armed neutrality

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

the curious zen of steady-state nervous breakdown

i have no idea why it still strikes me as somehow strange---since by all rights after having been through the cycle some umpteen billion times, one would expect that i should be accustomed to it by now---but there alway seems to come a point where the to-do list becomes so ridiculous or impossible that the part of my brain which controls accellerated heart-rates and associated freak-out factors just shuts down from the overload.

and this, naturally, provides a perfect explanation for the fact that i find myself susceptible to the "paralysis of procrastination," hence my journal-writing right now and not work-doing...

the whole "deer-in-the-headlights" phenomenon amuses me somewhat. why don't we take action to try and save ourselves from the impending doom until it's too late, or hopefully only nearly so? has the imminent danger caused our subconscious to throw in the towel? or is it more like a calculated rest before a sprint?

okay, philosophizing aside, work is kinda sucky. today i need to pull a presentation out of thin air for tomorrow which will supposedly summarize my thesis topic in 20 minutes. the good news is that it's only 20 minutes, and that 20 slides are probably doable in a day. the bad news is that my thesis topic is still so ill-defined that i'm not even sure i can adequately summarize what i've done over the last three years in 20 minutes, much less find a way to tie it all together in a coherent manner. but then maybe this will be a good exercise which might help me to better define it, who knows.

since i started by mentioning something that struck me as strange, here's another one: four years seemed like an interminably long time when i signed on to start my phd, and yet now, after three years, i feel like i have hardly anything to show for it, and the fact that alcherio has pushed the deadline back to the middle/end of 2008 actually seems like a reassuring thought rather than an annoying delay. i think i'm starting to understand why the average duration of a phd is so long. hopefully now that the webots simulation (with omnet++ radio plugin and jim's sound propagation framework) appears to be basically working (pending slightly more rigorous verification) i'll finally be able to just start crunching out results that might even be publishable. but of course now that i finally have the proper tools, suddenly i seem to be coming up short of ideas, but hey, any port in a storm, right?

okay, time to go back and start conjuring slides. wish me luck. hope the zen sticks around long enough for me to get it all finished up; it's far more pleasant to work while deep-breathing rather than hyperventilating. </captain-obvious>

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