Tiring, but Good

To the left is Mount Hood, in Oregon. I often see it when I fly on my way up North. I love seeing it as it emerges from the clouds rather pleasantly, looking a bit like a cloud itself for a moment, perhaps oddly shaped, but then becoming something rather different entirely.

I was in Vancouver for a few days last week, and chatted with a few friends and colleagues (such as Moshe Rozali, Mark Van Raamsdonk, and Joanna Karczmarek) at the Physics department at UBC, and gave a seminar. I talked about ongoing work on ideas I’m still struggling to beat into shape (mentioned a lot in earlier posts about my retreat at Aspen this Summer). This was a deliberate choice. Sometimes it is very useful to force oneself to do a pedagogical seminar on work in progress. This is not so much because someone in the audience might toss up an idea that you did not consider (this can happen, sometimes as a result of a good question – but it is less likely when the audience has no expertise in the area under discussion, as was the case here) but mostly because of the very act of preparing the seminar itself. It forces you to take the wider view, consider the big picture, and try to motivate why you are doing what you’re doing, or why you picked on path over another along the way. I find this process can be quite valuable as an internal pruning and self-checking exercise.

So it was that I spent three hours at LAX writing the first 2/3 of the talk. This is not because I’m a stickler for checking in early. Far from it. I was late. Well, actually I was just on time (planned it so to avoid rush hour traffic), and so as a result of going to the wrong terminal to pick up my flight (it was an airline code-share, and I plain forgot about that subtlety, having done it right several times in the past) I was late getting to the correct terminal to check in, and so was booked onto the next flight instead. This turned out to be perfect since the seminar was the day after and I had only the rest of the afternoon and some of the next morning to write the talk. (Was set to go out to dinner in the evening, you see.) So sitting in the airport in a cafe with nothing but a power outlet, free wireless and the task of writing my talk for three hours was just great.

I really love the process of scribbling notes and outlines on bits of paper, building up the talk layer by layer. I do that whether I’m presenting it on computer or giving a blackboard talk. It is a bit old-fashioned to some, but I am very much a creature of pen/pencil and paper for the initial creative process. I don’t like doing many things directly to computer. (Not counting emails and blog posts and instant messages and so on and so forth, of course.) In the end, by time it was the moment to start giving my talk at 2:30pm on Friday, I had about 20 pages of notes on the whole story. Or at least enough of the story as to make for a good tale to tell. Not surprisingly, I used about 4 or of those pages! It’s a complicated subject (non-critical string theory) that most people have not learned at all (although I think it is extremely important to learn lessons from if we’re ever going to figure out what string theory really is), especially the younger crowd, and so I tend to err on the side of pedagogy and go back to basics and explain lots of what’s going on. This means that the equation that should be the starting point of my talk only appeared at about 3:20. I’d spent about 40 minutes (talks start late) introducing the introduction. This was what I expected, of course. Most of the writing of the talk was really for me, and I did not expect to get through all of it. Once I was able to motivate and set up the notation and framework, I was able to dot around the key ideas of the new work, pointing out the places where the struggle is, and where the excitement is, and what’s understood and what is not. That’s the best you can hope for with a mixed audience, and I had fun. I hope they did. Coffee and chats with Joanna Karczmarek and various students to wind down, and then I was able to wind down a bit and think about other things.

I’m a bit tired. Since I returned on Sunday it seems that I have not stopped much to rest. I’ve been going from one thing to another, including of course preparing and giving my classes, going to an evening dinner/committee meeting/brainstorming session (the food was awful! I voted that we go to Bacaro next time), going to a half-day symposium yesterday and shaking hands with lots of Industry people (more on that later) and going out to dinner with some cosmo/astro colleagues last night. And then there’s personal life stuff on top of all that too, so it is Thursday and I am already tired from the week and feel I’ve actually got nothing done. I’m again thinking I’m getting super-swamped by this semester.

My short term plan to address this tired/swamped feeling? Hermitude. (Is there such a word?) I’m going to politely decline the many kind Thanksgiving invitations I’ve been getting for next week. I’m going to shut the door to the world come Tuesday evening. I am going to disappear from the face of the earth. I will not reappear and open it again until Monday morning.

I’m looking forward to it.

-cvj