I find it personally interesting that this is the third time in my life a major turning point has been marked by a solar eclipse. The first was the May 21st, 2012 annular eclipse that I saw on a college trip to the Grand Canyon, my first major adventure away from home. Then was the August 21, 2017 “Great American Eclipse” that happened to coincide with the start of my first full time teaching job. And now here, the April 8th 2024 eclipse, marking a point where something needed to change.

I love teaching. I love physics. And so I love teaching physics. Getting to explain things to people, showing them new ways to see the world, and working with someone to find out the best way for them to understand a frustrating concept. Seeing someone get that “Aha!” moment when the light bulb turns on and everything connects is a wonderful experience. So I do love my job.

It’s just unfortunate that my current position has me commute an hour away from my house for too little money.

Something needed to change.

I got to watch the eclipse from the comfort of my back yard, although only after zooming through the hour drive home from work to do so. It was a fairly meditative experience getting to stare at the literal celestial event overhead for hours through my cardboard eclipse glasses. Gives one time to think, as they watch the Moon slowly overtake the Sun. I thought about what I wanted to do, how I wanted to spend my time on Earth, and how to afford a living in our present economic inferno. Naturally my mind wandered toward my hobbies, the things I enjoyed spending time doing. My writing.

The more tired the past several years have made me with my day job, the more my family would remind me that they always thought I would end up in show business. Evidently I’m somewhat of a ham, something that I’ve channeled into my lectures to great success. I find it easier to learn when one is engaged and entertained, so I always try to plan out the most interesting ways to teach any given topic. My students’ smiles and laughs paired with their grades provide me with enough validation that my approach works.

That isn’t the only way my desire to entertain has manifested over the years though. Whenever I absorb media I regularly get a new creative itch, thoughts wondering how I would have written a movie differently or what I would want to do with a particular trope. This resulted in me starting to write, trying to get my ideas out of my head into a form I could see, and then arranging them into some form of script to make something out of it. I primarily engage with visual media, between YouTube, movies, and video games, so of course I default to envisioning my creative projects in a similar way. So my writing would take the form of scripts for videos, and I was always super excited by my ideas and the things that I’d write.

Except I rarely ever turned my scripts into anything, because video production is exhausting and I have an hour out plus an hour back commute.

Something needed to change.

A lot of people don’t like change, which is valid. It’s messy, it’s unknown, it’s any number of uncomfortable things. But something I remembered while watching the eclipse is that despite all that, change is actually what it means to be alive. Biologically speaking, the ability to change is what separates living creatures from inanimate matter. We intake food to incorporate into new cells, we intake information to incorporate into our processing to learn and make new decisions. All of this together means you are not the same person you used to be, literally physically and mentally. You have changed your cells, you have changed your thoughts. Rocks can’t do that. Dead things can’t do that. If I am alive then I am a dynamic and ever changing system. So long as I am alive not only can I change, I am already changing.

And if I can change, then my approach can change too.

At some point I was given some excellent writing advice. Whenever you’re stuck on a creative endeavor, it’s okay to get your ideas out in whatever way you can. Even if it’s messy, or unrefined, or not what you first had in mind. Once it’s out of your head, you can see it and manipulate it further from there. Just get it out in whatever way you can.

I love my writing, I love my ideas and want to share them. And I love the act of writing them out, seeing them evolve on my screen, and mashing the keys in a frenzy when an amazing idea pops into my head. That’s the part I can do within my current needs and parameters. If I lack the resources to share my ideas in the format I originally envisioned, I can change the game and present them in in whatever way I can.

This website is the change. This is a place for me to share my writing, my ideas, all the things I love and want to make, in the format that I am able to create. Where previously I would stare at my projects folder and wonder if I could ever make something of my ideas, now I look at it and see my written words are already something that I’ve made, and I’m now excited to share them and to improve as a writer.

I write this not only as the thesis for the site, but also as a hopeful encouragement to anyone that also needs a change. Change may seem scary, and your circumstances may not permit the big changes that you need. But just by being alive, just by doing the things that you can, you are already changing and becoming more than you were before. If you are alive then you are already a dynamic and ever changing system. Little by little, every day we change, and that’s what it means to be alive.