Did 5 hours of math today, played guitar for an hour, and am now going to write for at least 30 min. That’s pretty fucking good.
There are so many holes in my dissertation. By “so many,” I mean like 3. Still irksome. So now I’m tasked with either fixing them, or glossing over them. I want to do math properly, and not from a “career-oriented” positions. Which is to say I’d rather delay publication and do things correctly.
If I were to really do that, I’d take like two years to do some deep reading, and call it my postdoc. That is not financially viable at this time.
My mom is getting her first Covid jab in a few days. That’s awesome. Numbers are spiking badly in my area. I’m planning on staying home for another 3 weeks or so. Down to frozen, canned, and dried foods, but I should be able to swing it. I want to get well past the holiday spike before I reengage with humanity. I do have to take my van to the dealership up in Buffalo in a week. Sucks, but it needs doing. Still better than the grocery store.
I’ve been spending some money lately. Bought some bluetooth headphones (not earbuds) so I can play guitar at night (my little bluetooth transmitter can plug into the 1/8th inch hole in my amp). Got some nice, noise cancelling ones. I bet I’m gonna dig em. I also bought an external hdd today, since almost all my disk-space is full. Recording videos as an online teacher takes a lot of gigs.
Still doing pretty well, regardless. Got 4k in my savings right now. If/when I get confirmation of work next year, I’ll drop it all on debts. Saving it till I have a contract signed, though. Paying minimums on everything till then.
Reinstalled Kerbal Space Program over the weekend. Goddamn but that’s a good game.
I’ve been thinking about writing for pay lately, and have been wondering what I’d do for a first book. I’m leaning toward writing a 1/2-life memoir. I feel pretty certain that some of my readers here are most engaged by my writings on my own mental health issues, and that kind of material would necessarily make up a big chunk of my story to date. I got some stories. It’s daunting to think about being totally open about that stuff, but I think that’s probably one of the main challenges of being a writer, and would likely be the most curative aspect of the whole process. The fact that I’ve managed to get sober now and start working again makes for a nice place to end the tale, too. And it’s something I’d like to work on, even if I never managed to sell it. That seems like a good indication that it’s work worth doing, and the proper place to start.
The plan for now is to try to keep getting paid as a mathematician, and once I get some of these other projects out of the way, start writing every evening. I was listening to Brandon Sanderson talk about trying to make a career of it, and he claims that one would need to write for 2 hours everyday for 10 years before being at a place where you could subsist financially off such work. That sounds right to me.
