I feel like it could be nontrivially helpful (for me and for others) to re-organize some of my posts into blog posts.

for instance http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?p=3486902#p3486902

darn productivity (although i don't know if it actually conveys the right attitude) is too hard. it's no longer like high school where i had on the order of 2-3 actually substantial goals. actually i'm not sure i have many more right now, but there's just so much more to do/learn/explore, and so much less guidance/obviously-good paths (also feels like there's so much less time darn, even though that's probably not true).

in other news yesterday i wasted time making my website less sucky; http://web.mit.edu/vywang/www/ (but I'm glad I got the reflections on classes down)

hmm so I feel like there's often a conflict between practical advice and advice that would obviously be better in an ideal world. like attempting to do research right now (even though i do basically have a urop (either playing around with quaternion/octonion algebra factorization/number theory or kissing number problem for dimensions 9 to 12 or so, probably in the construction direction) i can work on, i haven't formalized it and i'm not sure if it's worth it (although i do think quaternions/octonions are special enough to merit this kind of attention, and it does seem interesting...) vs. learning more stuff. and even when learning stuff, like whether it's always worth it to try to prove a lemma/theorem first[url][/url] rather than just reading/checking/(understanding? but that's the whole question) the proof. or pushing out more subjects on expii vs. exploring other options (and generally doing stuff that is more interesting/innovative, probably mostly for myself right now but maybe eventually for others too)---i can't say i've done anything truly difficult for expii, even though, in some sense, this is obviously meaningful work (low-hanging fruit?) that (from what we can tell) still needs to be done.

and this is all just in math/education-related stuff. i wonder if i'll ever pick piano up again. also other real life stuff but i don't feel like writing about that now (i'd rather just do math/other stuff). maybe some other time.

at the end of the day the best advice always seems to be to do what it takes to be happy... because over-analyzing things always leads to apparent contradictions in this crazy world.