Sunday, May 26, 2013

away, again.

it's been quiet on my end. i took the week off and headed to france to go bouldering with friends [1]. i feel tired .. not necessarily in a good way, not in a bad way either, but just tired .. and certainly not from maths.

honestly, it felt like a bad time for a holiday .. especially as the last one wasn't too long ago. though it was fun, it didn't feel like an earned holiday.

at times it was hard to shut my brain off:
every morning i tried to wake earlier than everyone else and think about a problem or two over a cup of coffee, occasionally jotting down a few computations in a notepad that i brought.
come to think of it: with few exceptions,
i've been doing this every day since i moved to finland.

this routine worked for the first few days. after a while, though, the climbing became serious and everyone started getting up early for more time on the rocks.

there was also the matter of a research visitor next week .. one whom i actually invited this time but whom i've never met in person. during the last few days i was often preoccupied with how the visit would go. (as you may recall, hosting isn't one of my strong points.)
lately i feel like i've not been accomplishing much and that my recent endeavors haven't been very deep [2] .. and both without good reason. maybe it's just the flight i took home this morning, but paradoxically i'm tired yet feel like working.

there's the standard cliché that i need a vacation from my vacation. that's not what i want, though: not exactly, anyway. it would be nice to get away, go somewhere with only an empty notebook and pens, and just work without interruptions .. work and not come back until i had something complete.

i get the feeling, though, that paradoxically and simultaneously, i'd miss being at the office. it just goes to show you that, for some people, perfection doesn't really exist in life; at most, one gets a sufficiently nice balance of a "uncertainty principle" towards their quality of life.





[1] interestingly enough, one of the main pioneers of bouldering as a sport was actually a mathematician named john gill. according to the wiki, apparently he studied cοmplex dynamιcs!

[2] part of me suspects that those weeks spent at IΡAM have warped my usual research expectations. it's easy to forget that maths isn't about getting ideas .. but following through and shaping them into rigor.

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