What is the title of your autobiography?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the name of your autobiography?

I've edited to remove students' names; this means some titles are fully expurgated, since a lot of people were not satisfied with a byline and needed to include their name in the title of their own autobiography:

• [name]'s shared thoughts
• My autobiography
• [name]? More like [pun on name]
• [joke about first name]
• [joke about last name and studiousness]
• [pun about name]
• [joke about name's pronunciation]
• [name]'s book

Only one person self-aggrandized with "A Great American Novel"; many people went the other direction:

• Why am I like this
• I wrote some words here
• That Berpy Specy Person
• I smell
• a guy does stuff and has fun (maybe)

Some people only loosely followed the prompt, and their replies mostly reflected what they were thinking about during this lecture on Turing machines and finite automata:

• Am I a finite automaton? Why I'm so forgetful??
• I should NEVER have taken 5 classes in one semester
• TM: Nobody wants ALL The Details

Several students's titles followed a theme:

• How to sleep + eat a ton
• How to sleep more + eat a sh*t ton
• How I sleepwalked through life
• Life Goal: sleep like a kindergarten kid

The cutest one by far was today's winner: Existential Mathematician: Always Looking for "y". (To see previous students' replies to this question, go here.)

This post's theme word is lection (n), "a version of a text in a particular copy or edition; a selection read in a religious service (aka a pericope)." The second printing lection of my autobiography contained a number of typos; the publisher would like to apologize for the particularly egregious typos on the cover, including the author's name.

Incredibly retroblogging

An honest assessment indicates that I mostly want this blog as a post-dated account of things I once did, some time ago. Want up-to-date Lila information? want breaking Lila news? want to know where Lila is, what she's doing, and what she's thinking?

... well, you won't find it here.

On the other hand, you will find all that information, edited and curated as usual, for past iterations of Lila. In particular, starting with the "Repatriation Phase 1", you can now find the following new old posts:

The tiniest steamroller
Purple tree
Sky in mirrored skyscrapers
Ithaca is gorgeous
Bring Up the Bodies
License to Quill

Just so you know, my sycophantic readers, my curious future students, and my intermittently-checking-in relatives, I have made a resolution in 2019 to blog more consistently. And I've beeminded it, so if I fall off from my goal, the sharp sting of a penalty will (maybe) prompt me to post more frequently. I've successfully managed my akrasia on several other topics using beeminder. Here's to 2019, and the 11/12ths of it that remain!


This post's theme word is nuncupate (v tr), "to solemnly pronounce," or "to declare a will orally." Long-time readers considered Lila's nuncupation as tenuous and tongue-in-cheek, which it probably was.