What happens in Berkeley stays in Berkeley

Tomorrow I am flying to Berkeley for an MSRI workshop on dynamical systems, where I will be seeing famous people talk, networking with people I already know, giving a pseudo-Lebowitzian five-minute talk, and hammering out some things with one of my collaborators.

I'll be crashing with Gazebo, which he must be really eagerly anticipating at the moment given how grumpy I've been for the last week or so. As I found out at dinner today, some of my friends have been avoiding me lately (or at least not actively seeking me out), and I can't say that I blame them. I certainly haven't been my usual cheerful self lately.

Of course, I am currently dealing with a confluence of several things---my right foot (I hope somebody caught this allusion) and related things, food poisoning or stomach flu (and the only other person who got this from something at Interhouse was having lunch with me, so I can't decide between the two other than to speculate that the stomach flu would have lasted longer), projects whose components are taking longer to work than I was hoping, multiple collaborators on these projects who are applying pressure for these things to work (above and beyond the pressure that I apply to myself) and for me to give preference to my project with them, recruiting SURF students (though that's more of something that has been taking time away from catching up on work rather than something that directly causes stress... I have gotten some really good students, about whom I will brag more later), dealing with occasional annoyances in the work environment (that I am reacting to worse than I otherwise might because of my prevaling mood, so this whole business is cascading), and a bump in the road for my book (for which I am currently reading copy-edited versions of the text and compiling a list of changes, which mostly includes lots of things that need to be put back the way they were before...err, duplicating work I've already done multiple times). And, of course, my interactions related to the speedbump with the book have been helped by my mood. (There are lots of recent rants in my 'sent mail' folder...)

It's not that any one of these things is horrible or that they won't get resolved because I can already see how many of them will be resolved. (For instance, with the book, I know that some discussions and time investment will solve the problem, but I may well have to invest time I was going to use for catching up on work to make sure that we get this book out by this May, which we are really pushing to do.) Writing a book is really stressful.

Despite all this, I did have isolated moments of being social in the past week. And then I've just been really grumpy when around my friends. (I think apologies should go out to Lemming especially, as he has taken far more shit from me than he should have this past week.)

I suppose I should also include something positive in this entry. First, there was something really awesome at Robin's tonight, though I'll wait for Lemming to make his post and just link to that. Second, I was talking to an undergrad I know from ping pong last week (this would be the other person who got food poisoning) and apparently the fact that I actually care about undergrads really shines through. So at least I'm doing something right. It's always nice to hear things like that, especially during periods of time when I'm not having a fun time.

So, AG gets to host me at just the right time.

(By the way, I'm hoping that getting things off my chest with this blog entry will make me rant just a little bit less when I am interacting with people offline.)