Sunday, June 17, 2012

news gets old, normal life returns.

so after all of these months, i think the news has really sunk in: i'm really going to be okay .. at least in regards to jobs.
i've seven more years [1] of being an academic mathematician lined up.
if all goes well, then perhaps i can stretch that to as long as i like.

these circumstances are no longer "news" to me.  they've taken hold of my reality instead, become a part of it.  for better or worse, i'm going to believe them to be facts and to plan out my future with them in mind.

as a result, the hedonistic treadmill has started up its merry pace again.  my childish glee has disappeared and i've stopped being impressed with myself:
yeah, yeah -- so you won't starve for a while.
big deal: what's next?
in other words, i'm back to being my usual, frustrated self.  with my current project, i can prove a little something, but not quite what i believe to be true.

a lot of perfectly good paper's gone into the recycling bin;
i've deleted and commented out a lot of the LaTeX markup in my current set of research notes.

 on a related note, i'll have a new preprint [2] soon;
i've turned someone's theorem into a tautology,
which isn't very polite, i'm afraid.

i wince when i think about my other projects and how long it's been since i've gotten back to my co-authors. maybe it's good that i'm not a professor yet, because i'm hardly responsible enough for how busy of a life that gets.

why is it so hard to keep one's promises?
(it would be a lot easier if everyone would assume that i'm simply an untrustworthy person.)




[1] that is, one + six: a 1-year deferral, and 6 years before the tenure decision at my future employer.  why do i suspect that the busiest times of my life are yet to come?

[2] depending on how it goes, it might be a joint paper.  we'll see how convincing i am, by how nicely i can ask.

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