"Words... Words are very... good." -- Omar Velasco paraphrasing Maya Angelou on the Omar y Argelia radio show, circa 2016.
I've decided to pull the trigger and actually begin publishing some of my writing on my personal site. I'm mostly inspired by my good friend Tim's inactive blog, which I suspect was at least partly inspired by the venerable NYCB blog and its musings of dot-com era undergraduate life in the UCLA Computer Science department.
The greatest source of impedance to the creation of this site was my recurring decision paralysis. I contemplated using one of various blog platforms, but decided to start off with a static HTML version. I might write a simple script to set up RSS syndication, but that's not too important to me right now.
Regarding my current state: I finished up a very fun internship in the Bay Area (thanks Tim for letting me live on your floor for three months), visited family in Central America for the first time, had my longest non-work non-school break of the past five years, partied with my cousins almost every weekend between Thanksgiving and the new year, and moved back to LA to finish up my MS. About two days after I moved in began the terrible winds and fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
The particulate matter during a wildfire, combined with extremely low humidity, results in a lighting and air condition that is very unsettling. Sometime around 2018 I wrote a poem describing my emotional response to these conditions after the extensive fires of the previous two years. I cannot find it now, and I definitely would not post it until after the fires are contained.