I'm confronted with a lot of nearby deadlines for things that I don't particularly want to do, which has led to a general sort of malaise. On top of that, I'm staving off anxiety as always about graduate school and my relationship with Ben, and I guess the result is that most of the stuff I have to spend my time on now doesn't seem to be the things I care about. This mainly comes from having to study so much for the physics GRE, and now my midterm tomorrow. I'm doing well in my QM class, so far, which feels great, but I need to maintain that. And oh god, I really need to start writing grad school apps.

I don't have much time for swimming, which sucks because I don't feel as good and I can't eat as much, and I barely have time for piano, which I really want now after gran'dad's death. I eke out time talking to Ben and seeing my friends, with the feeling that I shouldn't be doing it the whole time.

So I guess the summary is, I feel the same way I did last year around this time, but only a tenth as desperate.

On the plus side, Thanksgiving is soon, and that'll be relaxing. And I'm looking forward to some opera hopefully this week, a Regina Carter concert at Yoshi's on Friday, and hiking with Jessica (hopefully, again) on Saturday. Nonetheless, I'm trying really hard not to feel unhappy and just tell myself that it'll change soon.

My conference proceedings paper is mostly done, being passed around the SNAP CCD group for editing. It's due Friday. Then I have to write the slightly longer paper for TNS, which will be pickier and more complete. So I'm working light this week, spending most of my time at home, studying for the physics GRE and taking occasional breaks for Farscape.

This reviewing isn't so bad... I don't mind learning the formulae so much now, it's just tedious and a bit high-pressure. I know that if I do badly, it'll be fine, but I'd rather go blasting into graduate admissions committee meetings (personified by my application, that is), guns blazing, completely ready. I feel like I have something to live up to now.

Isn't it funny how what bothers me most about my gran'dad dying is the feeling that I wanted to prove myself to him? I guess that right now I have this burning desire for vindication, especially to everyone who believe(d/s) in me. In terms of his life, he was very lucky. It's pretty cool, actually, he donated his body for science and it's rather good because he had that rare, aggressive cancer, sarcoma, and it will help them a lot to have more ways to study it.

I feel less prone to despair when bad things happen than I was a few months ago. I had a hard time picking myself up out of that 'everything that happens to me is horrible' mindset that I got into after grad school stuff in the spring, and it's like now I have a hard time getting myself into it. It's great. It doesn't mean I'll skip into the physics GRE, score very highly, and then frolic back outside, but it means I'm less freaked out about everything now. Which is relieving. I remember panic, despair, and being overwhelmed, and it's a lot easier to do all this stuff without them.

I have to take out my navel piercing, permanently.

It was completely problem-free until about a month ago, and it slowly started to degenerate. It started pussing, first a little bit then more, and hurting some, and some reddish tissue started building up at the inner hole. I started doing the salt-water soaks again, tried to keep it clean and sterile. It didn't help, and so today I had a doctor look at it, who said my body's treating the piercing as a foreign object and reacting to it immunologically, and it'll just keep getting worse and building up more scar tissue until I remove the metal.

It's very disappointing, firstly because it was fine for those first seven months, and so I really thought I was clear of my body rejecting it. The doctor wasn't sure how that could happen, that it was fine for awhile. This sort of problem isn't uncommon in navel piercings, though, and one source I said claimed that keloid growth and rejection were more common than infection for navel piercings.

A second disappointment is because, of course, I like the piercing, it looks good and is really cool. Well, when I say looks good, I should specify that it looked good before this started. Now it's kind of gross. And deciding to get it was a sort of, I need a change, and it'll encourage me to stay in shape and keep getting in better shape, kind of thing, and I still want it for similar reasons. I felt as though it completed my piercing needs, though every once in a while I'd wonder if it was a silly thing to do (mostly when it was giving me trouble). I really liked it.

And then, of course, there's the fact that I spent a lot of time taking really good care of it, soaking it for fifteen minutes twice a day for three months, even when I was backpacking in Zion, and pretty frequently after that. I endured pain in the piercing and discomfort in the healing, and really tried to be good to it so that I could enjoy a problem-free piercing for many years... not so that I could have a nice piercing for a couple months, then slowly regress to the point where I have to remove it. And no one gets pierced for the scars it leaves when you remove the piercing... in this respect, it might have been better if I'd had problems immediately, since the scarring would have been less. I don't know, and neither did the doctor, how much of the scar tissue will go away. The opening that's not in my navel shouldn't leave much of a scar because it still looks fine, but the one inside my navel might be worse. I don't know.

It's a risky thing to get pierced, and I know it'll be fine once I get used to it not being there, but it's just really disappointing.

The first day of quantum mechanics, as I think I've mentioned, was unpleasant. It's hard to get around the feeling that you're doing something as penance, or to make up for a mistake you don't think you made, etc. etc. And quantum mechanics, everyone agrees, is unpleasant.

endless integrals
many miscalculations
my summer of woe

But one of my stronger points is the ability to adapt and not leave myself unhappy for long, though, so things have improved a lot since then. The professor, Wohl, is a big help. He's very clear and understanding, and wants to be sure the class understands what he's doing. He also throws in some interesting, non-test-related facts, like Benford's Law. I know if I were unclear on the material, I wouldn't like that trait as much, but since it's all review, I really enjoy the interesting bits.

from a tangled and
hideous Hamiltonian,
pure eigenfunction.

But nothing can really change the fact that I've seen everything before. The homework is interesting and not all repeats (since Wohl writes his own problems), so I get a lot out of that in terms of furthering my knowledge. The lectures, not so much, especially since he hands out his lecture notes so I don't really have to take notes. Sometimes they're not bad, because I can review the derivations for things, but today we were going over Dirac notation, which is tricky when you haven't seen it and blindingly simple once you've used it some.

in a freezing room
we review formalism
interminably.

I found out the other day that the practice rooms are open at 8:15 AM on weekdays now, so I can go to play piano in between swimming and lecture, before work. I'm having a lot of trouble getting everything I want to do streamlined into a day. And although I promised myself I would go to lecture everyday (it forces me to think about the material more than I would just skimming the notes by myself), I can't help but think how I'm wasting that time that would be more fun in some other pursuit.

want to be outside
this beautiful wavefunction
useless for surfing.

I'm still happy to be pursuing my goals, and I understand I'll be more at peace with quantum after this, and more easily able to convince grad committees that I know it. And of course, it'll probably come in handy later. But the parts of quantum mechanics I'm interested in aren't quite the parts we're covering, not yet at least.

math is beautiful
in nature, not here where the
colors are so stale.