On autopilot

The stack of maths-to-be-done (part heavy coursework, part Lie groups catch-up) continues, and I'm lovin' it. Hard problems! Abstract generalisations! Subtle distinctions! And a marvellous simplification of my life; no obligations to deal with anything else, since the math backlog's obviously the priority. It's a glorious and exhilarating state of mind, and welcome. I haven't felt this way for -- well, at least a couple of months.

As always, my concentration comes in long but sometimes elusive blocks. The resulting devotion-of-self-to-mathematics is neither complete nor structured. I've spent plenty of time procrastinating (lying fallow, I call it). I've also been having very late nights -- it's easier just to keep going -- resulting in a characteristic alternation between the Thinking Days and the Others.

Today, for example, was one of the Others. I got up for school after not-too-many hours' sleep. The four hours of lectures in the morning were okay, the four hours of tutorials in the afternoon a bit more trying. By the last couple, my mind was accepting little other than disconnected daydreams of Prague and bicycles and Takapuna Beach. I did, however, emerge from my stupor on occasion, usually to make helpful suggestions ("direct product of two circles", "Pascal's triangle") to the tutors as they struggled with solutions to the exercises they were meant to be demonstrating.

Of course, I'm still in an exotic foreign country. There's no Halloween and no Fifth of November, but to mark All Saints' Day tomorrow there's a public holiday -- my second in less than a month. Germany loves opportunities to shut up shop. (Did I mention that shops close on Sundays here, too?)

But people's errands are just redirected to the days before and after. University tutorials are too, hence today's über-long day at school. So I suspect that the total time spent on useful activity isn't really varied, but rather just made more irregular in its distribution . . . .

My kind of country.