half-speed.

the night before last was mostly sleepless, and yesterday i felt like i was half-zombie, half-human. it's a sad state of affairs when caffeine now harms more than helps: sure, it might keep me awake, but there is an extremely unstable equilibrium for the amount of caffeine which precisely compensates for insomnia.

you see, it's too easy to slip over, to get a slight shake in your wrists. they get worse if the thoughts start racing and you want to write them all down but your hand is too damned shaky and slow. then you get frustrated and try to slow down, but slowing down when you're up on caffeine is about as hard as speeding up when you're caffeine deprived.

then you have to concentrate.

use less words, because words take time and one has to remember to spell correctly.

draw more, but draw simply and meaningfully. make sure the symbols (those arrows!) will make sense later, because everything's going to be a jumble and you'll have to sort through it again and write it well.

i don't have the willpower for that, anymore. caffeine is supposed to be the good sort of crutch: to get you started and going and on the road to thinking and writing about maths. it shouldn't be a broken crutch that you have to fix with careful rounds of glue and tape.

forget the up, which is not quite a high; at this stage of the game, what good are flurries of thoughts, if you can't write them down and check them later? after all, the human mind is imperfect and rigorous thinking is unnatural, even to civilised brutes wretches such as ourselves.

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so i spent most of yesterday with my brain processing at half the speed that it usually runs. i felt slow, and i was cold.

the idea i had, it didn't work.

i remember opening up the pages of a paper and without ambition, began to read. this is novel for me, because too often i have no patience to read papers very carefully; i get stuck, then frustrated, then convinced that i don't know anything and that i have no future in mathematics ..

.. which may still be true, but the frustration is quite pronounced, at such moments!

but i read a little and it wasn't so bad: section one didn't make sense, but it's an introduction and a microcosm of the whole paper. (i probably won't understand the enormity of the paper anyway.) section two was basic definitions, which always relieves me: no funny, fancy business yet, just definitions.

then section three was a little harder, but then something caught my attention. wait. i could use that, i think. i mean, if this is true and if the computation balks because of that ..


i carefully stuck a post-it note on the page, under the theorem, realising humbly that my mind was too slow to be creative, that day.

i went back to it, today. the new idea hasn't failed yet, and maybe it will. but maybe it won't, and i can fix a proof and have a few theorems again. here's to hope, anyways.

i never thought insomnia could be useful, if only for zombiism!