Update (February 5th, 2025)

Hello everyone! Amid all the awful and distressing events that continue to batter our world each day, I do have some tentative good news pertaining to my personal future, which is that—after four years, three rounds of applying, and a total of eighteen applications—I have finally received my very first real, official offer of admission into a PhD program. Last week, I received an email informing me that I have been admitted to the PhD program in classics at the University of Washington in Seattle. This is a good sign, but I am not celebrating too much this early because I do not yet know whether this offer will be funded, since the department is still in the process of discussing funding. If the offer is not funded, then I will most likely not be able to accept it. The University of Washington is one of the eight total programs that I have applied to for the current application cycle; so far, I have not received any official decision from any of the seven other programs.

In the meantime, I am still working very hard on the novel I am writing. At this point, I think that the first half or so of the book is generally well polished. The current draft is 80,000 words and, as I’ve said before, I am expecting the final draft to be somewhere between 100,000 to 110,000 words. I still have a significant amount of material left to write (around 30,000 to 40,000 words concentrated in the later part of the book) and I still have quite a bit of polishing to do on what I have written of the later chapters, but I am making progress.

In addition to working on the novel, I have also been doing an enormous amount of independent reading and studying over the past two years, especially in the past year since I graduated with my MA. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can and improve myself for my own sake, without posting about it online.

One of the reasons why I used to post online so prolifically while I was in undergrad was because I felt a deep, irrepressible need to show off how much I knew about a wide variety of subjects to as many people as possible. This benefited me in some ways and it gained me some opportunities that I am grateful for, but I’ve realized that it was very unhealthy of me to rely so much on impressing others for my self-esteem. In retrospect, I realize now (although I didn’t realize it at the time, since I was so accustomed to it that it felt normal to me) that I was also extremely lonely and socially isolated, with no close friends among my peers, and the comments that various internet denizens left on my work were one of the main forms of social contact I had.

As I have mentioned before, the fact that I have been focused on writing my novel rather than this blog is the main reason why I haven’t posted as much over the past year, but there are also many deeper reasons. One of them is because I no longer feel the need to impress strangers as strongly as I did when I was younger, which I think is actually a mark of personal growth.

One of the other reasons isn’t so positive. I generally don’t discuss my mental health on this blog, but I will say here that I have struggled with anxiety and depression my whole life and, due to a combination of several reasons, they have oppressed me especially greatly over the past year. Partly due to this, it has felt harder for me to write than it once was.

All of that aside, I do have a real, non-update post coming out very soon, which is the review of the film The Return that I promised I would write back in December. I finally saw the film and my review of it is now mostly written. I still have my review of Kaos saved as a draft and I have also been working on-and-off on a few other posts, including an analysis post about how online classics communities and discourses have changed over the past decade or so—change that has been very significant, but that no one has written about publicly in any depth to my knowledge.