Lately…

Lately I’ve been busy. Sure I’ve been busy before, almost every year when certain yearly deadlines roll around (I am thinking of the satellite observatory proposals), I get swamped with work and put in marathon shifts. But this is a busy I’ve never known the likes of.

I’ve always worked within the confines of the mantra: Work smart, not hard. And up to now it has worked wonders. I implement all kinds of efficient and time-saving measures like masterful use of Regular Expressions, writing scripts that talk to other scripts that run other scripts on multiple platforms (astronomical software can be so disjointed), and taking advantage of the fact that few students use the powerful number crunching Sun workstations over the weekends. On some weekends I’ll monopolize every single machine to perform data analysis tasks on large archival data sets. Of course, a key part of working smart means not actually having to set foot into that computer lab and managing everything from the comforts of the arm chair in my home.

But it isn’t working anymore. That is, the mantra isn’t cutting it. I’ve gotten to the stage where it is time for the elbow grease. I raise my head from a desktop of papers, sheets with calculations, and my TI-83 solar powered calculator (which I inadvertently stole from my high school back in 1995), and wonder, this must be what other graduate students mean when they complain about being treated like slave labor but I recall that no one is asking me to work so hard, I am doing it out of some twisted desire to achieve something for myself.

What I have found is that all work and no play eventually triggers a state of myself I never knew existed; a state of heightened concentration, increased drive, and perceptible and measurable progress. I am surprising myself, but I still have so much more to do. In less than a month I feel like I must accomplish the tasks that would have normally taken me three. And yet…

And yet I find myself watching more movies, preparing more elaborate meals, and reading more books than I have in months. This is like an uber-state of activity. Surely I must burn out, it is inevitable. But in the mean time…

Mmm, Pie

At the end of every year, my credit card company provides me with a summary of my spending. They break up my purchases into the categories they think are appropriate, but it doesn’t quite match up with reality, so I converted the data from the PDF file into a Numbers spreadsheet. A difficult and time consuming task, I might add. (I might add, get it? Oh, puny!)

I digress. Because of this terrific document, I decided I’d put most of my purchases on my credit card, the only thing I do not charge is my daily coffee fix (that’s probably a large chunk of change, but is for another post). For your pleasure, I present my credit card spending habits from the year 2009:

In the figure above my spending habits are presented in two forms, the monthly totals are shown with the solid line histogram and the individual purchases that go into that monthly total are shown as data points (crosses).

Explanations of some of the peaks:

• April: car insurance
• June: I paid for two meals over 100 (to be fair, I was reimbursed)
• August: an expensive trip to Niagara on the Lake for a day of Noel Coward plays, totally worth it
• September: health insurance
• October: new Ipod Touch (reimbursed by Apple) and car insurance
• November: black Friday BluRay player
• December: Samsung Moment Android phone ($100 was reimbursed)

Colorful pie charts describing the allocation of my money:

Further breaking up the large categories above leads to:

I need to change my habits.

Rattling Thoughts

On a recent trip to my nation’s capitol for the annual winter meeting of my country’s society of astronomers, I caught the capitol subway train, or The Metro, to several locations. I sought exotic lunches, devilish dinners, and even, on two occasions, cups of hand poured drip brew coffee. My mouth waters when I recall the barista gently pouring the scalding hot water over the single-origin estate coffee grounds. And the aroma floating over the counter to my anxious taste buds.

Anyway, snapping out of that delicious reverie and back to the point, the metro seems to be in a constant state of disrepair, or is it repair? Throughout my journeys I found many escalators out of service, and I was made to walk up or down a frozen escalator. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining because of laziness. Sure I’m lazy, but even when an escalator is properly functioning, I seldom stand still. Which is probably why I have trouble on non-moving escalators.

It is a very disorienting experience. It is as if my momentum has a memory and when I step on an escalator, it propels me in the proper direction to maintain my stability. How many times did I stumble as I entered the non-moving escalator? Every time. I wasn’t even drunk, yet.

So what is up with all the escalators in the capitol metro? Are they collapsing under the weight of my country folk? I recall no such problems on my travels and metro riding experience in Europe. Similar long escalator paths exist in Paris, Praha, and Stockholm, yet I cannot recall such a state of disrepair? Perhaps it is a skewed observation, but I think I spent more time riding in Europe than I did in DC.

Another curious note about the capitol metro, “music”. The squeals and bumps, sounds of friction, as the people conveyors operate is akin to an atonal, non-melodic, post-modern orchestration, where the cavernous escalator shaft play the role of a clamshell bandstand.

Red Suffusion

Somewhere over the US — Winter in the northeast comes with lots of snow and little sun. So while visiting Texas, I made sure to get some sun. Now on the plane, above the clouds, the blindingly bright sunlight pours though my porthole and warms the back of my hands. Sunlight reflected off my hand strikes my face with strong voracity. The suffusion of red from behind my closed eyes recalls the days of swinging on the elementary school playground, legs pumping, head back, staring at the sun through my eyelids.

Unhindered by ignorance, I attempted flight on those swings; a perfectly timed release from the confines of the rubber seat with metal chain links that bent at my will. From the apex I’d fly, or should I say, in the common parlance of my 4 year old nephew, I fell with style. A little projectile trying to break free from the earth’s gravity only to land in the same spot time and again; the limits imposed by my mass, the strength in my arms, the swing’s chain length, and Newton. Simple harmonic motion, the dominance of gravity, the inevitable decay of a 5 year old pendulum, the early failing of a failed physicist. Parabolic trajectories: failure, success, failure.

Later, a summer, 10 years old, and I make another attempt at flight off an artificial rocky ledge at the basin of a damn; my increased gravitational potential energy, the mechanical strength in my growing body, and a running leap off the ledge into shallow water about 3-4 feet deep. But this time I did overcome my limitations, by gradually increasing my distance with each successive leap. Pushing myself further and further away from the ledge into the water by sheer strength, speed, and desire. What became my best long distance jump pushed me past the underwater ledge I had been unknowingly landing and into the true depth of the body of water.

The surprise that traveled from the tips of my submerged toes, expecting to find ground but instead, nothing, then to my head, realizing the error of my assumption and telling my hands to clutch in the increasing darkness brought on by panic and the increasing depth of murky water above me. I found an ankle and pulled myself up, pulling the owner of the ankle down. An underwater melee ensued. Older cousins leapt into action, or so I am told for I only recall finding myself lying on the rocky ledge, with a burning sensation in my nostrils, and a suffusion of red behind my closed eyelids.

I am still awed when the plane leaves the ground and dismayed when it touches down.

Meandering Through Austin

San Antonio, TX — I spent the better part of today in the capital city revisiting some old haunts are exploring some new ones. Driving through the sluggish city streets and congested highways is becoming unbearable. I blame the small-city-living of Rochester, NY where even on the worst days traffic seldom slows to a trickle. However, I still love this city and share the sentiment from Olmstead’s A Journey Through Texas:

AUSTIN.

Austin has a fine situation upon the left bank of the Colorado. Had it not been the capital of the state, and a sort of bourne to which we had looked forward for a temporary rest, it would still have struck us as the pleasantest place we had seen in Texas. It reminds one somewhat of Washington; Washington, en petit, seen through a reversed glass.

Olmstead makes the note that “[t]here is a very remarkable number of drinking and gambling shops, but not one book-store.” which is out of date… or is it? I think of Austin’s infamous nightly college-drunkfest on 6th Street, of which I have the unfortunate honor of once being a patron to, and I conclude there are a remarkable number of drinking shops. But the proliferation of bookstores is definitely different since those days, probably largely due to the University of Texas (my alma mater) being built directly behind the capitol building. A balance, perhaps?

I took plenty advantage of the bookstores. Scored me an Evergreen Black Cat book from Grove Press (circa 1965) of two novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet (perhaps better known as the scriptwriter of Last Year at Marienbad, to which you might exclaim, “Scriptwriter! That film had a scriptwriter!?” and I reply, “Oh yeah!” while busting through the wall a la Kool-Aid man with a handful of matchsticks).

I quote from Olmstead, again and at length:

LITERATURE.

In the whole journey through Eastern Texas, we did not see one of the inhabitants look into a newspaper or a book, although we spent days in houses where men were lounging about the fire without occupation. One evening I took up a paper which had been lying unopened upon the table of the inn where we were staying, and smiled to see how painfully news items dribbled into the Texas country papers, the loss of the tug-boat “Ajax,” which occurred before we left New York, being here just given as the loss of the “splended steamer Ocax.”

A man who sat near said—

“Reckon you’ve read a good deal, hain’t you!”

“Oh, yes; why?”

“Reckoned you had.”

“Why?”

“You look as though you liked to read. Well, it’s a good thing. S’pose you take a pleasure in reading, don’t you?”

“That depends, of course, on what I have to read. I suppose everybody likes to read when they find anything interesting to them, don’t they?”

“No; it’s damn tiresome to some folks, I reckon, any how, ‘less you’ve got the habit of it. Well, it’s a good thing; you can pass away your time so.”