and aligned to no standard of grammar that existed in American English. What was grammatical was driven by the marketing department, as there was a limit to wavy lines that people could take. Also they severely disavowed any type of ‘humanity’ (who, which) for anything non-human, and a few other strange tics that indicate a world view that is probably deeply embedded in heads and writing styles for those who have used such tools since the 90s.

Fast forward past the MBA (in which, probably obviously, not only did I focus on models of quantifying the value of design and the investment in design, I wrote a fair amount about how language impacts everything from tax planning to financial models.), I found myself in a PhD program.

Language and geography are curious bedfellows. In some ways, language is always interesting, as it is the medium of all these fields. Not that I want to dip into the philosophy of language, but it is hard not to be endlessly aware of how difficult it is to bind such words as language, communication, knowledge, place, etc. Not only in the field of geography.

Starting my PhD, I was very interested in what had been done, theorized, understood about language within the field of geography. How does language show up? Does linguistics show up? What does it do in geography? I could do the long lit review here, but that would be a bore, I suspect. So instead, some generalization.

One of the most interesting places language shows up is in the schemes for GIS data. Is it a mountain or a hill? How to deal with spatial and conceptual variation? For many decades, this is the place that adopted the title of Geolinguistics. It expanded outward with the interests of particular individuals to look at language distribution, particularly as it relates to the physical places, and then to dialect variation, language planning and policy, and power. There is also a great deal of geographic interest in the names of places, how they were named, what they mean, particularly in the UK in the context of colonialism. (The political geographers are into the philosophy of language, but we are not heading there.) In all instances there is some ‘there there’, in effect, geolinguistics suggests that languages are contextual to places, and this must be considered.

If you asked a linguist about this, I think they’d find the geolinguists naive in suggesting that the linguists are not thinking about this. There is a book called ‘Linguistic Wars’ on a different topic than this, but you can see how the linguists do like to argue with each other. The Chomsky Lakoff debates were not always civilized. (In fact, when I was a masters student you had to do your entire degree in one theory structure or the other, or you would have to start over because you had had your head filled with nonsense.) The basis of this argument was about generative grammar — meaning is driven by underlying syntax etc vs syntax being shaped by underlying meaning.

And the Linguistic Society of Paris/Société de Linguistique de Paris forbid discussions on the origins of language in the mid-1800s. The London Philological Society followed suit a few years later. Too much infighting — of which there are some really great and crazed stories, so they basically shut down a huge swathe of what linguistics and philosophy could discuss, for over a century.

Let me just take a huge step to the left here. And get into the messy space between language and communication. There are quite a few theorists over the centuries who argue that language is the most human of human traits. That language is what makes humans unique. And then in the past decades, researcher after researcher publishes that other species communicate. Sometimes it is referred to as language, as in the case of whales, who are also known to have dialects. Sometimes, as in Kohn and Simard, trees communicate. There is the dances of the bees, as well.

Let us accept the premise that language is not a human-only trait. Let us accept that many if not all beings have the means to communicate within their species and sometimes with other species as well. This gets very interesting. Trees and whales have both been on this planet far longer than humans. I am unsure what the evolutionary linguists are doing these days, but I have yet to see evidence that they are tackling non-human linguistics. Most of the word on non-human language or communication comes from fields specific to the species being studied, biology, botany, and the like. There are some people working on theories of animal languages; there is a great deal of interest in using AI to translate these languages for human consumption.

There is a great TED talk by Karen Bakker, called Could an Orca Give a TED Talk in which she addresses interesting questions such as the ethics of overlistening to other species, and whether or not they want us to understand them.

But back to geography, a study of place, of the physical features of the earth, of human activity and distribution and population and so much more. There is physical geography, human geography, and cultural geography, and many sub-fields beside. My study of language doesn’t necessarily fit cleanly in any of them — it’s not about the humans, it is about physical places, everything is or has culture (one could argue but let’s not do that now), so it could fit there as well. But much like most of the humanities there is so much overlap that the fields seem to be what one says they are, with some historical differentiation by qual or quant methodologies. Which to me, seems a bit arbitrary, and now as more methods are birthed into the world, even harder to draw lines.

As it turns out, attempting to theorize how a place has language, and what this means for language, communication, knowledge, and place, is far too big for a PhD thesis. Even attempting to define what I might mean by all of this is, to use technical term, nuts. It requires re-arguing an ocean of accepted ideas to make it academically legible, and most everyone I’ve spoken to about this, finds it interesting, they also find it impossible.

The questions though, are so very interesting to me. If language evolved to exist on this planet before humans, does that change what and how we define language? Modern human language is a symbolic language, however there are endless instances of non-symbolic languages transferring information or knowledge. This runs us into what is language — is it a tool with a particular structure, or is it a means of communication? If we define language as the means of sharing then we can extend into systems non-human with greater ease. Then we get to argue about how we know. If I am certain that tree passed me a message, how can I know? How can I convince you I know? Granted, if I told you another human told me something, you believe in the possibility of the tool, but you cannot know if I am truthfully reporting, or if I even understood what they told me and am reporting what I believe to be true, even if it is not in actuality.

In the place based research that I have done as the basis of my thesis, place matters. It matters in the existence of the language, the type of language and the evolution of the language, but it also impacts the culture and communication modes of the humans, as well as the humans with the place itself. What does that even mean, you wonder? In the simplest form, some places require certain languages, and these are not always the commonly spoken human languages of that place. In effect, there is a different way to speak to a place, because the place insists on this. Or, you could ask, does the human insist and have they fabricated this all? Topple off the cliff of philosophy, fall into a tar pit of semantics, and circle back to the ancient days when animals and rocks and trees had tongues, in the metaphorical sense, and I wonder, mythology, or were the humans more open to listen?

By which I refer to nonfiction.co, a research organization that produces interesting and beautiful reports, and seems to manage to have long time frames in which to do this research.

I’ve been fortunate in my career to get to do research that takes many months to more than a year to field, and longer to synthesize and analyze. This, for me, is where a lot of the real joy in work can be. But the reality usually is that someone has a strategy in mind, or needs one, and they toss a few days to a few weeks at research, and consider that good enough. This is a longer discussion, especially in the age of AI and synthetic subjects and all that can be done, but which I question, should it?

My favorite place of research has to do with language — what does it mean, how is it used, how can we use it to change behaviors, what are the pitfalls. This is relevant to every single thing, and is not a surface level word choice, or branding issue, but something much more deeply entangled with thought and action and a slew of emotions and the ways in which we feel people are seen and judged and understood.

My overlapping favorite places of research is around what is meaningful and important and can make lives better. I ran years of research for the NIH on how people interact with the health system and medical and genetic information to make decisions about their own care. In the US, this is grim, and tied into the historical truths of racism and misogyny and force. How does one unravel these sentiments that are often so below the surface that it is not obvious where decisions are being taken and yet the long tail outcome is really shitty health and health behaviors. The most grim research project I ran was a year long exploration of American’s beliefs around human rights. The McCain Institute started with a question about why being a supporter of human rights does not seem to have an impact on how politicians get elected. (Short and terrifying answer: American’s don’t think they have human rights, human rights are things in other countries. Unpacking they why behind that was even more fascinating, but not the purpose of this post.)

One of the most complex and complicated spaces in the US, both to research, to get deep and honest responses, and to seek out ways to make change, is, broadly, financial. At the request of a Washington Post columnist I once did an assessment of the language in a decade of their personal finance reports. Corpus analysis, in a linguistic world, but tied deeply to the culture, gender, and directionality of how one considers one’s financial situation. Of course the WP is already a limited audience, but again, what the language use does and directs, and the lack of education, showed severe limitations in assisting readers to a state of financial security.

Nonfiction’s report on The Secret Financial Lives of Americans, I think, if I read the notation properly, is from 2018? It does not have a clear date on it, except a small ‘08.0118’ on the bottom edge of each page. It also doesn’t include some recent financial tools or disasters or the current presidency. The note that it was five years in development, and that in addition to 2,238 respondents, they interviewed bank robbers. I’ve recently discovered I know a bank robber, but I suspect they were not interviewing friends. But how, how I imagine the sourcing of those respondents must have gone. And, I imagine, they have an in-house booker for these narrow demographics.

(Oddly, perhaps, this makes me want to set up a panel of synthetic bank robbers to ask questions to. Not sure why them, and it would be hard to get enough color context unless I had a solid pool of bank robbers to build from. How many bank robbers are there in the world, anyway? Caught and uncaught? I suppose I could build it off of movie bank robbers, that seems the way of the future of America — shiny and fake and untouched by the real. This also aligns in a different way with the report itself, which notes that Instagram lives are shiny and full and the reality is dark nights and tears and despair over financial issues.)

This report, like any research on the financial and banking and savings and spending behaviors of Americans who are not the uber-wealthy, suggests an entire set of services that are missing, starting from education and knowledge to support. Not only does this help not exist, not as information or services or ‘a personal cfo’ it is difficult to imagine how to provide this in an industry that rarely feels it is going to help people who are trying to get out of debt or build wealth. Without wealth, where to start? Who helps for free?

Having working researching for crypto and blockchain organizations, for neo-banks and other services, I do not believe that these alternates are helping across the board to lift up people with the knowledge they need. These technologies are unequally distributed, especially in the early days when the off-ramps were so complicated.

But as Nonfiction notes in their report, one of the most significant impacts to a lack of money or from the sense of precarity — at any income point — is the things one cannot do. Having to decide between the present — food, transport, and the future — medical care, tests, saving, continues to and I would suggest is accelerating, to the only time is now, and the only thing in the now is fear and suffering for what the future might bring. When it comes to financial health or physical health or mental health, all the research I’ve ever read suggests that you cannot survive in good health if you are always worried. Somehow this is not the ‘living in the now’ that is suggested by new ageism and gurus and the influencers jetting off to fake lives.

It is notable to me, having lived and traveled extensively outside the US, that a significant amount of these issues are American issues. It is embedded in the cultures and the expectations, of individualism, of success, of how family units do or do not support their members. It is the white picket fence and glorious lawn of perfectionism that must be shown as the outside face, while the inside darkness seeps and swallows.

The entire report is a good read, it is worth seeing what this world felt like 7 years ago, and to think about it now, with the changes that are being put in place that support the wealthy and marginalize those who are not. This is not even a poverty issue, this is also the middle class, and everyone down from there. Yes, that is poverty, but, as Nonfiction notes, not the traditional demographic one thinks of as in poverty. This is, at this point, the majority of Americans. And the protections against businesses are being taken away, the CFPB is being hamstrung, health care costs will likely go up depending on what happens with the BBB.

I do not know what the outcome of the Nonfiction research was, if any, beyond information. This is always a good start, clear vision of what the situation is. It is unclear how it was paid for and if it was for a client. I do appreciate their sharing it. I don’t think anyone has solved for this in the US, and I suspect that the cultural system that lacks for collectivism (of which there are examples of lifting up groups rather than individuals), prioritizes what people think of you, and how we present, and it is getting worse. Disinformation and the current politics of cruelty are unlikely to help as well. If this research were done today, I suspect it would be even more grim.

Off to read more research done by others…and think about ways to fund more research done by me.