I believe that everyone should have three prevailing components in their life, which are a working/intellectual component, a social component, and a creative component. Several times I have witnessed that I experience burnout because I focused too hard on one category without allowances for the other two, so it's important that all three remain important in my life.

Sometimes, I do creative things. Primarily, I'm interested in theatre, singing, and making music, but I also have mild interests in technical and creative writing, design, and filmmaking.

Theatre

In my senior year of undergrad, I had the privilege to serve as Head Greek Sing Chair for my fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi, which entailed putting on a fifteen-minute long production of the musical Come From Away.

This project was my life for several months, and remains one of my proudest creations and fondest memories to this day. I think that there is unmatched meaning and fulfillment in storytelling, and the opportunity to work with others to tell such a weighty story about community, compassion, and loss, was one that I will not soon forget.

The show is available to watch online here.

Music

I picked up the guitar during my senior year of college, and it is one of my main hobbies. I don't really have anything to share here, as I'm not yet at the level of skill where I'm happy with what I can produce, but I'm inching closer every day.

I was in an a cappella group called Hillelujah in college, though. Here's a video of us performing at Kol Haolam, the annual national Jewish a cappella competition, in 2019.

Filmmaking

I find the medium of film an interesting one because of the unique presence of the elements of visual, audio, and storytelling elements. On various occasions in my life, I've had reason to work on a video project, and I find it a very relaxing process to mentally storyboard a project and edit it to the way that I like.

Often, for me, it starts with a song that I would like to set a moment of my life to, or set a scene in a story to. This has only happened a couple times, and in very, very amateur settings, but I am proud of what I create anyways.

Here is one such example, of a video I created to preserve the memories of my freshman year at CMU.

I also consider film analysis video essays on YouTube a guilty pleasure of mine, including channels such as Every Frame a Painting, shnee, and Now You See It.

Website

One example of a creative outlet is also this website, which I have painstakingly rendered into a form that I find aesthetically pleasing.

Significant efforts were put into rendering syntax highlighting using Highlight.js rather than Zola's in-built syntax highlighting, because Zola does not natively support Standard ML as a language. These colors were also picked out especially to make Standard ML look nice, by my standards. Have a look.

val x = 3 + (3 * 4)
val y = foo (2) |> 4
val y = fn x => 2

val y = ([1, 2, 3], "hi")

exception Foo

val y = x >>= f

(* foo *)
fun foo (x : 'a, y : int, z : int list) = 2

structure Foo : FOO =
  struct
    type t = int * string

    datatype t2 =
        One
      | Two
  end