From: jaffray@dent.uchicago.edu (Alan Jaffray)
Subject: Wheee...
Organization: Dept. of Mathematics, U. of Chicago
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 08:08:43 GMT

Wheee... It's so futile for me to write down anything about my feelings.
They're obsolete within days, or hours... yet I do it anyway.  So kill me.

My mood has been swinging around with reckless abandon...
It goes something like this.  Follow the bouncing ball...

1) Try to study.
2) Rapidly get restless.  Either:
   a) Burn time in non-enjoyable ways, return to (1) feeling even worse 
      because I have even less time available.
   b) Find something interesting to do, something that indicates I'm not
      a 1-dimensional math freak, that I might have a life.  Proceed to (3).
3) Enjoy a couple of hours, then realize I don't have *time* to have a 
   life, I'm a grad student for Christ's sake, and at *Chicago* (where even
   without a life I'll need to work insanely to survive), and having a 
   life is just too much of a luxury.
4) Try to force myself to work, but instead mope around for a while feeling
   depressed about my circumstances, despite the fact that this is, when
   I think about it, where I want to be...
5) Decide I need to get hold of myself, and spend lots of time analyzing
   why I feel the way I do, write stuff down, post to ASH, etc.  Make
   detailed plans for how to change this (which usually die within a 
   couple of days...)
6) Return to (1).

Well, that's my past week, at least... Tune in next week, I'm sure,
for something completely different.

The depressing thing is that Chicago *is* the best place for me, it's not
as if I made a wrong choice which I could just correct... (or is that
encouraging? i'm never sure).  I had plenty of free time as an undergrad,
but never a real social life.  It's because I'm here, at a cool university,
with lots of interesting people who are twisted in such a manner that I 
can relate to them, that it's possible for me to start becoming a person, but
being at this university is also what makes me so busy that I can't really
enjoy it.  

A bloody annoying paradox.

I suppose I should define "having a life".  To me it means finding many
different things interesting, relating to other people, exploring new
ideas, not letting hours pass without purpose... There are some people
around here who can do this all within the context of studying mathematics,
but alas I'm not managing to do that yet...

Let's see, a couple other things.  After thinking about it (wasting *more*
time), I suspect it's *very* likely that someone else in the dept here
is reading ASH... the combination of a very high level of general angst
in the Nth-years and the fact that virtually everyone is on the net
would make it likely, at least.  Hi there.  :-)

But I doubt I have anything to worry about, still... 
"Chicago math grad student feels depressed."  Big news.  Not.

A couple things which have helped me feel better recently, maybe
other grad students might find them useful:

1) A degree is not something you *need*, it's something you *want*.  Clearly
you want it a lot (otherwise why are you there?), but life will not end
without it... after all, you're verifying right now that you can live on
<$10K/year, and just on general talent you can find some job to make a lot
more than that... An advanced degree is something worth working for since
you can get a more interesting and/or profitable job with it, but it's
not necessary for leading a useful/happy life.  Not that knowing this
will help your grades, but I've found the thought helpful for warding
off "my life is gonna end" panic attacks...

2) If you have a loose time schedule (most grad students do, interrupted
by mid-morning or early afternoon classes only), and often have problems
with feeling tired or unproductive during time when you should be getting
work done, consider fucking around with your sleep schedule.  I was trying
out sleeping for 3-4 hours at night and then taking a 1-2 hour nap when
I got tired during the afternoon for a while, and it seemed to really
help.  I was less tired from a purely physiological standpoint, also it
helped me structure my time by breaking up the day a little.  However
recently there've been some fixed events in my schedule in the early
evening, when I would be taking my nap, so that idea got killed...

3) If you can't focus while studying, try changing something, anything,
in your habits... twiddle a few knobs.  Go somewhere else.  Change the
lighting.  Put on some soft music.  Change the routine of your day.
Anything.  Maybe something will work.  If you have any specific ideas
on what's going on, so much the better, use them...

   (actually, that applies to just about anything that's fucked up, not
   just studying...)

   (however, if you go too far, you could end up spending hours on end
   in meta-life commentary, like me, who just spent over an hour on this
   note... arg.  back to topology...)

Happy musing,

Alan