eh... a quote

apparently my body is so used to being asked to do 50 things at once that it just CAN'T HANDLE relaxing or slowing down for a bit.

this morning? 1.5 hours before i was supposed to meet a friend for lunch, i managed to pass out while getting ready... this meant i spent a day lying alternately in bed and in the recliner downstairs and had to postpone plans.

really, i can handle being insanely busy with stuff i'm supposed to do... i can handle being busy with things i want to do instead of what i *should* be doing... i have a really hard time sitting still and doing absolutely nothing.... once the lightheadedness and overall yucky feeling went away, i spent the afternoon starting in on new book. (letters to a young mathematician) this quote i thought rang especially true:

"Some careers seem to accumulate people who might easily have preferred to do something else. You will run into people who tell you that they practice law as a day job but they are really novelists or playwrights or jazz trombonists. Other people can't settle on something, or they see their careers in more purely practical temrs, and they drift into human resources management or advertising sales. Which is not to say that these people are not dedicated or fulfilled in what they do, but few of them consider their work a calling. No one drifts into being a mathematician. On the contrary, it's a pursuit from which even the talented are too easily turned away."

this is exactly a topic that has bothered me a bit this semester... i claim to like being around people who are "passionate" about what they do... not necessarily passionate about their job (because certainly for some people a job is just that and nothing more), but passionate about *something* that they do. because there are definitely people out there who i've encounted who i can't find a single thing that they're passionate about... these people completely baffle me and i don't know how to respond to them. seeing it explicitly in print that math people are passionate about their job and that *is* different from how many other people operate in the context of a much larger essay was affirming. i like knowing my connundrums aren't just in my head.

now to sleep and hope for a less health-wise traumatic day tomorrow.

night y'all.