SAD TO SAY Thesis Comes First Month (May) must be considered a success! I worked at least several hours six days a week, and accomplished about half of everything I'd hoped -- that's pretty good! In honor of the success of May, I've decided to make June also Thesis Comes First Month. If necessary, July and August as well. Through all those months of depression, I thought that "what I like to think of as the real me" was willing to work hard, while "what I like to think of as not the real me" was preventing that. Of course, if I'd been that way all my life I would have just thought I was a lazy doofus! But May seems to vindicate that I had just been an industrious man trapped in the body of a lazy doofus. But I'm sad to say the arrow is pointing down on my emotional health. The past ten days I've been dancing around the margins of depression. Not that I was ever not depressed -- about once a week I have a dream in which I'm weeping uncontrollably. But now it's a dream come true. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BACK IN BLACK Remember how I blamed my high rate of spending in 2000 on having a therapist and a girlfriend? Well, this year I have neither but I'm still living a little beyond my means, watching my savings account bleed down. (Though in the mental health category, my insurance company, which seems to have broken this year, owes me over $500 for anti-depressants.) As of the end of April, I had taken in $6728, and spent or charged $3437 on video equipment. When I got a $940 credit card bill ($450 video software, $100 RAM, $190 videotape, $100 business tax software, and $100 cables and connectors) in May I decided my life had to change. So I committed to stop buying video stuff for a while. And I even tried the old consumer psychology trick, which I had always thought I was too sophisticated to need, of spending only cash in my day-to-day transactions. I don't know if that trick did any good, but I definitely am getting my cash flow back in the black. My other strategy for staying fiscally fit is to never buy gasoline. It's kind of working because I drive little enough, and loan my pickup out often enough, that usually someone else buys gas for me before I need it. In fact the last time I bought gas, about six weeks ago, it was for someone else's car, which I borrowed while someone was borrowing mine. Did I mention that Caltech stops paying me June 1? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HA HA HA Here are the jokes I made up for my church's No Talent Night: a) Three neutrinos are annihilated and go to heaven, and see Niels Bohr is keeping the gate. Bohr said they each had to answer one question to gain entrance to heaven. Now, I don't have to tell you that physicists have always been biased against tau neutrinos, so the tau neutrino was getting kind of nervous. To the electron neutrino, Bohr asked, "What is Maxwell's first law?" "\Delta\cdot D = \rho." "That's right," and the electron neutrino propagated on into heaven. The muon neutrino was asked, "What is the Einstein Equation?", and replied, "R_i_j - 1/2 g_i_j R = 8 \pi G T_i_j," and was allowed to propagate in. "Well, this is going to be easy!" thought the tau neutrino. Then Bohr asked, "What are the equations of gravity near a naked singularity?" b) Three strings walk into a bar. The hadronization string walks up and asks for a beer. "Are you a string?" asks the bartender. "Well, I'm really more of a flux tube..." the string starts to answer, but the bartender is already saying, "We don't server beers to strings," and throws him out. Then the superstring walks up and asks for a beer. "Are you a string?" asks the bartender. "I'm just the solution to the boundary equations on a black hole..." the string starts to answer, but the bartender is already saying, "We don't server beers to strings," and throws him out. So the cosmic string decides to play it a little more subtly. He makes sure he is tied up into a tight knot, and makes his boundary conditions diffuse. Finally, he walks up to the bar and asks for a beer. "Are you a string?" asks the bartender. "I'm a topological defect!" ------------------------------------------------------------------------ OTHER STUFF THAT HAPPENS Follow my progress at http://www.hep.caltech.edu/~nolty/thesis.pdf updated regularly! One troubling L.A. phenomenon is apartment dogs -- unfortunate cat-sized creatures with walnut-sized brains who have to be taken out on potty breaks. I think every time a man stands whistling and pretending to look the other way while a mutt on a rope takes care of business six feet away, the soul of L.A. shrinks a little. I migrated to doing work on my Windows machine, with a client to a VNC session on a linux host for all the technical work. So now I'm more accessible -- say hi at rnolty@hotmail.com (MS Messenger) or rnolty (Netscape/AOL AIM). (Please don't send email to the either address because I never read them.) I think Bush won't be satisfied until every atom of carbon that is now underground is dispersed into the atmosphere to trap heat. ME: The only intuition I ever had was to love Julie Anne for the rest of my life. SHE (A DIFFERENT SHE THAN LAST MONTH): That's why it's called women's intuition. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Current reading: Most of the month was RL's Dream, a sincere novel about an old bluesman from the delta dying in New York. The author, Walter Mosley, was already known to me for a great series he is writing about a black private investigator passing through the decades in post-war L.A. Then, on the night of my greatest depression, I started reading Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground to try to cheer myself up. Quote of the Month: "He was eleven years old the first time he heard the blues. The year was 1932.... It wasn't like anything that Atwater had ever heard. The music made him want to move, and the words, the words were like the talk pepole talked every day, but he listened closer and he heard things that he never heard before.... A good friend of the boy's -- an older man named Bannon -- had been killed only a week earlier. Atwater hadn't shed a tear. People died in the Delta; they died all the time. Atwater hadn't cried, but a dark feeling came over him. He didn't know what it was until he heard Phil and Tiny play at the barn party. He didn't know that he had the blues." -- from RL's Dream