Hijacked by my Brain

Damn it. My adviser found me. All this time, I thought I was cruising along in the "no news is probably good news" category, having not heard from him in a few weeks and awaiting his direction on what to fix next, but I was actually bobbing around in the "I haven't had/made time to look at your stuff this whole time" box. Now that he's looking at it, I'm back to awesomeness: my academic responsibilities turned trump on my training. I spent the first seven hours of my day, after breakfast today, looking for "careless incidences" of the passive voice and reordering things to make them less "misleading to the reader." Sometimes, the exactitude that my adviser wants from me reminds me of the degree of perfection expected of serious YSB practitioners. Then I go into this quandary where I'm taking heart that he wants things (like it and me) to be as good as they can be, and yet I'm losing heart over the fact that I might just not be that good at details until they're pointed out to me in bold italics with a note about how stupid I am attached, usually with the s-word underlined in red ink. That also reminds me, at times, of missing details in YSB.... I was definitely told at one point in the past, by The Man himself: "maybe you're too stupid to learn this," which is kind of a hard, spiky, bitter, hot-pepper-coated pill to swallow when you're doing a Ph.D. in mathematics. I get a lot of verbal shit from people at various times, but the s-word isn't usually on the list.

Speaking of brain-related activities, my brain completely hijacked my workout yesterday. I wasn't "distracted" so much as I became intensely curious. Instead of grinding out scores of repetitions of the various drills I had chosen for the day (having decided that the saber was breaking my precious skin and need not be picked up), I started to do that and then was prevented from continuing by the overwhelming need to think and feel my way through the drills. I had to understand what I was doing and why I was doing it. I did drills for the same amount of time that I would have otherwise, about an hour, but I did most of them quite slowly, as if feeling around in the dark, stopping and pondering them midway. Some of them I figured out. Some of them I didn't. Some others I invented, but only in a slow, meticulous way where I could see the application before I proceeded. I'm hoping that today will afford me the opportunity to go drill the ones I have, shelving the figuring-out of the others until after I've managed a massive sweat and feel solid and powerful in what I'm up to. Today, so far, I've had only one window in which to train (which I shouldn't have taken... I've still got five sections to get through on this run-through of my dissertation), and it was just long enough for a challenging but too-short turning session. Tonight, I have to finish those five sections (more than likely) and write a final exam (*sigh*), so I'm hoping a window will open up in the near future that lets me go bust some drills out.