changes, busy-ness, and other such fun

my day:

* class. lecture started off something like this. "here's an open problem for all of you. in every theory, there are many hopeless problems. i promise this is not one of them"
later in class:
leigh: "so why is that true?"
prof: "oh, because i've been up since 5am today and the coffee is not working anymore. you are right, i am lying to you all again"
oi.

* post-class, i came home and putzed around for a good long time... i've been in a bizarre mood

* "lunch" with scott. i say lunch in quotes since it was 3pm, but whatever.
quote:
"here's the way i see it... if i can dance, *anybody* can dance... because i'm a white mathematician from wisconsin" ~scott
otherwise, it was a good catching up chat... since scott takes his oral quals in a month he's hard to track down lately, but i like when we do actually match up our schedules long enough for more than 5 minutes. so yay for scott.

* pretty shortly after coming home from that, scott went home to study, and i went with leigh and colleen to see "elizabethtown". it took a long time to get where it was going, but the ending (and the last 20 minutes) were completely wonderful. we all enjoyed it. plus, it's not often that all THREE of us do something together instead of in pairs.

* immediately after the movie, went on my daily 5 mile jog/walk. beat my old time by half a song on my playlist on leigh's ipod, so major yay for that

* just as i was warming up in the house again, i got a call from tammy. i've been emailing people i haven't heard from in awhile for fun (maybe a person a week or so?) and i emailed her today and her response was to call and chat for nearly an hour and a half. we hadn't chatted in a couple months, so it was a long overdue time to catch up, and it was lots of fun. life is treating her and marcus well, and there's even a new puppy in the background to make all kinds of trouble too. :P it was good to just chat with an old friend and not think about math for awhile.

* finishing on the phone at like 11pm, it's too late to think, so i started remodeling my blog. it's been awhile, so i decided it was time for a new look. comments anyone?

so here i am at 11:30, not having accomplished much today, but good chat with scott, and good chat with tammy... and quality time with my roommates... and it stopped raining long enough for me to get in my jog and set a new record time. :)

that's my day, now on to the top 3 rants / topics occupying lots of time in my head of the week....

rant #1:
you might remember my "vaguest post ever" a couple days ago. to make a long story short and still hide names, one of my college friends and one of my grad school friends are now dating. the grad school friend took me out to eat the weekend before this was official and basically asked my permission to date my friend. i told him that i don't have any control over his social life, nor should i, but i really appreciated that he talked to me about it. his main concern is that he "values my friendship" and doesn't want to throw a wrench into it if the idea was super weird for me. generally my college friends and my grad school friends live in two separate parts of my head, so yeah it's a little strange in my head to picture, but whatever, i'm happy that they're happy. the only thing still frustrating me is that my college friend never said a word to me about it until i emailed her last week, after she was officially seeing my grad school friend. again, not to ask permission, or anything like that, i just thought that after 2 months of being interested in someone she met through me, she might drop a comment or something about it. whether it's exactly true or not, the thought has run through my head periodically this week, "i guess we're not as close as i thought we were", and that makes me a little sad. as a result, i haven't had much to say to my grad school friend all week, which is probably unfair to him too, and such is life....
summary: unexpected collision of two previously separate worlds (in my mind) left my head reeling for a bit and i'm still trying to figure out equilibrium. scott and eric both affirmed this week that this isn't a psychotic reaction at all, that it's actually a fairly healthy one in their opinions.

rant #2 of the week:
i got a card this week from my mom... it was a "thinking of you card" that basically said "thinking of you" on the front and had a smiley face on the inside, and all she wrote inside was "always like to hear how things are going, love, mom". completely the opposite, a month and a half ago, she said if i was going to sound stressed all semester, she was just going to not call me until after my orals were done (date for that still TBA). last month, while driving around pittsburgh with her for stuff for my cousin's wedding, she broke down in tears complaining to me how she can't talk to her mother anymore even if she wants to and now she has a daughter who doesn't like talking to her anymore. i've been trying to piece together how to respond though. really, i don't like talking to people regularly anymore. i don't call people usually. i type a lot. i find typing therapeutic, and then i get back to my work. i get irritated when i'm stressed and mom, for example, comments every few breaths "are you depressed? should you quit grad school? should i call the chair of your department and complain about this prof you don't like?" that doesn't happen every chat, but when i'm busy and stressed it's easier not to have to explain all over again. for the last month or so though, i get the sense that she really wants to hear from me more (which i hypothesize is brought on by her mom not being around anymore after this summer, and that's more setting in). the thing is, i want to help and make it better, and have no problem calling regularly to chat, but it's hard to dramatically change the current habits of our relationship and have it be "normal". if i started calling her as much as she keeps leaving voicemails and IMs, it would just feel like fake reaching out in return (which probably makes no sense). i'm not ignoring my mom. i do return her calls at least once a week (and usually get the answering machine while the family is out). i do respond to her IMs when i'm actually home (which is rare b/c i'm at school a lot)... i'm maintaining the level of contact she's maintained with me for the past several years, and now suddenly she wants to increase it.

i'm probably overanalyzing it all. and i will call her tomorrow just to say hi. i'm just much happier being a hermit lately, and wish that people would mostly just give me space (wonderful friends and family included) so i can work and get less stressed, so her need for more of hearing from me comes at a time where being more in touch is actually MORE stressful for me. oi. i'm officially a nut case.

rant #3:
here's a quote i've had on my math website for awhile:
most mathematicians are bipolar disorders waiting to happen... one of the reasons that mathematicians tend to be eccentric is that we confront failure and disappointment every day, and try to find ways to surmount it. ~(from a mathematician's survival guide)
i have been feeling that a LOT lately. i sit down and work for 12 hours, and have nothing to show for it, since my attempts at proofs lately just seem to go around in circles. if you're in a lab science, you can show "ok, i did this experiment" whether it worked and gave the data you wanted or not.... if you're in a more humanities related discipline, even if it's not as quality or as quantity as you wanted, you can actually have read some amount of pages, or written some amount of text after a bit of time. if you're not a student and have a real-world job, then generally you can show something for your time in having done something on the computer, answered phone calls, been through meetings, and whatever else had you. math is the only thing i can think of that's so abstract that you can sit and work your head off for days and have absolutely nothing to show for it. it can be incredibly irritating when you're having a bad spell creatively and/or intuitively to figure out how to prove what you should be proving. it's a headache.
hopefully this weekend will be more fruitful than last one.

what a note to end on... i'm really not as unhappy as my posts seem to be lately. generally i like what i do. my students love me as far as i can tell, and i know that i enjoy working with them. my advisor actually makes me feel good about math on the days when i feel really dumb, and i like working with him. if only there weren't so much to do, and so many things (see rants above) for me to overanalyze and get grumpy about... oi.

nonetheless, yay for surprise phone calls and for good chats with the scott, and for movie time with the roommates.

happy weekend all?