Because the neurotic, occasionally weltschmerz, intellectual women need to represent...

Hello… (blowing off dust and cobwebs)…

In case you were wondering, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth (not yet, at least).

I have to admit that this feels kind of awkward … kind of like reconnecting with a long-lost relative of sorts, when after the first few minutes of usual exchange of pleasantries one inevitably finds herself forced to speak of an excuse or two in a vain attempt to explain where the hell she’s been and why in the world she hasn’t been keeping in touch for so long (I am, in fact, notorious for putting myself in exactly these kind of situations with way too many people who for whatever crazy reason happen to be quite fond of me)...

As far as they go, my excuses aren’t as elaborate and creative as one might think. You know, the usual knee-jerk response “I’ve been busy,” “swamped,” “don’t have a free minute to myself,” etc., etc. The truth is – I have been incredibly busy during the last semester. After all, juggling four time-consuming graduate courses and 180 plus whiny undergrads demanding credit for incomplete homework, while trying to squeeze in quality time to tend to my personal life and live-in boyfriend is quite a task. And yet, even if I have been busy during the last months or so, lack of time hasn’t been the only reason keeping me from writing. For one thing, I have discovered that even when I do have a free minute or two, I simply cannot be trusted with chunks of time, unless it is punctuated with deadlines and iron-cast responsibilities. I do with time what a shopoholic does with money – squander it as if there was no tomorrow. Another factor keeping me from writing is that I am having a “content crisis” of sorts. My life of late has been rather unexciting to be able to write anything attention worthy… Or rather, if I may rephrase, even though my life of late has been extremely full, I do not think the general public would find it as exciting as it is for me. These days my creative energy is mostly channeled towards stuff that either induces boredom upon my audience (yeah, yeah, so you learned the proof of some fundamental theorem) or makes them think that I am stark raving insane (heterowhat? Serially correlated what?). And yet, during the past few months or so I have been doing nothing but live and breathe mathematics and econometrics. So unless my audience were interested in the aforementioned serially correlated errors and heteroscedasticity, I do not think anyone missed a damn thing during this long-drawn period of absence.

Perhaps some may find my life monotone and boring… During the semester my days are spent at school – morning classes, night classes, work in between… On days when I am not at school, I hardly leave the apartment and spend hours sitting in one spot, writing proofs and running estimations. I don’t particularly follow the news: sources that simply (and seemingly objectively) report the news underwhelm me with their badly written and all over the place stories; those that provide some kind of an interpretation to current events usually throw me into uncontrolled rage. My own political opinions, although unorthodox, lack insight and imagination to be voiced to anyone but my poor boyfriend and the only other meaningful political discussions that I have these days is during my weekly two-hour conversation with my mother (she gets her news from Russian sources, filters the bullshit and propaganda and then discussed them with me). I am three issues behind with Foreign Affairs, but I read each month's Playboy from cover to cover. I don’t have any particular hobbies besides running. As pathetic as this may sound, I haven’t read a single literary work in the past couple of years. Instead, I read textbooks and obscure journal articles. I don’t discuss art. I find fashion boring. My music tastes are ridiculous (current obsession – Russian pop). My culinary tastes are bland and predictable. I watch cop shows instead of decent films. My personal life is calm and cloudless. When there is drama, I usually confide to a friend who lives a couple of blocks down the street or else pay a shrink to figure it all out... The most pathetic of all is that I find this life- my current life, extremely rich and fulfilling, and even if I’m as happy as I can possibly be, this doesn’t leave me with much to write home about.

And yet, despite this time and content crisis of mine, I really miss the kind of writing that does not involve symbols and numbers. A part of me really feels nostalgic about that period of time, before starting grad school, when I had the luxury to really appreciate and write about those most ordinary things that make me happy in their everydayness… I miss the time when I was writing about my life as if I were writing a story , as if by writing it down I was giving shape and order to what otherwise was fleeting and chaotic… Because of that I know that I am not quite ready to let this blog go. Let this be my poor attempt to reconnect with it.