.. there and back.

today and yesterday i felt like everyone treated me a little like a carton of milk, on which the expiration date was hard to read.

they: "janus, hi! how long are you in town?"
me: "hi! er, well .."

.. it was a short visit this time: a little more than 48 hours. i felt like i was constantly saying hello and sorry and measurablε dιfferentiable structure and goodbye to many colleagues, both new and familiar.

it happened that my colleague/friend/host asked me if i've visited his (new) university before. i nodded.

thrice before, in the last 10 years:
one of the first conferences that i ever attended, too.

speaking of a next time, another colleague asked me if i'd be free to visit next spring .. which means, i hope, late spring. honestly, i need a break from traveling [1].

besides that, there's something about the finnish winter that makes me want to retreat indoors, and not come out for anything but trail running, indoor rock climbing, a long session of sauna, or a pub crawl.



.. on an unrelated note, there's something very soothing about traveling on trains.

---

the more i think about it, the more collaborations feel unnatural to me. i find them stressful, honestly .. though it's often a good type of stress that leads to some productive end.

one problem is that i'm just not that quick .. not right now, anyway;

if i believe it and if i act effectively towards it,
then who knows: maybe i can actually become smarter.

on the other hand, maybe i should just let myself be "stupid" and throw out ideas, instead of sitting quietly, contemplating, working them out into a polished form by myself.

to a certain extent, it doesn't matter if a given idea is a good one or a bad one. what matters instead is that you eventually get a few good ideas.

so the point is to generate good-enough ideas and resolve them effectively, and more processing power (in terms of number of minds thinking about it) generally leads to swifter resolutions.

still, i hate sounding stupid and i can't stand not knowing what to do next .. which is a frustratingly impasse, i tell you. maybe i just have to get over it.





[1] in 2012 i've been to lappeenranta, madrid, new york, tampa, ann arbor, lansing/cadillac, turku, amsterdam & brussels & brugge & lille & reims & strasbourg & heidelberg & frankfurt, krakow, jyvaskyla, new york again, pittsburgh, paris, san francisco, london, madrid again, segovia, and jyvaskyla again .. which totals 88 days (or ~3 months) i spent out of town ..

[realises]

.. ye gods! now that i think about it, i criss-crossed the atlantic four times this year, and gave fourteen (14) talks & lectures. is something wrong with me? i must be a masochist..!