again, remiss and overdue

in posting. And this time, I actually have some stuff to write about. Although State College has been fairly mundane, we made it out to Philly last sunday and had a great time (we spent about 24 hrs there, barely enough time to rush around, but, recalling Vienna, that's how I roll). The friday before, I had a crazy bar adventure with Nate, Ben, Iryna, and Maria in Lock Haven, PA, where Iryna goes to school--it's a smaller town than this one, so I have a feeling we made quite an impression. And I'm hoping to get out of here again this weekend, but more on all of these later.

Life in general has been pretty good. Everyone in the program has been good company, although based on the lack of results everyone has so far, we may be the least functional REU ever. In my defense, the problem my partner Dan and I are working on is really hard--open-ended enough that we don't know where to begin, but complicated enough you really have to wade into an argument before deciding whether it's worth pursuing or not. Needless to say, we have a few leads, but nothing solid enough to turn into a 20-minute presentation, which we're supposed to give in about two weeks. Eek.

The food situation here is still tough. Everyone still has like $500 worth of board points, but the only things we can spend it on are just lousy. I've become a believer in the unofficial motto of the Food Network, which I would paraphrase as, "Good food can facilitate good times, but bad food by its nature is depressing." Well, it's depressing. Although I've enjoyed visiting friends and travelling a little bit this summer, the thing I always want to do first and foremost when I'm out of here is eat good food. At the same time, it's so hard to justify going out or cooking or shopping when we have literally unspendably many board points left to us. I think it's some sort of psych experiment that the NSA is funding (not math research)--see how much people can stomach, as long as it's free.

In the meantime, I've had abundant recreational sort of time. Given the general lack of oversight and the intimidating nature of our research problem, we've had ample distractions. REU kids are out playing frisbee or basketball or badminton most nights, we go to salsa night at a local bar on wednesdays, and in my own time, I've taken up LSAT prep. This may be the biggest surprise of the summer--after procrastinating, pushing back my test date from June to October, etc etc, I've taken to practice tests as a way of avoiding thinking about my math problem, and how there's no way in hell any step I take now can possibly produce a sufficiently generalized result to be useful. Part of it is also a pick-me-up, strangely enough--everything you may or may not have heard about the role of math classes in preparing you for the LSAT is true, so working through a logic section is in a sense validation.

Conclusions:
I can't live in a small town and be happy. I think I need the diversity, the culinary quality, the sort of unbounded exploration that comes with the frankly staggering scale of large cities. This dovetails neatly with my realization that I just can't deal with math research; although I'm still ok with math classes and the process of learning it and whatnot, the difference between the classroom environment and the professional environment is that research doesn't always have an answer, and that answer in no way is guarenteed to be satisfying or instructive. Math is famous for being completely, perfectly ordered, but where we stand right now is cluttered and confused--what we need to classify and define is slippery and protean. Taken together, I can't handle a career in academia. I haven't even gotten a taste of the politics of the profession, but the living situation and the subjects I could get into just aren't doing it for me.
On a more personal level, I think every new sort of "let loose in a new place surrounded by strangers" experience tells me a little more about what I value and what I want to value. Every step is part of a process of being myself and also becoming myself, discovering what I need in order to feel like I'm realizing what I want to be--dim sum is necessary for sure, and it made my day when Sarah, a girl in another program here, called my shoes "cute" as we were walking back from dinner.
Oh, and I need a haircut bad, almost as bad as my car needs new tires. Those are on the to-do list.