in a sense, the fact that i've written nothing here says this better than anything i could write, for two reasons: first, the fact that ignorance is a more damning indicator of not caring than bitching, and second, because i just don't write as well (or rather, as me) as i did two months ago. that sentence, with its misplaced parallelism and poor word choice, is a prime example. jeremy thinks that i'm just making up a dilemma, a drama, because it's what i do all the time. i point to the fact that my writing has clearly changed a lot (for the worse), something that has been independently noted by others.
the plain fact is that i've come to the (at least semi-permanent) conclusion that putting effort into mathematics has more marginal effect on my happiness than putting effort into people. this isn't to say that i don't still derive much more enjoyment in general from people than math, which was the stumbling block in this chain of epiphanies. but it seems like right now my actions have little effect on the social situations i get into and what people think of me, for two opposite reasons: first, because even if i'm at my best no one will fall head-over-heels for me, and second, because people like the auto-pilot me anyway.
to some extent, i feel that this is my revenge. all my life i've been frustrated by people who have no urge to grow, who don't think about their lives in depth. my argument for a while now is that people reach a level of interest that's just sufficient to gain the approval of their peers, and stop the self-improvement kick there. i won't bore you with the corollaries, but the upshot is that it seems like i'm starting to emotionally realize that this is true and that i myself don't need to try.
because that's the scary part. it's not that i rationally realize that this is right for me to do, which i probably have all along. it's that i'm really acting like it, emotionally, and from an effort standpoint, which is essentially intuition. i don't mean to say that i'm thinking about math when i'm writing this -- i'm not -- but it's telling that the three best things i've written over the past two months are my research statement, teaching statement, and a math talk. usually that category is swept by emails to people.
not to overdramatize the situation, but the world is faced with the same dilemma that i've had before. if people can only grow via rejection, shouldn't i reject my friends so that they improve their powers of perception and thought, improve their lives in a long-term sense, and come back to me improved? marriage is the same quandary on a larger scale: when you marry someone, it's the ultimate endorsement of their personality, which to a large extent then gets "locked in" for the rest of their life. this is why married people change less, are more boring, and so forth -- these deprecations are just children of this root cause.
anyway, that's just an off-the-cuff explanation of how my life has shifted from personal to mathematical over the intervening time period. i don't know if it's accurate or not, but i certainly feel like a mathematician right now, not a person. other major lifestyle changes: i've started playing lots of dance dance revolution, i've stopped reading the nose, i'm apparently getting my ph.d. this year (and moving somewhere else starting either fall 2003 or spring 2004; there's a program at msri in berkeley i'm applying to, and hopefully i'll get that postdoc and be here fall 2003), i've started reading a lot more (which isn't saying much, since i read almost nothing for my first two years of grad school; i speak here of literature, of course, not math), i've picked up a weekly poker game with math department people, and i've met a girl named meghan anderson, who has sufficiently little web presence that this humble weblog will probably be overly publicized.