Niall's virtual diary archives - January 2007

Saturday 20th January 2007: 11.32am. Johanna's friends have just left, so now I finally have time to sit down and write up my traditional birthday entry. I finished my exams a long time ago now, well over a week and half and they went reasonably well - I should get a 2.2 overall, maybe a 2.1 which isn't bad given the crappy semester and poor coursework grades I received.

As we limber up to the next semester, I have plenty on my plate. Lots of Future Society lectures, some thermal physics to study, shall be off to Barcelona next week to visit a friend N- who has been having a rough semester. Got a new computer to build whose parts I shall be ordering from Barcelona so they are here when I get back. No shortage of things to be doing ...

Usually this time of year I review my year, and decide the ups and downs. I will say that one particular up of this year was that S- organised the best birthday I have had in at least three years, and unlike the usual depression I feel on my birthday at being one year closer to death and another year of not getting enough accomplished, I actually had a good time. S- let me down badly last semester, but she's made up for it with that birthday - a little effort at the right time can mean a great deal, and she got it spot on - even if as she says herself, it was rather an easy steal. No matter I feel, my initial problem with her was not her intentions but rather her timing, and this time round she greatly improved her timing.

Ok, so major events in my mind of 2006:

1. Johanna and I broke up
   ... and thus ending the longest relationship I have ever had. It wasn't much fun, as it never is, but it was less awful than ever before which is mostly due to Johanna being far more sensible than previous girlfriends. But it also had something to do with me having learned to let go rather than trying to assert control of a failing relationship because I didn't want to lose it. I've finally at the age of twenty-nine learned to let things which are dying to die gracefully, which is about time. And here's the surprising jist - her and I are doing better than ever before since we broke up. We appreciate one another far more, and there is no longer that sense that we were in perpetual decline. Now, being broken up, she is far more of a positive thing than she was before, and while I logically expected that that would be the case, I didn't actually expect it as I've rarely (actually, no, I've never) seen that in anyone else I've personally known.
2. Started on implementing Tn on The World
   Now I know everyone thought I was nuts at the time I was starting Tn and saying it could be applied to everything, but hopefully last summer those reading this diary got to see that indeed yes it can. Right now I am finishing up an article on my approach which is somewhat like thermodynamics but also somewhat less Physics-based - after all, we are talking about social phenomena here where intersubjectivisation rules. I learned during the research for this article that I am not the first to think of economic entropy flows, indeed this fringe idea is called thermoeconomics and I just ordered about the only book on it from Amazon with next semester's course books. Interestingly, I have learned that the great Economist Jevons actually pioneered the approach in the 19th century during his discussion of coal!
3. Reset my relationships with close friends
   This past semester has been one (yet again) of having become over-invested in close friends. I am a lonely, fragile person and I find it very easy to get caught up in the lives of (usually dysfunctional so they need me) others. It gets too intense for them, so they hurt me. That took out much of last semester in depression, but then even at the start of that semester one had a sense of impending shrinkage and thankfully I'm old and wise enough by now to realise that the end of one cycle means the birth of a new cycle which appears to have begun just before the Christmas break.

Should I have the Future Society in there? No, I don't think so - while it could be a major achievement of 2006, it was very much seed planting for enabling the PhD funding I want ie; it hasn't yielded much yet except introducing us to quite a few important people (with a lot more very important people to come this semester). In other words, when/if I see the pan-out, then it'll get onto this list though I'd doubt that would even be the 2008 birthday entry.

Right so, back to my article! I hope you all had a great Christmas break, have fun!