physics | like it's your last

“You know I’m bad at communication, it’s the hardest thing for me to do”

There are people who have something to say in every situation they find themselves in. I am not one of those people. Instead, I agonise over emails, I never manage to say what I mean in conversations and I take an eternity to construct a blog post or comment. But at least I can proudly say that I continue to struggle on! It’s not that I’m bad at it. I can actually be really quite good at interacting with people; it’s just a huge effort for me. I’m so shy!

As a new blogger, I’ve been wondering about social networks, and how much I should utilise them for blogging. I use Facebook to keep in touch with “real-life” friends, but what about platforms such as Twitter and Google+? Does anyone use Bloglovin’ to follow and find new blogs? What about Tumblr? I tried Instagram – even though I never used to take photos – and I think it’s great. Do you get the urge to sign up to all these different networks to see what you’re missing… or is it just me?

In other news, I’ve been offered a place in the shortlist for a mathsy PhD project to do with cosmic magnetic fields and turbulence and computer simulations and magnetohydrodynamics (a word which I think might be too long for me to cope with). It’s still not an actual offer, and it’s a different direction to the particle physics stuff I’m interested in, but I think it could be really cool! I’m just so tired of waiting and wondering and getting my hopes up about these PhD applications.

Keeping a blog and pursuing this music project are very similar experiences. It’s easy to fall behind. I find it hard to create and complete things in a timely way. I feel like I could spend hours fleshing out a blog post, swithering over word choice and agonizing over the personal details, tempted to never press the Publish button. It’s the same with writing music! That’s the whole reason I started this project!

I feel the pressure of deadlines really strongly. I’m a big procrastinator, and as a deadline approaches I become more and more conscious of it, getting more and more agitated. With this project, there is the added bonus pressure of documenting everything in a blog! I really enjoy it, and I would write every day if I could, but I’m not very good at keeping myself organised. It can take quite a long time to write one entry, which could be my thoughts on something I spent a relatively short time on. Sometimes I feel like the time would be better spent focussing on writing the music.

Take my last post, for example. I wrote it about how I created a chord sequence that I sketched out in a few minutes, inspired by a photo. I thought it seemed like an interesting process to write about, but I scrapped the actual musical idea a couple of hours after publishing the post. I don’t regret writing about it, though. It’s all part of the process.

Thankfully I finally got the ball properly rolling with my next attempt at starting a song – I’ve written some cool guitary bits that I’m quite keen on. I’ll stick with this one.

There’s another deadline-type thing coming up that’s been getting me all nervous. I have an interview next week for a PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics! So I need to relearn all the physics and read about potential supervisors’ research and practice explaining why I want to spend the next several years doing ridiculously hard maths (it’s a love-hate love).

With that in mind, I’m considering squeezing a cheeky wee extra week in to finish off the songwriting part of the project. This is because I desperately need to re-record the guitars in songs 1 and 2, as well as finishing the drums in song 2. I’d also like to go home and borrow my sister’s bass guitar instead of relying on MIDI files or a bass simulator. I’d also quite like to borrow that same sister’s flute-playing abilities for one of the songs… Maybe I don’t need an extra week for all that; maybe I’m just getting lazy. Besides, 12 weeks sounds much better than 13 weeks!