with all the griping and ranting and moaning i do on this blog, i feel obliged to say that today wasn't one of those days, but that did have something to do with the past few days.
wednesday was my talk at student analysis seminar, and it lacked luster. in retrospect i should have realised that i wouldn't end up discussing things that i truly wanted to discuss .. not nearly that much at all.
i should have talked about something else .. less dear to my heart, perhaps, and maybe something lighthearted and fun, if analysis can be like that at all. i think i took it too seriously and spent too much time consolidating sources and facts and areas of study .. to the extent that half that time was a waste, and later i was irrationally upset by my own folly.
but promises are promises, and abstracts have their deadlines, and we cannot retract all our bad decisions.
if all goes well i won't be giving another talk for a while. sometime before december i trust i'll be drafted into another analysis study seminar talk, and there is a talk i promised friends for a mid-october conference. but apart from those, i'd rather be silent for a while, and wait until i have something worth saying before i speak.
at any rate: an obligation or two now met, and over.
yesterday afternoon i showed the advisor some colorful pictures i drew, and he pondered my idea for a construction, said that it might work, but not to dwell on it for too long. trust me: this isn't as strange as it sounds.
the idea also seems to work, which i suppose is good .. even though it took me a month, off and on, to sort out ..
.. and considering that it is one variant of someone else's very concrete example, and that doesn't prove anything deep. it's merely a motivating example.
the real work is ahead: what do two examples teach us? is there anything interesting happening, geometrically? as my friend john mackay would say, is this fit at all for man or beast?
it's too much thought for a friday night. a small job's done, but there are many more left, and i'll start another one tomorrow.
i may have time to write that paper, at last .. provided i don't waste it. the time for it had to come, sooner or later, but in the midst of errands and duties, sometimes i forget how things realistically follow one another, and my hope ebbs to dull expectations from dull, glassy eyes.
i hope things brighten for a spell. i could use the time to be productive.
2 comments:
You sound as if you are too hard on yourself at times. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but you have to give it a break.
Whoever said math was easy at the Ph.D. level?
Take some time out to read a Highsmith book, and sip a beer, or whatever.
good advice .. especially the bit about the beer. (;
as for the talk, i had a particular purpose in mind: to be a little narcissistic and talk about a little joint research i did with a friend, two years ago.
regardless of how it goes, work is always personal. so maybe that explains a little of the disappointment at not having the means even to say what we did. the spirit of the talk was lost, and the basic notions i discussed were things anyone could read about.
so i view it as a goal that i didn't reach. after all, you can't succeed in all of them.
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