The other day I was running and thinking, since the two go hand-in-hand, and a light bulb went off. It was one of those moments where I previously had an idea, wrestled with it for a few days, and finally realized, “OH. This is it!” I have some personal goals to work towards in 2015, and through that I’ve got a lot of self-reflection and writing ahead of me. A book I’ve been reading for this goal told me that it’s a good idea to practice. Practice expression, practice composition, practice organization… to just practice chronicling and writing shit down. I’ve got that grammar game down (thanks, GMAT), so I won’t be that strict on it here, but the rest could use some work. Quite simply, I need to get back into jamming on my keyboard late at night, solidifying my thoughts, and getting my mind back into writing.
a livejournal prodigy and littalild, circa 2001
Those who’ve had the (un)fortunate pleasure of experiencing my blogging as a high schooler and college kid will know, I streamed out everything, and the mundane took the same priority as the introspective. I’d spent years chronicling my daily escapades from a lowly sophomore in high school right through my final years of college in San Diego. Reading it gives me a full gamut of emotions, from full-on embarrassment (why the hell did I think anyone cared that I went to math, and then physics, and then ate a steak sandwich?) to some small, but beaming, sense of pride and awe (the title pic above is 3.5 pages of spoken word as a love letter to San Diego). But looking at my online presence now, the overall message is that I seem to have left behind, or at least put on the backburner, my passion for writing.
Writing and general expression of self has always been my hidden escape, my effortless hobby and my most underutilized skill as an engineer. Engineers don’t write. At least, not in the way that expresses oneself and creates legitimate and thoughtful ideas that stand within the words themselves, without supporting evidence. Sure, engineers can write a 20 page paper on the electronic transport properties of GaAs nanowires, but that’s all within the construct of providing readable fluff to explain mathematical concepts and scientific numbers. That’s not what I aim to do here.
I sometimes like to think that in my 30 years of existence, I’ve learned what’s important and what’s categorical bullshit. While that’s probably not true, I’ve come to this project with a purpose, a drive, and a set of rules. No one wants to read my daily minutiae, see or hear what I eat, or take the time to read this far into an entry just to find no actual substance. I can do better.
And so, I introduce this project, hastily dubbed “Precisely 603” – a (semi)daily collection of thoughtful entries of substance. Each post will be composed of exactly 603 words, and must serve a purpose to you, the reader. I don’t expect everyone to read all of these, and for all I know, no one will. The ultimate goal is to serve myself and give myself a platform to write. Why 603? Because it’s about one page, and it rhymes with ‘precisely’ (yeah, that’s a stretch). I wanted to base it on something cool like the length of an abstract in Nature (200 words), or something nerdy like 404, but in the end I just picked it out because it seemed rational. I’ve already got a brain brimming with topics to write shorts about, and I’m ready. But this is already 603 words. OKseeutmrw!
TL;DR: I am going to write something meaningful (semi)daily and it will be called “Precisely 603.” (This section won’t count towards the word count)
