(no subject)
I miss writing.
That's surprising, I guess, considering how much I disliked writing in high school. But the fact is, writing my thesis was one of my favorite parts of the whole process. I didn't expect it to flow as easily as it did-but I guess when you've spent all year working on a problem, and you know it inside and out, writing about it is a different kind of task from horking out a five-page paper on an assigned topic. And I'm really pleased with the result, but I miss the process of it.
I enjoyed having a network of interesting connected thoughts, and sitting down to put them in some kind of organized linear order. I enjoyed the challenge of translating those thoughts into sentences that were clear, concise, and elegant. My thesis being in computational physics, I enjoyed presenting mathematical arguments and computational algorithms, guiding the reader step-by-step through my logic-just as much as I enjoyed developing the history of the area I was studying, telling stories of the experiments and papers that shaped the field. And, looking back at it, I'm proud of what I produced.
But now I miss it. I want to write something again. This might just be the unemployment talking, but I want to spend my monolithically free time working to put words into sentences, and sentences into chapters, and chapters into some kind of a document. Another nine-month research project is probably out of the question-for one thing, I probably couldn't rope Joel Franklin into spending an hour a week with me anymore-and I've never really been one for creative writing, so I'm probably not setting out to hack out a novel. But I'm hurting for ideas.
That's surprising, I guess, considering how much I disliked writing in high school. But the fact is, writing my thesis was one of my favorite parts of the whole process. I didn't expect it to flow as easily as it did-but I guess when you've spent all year working on a problem, and you know it inside and out, writing about it is a different kind of task from horking out a five-page paper on an assigned topic. And I'm really pleased with the result, but I miss the process of it.
I enjoyed having a network of interesting connected thoughts, and sitting down to put them in some kind of organized linear order. I enjoyed the challenge of translating those thoughts into sentences that were clear, concise, and elegant. My thesis being in computational physics, I enjoyed presenting mathematical arguments and computational algorithms, guiding the reader step-by-step through my logic-just as much as I enjoyed developing the history of the area I was studying, telling stories of the experiments and papers that shaped the field. And, looking back at it, I'm proud of what I produced.
But now I miss it. I want to write something again. This might just be the unemployment talking, but I want to spend my monolithically free time working to put words into sentences, and sentences into chapters, and chapters into some kind of a document. Another nine-month research project is probably out of the question-for one thing, I probably couldn't rope Joel Franklin into spending an hour a week with me anymore-and I've never really been one for creative writing, so I'm probably not setting out to hack out a novel. But I'm hurting for ideas.