The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Dear Diary,

last night, I finished the last couple of pages of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I read it about 7 or 8 years ago for the first time and had very fond memories of it even though I couldn’t have told you anything about the actual content. That is mainly because there isn’t really any storyline. I mean, there is – but it’s not relevant at all. It’s not about what the people in the book do, it’s about why. And how they feel about it and what motivates them. Kundera is a special author that makes it very clear to the reader that he made up the characters and the situations they end up in to make a bigger point. Or to express an idea. Or because he liked a metaphor and wanted to see how that’d play out in human interaction. There are passages in the book where the author flat-out tells the reader: look, I made him up because he’s expressing a side of my own personality that I could never express – isn’t that interesting?

The whole book is filled with a lot of creative ideas, philosophical speculations, and pondering on what it means to “be”. I appreciate Kundera because of the way his mind works: I like tracing an author’s thought patterns and can appreciate the cleverness of their ideas. But what attracts me to Kundera is mainly the fact that I could never have had the ideas he has. His mind works so differently from mine that it’s a great source of “alien” ideas to me. I don’t really take anything he says seriously but I don’t think that’s his intention anyways: he’s just trying to plant a seed of an idea that will make you appreciate a mundane aspect of your existence a bit more. At least that’s what it does to me.

Data collection starts for real

Dear Diary,

right now, I am sitting in the lab while the first batch of participants do the experiment. If all participants show up today, I’ll have the data of 20 people by the end of the day. That’d be great.

So yeah, I’ll take the first shift in the lab and will be sitting here until 14:30. Then my friend and colleague SS will take over. I picked up the money from the financial department this morning and can pay participants now. Which should make it relatively easy to collect the data from 60-70 people. Next week, the lab is not really available because a course is given at the computers here which is kind of annoying. But it’s not too bad because I can already get started working with the batch of data I’ll have at the of the day today.

Now I just need to try and delegate as much of the data collection as possible to other people. SS is happy to help out and I have a student that also wants to help. So that’s great. That’ll give me some time to already work on the data in the next week. But first, I’ll go on vacation!

Tonight, I’ll have one more night of sports before leaving Groningen for a couple of days. I’ll go to my squash training and then head over to the climbing gym to meet some friends there. That should leave me properly exhausted. :)

Am I getting sick?

Dear Diary,

on Wednesday morning, I got up and didn’t feel good at all. My former supervisor MN asked me to join him at an information event about the research master program I did: he’d be talking about the structure of it for 15 minutes and then I was to say some things about it from a student’s perspective. I prepared a couple of slides and showed up at 9 to listen to his bit and then told the students about the possibilities the master offers and how much work they can expect to put into it. I made sure to leave some room for questions but there weren’t any. So I packed my stuff and left to get some work done.

However, I really didn’t feel well. I felt a bit cold and feverish. Really annoying. I went over my Method section again to adjust a couple of things and fix some typos that escaped me the day before. Then I had a meeting with my supervisors at 14:00. I explained to them that the experiment is ready to be run but no participants signed up. I explained the procedure regarding the money and how I recruited participants. They were glad that I took the initiative and that there are many sign-ups for the following data. Which meant I should have a bunch of data at the end of the following day. That’s good because then I can start writing the scripts for the analysis because the code is pretty much independent of the actual number of people.

We also talked about my publications to see whether I am on track for my thesis. The last paper I wrote (the extension of the conference paper) might be published in Topics in Cognitive Science (TopiCS) which would be a pretty good journal. I’ll hear about it some time this week. Otherwise we’ll submit it somewhere else. But it’s not on my desk at the moment because the “final” version is still on my supervisor’s desk and he hasn’t given me feedback yet. So nothing I can do at this point. And regarding my first paper with R and CM, I still haven’t heard anything. I am not quite sure what to do about it at this point because RM is just ignoring my e-mails (at least that’s what it seems like). My supervisors will e-mail him now to see what the situation is.

During the meeting, I also brought up the point of going to Psychonomics in November. Both of them agreed that it’d be a good conference but thought it’s not the best idea to go. I don’t know yet whether the data I am currently collecting are as promising as I hope. And after I am done with the data collection for this experiment, the participant pool will dry up and it’ll be hard to collect data before mid-September. So I need to make sure that I have one or two experiments planned by then so that I can collect data when the pool opens again. So November is probably not the best time to go to Chicago, especially if I want to combine it with a holiday. Fair enough. It’s a shame but I have to admit they are right.

The end of the PhD project is slowly approaching. I need to collect some more data at the end of the calendar year (beginning of the next academic year) so that I have data to write up one more paper (or even two) before my contract ends in September next year. It might not be the worst idea to save some funding and then go to a couple of conferences towards the end of my contract to network (good for finding jobs) and get some feedback while writing it all up.

After the meeting, I went home and made some tea. I still felt feverish and very exhausted. I just hang out on the couch for two hours reading and drinking tea. Then BB and JV came home and we had dinner together and caught up a bit. I went out for a drink with JV to meet some friends while he was in town. But I ordered tea. We were all very tired and decided to call it a night early so that I went to bed at around 10:30. I got a good night’s sleep and am feeling much better today. What a relief – I really don’t have time to get sick at the moment.

Bureaucracy and improv

Dear Diary,

on Tuesday, I spent most of the day figuring out the last bureaucratic obstacles and prepared some paperwork. I have requested some money to pay participants which means I need to have forms that the participants sign to show that I’ve given the money to them (and didn’t just keep it). And I also needed to launch a campaign to recruit paid participants online. There are two Facebook groups for that and I used SuperSaaS to take care of the scheduling. Very useful service!

Then I spent some time writing up the details of my experiment. I started a new Word document with the correct formatting for a paper and also build the skeleton with all the different sections I’ll need for the final paper. Then I wrote the part that describes the Methods as well as the details about the tasks and materials we’re using. Now it’s still fresh in my mind and they are set in stone so I know that those are the one we’ll use. And I can’t do anything else before I have the data.

I went home early because I was a little exhausted. I just chilled for about an hour and then went to my weekly improv class. We learned that the two things we’re going to do for the final performance are two Quartetts and an Anecdote. There’ll be no class next week (because of Liberation Day) and then there’s one more class before the final performance (which will be on May 15).

After improv, I stayed for drinks until my friend JV joined us. He arrived from Leipzig that day and was going to stay with me for the next two nights because he had a class he needed to attend in Groningen. I was very tired, though, and had an appointment the next morning so I left relatively early.

A sunny King’s Day at Bjoeks

Dear Diary,

this morning, the weather was awesome. BB and I got up at around 10 and started the day slow. We spontaneously decided to go to his parents’ because it’d be good to see them and because wanted to pick up another desk chair and a table for the living room. We sat outside in the sun and had a coffee with them and were back in Groningen at around 2.

Then we grabbed our stuff and went to the climbing gym (Bjoeks) to do some outdoor bouldering in the sun. They have this really cool boulder park outside that is made from a special type of concrete and (apparently) feels very much like actual rock (it’s modeled after the rock/style of Fontainebleau, if I understood correctly). It was the first time I ever tried it and I did some of the easy problems there. It’s amazing how little you need to stand on and hold on to if you trust yourself. The limiting factor for me wasn’t my strength in this case but the fact that the skin on my fingers is too thin. The “rock” is very rough and it’ll just tear off my skin if I put too much strain on it.

We had a short break and then climbed a little more inside. I did a short warm up and then decided to try another 5c. To my own surprise, i was able to climb it on my first try. I think I’ll try to do 3-5 more 5c’s in the next weeks and then start projecting 6a’s. I am really surprised to see that I can climb those routes already. When I first started climbing a couple of years ago, It took me many months to approach the first 6a and I think the highest rated route I ever climbed was a 6b. It’s good to see that my body still remembers most of what I learned about technique and that what I need to develop is mainly forearm and tendon strength. And tougher skin. :D Anyways, another great and very relaxed climbing session!

Back at home, my old neighbor called me asking what I was up to and I invited him over. We mixed up some left-overs and had a pretty decent dinner and then watched Mad Max. We want to prepare for the new Mad Max movie that is going to come out in about three weeks and thought we’d watch the old ones. I’ve never actually seen the first one and it was so terrible, that I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. :D Ridiculously bad – I can’t wait for the new one, though – the trailer is just so over the top that I can’t wait to see the rest of it.

Climbing and King’s Night

Dear Diary,

on Sunday, I woke up after almost nine hours of glorious sleep. I was very, very tired after a day of squash and a movie and slept like a baby. BB and I had breakfast together and we with part of the crew to go climbing. The weather was pretty shitty and I didn’t mind spending all day in the climbing gym. I paired up with RN and we spend almost 2 1/2 hours climbing various routes. I was able to do a 5b that I fell on the week before and also did three more 5b’s and two 5a’s. At the very end, to use up all the power I had left, I tried the easiest route on the longest wall with the steepest overhang. It’s 17 meters of overhang that gets gradually more extreme until you reach a small threshold and then the last four or so meters are only slightly overhung. I tried to climb as fast as I could because in the overhang, event “resting” means you have to hang on your arms and cost a lot of forearm strength. I made it a lot further up then I thought and just couldn’t make the last hold just before the easier part at the very end of the route. I might have to do it a couple more time to be able to complete the route. But it’s perfect to use up the remaining strength in my forearms before going home.

And just to demonstrate the difference between BB and myself at this point: he does that route three times in a row as the “easy” part of his warm-up. :D

It was a really good session and BB and I were back home at around 6 and starting thinking about what to eat. Then we got a message from two friends: they wanted to go out to eat and asked whether we wanted to come along. So we met at 7 to have dinner in the city and had a really good conversation about all kinds of things. At around nine, we moved towards the city center to see what was going on there for King’s Night. There was live music and it was busy and we decided go to a jazz café to sit and drinks. We were also waiting for more friends to join us and we ended up having a really fun night in the bar where it was amazingly quiet and we could just hang out and talk. When we decided to call it a night at around 2, the city center was so busy that you couldn’t move. You had to kind of squeeze through the mass of people – it was crazy.

I am glad we missed that.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron

Dear Diary,

on Saturday night, I had food with a couple of friends and then we went to see the new Avengers movie. Here’s one of the many trailers:

This movie was absolutely insane. The action was just awesome – no doubt about it.

That’s also the only positive thing I can say about it. Well, and that it had a couple of funny moments, maybe. But they were all very cheap moments.

In all other ways, the movie was incredibly bad. The story telling was atrocious. I had no idea what was going on at all. The thread they faced was potentially very interesting but the way they got out of it was unbelievably stupid. It didn’t make any sense and was very, very hard to follow.

I am pretty sure that for his movie, they just had a bunch of scenes that they wanted to make, a certain number of fights that should happen, and just cool shit that need to go down. And then they pieced them all together and didn’t leave any room for an actual story. Kind of sad really because this could easily have been the action movie of the year.

Squash tournament in Zwolle

Dear Diary,

today, I got up at 7:30 to meet with three friends/teammates and we drove to Zwolle for a tournament there. We spent all day at the squash center there which is a pretty nice facility. I had to play four matches in total and even though I had less than four hours of sleep, I did pretty well. It took a lot of mental energy to force my body to wake up and do what it should do as fast as it should do it.

I ended up finishing 3rd which was nice. The guy I lost to ended up winning the event and was clearly better than the rest (I lost 11:2, 11:3, and 11:3). The prize I got for being third was a pretty decent t-shirt that fits really well. So the 15€ starting fee was a good investment: a day of squash and shirt! They also had a gym with weights and machines there and after my last match, I hit the gym to do a couple of exercises with very few reps and lots of weight which was a good relaxing finisher.

Now it’s 8pm and BB and I have two friends over to cook. Then we’ll go and see the new Avengers movie at 9:30. Pretty exhausting but great day today. :)

Another very nice night with the crew

Dear Diary,

last night, we met at our place to cook together. I made a simple vegetable stir fry-type thing with curry paste and pasta and it was very tasty. We hang out here for the rest of the night. I was planning to go to bed relatively early because I had a squash tournament today. And BB also said he wanted to take it easy. That didn’t work out, though, and I went to bed at around 3 am.

I am really happy that we have a such a nice group of people to hang out with now.

Climbing event

Dear Diary,

on Thursday night, we went to the climbing gym. There is an organization that organizes social events for all PhD students and this one was climbing. So we went with our usual crew and there where a bunch more people. It was really nice – climbing is such a social sport. You can just talk to the person belaying next to you and discuss the problems in a route together. It was a lot of fun!

I climbed  a couple of 5a’s and tried on 5b that looked really cool. It was very hard for me and I made it almost all the way up. I just couldn’t figure out how to get to the very last hold. And I was very exhausted because I already had 17m of difficult (for me) climbing behind me.

I did another 5b, thought, that was really nice. It was in the overhang but had pretty big holds – just a little fewer. At the end, I picked an easy 5a in a pretty extreme overhang and climbed it as often as I could. I made it up three times because my body shut down. Not too bad.

To my surprise, I had no sore muscles the next day. That night, I was very nicely exhausted, though. I am going to try and find a 5c that looks nice and “project” it. I need a difficult route to work on and get back to each time I am in the gym until I can do it. Then pick a harder one. :)