Six months ago a lovely fellow from Iran emailed me to say that my personal website was down, but it was only until now that I bothered to get round to fixing it. Turned out to be a single malfunctioning WordPress plugin, who knew?!
The equally amusing thing is that I have a draft entitled ‘What the fuck, 2020.’ which I will probably clean up and backdate-publish it at some point, but it’s nonetheless a sobering realisation that personally blogging is hard for me because I put too much pressure on myself to get everything right and not miss out on any details. I’m reminded of when Terry Tao mentioned in one of his blog posts that he has many drafts and blog-posts-in-progress, so to me it means I probably should make a regular habit of going back to mine.
Anyway.
What went badly in 2021
I kept failing subjects in my MMath.
For those who don’t know, I decided to start a second Masters in 2020 to work towards my life goal of obtaining a PhD, but throughout these past two years as I continued to fail subjects it became increasingly clear that something was going wrong.
Arguably, trying to work near-full-time (by cobbling together casual + contract work) and studying part time on top of a pandemic and being stuck in online learning certainly wasn’t the best environment, but I have realised a few other things:
- I seem to lose interest in studying anything that starts to get too specialised and deep.
- For me, any kind of focused study is best done late at night (9pm onwards), which just does not mesh well with normal work activities done during the day. It’s also impossible to do if I’ve had a full workday and need the entire evening to rest.
What went well in 2021
I bought my own apartment!
This one I purposely kept off social media for various reasons, probably the main reason being that I couldn’t be bothered to get a picture of myself in front of the sale sign with the sold sticker on it. One of the more specific requirements I was looking for was “When I exit my apartment, I want to exit outside and be able to walk down straight to my car” as opposed to having to take a lift down a large apartment block building or into the car bay.
The whole process was interesting and there was a lot of first-time stumbling that I feel could’ve been made easier by some kind of generic list of ‘What to expect’ (of which I’ve tried to write myself at some point). I found myself frustrated at the amount of information that I had to purposely absorb and process that seemed otherwise very trivial, but I’m glad it’s over and I can only hope future real estate ventures will be much smoother in future.
While missing a few furniture pieces before I’d consider it fully/sufficiently furnished, it’s worth noting that my mortgage repayments are effectively ~$250 per week which is amazing considering that renting a 1-bedroom apartment would already be ~$400 per week. I can comfortably say that now that I’m living alone and in my own space, there is a level of calm that I’ve been aching for a very long time.
“Promotion!”
Admittedly, not so much due to actual effort on my part, but due to recent Fair Work Law changes essentially people who’d been working some number of hours on a casual rate over the past 6 months are required to be offered ongoing/fixed-term positions. As a result I ended up being eligible to be upgraded to a 3 year Level A fixed-term position at the university I’ve been working the longest at.
Very honestly it does pain me to no longer be working at more than one institution, but the stability and peace-of-mind at working at the place I’m most familiar with will no doubt give me much more breathing room for other parts of my life.
So what’s planned for 2022?
The current plan is to give up part-time study so that I can reclaim more personal time for myself. Despite failing subjects, I have to say that keeping myself overloaded felt like the easiest way to numb myself to the ongoing pandemic news, but now that we’re (hopefully) opening up and I’ve now had time to do stuff around my own place and reclaim my hobbies, I’m looking forward to having a fairer work-life balance now that I don’t have to worry about overloading on work.
- I want to start up an online store selling cross stitch patterns (and possibly pins and small specialised craft goods). I’m already capable of producing the pattern PDFs, so it’s a matter of setting up the online store, thinking through my pricing and untangling the mess of overthinking/planning.
- I want to get back into content creation:
- Streaming & Youtube videos: I’ve got a few different ideas in the pipeline, and am currently working on this. It’s very unlikely, however, that I will advertise this on my own personal social media for personal reasons.
- Blogging: Truthfully there’s a lot in maths education, politics, and similar that I’ve gotten to a point where I feel like I should write about it simply because I don’t see enough people on my Twitter feed that do that. Not that it’s their fault, obviously they’re very busy people.
- I want to continue learning and upskilling. Admittedly one of the other reasons I went back to do a second Masters is that a side benefit would be giving myself another shot at the job market, but if I’m now giving up study then I should at least make the effort to self-teach myself skills that’ll still make me more employable. Now that I’m in a stable situation for the next three years at a minimum, work will be predictable, I’ll be able to figure out how to spend my spare time upskilling as needed for the scenario that if my fixed-term contract won’t be renewed, then I’ll at least be in a position to successfully transition into a different job.
No doubt it’s not the greatest time in Australia to be opening up given the advent of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, so it’s very hard to foresee how 2022 will turn out. That said, any kind of progress is good progress especially given how many people have struggled over the past two years.
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