Another zero dollar day. Taking the van to an exhaust shop tomorrow, so I doubt I’ll keep that streak up. Running low on food too. Got at least another week’s worth, maybe more.
Had another falling out with the female voices in my head. When things go sideways between us, they get plaintive and needy. They get clingy, and feel reconciliation is necessary. But I need space. So it goes from bad to worse.
There was very little initially. It’s like an unstable equilibrium–any slight movement off the equilibrium results in forces that move me further from it. That sucks. Then, when I’m feeling bad, if something happens that starts to make me feel better, I often counteract it, as I don’t want to be managed or because I feel like I need to sit with the problem to drain it of power. So feeling bad is more like a stable equilibrium, with deviations from that state counteracted by forces that drive me back to that state.
That is far from ideal.
I definitely did better than I used to. Reminded myself to keep pushing that boulder uphill, telling myself, “Everything is actually OK, even if you can’t see it right now.” Trying to comfort myself, trying to work back toward emotional well-being. It’s like swimming upstream, but it’s worth doing.
Stuck it out, though, and worked all day. It was not a productive day in terms of actual math research. But I did submit a paper to the Annals of Probability, which is cool. Very little chance that it will be published there, but it’s the first place I’m trying, and I’ll work my way down from there. Oh, and I did come up with a possible approach for generalizing one of my results. Thought about holding off on the submission and trying for the more general result first, but decided the perfect is the enemy of the good.
No word yet on whether or not my current school will employ me again next year. If they won’t, I’m switching almost all my efforts over to getting a data science certification and trying to find work for June. I’m worried about that contingency. I’m not in a stable place, financially. And I’m worried about losing health care right now. A simple sequence of very likely events could land me with 10s – 100s of thousands in medical debt. Just gotta lose my insurance and catch a bad case of Covid. Fuck this country.
Leaving the US, no longer exercising my influence and my vote here, does kinda feel like abandoning the most powerful military that has ever existed to some fascist cracker assholes, and that ain’t right. But if I’m going to get to a place where I only work part-time for pay, and spend the rest of my time on my own work, that’s going to require universal healthcare. And I’ve got > 100k in student debt, and don’t fancy indentured servitude.