When I was asked what I read for Gillian’s course I blanked. I did not remember. I read quite a bit and watched a number of talks and lectured on YT with most of which I was very impressed, but when I was asked – I remembered nothing.

The reason is that I am super bad with names. This includes names of people, titles of books or films or names of streets or cities (as if it did need further prove I did not remember the name of the city I am in right now, when I was asked a bit later). Forgetting names certainly has it’s advantages (for example: you don’t get star struck as easily) but for the most part it is a source of numerous embarrassments and I think I encountered them all throughout my life.

That moment of me not knowing anything brought us to the topic of note-taking – and I am really bad with that, too. Those are all talents, I mean also the things that you are not good at. So what is the talent of forgetting? Well, it makes you appreciate the moment, and I am quite good at that.

Then we talked about note taking and came up with something that is obvious once put in words: The internet is basically a huge storage device. And more convenient than a notebook, as you don’t have to look for it all the time (you in this context means me). The internet is always there. So I will use the internet as a repository for my notes. And to keep it simple I will store my note on a blog. On this blog.

We also talked about the reading I have to do. This was in fact the topic of this supervisory meeting. And that was really successful as we came up with three domains of knowledge that do make perfect sense when we looked at it once they were expressed – each domain is the core domain of each of my supervisors. The domains of knowledge then kind of defined my reading list.

Next SVM:
Monday 2022-03-14 11:00 DE / 10:00 UK

JA: This meeting really cheered me up. And I agree!