except that's not really true. i guess you could say that what's going on is the inevitable weight of ties to a past incarnation of yourself. when i started this thing 16 months ago, it didn't have a form, so it was free to evolve with my personality. but by now, with my apparent coterie of regular readers, i feel a good deal of pressure to give you the stuff that you obviously like, to remain the old internet-me with all its trappings.
not that i've changed qualitatively, but as with most gradual change the weblog and i are growing apart. it's an expression of entropy, the same entropy that causes friends to drift apart and relationships to go awry. given two things that are close, and random forces, eventually they will have velocity vectors that take them further and further apart. just like all points in the universe are, in principle anyway, getting further apart from each other.
there's this adage in society that if you tell yourself something long enough, you start to believe it. well, i often contended that my life would be better if i derived my enjoyment from math instead of people, and it's starting to be that way. it's hard to tell if it's because the math is better, the people are worse, or i've changed, at least from my vantage point. i'll go with door number three, as much for the story as because i think it's true.
for the past 12 days, all of my best experiences have been mathematical. i'm dealing with this slick field of tropical geometry, and it really does kick major ass. we're inventing stuff and figuring out the right definitions and all that cool stuff where you try to build as nice and interesting a model as possible, the sort of stuff that polished the legend of gauss and galois and all of those ancient greeks. nonetheless, i can't help but feel that this is something of a major landmark in my life: if it lasts, two whole weeks whose top ten experiences are all vocational. okay, there's also the roller-coaster; that pretty much kicked ass. still, nine out of ten.
i don't mean any disrespect to people. i don't think it has anything in particular to do with them, if for no other reason than occam's razor: it seems much more likely that i've changed than that everyone around me has changed. and i guess you could throw in a couple of conversations with people into that top ten. but lately i just expect more going into my interactions with math than i do going into my interactions with people, and while cause and effect are debatable, the results certainly have paralleled the expectations as far as my happiness goes.
for almost all of the past, i guess this is the tenth night, i've gone to sleep thinking about tropical geometry. as my faithful readers know, i have terrible insomnia, and it was always because i couldn't stop analyzing the social milieu i was in, couldn't stop projecting future interactions and investigating past ones and figuring people out. but this is a totally different kind. one night of mathematical insomnia is hardly unprecedented; ten in a row is beyond the pale.
which is not to say that this is a cry for help. i'm perfectly happy with my life. if anything, it's a challenge to people who think i have promise as a person, a challenge to make it worth my while. (if anything. i'm not convinced it's anything, but it's hard to be totally convinced of thoughts one has at five in the morning, i suppose.) in any case, the autopilot is firmly placed in the social part of my life at this point. i suppose it's cyclical; after all, before that saturday night where bernd mentioned this stuff to me, i hadn't thought about math in a few weeks.
so for the half of you who read this to keep tabs on me, that's what's going on. for the half of you who read this for the ramblings of a mad scientist, i can't promise we'll return to our regularly scheduled programming. wars are unpredictable in duration and outcome, and this internecine war between my dual selves is no different.