Evening Perturbations, and a Desire to Read

My first day back at school and at my desk. A poor night’s sleep left me tired throughout the day. After a meeting in the afternoon, I went with a friend to buy the necessities, so that I would not wake up hungry tomorrow morning.

I will soon be welcoming a new roommate. The one-bedroom apartment, with its living room and bathroom, will be divided between two people, while I move into the living room. It will save me about eight hundred dollars in rent each month, which makes it seem worthwhile. The trouble is that the two of us own rather a lot, and I do not know whether the small apartment can hold it all. The corridor connecting the living room and bedroom is quite narrow, so some pieces of furniture had to be taken apart and then assembled again. It took a fair amount of time and effort. As I write this, the room remains in a state of considerable disorder.

To avoid making noise at my desk during the meeting, I held it in the small room next door. As a result, I left behind a shirt I had bought only two months ago. I have thought of it several times while writing this article. I must hurry to the department when I wake up tomorrow and see whether it is still there. I hope it has not been lost.

Since I live in the living room, the bed is visible as soon as the door opens. For privacy, I must put up a curtain, or perhaps a screen. Once the curtain is installed, the space will suddenly feel cramped. I hope it will not affect my mental health too much. But at least I will have a space of my own again.

After writing so much, I seem not to have addressed the title. While putting things away, I was suddenly overcome by a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness. I feel that I no longer have so much desire for knowledge. Must I pretend that I still do, in order to carry on with research? Yet when I read closely and think about things, I truly am happy. And, of course, when I share them with others. Perhaps the sudden change in my surroundings caused certain thoughts to rush in all at once. The first year of my PhD has ended just like that, and yet I remain very, very far from becoming a master.

(I got stuck here when writing..) The number of things to consider seems only to grow, and my mind is having trouble processing them all. Would doing something make things better?

Delete the app I use to scroll through reels. I have acquired enough sense of humour already.

Although yesterday, on that same app, I saw a post by my friend FW quoting a passage written by Shi Tiesheng in The Temple of Earth and Me (我与地坛). The passage beginning, “But the sun…” Perhaps I have read this book before, but I have long since forgotten its contents. I cannot write words like these. I hope that, outside research and classes, I can seek more knowledge from books. Perhaps I will begin with The Temple of Earth and Me.

---

One more thing: I would like to write about the hole-hole conservation law I noticed while studying for the qualifying exams. In electrodynamics, the holes in letter variables obey a certain conservation law. This is also related to the physics contained in those letter variables. It is an interesting subject.