I love listening to pop music when I work, but I can’t listen to anything with words when I’m reading or writing. And my life is supposed to be including a lot of that right now. At a time when I hoped to be building my Great Food Model, placing all my projects in a diorama with spotlights, I have been told instead to publish or perish. A man with many interests is not appreciated in academia, I’m told, without some beans to count.

I won’t recite the litany of projects and goals, but a couple highlights might give a gist. First, I’m really excited because my proposal to research coffee has been accepted for funding, in the time it took me to read three books on the subject to fall in and out of love with the beverage. My paper on marine reserves went through a three week crisis, during which all the results seemed like mirages, but it was resolved yesterday. I keep promising one professor that his project is now my top priority, but the processing to generate its data has taken all summer, and now I wonder if one of the inputs invalidated the whole thing.

I’ve been trying to keep a strong boundary between my work and home lives, but as work picks up pace, as occupation turns preoccupation, and the success feed on themselves, it’s been consuming more and more. I’m relying more on Flame to orchestrate our social life, and feeling more at a loss on the weekends. I’ve been learning a lot about relationships from the first self-help book I’ve read in years– Models by Mark Manson– and the January Scientific American Mind edition on relationships.

The summer is over too soon, and leaves are falling when I still haven’t worn all my shorts. I organized a soccer group, but haven’t gotten them together to actually play, or purchased a soccer ball. I have been finding time to do more climbing at the Brooklyn gym. The pain in my arms feels good, even as demons in my blood lash out at the change.