Kish’s Blog

I love consistency. I’m pretty sure the reason why is because my father was super inconsistent when I was growing up, and I really disliked it, so I went way in the other direction. But as with everything, it’s a blessing and a curse! One of the reasons loving consistency is great is because it’s easier for me spot inconsistencies in logic and thus learn faster. And one of the ways it has made life difficult for me is that, for a long time, I’ve struggled to resolve a bunch of internal inconsistencies, so that I can feel alright with myself. One of the first things that made me realize that it’s not “wrong” to have internal contradictions is when I was starting character work for one of the people I interviewed over the summer (for my solo show!). She is an older woman, and I was confused about how to play both the silliness in her speech and her laughter, as well as the serious, high-achieving part of her. I told my advisor how frustrated I felt, because it was difficult! And she resp...

I was reminded of how much of an impact small things can have on your life after I started using a new water bottle last week and saw my water consumption drastically increase. This lesson was one of the first things that I internalized when I started studying design (and it probably goes without saying that it’s generalizable haha)— habits , physical objects, aspects of the environment, etc. can all have seemingly disproportionate effects, and not just in an emergent/gestalt sense. For instance, there was a housing project in St. Louis known as Pruitt-Igoe that turned into a crime hotspot and was demolished around 20 years after completion, despite a ton of public enthusiasm and optimism for the plan. There were a bunch of factors that contributed to its decline, but one of the dominant ones was a design decision that had an unexpectedly large negative effect: to reduce elevator congestion, the elevators only stopped at certain floors, forcing residents to use the stairs in betwe...

I was trying to find a list of habits like this to inspire my New Year’s resolutions, but the ones I found online weren’t super helpful. (The only one that I found that I might adopt is to set a short timer in the morning for cleaning up.) So I decided to write a list of my somewhat easily adoptable habits that may inspire others. Having a consistent sleep schedule!! This has probably been the biggest game changer for me. Right now I’m sleeping 12:30-8:30. Since I usually don’t have anything until 11am most days, I get to indulge in a relaxed/relaxing morning routine that can help set the tone for the rest of my day. I hate the feeling of having to rush! Before adopting this habit, my sleep schedule was super irregular, and I would frequently stay up late and/or sleep for 10-12 hours. Some tips on how to get started: It may be helpful to start a new sleep schedule during a phase where you’re already transitioning anyways. For instance, after a vacation when you’re trying to get ove...

I fluctuate between wanting to obsessively chronicle everything, and hating getting photos of myself taken + trying to “live in the moment.” In case it’s not super obvious by my recent blog posts, right now I’m in the former state, after maybe a few years in the latter. I’ve realized that the desire to make an impact on the world can manifest in smaller ways than a choice of career path, like when I went on vacation and realized that the only/main way I could “leave a mark” on a place that felt meaningful and transformative to me was to take a bunch of photos. I don’t think that’s the main reason other people take photos in a place, but I also know that I’m not alone in wanting to touch the places and things and people that have touched me. (That’s why Kilroy existed! That’s probably also a big reason why this blog exists...) Part of this shift is probably me getting older, and more than that, being on the precipice of another major shift in my life (college graduation). In 2014, the ...

(More stream of consciousness than my usual blog posts, inspired by some poetry I've been reading and life!!!) Things that you do are not isolated. This is why small things can have big effects. Like parenting. And also proving things to yourself. That's why I like taking walks so much. Everything is a metaphor . The cliché of the journey is more important than the destination. That's why I do weird things on my walks too, like turn around abruptly, walk backwards, skip, sing, etc. I know this is true because I've seen the effects of standing up for myself in one area of my life manifest in others.

I love buying presents for other people and would consider myself pretty good at it too. Gift-giving is one of my love languages 😊. For some reason, my mom finds buying presents really difficult and is pretty bad at it, so I wanted to write this post to teach my mom and other people who aren’t good at gift-giving the heuristics that I use. This post is going to be a combination of theory, tips, and general strategies, rather than me listing specific gift ideas. To begin, what is a present (i.e., what distinguishes it from something you would buy for another person in a normal context)? And what are you trying to accomplish by giving this person a present? I think it’s really important to think through these questions for yourself before starting the process of picking a present. Here are my answers: I think a present is a combination of both the present itself (e.g., a physical object, a future experience) and the symbolic gesture that is your giving of the present. The symbolic g...

To give some context on why I’m writing this post: I have selective memory repression/loss and a form of aphantasia where I can’t relive past emotions (I briefly talked about this in my last video ), and I’ve been feeling a lot of pre-nostalgia about my time at Princeton, so I want to record as much as I can while I’m still living it. The level of anxiety I feel about my work at Princeton is insane and probably extremely unhealthy, despite me taking countermeasures like taking regular walks and making task lists. When I’m in an anxious time (midterms, weeks where I have a lot due—usually right before breaks) it’s difficult for me to sleep well, which is rarely a problem for me at other times. I can’t fall asleep because I’m thinking and maybe feeling guilty about all the work that I need to do/could be doing, and my sleep is restless because I wake up periodically in the night because (I think) my subconscious knows I have a lot of work to get done. I feel like I need to be a machine t...

Something I've been thinking about recently is the question of how much of what we think/"know" about ourselves is a consequence of what others have said about us, and how much of it is from first principles. I was surprised when two of my classes this week touched on this question. In my Attitudes and Persuasion seminar, we were discussing the difference between explicit and implicit attitudes, and which one is one's "real" attitude. There is actually no consensus in the field about whether or not explicit and implicit attitudes are even internally represented separately. Explicit attitudes are ones that can be measured using surveys, like Likert scales, and are known to us. Implicit attitudes are commonly measured using the  implicit association test , and use responses that are automatic/out of our control in some way (like muscle activity in the face , heart rate, etc.). There was one study  on racial attitudes that examined body language as well as imp...

I'm taking 5 classes this semester, and something that's been surprisingly nice is that I have a pretty regular schedule (and no classes on Fridays). Monday through Thursday, I have a class 11-12:30, a one hour lunch break, and then either a 1.5 or 3 hour-long class. I realized that having a consistent daily schedule really helps with establishing a regular sleep schedule and morning routine. Usually, I wake up a bit before my alarm at 9:20 (unless I go to bed late/am super tired, in which case I wake up later and skip breakfast), and have a slow and relaxed morning in. Usually I have time to walk to class early and either journal by the Woody Woo fountain or reflect inside the Richard Serra sculpture. In terms of my classes...they're definitely a lot of work as a whole, which I kind of touched on in my last post . I'll just go through them one by one. World Drama (English / Theater) : I am taking this class to satisfy my requirements for the theater certificate, and I ...

For people who don't know what pomodoros are, they're basically alternating periods of work + break (usually 25 min working / 5 min break), and there are a bunch of desktop and mobile pomodoro apps that you can get. I've known about pomodoros for a pretty long time but only started doing them after learning more about them when I took the Learning How to Learn online course  while I was at RC. Even then, I never fully incorporated them into my work until this past month. I feel like doing pomodoros has changed my life in a big time way, by making me more aware of both the passage of time and my own mental state. For instance, now I can set daily goals for myself like "work on cos pset for 3 pomodoros," which allows me not only to break down big (and undesirable) tasks into manageable daily chunks, but also to become more aware of how long it takes me to do certain parts. Not only that, but I'm now also more aware of how many things I can actually do during the...