Murdering the time

It's 3 am on a weeknight. But when you're friends with Emily and Matthew, sleep becomes a random and unscheduled pastime, and when you have an old friend to stay for a week and a half, your to-do list tends to grow merrily unattended. Fortunately, I'm energetic and stubborn enough these days that telling myself "you can't go to bed until you've done X properly" produces good work rather than an infinite insomniac loop.

Princeton Simon left for Princeton on Sunday morning, leaving ice cream and a representation theory texbook behind to console me. Before Helene and I met Oxford Simon (down for another day's visit) for dinner yesterday, we killed time for half an hour by hanging out in the maths common room at uni. The maths common room is a nice little place -- there's no equivalent tiny room at Auckland squished full of blackboards and posters and sagging couches and a coffee machine, just for the use of the undergrads. It's also always full of people, so I avoid it when I'm not with friends -- my German's not yet up to large groups of strangers. I can still sort of listen in to the chat, though.

Anyway, I'd never been there in the evening before, and was delighted to find that at about six pm it's full of maths students happily loitering and swapping their plans for Monday evening, just like the schoolyard at middle school after class finished for the day. The nicest part of the common-room crowd -- eat your heart out, supposedly-egalitarian New Zealand! -- was the total lack of hierarchy. Little first-years (well, they're still mostly older than me, but . . . .) didn't get in the least ignored, and a postdoc and a lecturer were there too, chatting totally casually with the undergrads about who they were going dancing with that evening.

A woman from an investment bank sent me an email last week, and I replied today. Selling out? No. Curious? Yes.