Starting over

I'm at my new house. £400 per month of pure potential. It's time to reassess my life.

Right now I'm sitting in the dining room. It's quiet, apart from a neighbor's dog barking and one of my new flatmates munching toast in the living room. In the old house, one of the flatmates always dominated the common area with his TV watching habit. I don't want to be "that guy", but at the same time I'm feeling iffy about keeping my laptop in my room. Days when I roll out of bed and immediately get on the computer (or rather, don't roll out of bed and get on the computer) feel far too slack. On the other hand, if I don't do my casual computing at home, I'll end up doing it at work, and that can take up the entire day. And again, if I don't go into the office at all... well!

Partly since I work with computers (and, obviously, the internet), the whole idea of being an "internet addict" just strikes me as funny, ridiculous. That would be like being addicted to books or addicted to talking on the phone, yeah? What they have in common is information transfer. Some people get by fine without books, phones, or computers, but no one can do without information.

Nevertheless, linguistic information is of a particular sort. It's different from a landscape in the sense of being discrete. A fisherman might rely on linguistic information when selling his fish, but when fishing, well, it's a different story. (The Old Man and the Sea.) Yet, if we look closely, each physical body is somehow a "discrete landscape" with texture and form. Language is so many physical bodies made of sound or image.

I work with these, I immerse myself in these. If I throw away what's extraneous (things like the boxes of papers I don't read, memorabilia that I never look at), what's left? Still more of the same thing, but now it looks like a Zen garden instead of an overgrown back yard. What else can be thrown away? Maybe start by throwing out those old papers and we'll see.

Why have I hung onto them anyway? Maybe I thought they'd be relevant later, you know, when I'm writing my thesis or something. The problem being that my thesis isn't going to be about papers, it's going to be about experiments, and the experiments haven't happened yet (PlanetMath Overview). And why is that?

There have been the inevitable delays, and distractions. Numerous aspects of the project have been "close" for months. (A few stalled efforts have been "close" for a year or more, which presumably means, not that close.) I seem to frequently get out of my depth. Working closely with my friends/colleagues usually helps (All that glistens...), but even they get stuck at times. Then they ask someone with more particular expertise for help and the tasks become more clear.

Distractions on the other hand: informal writing, social life, a few physical ailments, sometimes too much noise or a bad smell at home or at the office. In other words, things that I can "manage" in a way, but that take attention. Perhaps many of these are less "distractions" than they are the necessities of life. Instead of comparing these things to the boxes of papers I keep but don't read, maybe these things are more like the clothes I wear but don't like that much. Both disgruntle me. How many times have I looked at those boxes of papers and said "Why am I taking up space with those things?" But also -- how many times, after my favorite pair of jeans (which themselves have a rip in the cuff from a misencounter with my old single-speed bicycle) and a couple of favorite shirts have been worn that week -- have I said "I really have nothing left that I want to wear". And yet I have a backpacking pack full of clothes that I don't really like.

This might be the side effect of student poverty. It's not so clear what any of this has to do with my work, except that it puts a damper on my mood. The worst thing there, though, is the sense of not making progress. Then I feel like I'm in the Donner party and it's getting on towards February ("a taboo always allures with as great strength as it repels."). Anyway, post-move, I feel like I'll be nursing myself back to health, in one way, shape, or form.