Week 5 — Random Thoughts
My my my, we're getting closer and closer, aren't we! A little under a month left! I cannot wait.
Strategery
Week 5 had me actually meeting with Advisor in person; we mostly discussed where to try and publish the work I have just completed in a subfield that neither of us is an expert in, meaning that we do not know the journals and conferences very well. What I have done is a rather direct application of an algorithm we have developed for an entirely different purpose, and published in a journal that has probably very close to no visibility to said new applicative subfield, so I am sure a short communication would be quite relevant, but these people only seem to publish long and detailed articles on entirely novel research. In the end I was to come up with a strategy (under the guidance of our conversation), which mostly meant sitting around eating lollipops and virtually flipping through the electronic pages of relevant journals, occasionally chuckling at a particularly incongruous-sounding title. We have made a decision, though, and I am careful to hide my hunches that the paper will be rejected.
In Dancing News
We had a dancing event last Saturday. Dancing events are for me quite like Christmas for a little kid, only they come more often and nobody gets drunk. (It is indeed one of the many things I appreciate about dancing events: it is considered quite okay to have a lot of fun and let loose without the pretext of alcohol.) I said "we" but I took little part in the organization except for putting a website together weeks ago, putting off fires the day before, and spending eight hours on location the day of (about one of which was spent working on my laptop in the lobby after having been explicitly told to just sit there and look pretty). The lyrical thanks I received afterwards (containing phrases such as "webmaster extraordinaire" (originally badly mistyped) and "tango dancer awesomeness" (the grammatical correctness of which I doubt even more than the semantic one)) make me wary of what exactly these people have done wrong.
What really matters though is that I had a blast. I wasn't quite sure of how things were going to pan out because it was a West Coast Swing event and, Lindy hopper that I am, I am not a big fan of it. I do not like most of the music it is danced to (basically, top hits), and I probably don't need to tell you why this is a problem. Also, I took an instant dislike to the super duper special professional instructor even before he opened his mouth, a dislike that was very quickly confirmed by his hetero-normative jokes (Dude. You are a professional dancer. And even if you weren't, you don't have to justify yourself for knowing how to style your arms in a hand-through-the-hair kind of way.) The workshop was actually rather good, all in all, I had fun and learned the lot.
It is apparently quite fashionable these days to have a blues room and a tango room at west coast events, so we had those. We also had Lindy hop planned in the tango room. As at first I was the only follow interested in either style, I was kept quite busy; eventually, this room was turned into an overflow for the westies while I was, I don't know, manning a table or dancing west coast or eating pizza, and the four tango dancers of the entire party found ourselves dancing to blues music. The guy who is teaching me how to lead tango has figured out a choreography that forces me into a leading posture, so we did lead changes as well. The four of us are actually still surprised by how much fun it was.
Seeing big
So while I was dancing at that party, all alone with my partner in a room with a nice clean wooden floor and mirrors and bars and a good sound system, and that we were goofing off with the random abandon of two kids who can do Lindy and Charleston and whatnot at last after about two hours of West Coast, I thought that would be a really, really neat thing to have in my own home. A dance floor with a wall mirror. Not necessarily very big, but still, probably quite conflicting with my preference for small, slightly crowded apartments over large, empty, isolated houses.
Saving money
It has gotten a bigger and bigger trend over the past few years: living frugally. Parts of it I am all for: do not live above your means (provided you have the means to feed yourself and put a roof above your head, otherwise, well); do not accumulate tons and tons of stuff that you'll have to pay loads of money to get shipped to your new place when you move across the ocean, ahem; do not buy things you don't need; keep a budget if that's what you need to spend less than you have. Other points, not so much. More and more often do I stumble upon brilliant pieces of advice such as "buying whatever you feel like eating at the supermarket is ridiculous; buy what's on sale and plan your meals around it!" or "change hobbies for one that doesn't cost money!" or "do not eat out! There is no point in eating out when you can whip the same meal at home for a fraction of the time!" or "stop paying people to do things you could do yourself!". Which are things that can make sense if your budget is tight and that you need to make the most out of little scraps of money here an there. But otherwise? What are you even saving that money for? My taste for luxury makes me favor brand breakfast cereals over the satisfaction of having spared a dollar by purchasing their supermarket-brand, made-out-of-cardboard version, and paying for repairs rather than mucking with things for hours myself. Such a rejection of my culturally Lutheran education.
Health, redux
The wrist is getting better. It is nothing like before, but it is much more functional and less painful. All in all it is functional enough for what I need to do now, that is to say handwrite a few words here and there, type continuously for several hours a day, and use my computer less intensively throughout my remaining waking hours. I am a bit fearful of what's coming up next, though. Will I get my handwriting back? Will I be able to play the viola again? Mostly I put these concerns at the back of my mind; I am dealing pretty well with my slipped disk, for instance, but few of the things it prevents me from doing are things I used to enjoy before. If I had started swing dancing and discovered aerials at a time when I would have been able to do them without hurting myself, for instance, that might have been a different matter; not being able to sit in any position and for as long is only a very minor inconvenience, as I have totally integrated better posture and regular breaks to my lifestyle. I know, though, that there is always the possibility of an operation (however inconvenient the weeks of recovery are)...
