a quick one, while he's away .. (updated)

// started: 24 dec 2012, mid-morning.

i haven't worked in a coffeehouse in a while:
comforting but slightly unfamiliar.

the background christmas music is distracting, though.

// added: 25 dec 2012, early morning.

due to oceanic jet lag, i woke up dreadfully early, well before sunrise on EST .. and managed to improve a technical lemma in one of my manuscripts.

so if all goes well, then this will make an extant proof even clearer,
and will cut away ~2 pages from the previous writeup.

not bad: a little thinking done, even before any of the family's woken up. you see, the older i get, the harder it seems to carry a normal conversation, first thing in the morning.

put otherwise, i feel more encouraged to work out ideas, right away upon waking up ..

.. as if it were a perfect time to hack my unconscious,
see what strange intuitions have occurred to me while i slept, the night before ..

.. so it happens fairly often that i can't wait to get up and start the day, even if i'm not fully awake. ultimately, i'm a more effective (and less irritable) person when left alone in the mornings .. at least long enough to sort out an idea or two.

// added: 25 dec 2012, late afternoon.

i was about to check the arXiv .. but then realised:

if i do look for preprints, then it's likely that i'll browse through some of them and start thinking about ideas. once that happens, then the whole week will turn into something degenerate.

it won't really be a holiday, nor will it be a proper workweek. i'll probably judge it as one or the other; in either case, i won't be satisfied by what will happen.

no good can come out of this.

so i left the arXiv alone, for now. it's one thing to work in the early mornings when everyone else is asleep .. but if i've made a point to visit family during the holidays, then shouldn't i be consistent and set aside the maths?

[sighs]