again: works and days.

if it were summertime i'd wait a few days and then undergo a post-conference slump. but the fall term remains in full swing and i spent most of today "taking care of business" ..

prep and teaching,
then attending a grad union committee meeting,
then attending Geometric Measure Theory lecture,

then i was nudged out of my office, because my officemate's calc ii students flooded into the floor and chairs of our already crowded hovel in east hall.

retreating to the psychology atrium (which is far quieter than the mathematics atrium) i tried to focus and to think.

but in the end my thoughts were sporadic and ineffectual. coming home after fetching supplies from trader joe's, the mood's been the same.

i can't get any research done today .. the issue isn't even research; the confusion lies in understanding an existing proof of an 8 year-old theorem. it leads to nothing new and possibly something instructive, but at the core it is prerequisite before anything else is done.

this seems to echo conversations from this past weekend with friends and peers:

i've said before that the content of my talk would make a tolerable paper, but i would be the wrong person to write it. it would be an anthology of topics, and most of the results would be previously known and the only novelty would be to see them in one place.

others have said that there is something valuable in making connections, even if the results are known. it would solidify and further the body of knowledge in the field. i don't disagree with them, or more accurately they haven't disagreed with me.

but they weren't listening.

i didn't dismiss the role of such a paper. my point was that i'm the wrong person to write it. the most important quality of a student or a young researcher is creativity and innovation.

i'm not agreeing with g.h. hardy and i'm not saying that 'mathematics is a young man's game,' but in the sociology that is mathematical academe, new researchers have different priorities than established, tenured researchers. my priority is to create or to discover something useful.

i haven't had very many good ideas. in recent history, i have had two good ideas which have worked, but one isn't really worth anything and the other is a computation that any analyst could do. countless bad ideas make the rest.

but i digress.

in sum, i was distracted today by obligations, and i did very little thinking. the object of my thoughts isn't new, but it must precede any future innovation. i'm not clever enough to be impatient, and i'm not as patient as i need to be.

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maybe tomorrow will be better. the obligations and errands will meet me again tomorrow and greedily snatch away my time.

october soon ends. in a year's time i might have to look for jobs, and i don't know if i'll be ready by then.