 The windswept shores of Acadia National park, Maine, U.S.A. Taken last month. | This post's title may make it seem as though I've gone cross-eyed, and, in a way, I suppose I have. My future eye is already looking to tie up loose ends as I finish my Ph.D. My dissertation is complete, defended, and in the final stages of edits. A major job interview within two weeks. Graduation in less than a month. And then . . . moving (again) to a different state, starting a new career, making new friends, seeing a new area, adding the introduction to a new chapter. In short: the relative unknown. My past eye has been digesting my graduate studies of the past four years: my wonderful friends, colleagues, mentors, and partner; my academic triumphs and travails; the new skills and mindsets I've acquired (not all of which are healthy, I might add); the things I've read, digested, researched, and published; and the places I've been as a result of attending conferences and presenting. In short: the culmination of four years of very difficult, rewarding, wonderful work. I've also been revisiting this website quite a lot, as I tend to do when feeling sentimental. |
I've had quite a few people want to cite my work, and I never have dates for them. So, as with everything in life, I had the unconscious bubbling-up of a desire to look at when I first began to publish things. Tracking dates down required quite a bit of triangulation between my website, Google Drive, older hard-drives with Microsoft Word documents, my journal, and my memory. The first thing I wrote (Water Temple, Ocarina of Time) was in July of 2013. It's now April, 2025. Almost a dozen years. Of course, after I found that out, I was interested: What about the timeline for the rest of my writings? Can I put a date to everything? Well, not to go into too much detail, but, mostly: Yes. I can put a solid date to all but one or two things—and even then I have a rough idea. So, if you open up most any article now, you should see a date at the top. Hopefully that's helpful to someone. Mostly, it was fascinating and meaningful to me, and I spent a happy afternoon today tracing the development of my thoughts and writings over time. Someday, I'll go back and edit my early articles; they can be rough in all sorts of ways. (One is always critical of one's past writing.) For now, though, I'll continue exploring Gorondia and putting myself in a cavelike frame of mind.
I hope you're all well, wherever you are,
Talbot
I hope you're all well, wherever you are,
Talbot
Sunrise at Acadia, Dawning of a New Day
