the limitations of work, and mind.

it's a little unlike me to be an optimist, but i feel as if i have all the pieces to settle this investigation, which concerns the "conformally natural" extension of Douady and Earle and its sobolev regularity.

so said, it's a matter of figuring out how all the pieces fit .. which isn't easy, but i think it's possible now.

i just have to trust to a little luck and work when i can. then a stroke of good fortune just might come my way.

of course, there's a problem (after all, there is always a problem):

i can't seem to work for very long anymore.

after about two hours of working i can't seem to look at the pages, at my diagrams and formulas and figures any longer. it's as if an obsession takes over; my efforts are no longer natural, but forced and artificial and meant to finish this as quickly as possible.

i grow sloppy and hurried and it makes for bad ideas and shoddy work.

usually this is not too worrisome .. hitting the mental wall, i mean.

during the academic year i never have a sufficiently large block of time to finish something as i'd like, so it never happens.

but summertime and silence are like the white of an empty page to a writer: it's condemning. there is so much space (that is, time) that you cannot stand to see all of it empty, and somehow you must fill it ..

.. and i'm at a point in my life where my hobbies and passions are few. there's sleeping and eating and coffee and the internet; every other day there's running and if my knee is up to it, saturdays are basketball. occasionally someone throws a cookout or a party and i chat a little before this newfound silence finds me again.

aside from all of that, there is silence and much nothing .. and there is work to be done. when one is not truly a person, then one can be fully committed to a cause, devoting one's mind and time .. even one's life, if the cause is worthy.

what a waste, it seems, if i can make out the goal from a distance, that i have the time, yet no able mind to see the journey through!