[Title of Blog]

My energy level during the semester always goes through these cycles of high and low.  It’s a pretty bad cycle - I start out really high, excited to do everything.  Halfway through, I’m listless and exhausted by the grind.  It’s all from a bad habit, of course, and an easily correctable one.  I like signing myself up for too much; it’s easy at the beginning, and everything is fresh. But why back down when all the signs are looking up?

I got a lot of sleep last night.  11 hours of it, actually, and I’m feeling fresh.  I feel good.  Better than I’ve felt in a month.  It’s quite amazing what a little extra rest can do for you, actually.  It’s getting me thinking more positive already - I’m motivated to go and do this reading.  I feel good about doing what I’m doing, when two days ago it was more of a slow kind of despair.

I don’t know, the semester is starting to look up already.  Just two more weeks to finish applications, and life will be… all sorts of wonderful.  I’m writing proposals for the NSF grad fellowship right now, and there are problem sets for my classes to do.  But everything feels manageable, and I’m motivated to do the work.  How nice!  How nice it is.

If writing blog entries is an ungainly activity for me, writing papers for school is an unbelievably more painful exercise altogether.  I hate it.  I don’t know if it’s because I’ve placed a mental block within my brain, or because I don’t care for the types of questions that we’re expected to answer (though I do, for this one), or because I’m no good.  What always ends up happening is that once I sit down for a paper, my head becomes cloudy as the boston sky, and the act of dragging out even individual sentences becomes a horrible chore.  Which is, of course, why I am taking a course in poetry.

In any case, I don’t have the time to finish this entry off proper.  There is a paper due tomorrow, and I have hardly begun writing.  Maybe next time!

It’s the second week of school (third?), and I’ve had to do almost all-nighters in two out of the last three days. It’s so important to keep your mind focused on what you want to do.

I hope I can keep myself going.

There isn’t much more to update, or even write about.  I am learning, which is good.  I am not exercising, which is bad.  I am eating better than I did at the beginning of this school year, which is good.  I haven’t had the chance to buy fruit in a while (can’t make it out to Haymarket), which is bad. I went and did my second assignment as a Tech Photographer last night, which is good.  I got to use a Nikon d300, which is good.  And a 80-200 f/2.8 lens, which is good.  The whole thing took three hours, which is bad.  Also, the assignment was Men’s Water Polo (a last-minute loss to Brown), which is good, because I got to learn a little about what Water Polo is even about.  That’s another plus!

Also, I’m taking “Reading Poetry” as my final HASS-D, and I really enjoy it.  Even if I do feel very dense in that class.

Well, I need to go finish polishing up this pset.  Toodles!

These are two things that I often find myself struggling with.  I always enter a phase full of energy, hope, and thoughts about the things that could happen.  My head is always full of the same thoughts: the things I could make happen, the things I could do, the things I could learn, and so on.  Invariably however, I run out of steam at around the third week, and start to grow despondent  about my state.  It happens when you don’t see any results coming, or the slog starts hitting you.  Or sometimes it just doesn’t seem interesting anymore.  What is it like?  Let’s take tennis for an analogy.  Sure, everyone wants to hit like Roger, Rafa, Justine, and the rest.  But say you spent a month practicing your strokes, and (as more often is the case) you still shank balls half the time.  It’s pretty discouraging, and the feeling is tough to shake off.

What’s the difference?  I suppose that in tennis, you aren’t going at it alone.  There are people you’re hitting with, or a coach, or parents, who support you and push you to keep going at it.  Or maybe you’re strong enough to be your own motivation (and those are the people who I have a lot, a lot of respect for).  In most of my endeavors in which I have been successful, there was this aspect of someone else pushing me, driving me.  I guess I’m pretty bad at dealing with disappointment, alone.  Usually, I shut down to some degree.  Distract myself with starcraft, reddit, or other things.  It’s a poor attitude, and probably means I’m not suited (in my current form) for long-term commitments, or at least, research.

This has happened to me a frighteningly high number of times in the past.   It happened to some extent during my present UROP, when I wasn’t getting anywhere with my problem.  But this time, I think I got better.  Instead of wasting time, I actually managed to get other stuff done - read other math, think about photography, exercise.  I think I have spent my time rather well in the last few weeks.  Hopefully, this will go for

I’m currently reading a book called Discrete Thoughts.  One of the authors is Gian-Carlo Rota, a former professor of Combinatorics at MIT.  Reading his essays in this book has been extremely helpful in reviving my own enthusiasm for learning maths.  I guess that’s all you need, really, when things go sour.  Something to fall back on, and remind yourself why you loved something in the first place.  It’s hard to sit back and reflect on that here, at the Institute, where there are so many things going on, and so many assignments to complete.  We - or, at least I - often lose sight of what it was that first excited us about it all.  Maybe we should all spend some time to try and remember it again.

The Boston skies have not been too happy since I got back.  This is the third weekend that I’ve spent here, and in that time period, I feel like we’ve had clear skies for less than three days. That doesn’t bode too well when you’re trying to play tennis every day - that darned 60% chance of precipitation is always looming over you, and you never know if you’ll get to go out.  Muh!  This isn’t what Summers are supposed to be like!  I wish the sun would come out…

On the other hand, life here hasn’t been too bad.  This summer has been a summer of doing things that I’ve been meaning to do, and I’m really happy with it so far.  My UROP is going all right.  I’m working with Scott Aaronson at CSAIL.  What does that mean?  Well, right now, I’m working on a problem for him, and in the meanwhile, I’ll be looking through literature for other problems that I could try my hand at.  As for the problem that I have now, I have a partial result, which is encouraging.  Research is a lot of fun, and I’m very glad that I chose to do this this summer.  There are also a few grad students in the area, and it’s nice to talk to them.  I share an office with a chinese student, and when I can, I try to practice my mandarin with her.  Also in my office is Brendan Juba, my TA for Complexity Theory this past term.  He’s in around his fifth year of school, though, and getting ready to graduate, so he isn’t around too much.  In all, this floor of the Stata Center is pretty quiet.

What else has happened?  Well, when it’s not raining, I’m playing tennis nearly every day.  It’s been a while since I’ve played regularly, and I hope that I can get some good feel again.  There have been a few days when I’ve felt like I was hitting well, which is encouraging.  The problem is that my fitness level isn’t very high, but I’m working on that. By the end of summer, I think I’ll be play at a good level again.

What a nice summer!  What a nice life!

Summer has started again, and life is, as always, busy.  Sometimes I wonder if I will ever settle down and have a normal life.  One where I’m not rushing from thing to thing, and I’ll be able to savor the things that I have.  I got back to Boston last Saturday, and and my life has been a whirlwind since then.  Unpacking, groceries, and cooking for food (yikes, I’m really starting to feel the whole lack of a dining hall situation).  Since then, my schedule has migrated to a stable  point, but I still feel sometimes that there just isn’t enough time in the day, to do everything I want to do.

So, what am I doing this summer?  Well, at the highest level, I’m searching for what I’m interested in in theoretical computer science.  More specifically, I’m a summer UROP student for Professor Scott Aaronson.  He gives me problems to think about, and I think about them.  Other times, I’m reading papers and the good ole wikipedia to try and see what else is out there, and what would be interesting to try.  This life is not too bad, though the feeling of not being able to solve a problem is pretty terrible.  I guess this summer is, you could say, me trying to figure out if I would be all right with grad school.

Oh, well.  It’s 12:30, and I’m getting tired.  I’ll try not to neglect this page as much as I have been…

I have a few thoughts that I will put down into words later, but until then, I leave you with this:

Angelaise   says (12:54 PM): rook at you

I used to be a very frugal person, and I don’t like how loose with money I’ve become.  Let’s try to cut back on the unnecessary buys from now on - after all, I was perfectly happy before I had those things. I don’t want to make any big purchases from now on.

…

uhh, after I get a camera -_-

I’m munching on chunky apple sauce, listening to the the sound of cars rushing by outside.  I spent some time earlier today standing by the river and enjoying the weather.  The wind was cool, and drizzle was light, and the entire scene felt very peaceful to me.

I’m very glad to be able to experience these moments of silence.

I was reading a series of speeches by Freud (for my “Rise of Modern Science” class) when I came across the following.  I really liked it, and definitely feel that it’s “moral” is definitely pertinent to the students at this school.

German literature knows a town called Schilda, to whose inhabitants were attributed all sorts of clever pranks. The wiseacres, so the story goes, had a horse, with whose powers of work they were well satisfied, and against whom they had only one grudge, that he consumed so much expensive oats. They concluded that by good management they would break him of this bad habit, by cutting down his rations by several stalks each day, until he had learned to do without them altogether. Things went finely for a while, the horse was weaned to one stalk a day, and on the next day he would at last work without fodder. On the morning of this day the malicious horse was found dead; the citizens of Schilda could not understand why he had died. We should be inclined to believe that the horse had starved, and that without a certain ration of oats no work could be expected from an animal.

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