An Eye to the Future, An Eye to the Past

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

Sunrise at Acadia, Dawning of a New Day