This is from Monday night, while I was still in the office.
I think I had 3-4 cups of coffee today, and as of now (9:30 pm) I'm on the verge of sleep, teetering on my office chair and blinking at too frequent of a rate for a waking person. I could swear that earlier Matti1a was easier to understand, and now I'm debating whether a nap is reasonable, or maybe I should crash early tonight and get a good start at work tomorrow morning.
But crashing "now" means stumbling the 20-minute walk home, which isn't very inviting on a damp, rainy night like this one. I might even wake up on the way home, which would have made the whole endeavor pointless ..
The work's piling up, though I feel I've made a tactile [1] dent in the pile today after a large dose of reading and thinking and scratching out examples. If I could get tangent measures straight in my head, find time to understand the area and coarea formulas, and remember all the Sobolev stuff, then a mid- to late December prelim might actually work out.
One should put emphasis on the word "might." There are several matters to attend to, this December: I'm meant to give a talk in each of my two classes this term, and damn it -- I should have worked on them earlier. Now there's hell to pay and little to no time to negotiate the concepts needed to give a 50-minute exposition on matters that I should know better than I actually will.
Then there's final exam grading for Calc II, on 15 December. It's a one-day commitment, but the last thing I want to consider at this point.
Funny how it seems: after all these years, all I really want is to sit down and be left alone to do one thing at a time. I don't mind giving a talk or two, and I don't mind reading and preparing for an oral exam .. but just not all at once. It feels like too much, the end goal too far, and the light at the end of the tunnel too bright. I can't seem to do a damned thing right anymore.
There seems like so much to do and I don't even know where to begin. This is too much like last fall where teaching took half my life away and three courses' worth of problem sets took away the other half. I was too busy being a GSI and and student to look for or even think about an advisor. Now I feel like I'm too busy being a GSI and a researcher in training to be any sort of student.
You'd figure that with the time constraints at hand, I'd find better uses of my time than e-ranting over the internet. Funny how that goes, too: maybe it's a means of escape from the cold, unrelenting reality that is my non-life and the work that won't ever diminish in bulk.
Well. At least rectifiability seems comprehensible. I'll hit a big theorem tonight, and I might even be able to make sense of it. If my plan isn't fully shot to pieces then I'll read about Ah1f0rs' Measure Conjecture, hyperbolically harmonic functions, and other matters of geometry. That way, I might be able to settle down with my Hyperbolic Manifolds prof and have a decent conversation about what I'm supposed to talk about next week.
Getting close to 10 pm. Damnit. I wonder if my kids will notice that I didn't do any preparations for their Calc II class tomorrow. Oh well: it's separation of variables from ODE, they've done the reading, and they need the practice. I'll let them loose on problems and give my suggestions and point out their errors. There's little else I can do for them, anyways.
Epilogue: the plan did get shot to pieces. I never did read about Ah1f0rs' Conjecture until today, but that seems more comprehensible and less tenuous now.
[1] I would have said tangible, but that's not precise enough. This is the sort of dent that you can't see with the naked eye, but you can feel if you have sensitive nerves on your fingertips.
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