COLM

I’m in the last moments of my first academic conference, COLM, the conference on language modeling. Since last fall I’ve been working with a lab at the University of Illinois that focuses on constrained generation. I wrote a paper about the relationship between byte-level tokenizers and UTF-8 that was accepted for a poster at this conference (tl;dr: Unicode is very a leaky abstraction that doesn’t play nice when you manipulate it at the byte level) and came here to present it in the poster session. I’ve met several heroes and colleagues and hopefully not humiliated myself too much. I’ve got some disparate observations I may find order for in the end, but for now I’ll write them out independently.

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Yoga teacher training I

Last week I started a 200-hour Yoga teacher training course in San Francisco. It will last 10 weeks for an average of 20 hours a week, which is a part-time job as my friend Zach said to me. This training is an introduction to instructing yoga classes in the Vinyasa/Flow style, taught at the Yoga Flow group of studios in San Francisco, owned by Kathleen and Steve Holms. There are thirteen in the cohort.

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Meddlin' in Medellín

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Baby bear and label

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In Bogotá

I’m in Bogotá, Colombia now and have been since this past Wednesday. I’ve talked to one person at the first hostel I stayed at, a very nice German chef from Munich, who shared a joint with me. Apparently medical weed is now legal in Germany. Besides that, I’ve not talked to anyone. I’ve been brushing up on Spanish, but I can hardly have a conversation with that: it’s all I can do to say “soy de los Estados Unidos” (which may be erroneous, but I’m not going to check), and I get shy and trail off halfway through. I think part of the reason people can’t understand me is that I’m talking so damn quietly, because I’m ashamed of speaking poorly. It’s just that I’m a little shy.

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The one who got away

I was at a party talking about the “ones who got away” with some folks, and I mentioned that I’d had a weekend with a girl I’d dated and now wasn’t seeing but for whom I still had feelings. Then in a different context I mentioned that I keep a blog, and I was asked whether I blogged about this missed connection. I was embarrassed to say I hadn’t, so I’m going to change that.

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Travel check-in

It’s been one hundred and thirty-four days since I left Chicago, and I haven’t blogged once in that whole time. Sucks to suck, I guess. I’ve had other stuff going on. In brief, my itinerary has been: Denmark, Thailand, Japan, France, Belgium, USA, Canada, USA again, Scotland (now), and then France again and back to the USA. Then maybe Brazil before a longer stint in the USA for a 200-hour yoga teacher training in San Francisco, which really is a delightful city.

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Here we go again

So here we are once again. I guess it’s terminally online of me to immediately turn to the internet to say what I’ve got to say. The blog is strangely public and private at the same time. I’m not sure why it feels so natural, but it does. I know I don’t write at the level of some people: for example, I learned in a previous post about Sara Ahmed’s blog feminist killjoys, where she says far more interesting things than I do. I’m just working through my feelings, I guess. A semi-public private kind of life.

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Move-out check-in

I’m moving out of the apartment that I moved in to almost two and a half years ago. This is the longest I’ve ever stayed in one flat. I was in my college apartments each less than a year, then in the place in Bologna for a couple months. The only places I’ve stayed for a longer time were the three houses I lived in with my mom.

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Reading notes for the near future