My 2021 in Review

Introduction

When I was growing up (and arguably, I still am), the New Year was a weird time. Adults treat it as a marker of fresh starts and segments of life and other things. As a student, it just means the school year is halfway done. I remember time periods of my life more vividly by what year of school I was in than what the year on the calendar was. This will be the first year that the New Year is more than a halfway-point. With that in mind, I want to go over some points of my life that feel important enough to mention.

Goals

I gave myself some goals in 2021. Here's how I stacked up to them:

Career Goals

get a job before the start of Summer Cyber Security First Responder cert a public sector job in digital forensics

Two out of three ain't bad. Especially so when the third is something you feel even happier having not completed. That isn't to say that I think I would have disliked a public sector job in digital forensics - I'm just incredibly happy with what I do now.

Money Goals

Find a working money management system Start saving long-term Be picky about buying things

All three completed. I've been using KMyMoney for about 3 months now, and I have an IRA that I'm putting money into each month. Sadly, a large amount of money each month goes to student loans, but there are far worse things than that. As for being picky about buying things, I have been saving my money to buy fewer, higher-quality items than before.

Athletic Goals

Lose weight to reach a goal of 180lb Get back into archery

Both of these were very much not met. While I would like to attribute it to COVID or something else, I really can't. This was more-or-less just laziness.

(That said, I told myself back in August/September-ish that I would get a Planet Fitness membership as soon as Delaware dropped back below 100 7-day-rolling-average cases a week. We are currently at 737 - the highest since January.)

Social Goals

Post at least once a month to each blog Join at least 2 communities and be active in them Stream on Twitch at least twice a month

According to my folders, I had a post each month except for July and October. Goal almost reached?

As for Twitch streaming and communities... not so much. I realized kinda recently that my desire to stream on Twitch might just be FOMO. I'm not a very public person in any regard, and especially not a very social person. (And even then, I'd rather stream on YouTube than Twitch.)

Other Points

While I may not have met most of my goals this year, I still feel it was a good year overall.

My final semester at RIT went well. I had good grades. I got the co-op I needed to graduate. I was able to attend graduation and see people I hadn't seen in a while.

Of the most important things related to the beginning of the year was taking a class on Existentialism. I had one more free elective, and the course sounded interesting - especially after having finished Nier: Automata. Little did I know that it would be the most interesting class in my time at RIT. I was attending the professor's office hours every week just to learn more about the works of Nietzsche, Sartre, and de Beauvoir. Once the class was over, I picked up multiple philosophy books and started reading in a way that I hadn't since before I started high school. I'm immensely grateful to Professor Terezakis for starting me on this road.

On another topic, I started a job doing penetration testing for a major consulting firm. I don't feel comfortable divulging too many details just yet, but I cannot emphasize enough how happy I am to be working for real. As nice as the learning portion of college can be, the application never feels tangible.

With the newfound income from my job, I also had the opportunity to greatly expand my fountain pen collection. The two I'm most proud of are the Visconti Homo Sapiens and the BENU Talisman Mistletoe 2021 LE. Of course, having fancy writing utensils is nothing without having something to write, so I've taken to writing down as much as possible when I read something educational. Philosophy postings on Aeon, Accounting 101 lectures on YouTube, MIT's COVID-19 lecture series, etc... I'm taking better notes than I did in school.

Books

I mentioned that I had been reading more books than since before high school, and it seems to be tradition to "review" books on a blog, so... here we go.

Finished

The Little Book of Philosophy from DK Publishing. Returning to serious reading after years of being traumatized from it by terrible English teachers and professors is like trying to jump into running a 5K after not so much as jogging for years; it just doesn't end well. Luckily, the Little Book of Philosophy uses clear language and keeps most of its "chapters" to a page or two. Each "chapter" is about a single philosopher, and includes a good introduction to their most notable thoughts. The book will probably be less useful for someone who already knows some philosophy, but would be great for someone who is just getting started.

The Portable Nietzsche/Thus Spoke Zarathustra edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann. While I was initially iffy on Nietzsche during the existentialism course, I somehow gravitated toward him once I started studying philosophy on my own. This is a great book for someone interested in Nietzsche, but a terrible book to get started with. Zarathustra starts out interesting, but gets increasingly obscure as time goes on. I plan to go back to it again when I finish a few more books.

Beyond Good and Evil written by Nietzsche, translated by Kaufmann. I told myself I could read this book in two weeks as a sign that I could really get through a book quickly if I wanted to. Even moreso, I told myself I could do it while taking notes and understanding the text. I think I did so. Nietzsche's writing style is the kind that echoes with the forcefulness of an actor owning a stage in front of a huge audience. It's also much easier to read once you realize he wrote it in a way to be spoken aloud - prose be damned. Inflections in voice feel like a requirement to understand BG&E.

His work is certainly not without error - and I don't dare try to explain some of the more inflammatory comments as I can't do his philosophy justice. All I can say is that he can easily be taken out of context to say the opposite of what he means.

In Progress

I've had a few books "in progress" due to not wanting to read the same thing all the time. I can't properly review what I haven't finished yet, but I can give some information on what I have read.

Start with No by Jim Camp is basically a book on marketing and sales. I imagine it would be much more useful to someone whose job is to regularly sell things instead of just perform work, but there are a few points that have been more useful for me in day-to-day life. For example, he says that one should have a goal beyond just selling things. In my case, rather than my job being to perform penetration testing for companies, it would be to make companies safer by informing them of weaknesses in their environment so that the company, their employees, and their customers can be safe from cyber crime. Again, I don't do the book justice, but I do think it to be a good thing to read. If I had to provide one criticism, it would be that there are almost too many examples in the book.

The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef is not a book related to the Boy Scouts. It is a book about countering biases and looking for the most accurate answer to a question or problem. I've not made it very far into the book, but I am looking forward to getting further.

Voltaire's Philosophical Letters (concerning the English nation) from Dover Press. Finally, the philosophy book I've been reading as a break from Nietzsche before I dive into Genealogy of Morals. I'm several letters/chapters in and I don't know if I can recommend it as a book on philosophy. There is so much in the way of historical context and religious criticism (neither of which are bad) that it doesn't feel as philosophical as the title suggests. Even if it isn't as philosophical as other works, it is filled with so much humour that I still recommend it for that alone.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I read this book in ninth grade as part of one of the first English classes I ever enjoyed. I started re-reading it because I wanted to find a specific quote (or something like it) that I remember from it that has stuck with me since I first encountered it. I haven't encountered it yet, but my purpose for reading it has changed to doing it primarily for enjoyment.