This semester I’ve positioned my desk so that I face the River while at my computer. Having woke up only at 4pm after a night of drinking, video games, Dogma, and those delightful broccoli and cheese chicken things they used to serve at brunch with Tracy and DJ, I figured that maybe I should sit down to stare at my computer and the River until meeting with Susannah sometime after 9pm.
Sometime last week Verena and I found hard-covered composition notebooks, the type we had to purchase for high school chemistry and physics classes, at Staples on sale. The asking price was only seventy-nine cents for the gridded kind. (Seventy-two for ruled.) We abandoned our loose sheet note method, joining the long tradition of notebook note takers. So far it’s worked out pretty well for me.
Earlier this summer I had lost several notes I had taken for my thesis — I recently rediscovered some of them during the move next door to my current room — but now! now I can take my notebook with me where ever I go and have all my notes in one place.
But as utile as my notebook is, it doens’t make it any easier to concetrate for extended periods of time. As mentioned in my last post, I’m redrafting the section on Dirac operators before I give a copy to Professor Taubes. In his paper he used coordinate calculations. I rely on them, too, but in a somehow less coordinate-dependent manner. At least that’s how it feels to me. I rely pretty heavily on Clifford algebras, and I can’t remember if he told me to develop my understanding of spinors in a Clifford algebraic or a representation theoretic framework. I chose what seemed to be more geometrical, but I have my misgivings.
I was distracted initially by the sunset, and I meant to describe the clouds. But the sun has nearly completed its setting and my transcendentalist tendancies have subsided. My new neighbor, also Josh, just walked in. Henry Walters, who is presently in the Vatican attending a year-long Latin immersion program, suggested that I invite him to brunch this year. (Henry, you may know, was a core member of our exclusive and little-known brunch club. Apparently Henry now calls himself Sylvester Slipshod though he sometimes lapses and signs his emails Hank. I’m genuinely concerned.)
