I have started writing up my thesis. That means practically
a) all of the research that I've done in the past 4 years has now to be put in a written form in a comprehensive and scientifically approved way, task that demands my full concentration and energy
b) for the next month the keyboard and the mouse will constitute extensions of my hands
c) the only form of social life I will have until my submission is through virtual reality, I will be an e-person. I don't really mind. I actually enjoy it. It is a creative time. I feel as if I am pregnant with knowledge and have to deliver a beautiful baby-thesis in one month from now! This will be my baby, my results, my work, my late nights in the lab, my endless hours on the microscope, the countless experiments. All that I have devoted myself to in the last 4 years will be put in a book within a month! So looking forward to it.
My imprinted curiosity for everything made me log on to twitter. I had been ignoring this idea for ages, since I really didn't want to get involved with another virtual social network. But I did. I wanted to see what it is like to be "twitterific". And to be honest I enjoy it so far. Accidentally I came across Lance Armstrong's twitter page and decided to follow him. His athletic achievements are more than an inspiration to me (he's a 7-time Tour de France winner but also an ex-triathlete, which for me is the ultimate sports competition). He has fought with cancer at a young age and has survived. He is working on the fight against cancer on multiple fronts by his Livestrong Foundation. And his enthusiastic posts about the weather, the snowy Colorado, the bikes, the training, are cheerful and motivating. And I need some glow and motivation from big men like Lance at the moment and always I guess. Cause I always want to improve myself and there's no limit as to where we can go. Keep on rising...
I ve decided I am doing another marathon by the end of this summer. It was last April that I ran my first marathon in Paris. A year ago. I remember the day before the run, I was so nervous and totally didnt know what to expect. Would it hurt? How much? Would I make it to the end? Would I even make it to the half point? What is "the wall" like? What if I have a heart attack and die in some street in Paris? I was so sure that this would be my first and last marathon ever, why would I put myself through this again? I didnt even care if I would finish, even trying it and going through the training was good enough. And I did run my first marathon. The feeling of contentment is greater than any muscular pain. I didnt feel like hitting the wall as they say until very late. I was initially running to make it to the half-point. By reaching 21km, I thought to myself, this is now your marathon. At 30km, there is no stopping now. At 38km I wanted to die. I could see I was close to the finish, I felt I had made it, so there was no motivation to keep pushing. My whole body was screaming at me. I kept going, talking to myself, not looking around me. Crossing the finish line was a bless. And then the pain kicked in.
The human body has great limits. And the human mind can conquer over the body. Together they can make great things, push the boundaries to where you didn't think you could. And so this time I want to push it a bit further and see where I can go. Such a great feeling. Makes you feel alive.
Wow! Iceland. Another place (in a long list of them) I've always wanted to visit. Such an alien landscape, like Io or something. Guess that's what it gets for sitting atop a seam in two crustal plates. I also love Bjork, Emiliana Torrini, Sigur Ros, and a few other Icelandic bands. Mostly it just seems exotic: Fairy-tale and modern at the same time.
ReplyDeleteI hope your training goes well. I'm beginning to train on the bike at the moment, first stationary then maybe soon (it's actually raining now, in California in May, which is rare) out in the real world. I'm a little road shy of this particular highway near me (which btw is part of the Tour of California that Lance just rode a few months ago and which Levi Leipheimer won - he lives in the same town as I do, Santa Rosa) - it's claimed many lives and I've been hit twice on my road bike as there is virtually no room for riding on the sides, just a drop into a gully. Maybe I'll exchange it for a mountain bike and take that up instead. There are loads of great trails around here, all through the mountains and state park.
I want to start swimming and running too, and though I always intend to "hit the weights", maybe this Spring/Summer, I'll really do it. I just need to get through that initial inertia.
Speaking of which, I just read a book on Zeno's Paradoxes of Motion, and how some of them, even with the invention of calculus (limits, and so forth), remain unsolved to the satisfaction of philosophers, even though maybe not to mathematicians, who tend to be doers more than big-picture people. Anyway intertia is one seemingly very simple thing in physics that, for all our theories on everything else, seems not to be well-understood, except that (like quantum mechanics), it 'works' when you plug in the numbers. But conceptually, intertia and motion... they start to get as weird to think about as time does when you really think of them. A bit like thinking of a word over and over till it loses all sense.
I also just watched a show on the ambitious but ultimately aborted attempt to clone the extinct thylacine of Tasmania from the foetus preserved in alcohol that still exists, and that's something that's always fascinated me. You too, I would imagine, given your specialty. Cloning, genetics, development, how little we really understand about the complex relationships between genes, DNA, coding switches, proteins (other than DNA), and so forth. It's much more complex obviously than Darwin, or Mendel, or Watson, or even Dawkins have successively believed. One of the most exciting forefronts in science; you're lucky to be involved.
Keep us who watch your blog informed of your thesis paper and, especially if it does turn out to be a book, I want to see a link!
Cheers.