A Travel Whitepaper

Welcome. Before beginning to recount what I have been up to, I thought it appropriate to at least be clear, if only for my own benefit, about what exactly I hope to accomplish here. Nearly a year ago now, I made this website in the hopes of having a platform custom-built to my particular desires and needs to share any thoughts or things I had learnt to quite literally anyone who cared. To this point, this has resulted in a fairly anemic output of occasional writing. With a fresh year, and now a legitimate source of interest to broadcast here, it seems fitting to take up the practice again. But, given my current situation, is a strong writing habit the most applicable use of time? My conclusion upon reflection is certainly yes.

What Am I Doing?

But let's start with a more important question. Where am I actually? Perhaps you already know, but perhaps I never told you. I'm currently on study exchange at Purdue University in the USA. I will return to Monash University for the Spring semester, but for right now I am taking my usual electrical engineering/computer science units from this bitterly cold campus here in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Following this, I will be doing what 90% of Melbournians it seems at this time of year by heading over to Europe to visit family and old friends. And to meet new ones.

Why?

First and most obviously, writing is a very easy way for me to keep you updated on what I am doing, and more importantly, how I am responding to these goings-on. Given the number of requests I received prior to departure, and given the limited amount of time I have here to do a seemingly infinite amount of things (which includes actually studying...), it seems like a weighty opportunity cost to engage in extended conversation on an individual basis, when from prior experience a lot of this dialogue tends to be repetitive. Of course, if there are particulars that come up any point, this is by no means to say you shouldn't reach out to scratch that itch, just that I don't see great value in answering the line of "how was your first week?" or "how are things going?" more than once.

To be sure, the answer contained in any weekly update to the above questions will far exceed anything I could hope to convey to you via text or email. In engaging directly with a singular person, it is a vain attempt to not let my responses become coloured by the particular relationship that I have with that person; certain events will get downplayed, exaggerated in their significance or otherwise entirely fabricated altogether in those exchanges. But in writing to everyone simultaneously, this bias is more easily sidestepped. And, since most of what you will read is hoisted directly from my own interstitial journaling on a given day (more on that process surely to come in future) it has the important effect of incubating my actual response to that moment in time in perpetuity. What I find when writing or talking after the fact is that the descriptions fall victim to many bad pitfalls:

The inexorable fading of memories as they are attempted to be ported from short-term to long-term channels. The number of times I have had an insight which I thought so vivid as to be impossible to forget, yet for it to elude me only hours later, are uncountable. Hence, given the goal of sustaining as much detail as possible, writing in this long-form, stream of consciousness format allows for the greatest brevity possible.

The time transpired from the event allows opportunity for my brain to wander carelessly back to said occurrences and rewrite it in a manner that is perhaps more digestible to my own mind. Additionally, over time my perspectives on things is guaranteed to change, and so any reflection that takes place after such an alteration is going to necessarily read far differently than it was originally experienced.

In order to best capture as much of my current situation as possible, then, there has to emerge a commitment on my end to engage with each and every second of my time here at the strongest possible level of observation. At the level of direct experience, all I have at my disposal to aid in thought generation are the faculties of sense: there is nothing else. So it seems obvious to me that if every walk across campus, every meal in the dining courts and every class in a lecture hall is infused with keener interest, searching in awareness for the next noteworthy appearance to report on, this can allow me to get even more out of my time here.

I do recognise that that the written format is perhaps not the most impactful medium for me to share my adventures along with you. However, it is most time-effective given my limited video-editing skills, and I think I do enough screen-watching that taking the time to pause and read is perhaps not the worst thing in the world.

What I hope for this above all else is that it is a reflection of my responses and interpretations to a particular chapter of my life. There is no joy in me simply enumerating the classes I took, the names and degrees of the people I met or the meals I ate - for neither the reader nor the author. In this way, and this way only, there is no space for inference on your part, or obfuscating the true proceedings on mine; if only for the simple fact that you may be one of the unlucky souls that make up my retellings, in which case any misprints (intentional or otherwise) will surely be caught.

If you read all of this, or choose to read anything I put out in the coming weeks, I am so very thankful. I hope you got something from it. If you don't, however, do not give it another second's thought - there are undoubtedly plenty of better ways for you to spend your valuable time.

Nick