This was a crazy year, so much so that I thought about not writing this because what’s the point? Obviously all my plans were uprooted by the pandemic, right?
Well, maybe. Regardless, the exceptionality of the year might make it more interesting to report and reflect upon. Let’s go!

What was planned that had to be cancelled?

I was hoping to visit Cologne since I last went in August 2019. I guess it will have to wait. In my previous post I’ve also talked about visiting Switzerland more, this happened only in part.
I spent one week in March (right before the lockdown!) and two days in July. This is definitely less than what was expected, but I guess it’s fine. Besides, I went there for work, not leisure.
Another thing that I would have wanted to do more is sports, this is one thing the pandemic had nothing to do with, it’s all due to my lazyness, however working from home took away all the walking I used to do as a commuter. I used to walk about 3km each day, which is a sweet spot to not become either too tired or too weak.

Time at home

Working remotely most of the year was strange. Time is not made of blocks you add and subtract, it’s like a flexible surface that thins or thickens depending on how much it’s stretched.
The first lockdown was particularly hard on my mental health. I’ve been confined in the house for two whole months, never going outside if not to bring down trash twice a week. Not knowing when the lockdwon would end was what made it harder. The first few weeks I took advantage to draw more in the morning, then my schedule was shifted from 9-18 to 8-18 (with two hours lunch break) which meant I had far less time in the morning. I tried taking advantage of the long lunch break to read a manga (Bleach) in German instead.
Some attempts to spend some time in the morning to workout were made and soon forgotten, this is ongoing.
In general, most of the time this year was spent drawing and painting, which means everything else suffered. On one hand my draftmanship improved a ton, on the other hand my Maths and CS education suffered. I only managed to study some things for work (Nix, Kafka, Flink…) and review some programming language theory.

During the second lockdown I was determined not to relive the experience. My girlfriend got into photography, so we started a project to take one picture from the window each day for the month of November. I know it sounds boring, especially considering that our view is made of a parking lot, but you’d be amazed what a boring landscape can do to your creativity. As a December project we decided to compile those pictures in a sort of digital book, still working on it.
My schedule got changed to 8-17 and I decided I would draw in the morning no matter what. I think this is one thing that helped me improve the most. I would only have time for a quick (20-30m) copy in pencil and I would copy a drawing at 1:1 scale. After a few weeks the results were quite apparent.

The lockdowns made me cherish going outside for walks, something I didn’t really enjoy before. As a commuter I had the opposite problem: all my time was spent outside. Taking advantage of the summer weather we went to the countryside and visited a few remote creeks I hadn’t seen since I was a child. Drawing from life and taking pictures in nature is also fun. My Go practice is stil lingering to a few games a month. I watch more than I play and mostly enjoy playing against KataGo.

Books of the year

As you know, I set myself a goal of reading 24 books in a year, and that’s a maximum! I want to read less and read better. This year I’ve read 29 books, which is the closest I’ve ever got to my goal.
A few of these are actually mangas, the best I’ve read is Oyasumi Punpun. The character design (or lack thereof) is what drawn me in and the story did the rest. I’ve read Solanin from the same author but didn’t like it as much.
Another honorable mention is Plato. I’ve started reading his dialogues in chronological order and finished a volume going from the Apology to Meno. I haven’t studied much ancient philosophy during my degree, so this was interesting. I found some dialogues to be really fresh and still able to speak to a contemporary audience.
Speaking of art books, I fell in love with The book of a hundred hands by Bridgman. I went through it first copying in pencil and now once more copying in ink (fineliner, dip pen, brushpen). His style is odd at a first glance and it’s hard to see what you’re supposed to learn from it, but it grows on you and becomes so clear after you spend some time with it. I’ve tried some other books from him but the drawings are much more cryptic, I’ll need to go back to them.

Programming

@home: basically nothing was done. I’m going through a TLA+ book with a former colleague. Most programming has been in my head as a puzzle solver.

@work: I’ve started at a new employer in March. The first week was spent in Zurich for training and the rest working from home or going to the office in Milan sporadically from July onwards. It’s very different from my previous employer in terms of scale, stack, and culture.
I switched mostly because of the stack: I’m finally paid to write Haskell! This is a dream come true, something I didn’t think would have been possible. We write very basic or boring Haskell, so my foundation there has strengthened quite a bit. We’re not looking to go type-level crazy anytime soon which is a bummer on my curiosity but a blessing for my anxiety. I’ve only had one type error that I wasn’t able to solve after banging at it for a week. Luckily a colleague had some time to take a crack at it. Other than that I would say it’s been smooth sailing.

Faith

As most Italian kids, I was raised catholic and hated every minute of it. At around 12 I stopped going to church and at 15 I declared myself an atheist.
At the time becoming an atheist and vegan (which had to wait a few more years) was the logical consequence of my politics. I was reading a lot more and forming my ideas around the world. My outlook was (and well, is) in stark contrast with party politics and capitalist realism. I don’t know what I am, but I’m mostly drawn towards anarchism. Whatever that means.
Ditching authority meant ditching the church and refusing specism.
At times I was aware that my atheism was not sincere, but I didn’t know what to make of it. It’s not so much that I didn’t believe in God, I was refusing God in order to live to my own accord. I wanted to make my own mistakes instead of walking on the paved path. I used to say that God was the true temptation, the literal deus ex machina. Before dying my father told me how wrong this was, that God was not an all-ecompassing explanation but rather a mystery, especially in relation to theodicy. It took me quite some time to understand what he meant.
In the past few years I felt something growing in me I can no longer ignore. I’m catholic, but I still cannot come to grips with parts of the catholic doctrine when it comes to LGBT rights, bioethics, lingering mysoginy. This however is a smaller part of the magisterium, I figured I would rather be a bad catholic than keep lying to myself. It was a big shock for my girlfriend and well, to myself.
I feel like I’ve spent my youth breaking myself in pieces and it’s now time to put the puzzle tiles back in place. Reading the Fratelli Tutti made me realize how the catholic church is far more aligned with my political outlook than I could have credited it for.

What I expect from 2021

The vaccine is out but I’m not holding my breath. Should there be the chance, our first trip will most probably be to Cologne to visit friends and family. I also want to go back to a few museums (the Japanese and east asian ones in Nagasaki park) and churches to sketch from life. Come spring I would also like to paint outside.
Painting still scares me, but I think the best way to improve is to do so from life and, well, do it more often. I’m still focused 90% on drawing, but would like to move to other mediums soon. My mom gave me a very fancy watercolor sketchbook for Christmas along with good brushes and need to put them to good use.
I would like to go back to programming for leisure in 2021. This will be hard and I honestly don’t know how I’ll manage, but I need to find a way. Advice is certainly welcomed. Hopefully either this year or the next meetups will be back. One day a month for Open Source Saturday would be a good starting point.